Much of this century’s empirical research in the social sciences has been devoted to understanding the causes and contributing factors of antisocial behavior. In studies of children’s moral reasoning and conduct, developmental psychologists have probed the cognitive and social bases of aggression, conflict, delinquency, and prejudice. In contrast to psychology’s lengthy preoccupation with negative behavior in children, the study of children’s altruistic, cooperative, and sharing behavior has a relatively short history.
The Caring Child provides the most up-to-date account of our current understanding of the motivations behind prosocial behaviors and how these motives develop and are elicited in various situations. When do children first exhibit prosocial behavior, particularly altruism? How do helping, sharing, and comforting behaviors change with age? Why are some children more caring than others? Are differences among children’s prosocial behaviors a result of hereditary factors, of how children are raised, or both? Can prosocial tendencies be enhanced by parents’ and educators’ deliberate attempts to instill altruistic motives and to teach caring behaviors?
Nancy Eisenberg broadens our concept of the moral potential of children as she shifts the focus from censoring antisocial behaviors to the active promotion of kindness and caring in children.
One of the major concerns about the changing U.S. health-care systems is whether they will improve or diminish the quality and cost-effectiveness of medical care. The shift from a fee-for-service to a prepaid method of reimbursement has greatly changed the incentives of patients to seek care as well as those of providers to supply it. This change poses a particular challenge for care of depressed patients, a vulnerable population that often does not advocate for its own care. This book documents the inefficiencies of our national systems--prepaid as well as fee-for-service--for treating depression and explores how they can be improved.
Although depression is a major illness affecting millions of people, it is seriously undertreated in the United States. The ongoing shift of mental-health care away from specialists and toward primary medical-care providers is causing fewer depressed patients to be appropriately diagnosed and treated. Depression is frequently more devastating than other major illnesses, such as arthritis and heart disease, because it often begins at a younger age, when people are at their productive peak and thus at risk of permanently damaging their careers. It also differs from many medical conditions in that its indirect costs are usually much higher than direct treatment costs.
The authors urge the integration of both medical and economic considerations in designing policies for the treatment of depression. They show that by spending more money efficiently on care, the nation will gain greater health improvements per dollar invested and a more productive population.
In 2001, Vanity Fair declared that the Age of Irony was over. Joan Didion has lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama has become an "irony-free zone." Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope looked into America’s heart to ask how might we dispose ourselves if we came to feel our way of life was coming to an end. Here, he mobilizes a squad of philosophers and a psychoanalyst to once again forge a radical way forward, by arguing that no genuinely human life is possible without irony.
Becoming human should not be taken for granted, Lear writes. It is something we accomplish, something we get the hang of, and like Kierkegaard and Plato, Lear claims that irony is one of the essential tools we use to do this. For Lear and the participants in his Socratic dialogue, irony is not about being cool and detached like a player in a Woody Allen film. That, as Johannes Climacus, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors, puts it, “is something only assistant professors assume.” Instead, it is a renewed commitment to living seriously, to experiencing every disruption that shakes us out of our habitual ways of tuning out of life, with all its vicissitudes. While many over the centuries have argued differently, Lear claims that our feelings and desires tend toward order, a structure that irony shakes us into seeing. Lear’s exchanges with his interlocutors strengthen his claims, while his experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst bring an emotionally gripping dimension to what is at stake—the psychic costs and benefits of living with irony.
When many individuals aggregate and no special organization is imposed, casual social groups form among monkeys in tree tops and among human beings on sidewalks, beaches, and playgrounds. Joel Cohen shows that previously existing probabilistic models do not describe the details of available data on the sizes of such casual groups. He proposes a new family of models, called linear one-step transition (LOST) models, which predict observed equilibrium group size distributions, and also describe the dynamics of systems of social groups.
For the first time, he presents recorded observations of the dynamics of group formation and dissolution among human children in free play. These observations are consistent with the dynamics assumed by the LOST models. Such models suggest generalizations that may apply to epidemiology, the sociology of rumors, and traffic control. Within biology, this approach offers ways of linking the behavior of individuals with the population ecology of a species.
In addition to his mainstream research, Cattell had also authored a series of publications that posited evolutionary progress as the ultimate goal of human existence and argued that scientifically measurable criteria should be used to distinguish "successful" from "failing" racial groups so that the latter might be gradually "phased out" by non-violent methods such as regulation of birth control. Derived from science, Cattell's evolutionary philosophy was intended to be the basis of a full-blown religion. Although the earliest of these works had been published in the 1930s, near the end of an era in which eugenically based policies for human improvement were much more acceptable, Cattell promoted similar ideas well into the 1980s and '90s.
The Cattell Controversy describes Cattell's socio-religious beliefs in detail and analyzes their relationship to his scientific contributions. William H. Tucker discusses the controversy that arose within the field in response to the award's postponement, after which Cattell withdrew his name from consideration for the award but insisted that his position had been distorted by taking statements out of context. Reflecting on these events, Tucker concludes with a discussion of the complex question of whether and how a scientist's ideological views should ever be a relevant factor in determining the value of his or her contributions to the field.
A renowned philosopher argues that singular causation in the mind is not grounded in general patterns of causation, a claim on behalf of human distinctiveness, which has implications for the future of social robots.
A blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face. Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in the voice of a seven-year-old. “Can you help me?” “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” “Who in the world do you love most?” People pour their hearts out in response.
This droid prompts the question of what we can hope from social robots. Might they provide humanlike friendship? Philosopher John Campbell doesn’t think so. He argues that, while a social robot can remember the details of a person’s history better than some spouses can, it cannot empathize with the human mind, because it lacks the faculty for thinking in terms of singular causation.
Causation in Psychology makes the case that singular causation is essential and unique to the human species. From the point of view of practical action, knowledge of what generally causes what is often all one needs. But humans are capable of more. We have a capacity to imagine singular causation. Unlike robots and nonhuman animals, we don’t have to rely on axioms about pain to know how ongoing suffering is affecting someone’s ability to make decisions, for example, and this knowledge is not a derivative of general rules. The capacity to imagine singular causation, Campbell contends, is a core element of human freedom and of the ability to empathize with human thoughts and feelings.
Changing Youth in a Changing Society begins with a complete survey of the problems of youth, showing which disorders peak during the teenage years. With this background of fact firmly established, Michael Rutter turns to the difficult historical questions about whether adolescent disorders are truly becoming more frequent. Here Rutter shows that the news is not uniformly bad. Some psychosocial problems, such as teenage alcoholism and crime, are still on the rise. But other problems, among them the much heralded generation gap, turn out to be largely mythical. Still others, like the decline in educational achievement, may only reflect historical changes in the population of teenagers being assessed.
Rutter’s historical analysis supports a comprehensive discussion of the causes of adolescent disorder. The effects of heredity, childhood, family, school, peer group, religion, the media, and the urban environment are all assessed in review of research which is a model of clarity and good sense. This review provides the factual framework for informed recommendations for more effective prevention and treatment of adolescent disorders.
Modern permissiveness and the new culture of entitlement allows disturbed people to reach adulthood without proper socialization. In a book meant both for the general public and for professionals, bestselling author and psychologist George Simon explains in plain English:
•How most disturbed characters think.The advent of chemical or pharmacological therapies has had an enormous impact on the treatment of psychiatric illness. For the chemotherapy to be effective, however, the clinician must take into account many factors in addition to recognition of a syndrome and selection of an appropriate agent and dose. In this extensively revised and expanded edition of a widely used book, Ross Baldessarini concentrates on providing rational, scientific underpinnings for the treatment of patients. In doing so, he bridges the gap between biology, psychology, and clinical practice.
To provide the most up-to-date coverage of the actions and use of psychotropic agents, Professor Baldessarini has enlarged the text to nearly twice its original length and has added sixty-three new tables. More basic preclinical pharmacology is included to guide the thoughtful use of medication. In addition to summarizing this basic knowledge, the text reviews the indications for each drug, the kinds of patients most likely to respond, and side effects and contraindications, and provides summaries of clinical research findings on which rational clinical practice rests.
A chapter is devoted to each of the principal classes of psychotropic drugs: antipsychotic agents, lithium salts and other antimanic agents, antidepressant agents, and antianxiety drugs. Within each chapter is a new section that surveys the future of the field and examines new procedures, theories, and agents. A final chapter covers more general topics such as psychosocial, ethical, and legal aspects of practice in the administration of drugs, as well as the emerging topics of geriatric and pediatric psychopharmacology--material not readily available elsewhere.
In the first extensive American study of child psychiatry in the Soviet Union, Dr. Nancy Rollins explains that her aim is two-fold: to expand knowledge of the theory, diagnosis, and treatment of psychiatric disorders of children and adolescents and to stimulate a professional dialogue. Her attainment of this goal is clearly evidenced here by means of her astute assessment of the findings of her four-month visit to Russia as an individual investigator on the Medical Cultural Exchange program. The author's basic concern about the relationship between a society's child-rearing practices, character formation, and psychiatric disorder propelled her to ponder such questions as: Is there a describable difference between the Soviet conscience and the American conscience, as it develops during the years of childhood and adolescence? What about the problems of sexual identity in the two societies? Identity crises? Why have Soviet psychiatrists and educators remained so consistently anti-Freudian?
In addressing herself to the various questions that intrigued her, Dr. Rollins first considers the history of Soviet psychiatric thought, with the major influences shaping the direction of Soviet child psychiatry and the social perspective with personal impressions of Soviet culture and society. Ensuing chapters, based upon first-hand observations and case material, take a close look at such topics as the organization of psychiatric services, diagnosis, general treatment methods, special psychotherapy, research, and psychiatric training programs. The author's reactions to the people she encountered in children's psychoneurological hospitals, polyclinics, sanatoria, and research institutions contributes a lively dimension to this impressive work.
The study points out some differences between Soviet and American treatment methods; for example, Soviet treatment aims at inducing peace and relaxation in the patient, whereas American methods encourage exposure to and mastery of conflicts and tolerance of anxiety. Dr. Rollins also offers suggestions for further study and reflects on the relation of psychiatry and culture in the two countries.
Compelling and humane, this book reveals the lives of the 300,000 child soldiers around the world, challenging stereotypes of them as predators or a lost generation. Kidnapped or lured by the promise of food, protection, revenge, or a better life, children serve not only as combatants but as porters, spies, human land mine detectors, and sexual slaves. Nearly one-third are girls, and Michael Wessells movingly reveals the particular dangers they face from pregnancy, childbirth complications, and the rejection they and their babies encounter in their local contexts.
Based mainly on participatory research and interviews with hundreds of former child soldiers worldwide, Wessells allows these ex-soldiers to speak for themselves and reveal the enormous complexity of their experiences and situations. The author argues that despite the social, moral, and psychological wounds of war, a surprising number of former child soldiers enter civilian life, and he describes the healing, livelihood, education, reconciliation, family integration, protection, and cultural supports that make it possible. A passionate call for action, Child Soldiers pushes readers to go beyond the horror stories to develop local and global strategies to stop this theft of childhood.
The culmination of twenty years of research, this book is a cross-cultural exploration of the ways in which age, gender, and culture affect the development of social behavior in children. The authors and their associates observed children between the ages of two and ten going about their daily lives in communities in Africa, India, the Philippines, Okinawa, Mexico, and the United States. This rich fund of data has enabled them to identify the types of social behavior that are universal and those which differ from one cultural environment to another.
Whiting and Edwards shed new light on the nature-nurture question: in analyzing the behavior of young children, they focus on the relative contributions of universal physiological maturation and universal social imperatives. They point out cross-cultural similarities, but also note the differences in experience between children who grow up in simple and in complex societies. They show that knowledge of the company children keep, and of the proportion of time they spend with various categories of people, makes it possible to predict important aspects of their interpersonal behavior.
An extension and elaboration of the classic Children of Six Cultures (Harvard, 1975), Children of Different Worlds will appeal to the same audience—developmental psychologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and educators—and is sure to be equally influential.
Now in the midst of the largest wave of immigration in history, America, mythical land of immigrants, is once again contemplating a future in which new arrivals will play a crucial role in reworking the fabric of the nation. At the center of this prospect are the children of immigrants, who make up one fifth of America's youth. This book, written by the codirectors of the largest ongoing longitudinal study of immigrant children and their families, offers a clear, broad, interdisciplinary view of who these children are and what their future might hold.
For immigrant children, the authors write, it is the best of times and the worst. These children are more likely than any previous generation of immigrants to end up in Ivy League universities--or unschooled, on parole, or in prison. Most arrive as motivated students, respectful of authority and quick to learn English. Yet, at the same time, many face huge obstacles to success, such as poverty, prejudice, the trauma of immigration itself, and exposure to the materialistic, hedonistic world of their native-born peers.
The authors vividly describe how forces within and outside the family shape these children's developing sense of identity and their ambivalent relationship with their adopted country. Their book demonstrates how "Americanization," long an immigrant ideal, has, in a nation so diverse and full of contradictions, become ever harder to define, let alone achieve.
Researchers in child development often study children in isolation--apart from the environmental influences that shape, nurture, or harm them. In Children of Social Worlds, leading social scientists show how much is lost by this approach. Their underlying assumption is that children's psychological development can be understood only in the context of the social worlds in which they grow up and that the disciplinary boundaries of traditional psychology must be expanded. This book offers insights from scholars in a variety of disciplines--anthropology, education, linguistics, economics, medicine, and law, in addition to psychology. The result is a wide-angle perspective on child development based on some of the best research in the field.
The authors look particularly at broad trends and patterns, addressing such issues as the effect of institutions on family life, the changing roles of parents, cross-generational effects on development, the status of children in the legal system, schooling and learning, gender differences, the acquisition of communication skills, and the psychological impact of the nuclear threat. Chapters on cultural and historical definitions of the family add depth to their argument. Included, too, are discussions of emotional development and psychoanalytic theory, topics that are receiving increasing attention. The authors also reflect on the directions that research is likely to take in the future.
This well-balanced, closely integrated volume is full of innovative ideas and is written in a style that will be accessible to both specialists and students. As an incisive and informed evaluation of the field, it is sure to become an essential resource for psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists, social policy analysts--all who are concerned with human development in its social context.
A one-year-old attempting to build a tower of blocks may bring the pile crashing down, yet her five-year-old sister accomplishes this task with ease. Why do young children have difficulty with problems that present no real challenge to older children? How do problem-solving skills develop? In Children Solving Problems, Stephanie Thornton surveys recent research from a broad range of perspectives in order to explore this important question.
What Thornton finds may come as a surprise: successful problem-solving depends less on how smart we are—or, as the pioneering psychologist Jean Piaget claimed, how advanced our skill in logical reasoning is—and more on the factual knowledge we acquire as we learn and interpret cues from the world around us.
Problem-solving skills evolve through experience and dynamic interaction with a problem. But equally important—as the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky proposed—is social interaction. Successful problem-solving is a social process. Sharing problem-solving tasks—with skilled adults and with other children—is vital to a child’s growth in expertise and confidence. In problem-solving, confidence can be more important than skill.
In a real sense, problem-solving lies at the heart of what we mean by intelligence. The ability to identify a goal, to work out how to achieve it, and to carry out that plan is the essence of every intelligent activity. Could it be, Thornton suggests, that problem-solving processes provide the fundamental machinery for cognitive development? In Children Solving Problems she synthesizes the dramatic insights and findings of post-Piagetian research and sets the agenda for the next stage in understanding the varied phenomena of children’s problem-solving.
A window on the insular world of autism, this book offers a rare close look at the mysterious condition that afflicts approximately 350,000 Americans and affects millions more. As they make sense of the many features of autism at every level of intellectual functioning across the life span, Marian Sigman and Lisa Capps weave together clinical vignettes, research findings, methodological considerations, and historical accounts. The result is a compelling, comprehensive view of the disorder, as true to human experience as it is to scientific observation.
Children with Autism is unique in that it views autism through the lens of developmental psychopathology, a discipline grounded in the belief that studies of normal and abnormal development can inform and enhance one another. Sigman and Capps conduct readers through the course of development from infancy to adulthood, outlining the differences between normal and autistic individuals at each stage and highlighting the links between growth in cognitive, social, and emotional domains. In particular, Sigman and Capps suggest that deficits in social understanding emerge in the early infancy of autistic children, and they explore how these deficits organize the development of autistic individuals through the course of their lives. They also examine the effects certain characteristics can have on an autistic person's adjustment over time. Their book concludes with an overview of existing interventions and promising avenues for further research.
David Foulkes is one of the international leaders in the empirical study of children’s dreaming, and a pioneer of sleep laboratory research with children. In this book, which distills a lifetime of study, Foulkes shows that dreaming as we normally understand it—active stories in which the dreamer is an actor—appears relatively late in childhood. This true dreaming begins between the ages of 7 and 9. He argues that this late development of dreaming suggests an equally late development of waking reflective self-awareness.
Foulkes offers a spirited defense of the independence of the psychological realm, and the legitimacy of studying it without either psychoanalytic over-interpretation or neurophysiological reductionism.
Anyone who knows children understands the importance of their relationships with one another. But until recently, psychology has offered little to illuminate children's friendships, assuming Instead that development is largely determined by the relationship between parent and child. Now, however, a new psychology of the child's social world has begun to take shape. Zick Rubin's book provides a graceful introduction to this work, written in the clear, nontechnical style that readers have come to expect of the Developing Child series.
Children's Friendships covers such questions as how friendship develops out of the simple play among young toddlers, how the child's conception of friendship changes with increasing cognitive sophistication, how individuals become popular or unpopular and how each affects them, why children form cliques, adopt stereotypes, follow fads, and (almost universally) exclude members of the opposite sex in the years just before puberty. The author's answers to these and other questions may surprise even the most experienced child-watcher.
Whether we like it or not, children learn a great deal—both cognitively and emotionally—from one another. Children's Friendships provides important insight into this kind of learning that all interested adults will find extremely valuable.
How do children learn the intangible rules of conversation? How do they make talk “work”? Adults usually regard talk as a simple means of conveying information. Catherine Garvey’s examination of children’s talk reveals, however, that much more than this goes on in any conversational exchange.
Talk always takes place in a particular situation or context: the speakers are continuously interpreting what is going on, and they adjust their responses accordingly. To be sure that the message is received, children must learn to engage the attention of the other person, to take turns at talking, and to set up signals for the beginning and end of conversation. They learn to confirm that the intended meaning is understood and to evaluate the acceptability of the message, and they acquire an understanding of the ritual aspects of talk, including marks of courtesy such as “please” and “thank you,” displays of attentiveness, and an awareness of interpersonal status. Children must also learn to say “no,” to use talk to reach a goal, and to interpret the differences in the ways other people talk.
Garvey explains the importance of talk to children’s socialization and development and shows why talk is an integral and revealing part of the child’s life that reflects important changes in thinking and social interaction.
We all know the saying, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” but is that really true? After all, for some people, traumatic experiences ultimately lead to genuinely debilitating outcomes. For others, though, adversity does seem to lead to “post-traumatic growth,” where individuals move through suffering and find their lives changed in positive ways. Why does this growth happen for some people and not others? How exactly does it happen? Can the positive results be purposefully replicated?
To attract readers, journalists have long trafficked in the causes of trauma--crime, violence, warfare--as well as psychological profiling of deviance and aberrational personalities. Novelists, in turn, have explored these same subjects in developing their characters and by borrowing from their own traumatic life stories to shape the themes and psychological terrain of their fiction. In this book, Doug Underwood offers a conceptual and historical framework for comprehending the impact of trauma and violence in the careers and the writings of important journalist-literary figures in the United States and British Isles from the early 1700s to today.
Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work.
The most extensive scholarly examination of the role that trauma has played in the shaping of our journalistic and literary heritage, Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss discusses more than a hundred writers whose works have won them fame, even at the price of their health, their families, and their lives.
In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, Connelly shows that the source of enjoyment of confined spaces lies in the viewer's relationship to excess.
Cinema of Confinement offers rich insights into the appeal of constricted filmic spaces at a time when one can easily traverse spatial boundaries within the virtual reality of cyberspace.
"The goal of my teaching has always been, and remains, to train analysts."
--Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, 209
Arguably the most profound psychoanalytic thinker since Freud, and deeply influential in many fields, Jacques Lacan often seems opaque to those he most wanted to reach. These are the readers Bruce Fink addresses in this clear and practical account of Lacan's highly original approach to therapy. Written by a clinician for clinicians, Fink's Introduction is an invaluable guide to Lacanian psychoanalysis, how it's done, and how it differs from other forms of therapy. While elucidating many of Lacan's theoretical notions, the book does so from the perspective of the practitioner faced with the pressing questions of diagnosis, what therapeutic stance to adopt, how to involve the patient, and how to bring about change.
Fink provides a comprehensive overview of Lacanian analysis, explaining the analyst's aims and interventions at each point in the treatment. He uses four case studies to elucidate Lacan's unique structural approach to diagnosis. These cases, taking up both theoretical and clinical issues in Lacan's views of psychosis, perversion, and neurosis, highlight the very different approaches to treatment that different situations demand.
It inspired written testimonials from William McKinley, Thomas Edison, and Sarah Bernhardt; merited a medal from Pope Leo XIII; produced "exhilaration and lasting euphoria" in Sigmund Freud. Once the stimulant of choice of the enlightened and the elite, cocaine has become, a century later, a plague, ravaging the lives of millions. This book is the first to draw together all the facts about this pervasive drug--from its natural occurrence in a tea-like native South American plant to its devastating appearance as crack in the inner cities of the United States.
Drawing on the latest work in medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, pharmacology, epidemiology, social work, and sociology, the volume is a highly accessible reference on the history and use of cocaine, its physical and psychological effects, and the etiology and epidemiology of cocaine addiction. It also provides a critical evaluation of the pharmaceutical agents and psychosocial interventions that have been used to treat this addiction. Author Jerome J. Platt answers such basic questions as: What is cocaine? What forms does it come in? How is it administered? What does it do? What are the medical complications of cocaine addiction? What are the treatments, and how successful are they?
Uniquely comprehensive, Cocaine Addiction makes all the latest information on this urgent subject readily available to medical professionals and practitioners, social workers and scholars, and anyone who cares to know more about this perennially troubling drug.
The cochlear implant debate has changed, as evidenced in this cogent collection that presents 13 chapters by 20 experts, including several who communicate through sign language but also utilize cochlear implants. The impetus for this change stems from recognition that both visual and aural input can enhance the education of deaf children.
Divided into four sections, Cochlear Implants: Evolving Perspectives first focuses on the impact of implants in the Deaf community. Chapters in this section examine the issues driving the cochlear implant debate, the ethics of genetic engineering, experiences of implanted adult deaf signers, reflections of deaf mothers who have had their children implanted, and the effects of implants on deaf identity. The second section delves into the mechanics of bimodal processing, including listening strategies that can benefit signing children with cochlear implants. The third section surveys combined aural/visual educational approaches, such as teaching implanted children in an ASL/English bilingual classroom, and applying auditory rehabilitation to a signed communication context.
The final section challenges readers to reframe the debate first by exploring sensory politics, then by envisioning an emerging world that requires the Deaf community to connect with it to secure its future. With this information, readers will reach their own conclusions about cochlear implants and auditory and visual approaches to the mastery of both spoken and signed languages.
This book explores the strikingly similar ways in which information is encoded in nonverbal man-made signals (e.g., traffic lights and tornado sirens) and animal-evolved signals (e.g., color patterns and vocalizations). The book also considers some coding principles for reducing certain unwanted redundancies and explains how desirable redundancies enhance communication reliability.
Jack Hailman believes this work pioneers several aspects of analyzing human and animal communication. The book is the first to survey man-made signals as a class. It is also the first to compare such human-devised systems with signaling in animals by showing the highly similar ways in which the two encode information. A third innovation is generalizing principles of quantitative information theory to apply to a broad range of signaling systems. Finally, another first is distinguishing among types of redundancy and their separation into unwanted and desirable categories.
This remarkably novel book will be of interest to a wide readership. Appealing not only to specialists in semiotics, animal behavior, psychology, and allied fields but also to general readers, it serves as an introduction to animal signaling and to an important class of human communication.
Contributors. Miran Bozovic, Mladen Dolar, Alain Grosrichard, Marc de Kessel, Robert Pfaller, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic
Alexander Romanovich Luria, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, is best known for his pioneering work on the development of language and thought, mental retardation, and the cortical organization of higher mental processes. Virtually unnoticed has been his major contribution to the understanding of cultural differences in thinking.
In the early 1930s young Luria set out with a group of Russian psychologists for the steppes of central Asia. Their mission: to study the impact of the socialist revolution on an ancient Islamic cotton-growing culture and, no less, to establish guidelines for a viable Marxist psychology. Lev Vygotsky, Luria's great teacher and friend, was convinced that variations in the mental development of children must be understood as a process including historically determined cultural factors. Guided by this conviction, Luria and his colleagues studied perception, abstraction, reasoning, and imagination among several remote groups of Uzbeks and Kirghiz—from cloistered illiterate women to slightly educated new friends of the central government.
The original hypothesis was abundantly supported by the data: the very structure of the human cognitive process differs according to the ways in which social groups live out their various realities. People whose lives are dominated by concrete, practical activities have a different method of thinking from people whose lives require abstract, verbal, and theoretical approaches to reality.
For Luria the legitimacy of treating human consciousness as a product of social history legitimized the Marxian dialectic of social development. For psychology in general, the research in Uzbekistan, its rich collection of data and the penetrating observations Luria drew from it, have cast new light on the workings of cognitive activity. The parallels between individual and social development are still being explored by researchers today. Beyond its historical and theoretical significance, this book represents a revolution in method. Much as Piaget introduced the clinical method into the study of children's mental activities, Luria pioneered his own version of the clinical technique for use in cross-cultural work. Had this text been available, the recent history of cognitive psychology and of anthropological study might well have been very different. As it is, we are only now catching up with Luria's procedures.
Merging evolutionary ecology and cognitive science, cognitive ecology investigates how animal interactions with natural habitats shape cognitive systems, and how constraints on nervous systems limit or bias animal behavior. Research in cognitive ecology has expanded rapidly in the past decade, and this second volume builds on the foundations laid out in the first, published in 1998.
Cognitive Ecology II integrates numerous scientific disciplines to analyze the ecology and evolution of animal cognition. The contributors cover the mechanisms, ecology, and evolution of learning and memory, including detailed analyses of bee neurobiology, bird song, and spatial learning. They also explore decision making, with mechanistic analyses of reproductive behavior in voles, escape hatching by frog embryos, and predation in the auditory domain of bats and eared insects. Finally, they consider social cognition, focusing on alarm calls and the factors determining social learning strategies of corvids, fish, and mammals.
With cognitive ecology ascending to its rightful place in behavioral and evolutionary research, this volume captures the promise that has been realized in the past decade and looks forward to new research prospects.
“This is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences… Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language.
Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.
As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.
People differ in their cognitive styles—their ways of getting and using information to solve problems and make decisions. Alfred G. Smith and his associates studied these differences in a selected group of over 800 students at a score of law schools throughout the United States. Two major cognitive styles were identified: that of the monopath, who follows a single route of established principles and procedures, and that of the polypath, who takes many routes, as circumstances suggest.
A battery of both original and standard tests was administered to both law students and their professors to investigate differences in cognitive style and their relationships to self-image, anxiety, and academic achievement. This also revealed differences in prevailing styles at different schools.
The results will be of special interest to readers concerned with legal education, to psychologists, and to behavioral scientists. The research format developed here will serve equally well for raising significant questions about the professions of medicine, education, social work, and others in which cognitive and communication styles play a central role in determining outcomes.
SATs, ACTs, GPAs. Everyone knows that these scores can’t tell a college everything that’s important about an applicant. But what else should admissions officers look for, and how can they know it when they see it? In College Admissions for the 21st Century a leading researcher on intelligence and creativity offers a bold and practical approach to college admissions testing.
Standardized tests are measures of memory and analytical skills. But the ever-changing global society beyond a college campus needs more than just those qualities, argues Robert Sternberg. Tomorrow’s leaders and citizens also need creativity, practicality, and wisdom.
How can the potential for those complex qualities be measured? One answer is “Kaleidoscope,” a new initiative in undergraduate admissions, first used at Tufts University. Its open-ended questions for applicants, and the means used to score the answers, gives applicants and admissions officers the chance to go beyond standardized tests.
Does it work? As Sternberg describes in detail, Kaleidoscope measures predicted first-year academic success, over and above SATs and high school GPAs, and predicted first-year extracurricular activities, leadership, and active citizenship as well. And every year that Kaleidoscope measures were used, the entering class’s average SATs and high school GPAs went up too.
What worked at Tufts can work elsewhere. New kinds of assessments, like Kaleidoscope, can liberate many colleges and students from the narrowness of standardized tests and inspire new approaches to teaching for new kinds of talented, motivated citizens of the world.
They’re not the students strolling across the bucolic liberal arts campuses where their grandfathers played football. They are first-generation college students—children of immigrants and blue-collar workers—who know that their hopes for success hinge on a degree.
But college is expensive, unfamiliar, and intimidating. Inexperienced students expect tough classes and demanding, remote faculty. They may not know what an assignment means, what a score indicates, or that a single grade is not a definitive measure of ability. And they certainly don’t feel entitled to be there. They do not presume success, and if they have a problem, they don’t expect to receive help or even a second chance.
Rebecca D. Cox draws on five years of interviews and observations at community colleges. She shows how students and their instructors misunderstand and ultimately fail one another, despite good intentions. Most memorably, she describes how easily students can feel defeated—by their real-world responsibilities and by the demands of college—and come to conclude that they just don’t belong there after all.
Eye-opening even for experienced faculty and administrators, The College Fear Factor reveals how the traditional college culture can actually pose obstacles to students’ success, and suggests strategies for effectively explaining academic expectations.
Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship.
Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France’s postcolonial legacy.
More than 100 indigenous languages are spoken in Mexico and Central America. Each language partitions the color spectrum according to a pattern that is unique in some way. But every local system of color categories also shares characteristics with the systems of other Mesoamerican languages and of languages elsewhere in the world.
This book presents the results of the Mesoamerican Color Survey, which Robert E. MacLaury conducted in 1978-1981. Drawn from interviews with 900 speakers of some 116 Mesoamerican languages, the book provides a sweeping overview of the organization and semantics of color categorization in modern Mesoamerica.
Extensive analysis and MacLaury's use of vantage theory reveal complex and often surprising interrelationships among the ways languages categorize colors. His findings offer valuable cross-cultural data for all students of Mesoamerica. They will also be of interest to all linguists and cognitive scientists working on theories of categorization more generally.
The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster’s famous Paradise Gardens, his journey—of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle—is an unparalleled look into the lives and visionary works of some of Finster’s contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and oeuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy.
With his prodigious gift for conversation and quietly observant storytelling, Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation; Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now lives as a recluse in rural Wisconsin and paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter was brutally murdered. These artists’ works are as wildly varied as their life stories, but without sensationalizing or patronizing them, Bottoms—one of today’s finest young writers—gets at the heart of what they have in common: the struggle to make sense, through art, of their difficult personal histories.
In doing so, he weaves a true narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.
To penetrate the opaque, to lift the weight and let the self escape its frozen image—this is the essence of psychotherapy, a process described with extraordinary grace and warmth in this book. In remarkably candid portraits of patients at odds with themselves, Leston Havens takes us through the wonders and rigors of psychological healing and shows us what it really means, in immediate, human terms, to come to life.
We are all captives of the images we carry with us—and those we inspire—and therapy seeks to expose the relation of these images to a deeper psychological life, to free the captive from labels and crippling assumptions. Havens views this process through the multiple lenses of literature, art, and psychiatry. In rich clinical portraits, short on jargon and rigid techniques and long on empathy and wisdom, we encounter ordinary people struggling with the trials of their own existence: marriage and divorce, sexual identity and fulfillment, illness and death. We meet a woman imprisoned by eager responses to her beauty and helpfulness, a proud lawyer in thrall to conventional expectations, a dying man becoming more and more alive as he approaches death.
Through these very personal stories, Havens explores the meaning of psychological health—how it can be recognized through the filter of images and ideas, protected from their distorting power, and encouraged to flourish. The result is a revealing and deeply moving explication of the process of self-discovery as it emerges from the life story that therapy can tell.
Communication and Development was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
What role does communication play in the economic, social, and political development of a community? The results of the study reported here, based on comprehensive field work in two small villages in India, throw considerable light on that question, one which is of fundamental importance to those concerned with rates and patterns of growth in any developing country.
In this study, the term "communication" refers to a social process—the flow of information, the circulation of knowledge and ideas in society, the propagation and internalization of thoughts. It does not refer to the media or means of communication, such as electronics, roads and railways, or vehicles.
The two villages studied, both in South India, were at contrasting stages of development. One was becoming industrialized, while the other still clung to such traditional ways as the barter system. To carry out the field work for his study, Dr. Rao lived in these villages for several months, talking at length with the people, obtaining information about their attitudes, beliefs, and opinions, and observing them and their surroundings with a trained eye. He also checked official records for pertinent information. He analyzes his findings from a psychological and sociological standpoint and, in addition, provides an intimate description of the village life.
The book will be of particular interest to communications specialists, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and others concerned with studies of the developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
This single source provides a manageable, representative selection of rapidly accumulating literature. 1,158 items, primarily in U.S. literature from January 1953 to April 1961, complement the 984 items to May 1953 of Evaluation in Mental Health (USPHS Publications, 413).
The Guide’s arrangement imposes a useful structure upon the entire field; the detailed subject index offers easy access to all aspects of the materials. Part I lists 15 books for orientation in the field. Part II gives 715 items in five subject-categories: theory; practice; research methods and findings; evaluations and reviews of practice and research; and professional roles. Part III lists 317 items for related professions, and social problems. Part IV gives 61 bibliographical items to aid access to more extensive or specialized materials and 22 reference books on vital statistics and census data. Part V lists 28 reference works on information and funding organizations, with their addresses. The Guide’s comprehensive Author-Title-Subject Index is of special value. Introductory discussions, instructions on use, and a List of Journals are included.
The psychology of thinking has traditionally been in the business of making comparisons between different groups of people. On the whole, these comparisons have rendered a substantial body of knowledge; but all too often, they have suffered the pitfalls of faulty organizational logic and unfounded or invidious conclusions. In this extraordinarily clear and critical introduction, Michael Cole and Barbara Means out the problems involved in comparing how people think. They show, for example, how variables confounded with the constitution of two groups can lead to the wrong interpretation of group differences. More subtly, they demonstrate how cognitive differences between groups can destroy the equivalence of the tests used to make comparisons. They also discuss the unfortunate way that observed differences between groups have led to prejudicial interpretations in which mental differences are transformed into mental deficits.
Cole and Means illustrate all these problems with a rich variety of examples drawn from the research literature in comparative cognition. Because they use real examples. Cole and Means offer much more than the usual banal remedies for improving research design. Instead of merely telling the student to run the right control groups, for example, they show how theory enters into the selection of appropriate controls and how atheoretic comparative work can easily run amok.
It is a rare event when seasoned researchers take time to tell the novice how to avoid the problems of previous research. Comparative Studies of How People Think provides just such an event.
In a field choked with seemingly impenetrable jargon, Philip N. Johnson-Laird has done the impossible: written a book about how the mind works that requires no advance knowledge of artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, or psychology. The mind, he says, depends on the brain in the same way as the execution of a program of symbolic instructions depends on a computer, and can thus be understood by anyone willing to start with basic principles of computation and follow his step-by-step explanations.
The author begins with a brief account of the history of psychology and the birth of cognitive science after World War II. He then describes clearly and simply the nature of symbols and the theory of computation, and follows with sections devoted to current computational models of how the mind carries out all its major tasks, including visual perception, learning, memory, the planning and control of actions, deductive and inductive reasoning, and the formation of new concepts and new ideas. Other sections discuss human communication, meaning, the progress that has been made in enabling computers to understand natural language, and finally the difficult problems of the conscious and unconscious mind, free will, needs and emotions, and self-awareness. In an envoi, the author responds to the critics of cognitive science and defends the computational view of the mind as an alternative to traditional dualism: cognitive science integrates mind and matter within the same explanatory framework.
This first single-authored introduction to cognitive science will command the attention of students of cognitive science at all levels including psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists--as well as all readers curious about recent knowledge on how the mind works.
Confronting Theory presents a critique of what has come to be known as theory in cross-disciplinary humanities education. Rather than dismissing theory writing as pretentious and abstract, Confronting Theory examines its principal concepts from the perspective of academic psychology and shows that although many of these analyses sound like revolutionary psychological theory, few, if any, have empirical implications that students can evaluate. By considering the educational implications of cultural theory, Confronting Theory will empower students with arguments, not just opinions, about the increasingly idealist and irrelevant anti-realist curricula they confront in their humanities education in today’s universities.
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