Marital Maladjustment and the Crime of Murder Among Pakistani Female Criminals

This study explores marital maladjustment as concomittantly related to female crimes such as murder and running away from home. Seventy female convicts were interviewed in depth on variables indicating marital maladjustment. The variables were: Sharp disparity between the ages of husbands and wives, early marriage, husband's other wife, exchange marriage, forced marriage, problems with in-laws, husband's extra-marital relations and severe conflicts with husbands. The findings indicate that marital maladjustment is an important factor behind criminal acts commited by women in Pakistan. The two most frequent of these are murder and running away from home. Results have been discussed in terms of the peculiar cultural conditions existing in Pakistan. The implications of social reform are suggested and the need for adopting a helpful attitude towards women before and after their criminal acts is stressed.     

Two Families: The Origins of a Therapeutic Crisis

The treatment by individual and family therapy of a hospitalized young woman is presented as it reflects the historical and current family dynamics of the patient and her individual psychotherapist. The contribution of these factors to a therapeutic crisis is discussed.     

Depictions of Murder in Maine: The Dominant Ideology Thesis

Recent research suggests that popular depictions of crime reflect and reinforce a dominant ideology in which criminals are viewed as rational actors who bear individual responsibility for crime. The research reported here employed a content analysis approach to examine depictions of 108 assailants found in media reports of murders that occurred in Maine from 2008 through 2012. While most of the depictions examined here describe crime as a matter of individual responsibility, this analysis found that many media depictions of Maine’s murderers include content that is sympathetic to the offender and some accounts raise questions about the effectiveness of police services, mental healthcare, and related social services.     

Migratory Emotions: The Murder of Jean Charles de Menezes

What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise solidarity in a time of common sense individualism? In this piece, I reflect upon the deeply tragic case of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian immigrant who was brutally murdered by the British police in the wake of the London bombing. Drawing upon concepts from psychoanalysis and critical psychology, I discuss the affective and emotive nature of the case. I argue that the case offers insight into the irrational nature of `terror' used to explain state-led violence in a time of mass Islamophobic paranoia. I further argue that the emotive nature of the political is consistently disavowed in order to consolidate the face of the nation state as a white, western, masculinist, rational one. Finally, I offer thoughts on what this case might tell us about the interrelationship between discourses of `race,' racism, and citizenship within our contemporary political moment. Rather than being used to support succinct political and theoretical categories of identity politics, the death of Jean Charles de Menezes is an example of the urgent necessity for solidarity to be formed between marginalized bodies. The persistence of state-led murders, justified and legislated by the newest `N word' of the decade – `terrorist' – requires theoretical endeavours that transcend disciplinary boundaries and political action that transcends bodies.     

Depictions of Murder in Maine: The Dominant Ideology Thesis

Recent research suggests that popular depictions of crime reflect and reinforce a dominant ideology in which criminals are viewed as rational actors who bear individual responsibility for crime. The research reported here employed a content analysis approach to examine depictions of 108 assailants found in media reports of murders that occurred in Maine from 2008 through 2012. While most of the depictions examined here describe crime as a matter of individual responsibility, this analysis found that many media depictions of Maine’s murderers include content that is sympathetic to the offender and some accounts raise questions about the effectiveness of police services, mental health care and related social services.     

The New Theory of Reference: Kripke,Marcus, and Its Origins

Book Information The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins. Edited by Paul Humphreys and James Fetzer. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Boston. Pp. xiii + 290. Hardback, US$105.     

The Origins of Wittgenstein's Imaginary Scenarios: Something Old, Something New

The imaginary scenarios that appear in nearly every work of the later Wittgenstein – ones involving laughing cattle, disembodied eyes that see, and the like – are decidedly absent from the Tractatus. What necessitated this change in methodology? A comparison of the Tractatus with the Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein's first major work after his return to philosophy, reveals that these devices are the product of something old and something new. The rationale for these devices is already present in the notion of a “propositional variable,” but Wittgenstein had little use for them until he rejected the phenomenological language and laconic style of the Tractatus.     

Bystander intervention in a Crime: The Effect of a Mass-media Campaign1

Two field studies investigated bystander intervention by witnesses to a staged shoplifting in a University bookstore. In the first study, a mass-media campaign was successful in communicating information and altering behavioral intentions, but not in increasing actual intervention behavior. A second study attempted to determine whether the low report rate and the relative ineffectiveness of the campaign to alter this rate was due to in-group loyalty between students. The results indicated that although students differentially perceived a nonstudent shoplifter, there was no increase in intervention.     

自闭症碎镜理论之迷思:缘起、问题与前景

自闭症患者在社会沟通和交往障碍上主要涉及社会情感互动缺陷、非语言行为交流缺陷、发展维持和理解人际关系的缺陷。该群体在社会认知过程中潜在自动的直觉成分受损被视为其独特的临床症状。鉴于镜像神经元系统在社会认知的直觉成分上扮演的重要角色,该系统的功能障碍假说(或称"碎镜"理论)被提出并用以解释自闭症的成因及其异常表现。然而,在经历了10年的发展与证据检验后,该理论潜在的问题逐渐暴露。当前的研究显示,迄今为止人类镜像神经元系统的研究存在内在缺陷,镜像神经元系统至多是社会认知的附带原因,该系统功能障碍也并非自闭症患者社会认知障碍的必要条件。碎镜理论面临来自临床行为研究与认知神经科学实验证据的广泛质疑。未来,伴随自闭症研究对象的变化,镜像神经元的社会响应学说的提出,双个体范式、第二人称神经科学范式与计算精神病学的兴起,镜像神经元与自闭症的真正关系将有望得以阐明。     

Creativity,Drugs, Crime,and Education: On Eisenman's Contemporary Social issues: Drugs,Crime, Creativity,and Education

This article reports analyses of the verdicts of various film organizations that annually present awards to motion pictures and investigates whether they award/nominate the same movies in a given year. This research disputes previous findings that reported a high level of agreement between those juries, by the means of reliability analysis and the Cronbach's alpha composite. Arguments were raised for why these earlier findings were flawed and why the use of Cronbach's alpha is problematic. Different aspects of consensus are discussed, after which a new measure (β) is introduced. This is followed by a detailed comparison between particular juries with regard to the percentage share of their decisions that award the most successful (chosen by multiple other juries as well) and the least successful (uniquely awarded) films. This measure shows how often a singular jury decides in line with the others and how much does it stray from the consensus. The article also broadens the theoretical discussions about the reasons for (not) expecting a consensus to arise between various expert juries. It argues that by adopting a cultural economic perspective we become aware of various reasons, most importantly competition between the award events and the juries tend towards a lower level of consensus.