"On the spectrum from Bible thumper to social helper, my father is way on the social-helper side," Parker told me.
To coincide with Mental Health Awareness Week, the Guardian Social Care Network and US website Social Work Helper are joining forces for a Twitter chat to discuss social work and mental health.
Social insects, helper birds and apoptotic cells (evolutionary suicide) exemplify such paradoxical behaviours which are typically explained by the existence of genetic relatedness between the cooperating entities - they actually do not reproduce independently from each other.
These groups include senior staff nurses, managers and representatives from the production kitchen, nutritional and healthcare assistants, registered nurses, social and healthcare helpers and assistants.
All female eldercare workers who either worked as social and healthcare helpers (SH, 19 months of job training) or social and healthcare assistants (SA, 39 months of job training) were eligible and were invited to participate.
A few nurses (14% of the senior staff nurses, registered nurses and social and healthcare helpers and assistants) show no appreciation of the importance of nutrition for the care and treatment of the patients, nor do they appreciate the fact that agreements to provide the nutritional care according to the accreditation requirements shall be observed.
This basic finding, to be published later this year, is one of dozens from a field called affective computing that is helping scientists discover exactly which features of a robot make it most convincingly "real" as a social partner, a helper, a teacher.
Within this context, the assessment of social support and informal helpers is indispensable.
Another interesting aspect of the findings on help-seeking is that most people who sought help for their excessive behaviors turned to health care professionals and not to lay helpers or social support in general.
We found no evidence that predation risk affected the overall level of within-group conflicts, social contacts and breeder-helper punishment.
