Healing Without Waging War: Beyond Military Metaphors in Medicine and HIV Cure Research

Military metaphors are pervasive in biomedicine, including HIV research. Rooted in the mind set that regards pathogens as enemies to be defeated, terms such as “shock and kill” have become widely accepted idioms within HIV cure research. Such language and symbolism must be critically examined as they may be especially problematic when used to express scientific ideas within emerging health-related fields. In this article, philosophical analysis and an interdisciplinary literature review utilizing key texts from sociology, anthropology, history, and Chinese and African studies were conducted to investigate the current proliferation of military metaphors. We found the use of these metaphors to be ironic, unfortunate, and unnecessary. To overcome military metaphors we propose to (1) give them less aggressive meanings, and/or (2) replace them with more peaceful metaphors. Building on previous authors' work, we argue for the increased use of “journey” (and related) metaphors as meaningful, cross-culturally appropriate alternatives to military metaphors.     

Becoming a lifer? Unlocking career through metaphor

Despite growing interest in the adoption of metaphor analysis as a method of studying organizational and working life, there have been few, if any, empirical studies of career metaphors. Although career scholars have imposed their own metaphors to help illuminate their conceptions of career, the metaphors employed by those having careers and the conceptual insight this might generate has been all but ignored. This paper seeks to address this gap. Drawing on the career accounts of graduate level employees within a large blue‐chip corporation, the metaphors they employ are analysed. The dominant metaphors contained within the careers literature – spatial, journey, horticultural, and competition metaphors – are drawn on heavily by participants. So too are other groups of metaphors not acknowledged within the literature. These are revealed as imprisonment, military, school‐like surveillance, Wild West and nautical metaphors. An analysis of these metaphors generates fresh insights into the concept of career and leads to the ‘unlocking’ of important, but to date neglected features of career. On the basis of this metaphor analysis, the paper argues that career may be better understood in terms of a politicized process in which discipline and control are key dimensions.     

The Place of Earth in Lutheran Funeral Rites: Mapping the Current Terrain

Do funeral rites help Christians leave the earth or return to the earth? This article identifies the conceptual metaphors by which the funeral rites in Evangelical Lutheran Worship ¹ portray earth. All of the conceptual metaphors related to earth in the rites identified by this essay are at least compatible with an overarching image of journey, and most of the conceptual metaphors are directly structured by the journey image. While these conceptual metaphors can be understood as mapping a journey that seeks to abandon the earth for an otherworldly heaven, a number of tensions within the metaphors challenge this trajectory with an earthward goal of resting in the fruitful, living earth. The article concludes by briefly identifying some ecotheologically promising synergies between some of the biblical‐theological images and the emerging practices of conservation burial. ²      

Business students' evaluation of their internships

An 8-item evaluation of a business internship was completed by 363 junior and senior undergraduates. Students agreed or strongly agreed that the internship met the following goals and criteria of the for-credit course: adequacy of orientation, clarity of expectations, helpfulness of supervision, adequacy of feedback, application of business education, development of new knowledge and skills beneficial to career exploration, value of the placement and recommendation of employer for other interns. The importance of outcome assessment is discussed within the context of internship programs.     

Aptness in metaphor

We propose that in understanding a metaphor, an individual sees a concept from one class or domain in terms of its similarity in two different respects to a concept from another class or domain. The two kinds of similarity are within-domain similarity, or the degree to which two concepts occupy similar positions with respect to their own class or domain; and between-domain similarity, or the degree to which the classes or domains occupied by the concepts are themselves similar. To test this dual notion of similarity, we obtained ratings of the aptness of 64 metaphors from one group of subjects and ratings of their comprehensibility from another group of subjects. The terms of the metaphors had been scaled (based on the ratings of pretest subjects) to give measures of distance both within and between domains. Aptness of metaphors related positively to betweendomain distance, negatively to within-domain distance, and not at all to overall distance. Metaphors are thus perceived as more apt to the extent that their terms occupy similar positions within domains that are not very similar to each other. Comprehensibility also related to aptness. In a second experiment, subjects ranked a set of terms as possible completions for metaphors. For both groups of subjects in this experiment, the rank of an alternative's within-domain distance correlated with its relative popularity. Quantitative models, patterned after a model proposed by D. Rumelhart and A. A. Abrahamson (Cognitive Psychology, 1973, 5, 1–28) for analogical reasoning, afforded significant prediction of the choices of the group of subjects in which all the possible completions of a metaphor were from a single domain. The same models did not predict the choices of a group of subjects in which the possible completions of the metaphors were from different domains.     

Personality through metaphor: Optimism, pessimism, locus of control, and sensation seeking

In two experiments, several personality attributes evident in metaphors people use to describe everyday experiences were examined. Subjects either generated (Experiment 1) or endorsed (Experiment 2) a metaphor that represented their views about six facets of their lives (e.g., work, relationships, graduating). In self-generated metaphors, content analyses of the metaphors revealed that attributes of optimism (e.g., looking forward to the future) and pessimism (e.g., cynicism) were significant components of metaphor content. Also, modest relationships were found between the themes of optimism contained within their metaphors and scores on an optimism scale of a questionnaire designed to evaluate the optimistic and pessimistic orientations. In a second study, subjects endorsed how strongly preselected metaphors represented important aspects of their lives. These preferences were significantly related to their scores on an optimism/pessimism instrument and a locus of control inventory. These results support the notion that metaphors, like other creative productions, may prove a useful vehicle for studying personality characteristics. They also provide evidence for the construct validity of the optimism and pessimism questionnaire.     

Personality through metaphor: Optimism,pessimism, locus of control,and sensation seeking

In two experiments, several personality attributes evident in metaphors people use to describe everyday experiences were examined. Subjects either generated (Experiment 1) or endorsed (Experiment 2) a metaphor that represented their views about six facets of their lives (e.g., work, relationships, graduating). In self-generated metaphors, content analyses of the metaphors revealed that attributes of optimism (e.g., looking forward to the future) and pessimism (e.g., cynicism) were significant components of metaphor content. Also, modest relationships were found between the themes of optimism contained within their metaphors and scores on an optimism scale of a questionnaire designed to evaluate the optimistic and pessimistic orientations. In a second study, subjects endorsed how strongly preselected metaphors represented important aspects of their lives. These preferences were significantly related to their scores on an optimism/pessimism instrument and a locus of control inventory. These results support the notion that metaphors, like other creative productions, may prove a useful vehicle for studying personality characteristics. They also provide evidence for the construct validity of the optimism and pessimism questionnaire.     

Modeling adaptive cooperative and competitive metaphors as mental models for joint decision making

In this paper, joint decision making processes are studied and the role of cognitive metaphors as mental models in them. A second-order self-modeling network model is introduced based on mechanisms known from cognitive and social neuroscience and cognitive metaphor and mental model literature. The cognitive metaphors were modeled as specific forms of mental models providing a form of modulation within the joint decision making process. The model addresses not only the use of these mental models in the decision making, but also their hebbian learning and the control over the learning. The obtained self-modeling network model was applied to two types of metaphors that affect joint decision making in different manners: a cooperative metaphor and a competitive metaphor. By a number of scenarios it was shown how the obtained self-modeling network model can be used to simulate and analyze joint decision processes and how they are influenced by such cognitive metaphors.     

Understanding and appreciating metaphors

We consider three theories that have dominated discussions of metaphor. One view is that metaphors make comparisons, the basis for the comparison being the features (or categories) that the terms of the metaphor share. The second view is that metaphors involve an anomaly. The third view is that metaphors are ‘interactive’, producing a new way of seeing the terms. We propose a new theory—the domains-interaction view—that draws on elements of all three earlier views, but borrows especially from the interaction view. We consider the implications of our theory for three questions: What are metaphors? How are they understood? What makes a good metaphor? We argue that metaphors correlate two systems of concepts from different domains. The best metaphors involve two diverse domains (more distance between domains making for better metaphors) and close correspondence between the terms within those domains. We call the degree of correspondence within-domain similarity. Metaphors are interpreted in several stages: the terms of the metaphor are encoded; the domains involved are inferred; the structures to be seen as parallel are found; the correspondences between these structures are ‘mapped’ or constructed; the terms of the metaphor are compared. If the terms are not seen to match or occupy analogous roles in their different domains, then the metaphor may be reinterpreted. The evidence on all this is tentative but supports our view. We review two studies (Tourangeau and Sternberg, 1981) that support the hypothesis that distance within domain relates negatively to aptness, whereas distance between domains relates positively. Several studies on comprehension tend to disconfirm the comparison theory's notion that the tenor and vehicle necessarily share features. Tenor and vehicle also appear to have asymmetrical roles in the interpretive process.     

Postdoctoral Internships: Potential Adverse Impacts on Internships, Dissertations, and Trainees

Increased consideration of transforming the predoctoral psychology internship into a postdoctoral training experience has resulted from changes in the training and reimbursement for psychology trainees, concerns about employment of recent graduates, and the perceived limited status of psychology interns within health care settings. Whether this fundamental shift in psychology's training paradigm could resolve any of the problems that have led to its deliberation is not known. The authors identify problems with a postdoctoral internship which may be as thorny as the problems it is intended to ameliorate. It may have unintended adverse effects (e.g., risk of reduced quality in training and dissertations, new pressures on internship programs and trainees, increased licensure quandaries). Until a highly detailed proposal is developed and its full range of potential consequences are analyzed and debated, it is premature for professional organizations to conclude whether such fundamental change should be pursued.     

Metaphor comprehension: A computational theory

Metaphor comprehension involves an interaction between the meaning of the topic and the vehicle terms of the metaphor. Meaning is represented by vectors in a high-dimensional semantic space. Predication modifies the topic vector by merging it with selected features of the vehicle vector. The resulting metaphor vector can be evaluated by comparing it with known landmarks in the semantic space. Thus, metaphorical predication is treated in the present model in exactly the same way as literal predication. Some experimental results concerning metaphor comprehension are simulated within this framework, such as the nonreversibility of metaphors, priming of metaphors with literal statements, and priming of literal statements with metaphors.     

Functional-anatomical organization of predicate metaphor processing

The bulk of the research on the neural organization of metaphor comprehension has focused on nominal metaphors and the metaphoric relationships between word pairs. By contrast, little work has been conducted on predicate metaphors using verbs of motion such as “The man fell under her spell.” We examined predicate metaphors as compared to literal sentences of motion such as “The child fell under the slide” in an event-related, functional MRI study. Our results demonstrated greater activation in the left inferior frontal cortex and left lateral temporal lobe for predicate metaphors as compared to literal sentences, while no differences were seen in homologous areas of the right hemisphere. We suggest that the results support a neural organization principle for motion processing in which greater abstraction proceeds along a posterior-to-anterior axis within the lateral portion of the left temporal cortex.     

Countering Cultural Metaphors of Aging

SUMMARY

This article examines three clusters of metaphors or cultural images of aging which function to marginalize older adults: metaphors which focus on aging as physical decline, on aging as aesthetic distance from youth, and on aging as failure of productivity. It then sketches out two ways to counter the marginalizing power of these cultural images of aging, to shape new metaphors or images of aging within a community of meaning, and to help make new sense of growing old, namely the formation of face-to-face groups of older adults and the creation of rituals in worship which name publicly the realities and experiences of aging.     

AX murderers,dragons, spiders and webs: Therapeutic metaphors in couple therapy

Using metaphors in psychotherapy is not a new practice. Metaphor has long occupied the interests of theorists and practitioners of psychoanalysis. Recently, influenced by the work of Erikson, metaphors have been utilized by non-analytic therapists. This paper explores the historical background of metaphors, examines the components of metaphors, explores metaphors and the social construction of reality, and presents a discussion of the use of metaphor in couple therapy.     

Searching hard versus searching smart: The role of search process quality in an internship context

Based on a self‐regulatory approach, we propose that students searching for an internship following a high‐quality process will show greater search success. In a sample of 191 Belgian final year students looking for an internship, the quality of students’ search process was positively related to both self‐reported and objective search outcomes, beyond the mere intensity of their search. Specifically, reflection related positively to students’ satisfaction and perceived fit with their internship, as well as to organizations’ assessment of students’ internship performance. Planning related positively to the speed of finding an internship. Furthermore, the four search process quality dimensions explained incremental variance in these outcomes beyond a unidimensional measure of metacognitive activities, supporting the added value of our multidimensional approach.     

Metaphor as an Instrument for Orchestrating Change in Counselor Training and the Counseling Process

The authors explore the use of metaphors as a training tool for beginning counselors for enhancing client case conceptualization, counselor‐client relationships, and intervention strategies. The history of the use of metaphors in counseling, several definitions, and a case study are presented. The authors discuss intentional use of metaphors with students in training and with clients. How to introduce the use of metaphors into counselor training and practice is also included.     

Conceptual similarity and the quality of metaphor in isolated sentences versus extended contexts

Many researchers have theorized or demonstrated a relationship between tenor and vehicle similarity and the judged quality of metaphors. In four experiments, each using different materials, the relationship between similarity and metaphoric quality was examined. Undergraduates in two different institutions rated: (1) the similarity of tenor and vehicle concepts, (2) the quality of metaphors in isolated, formulaic, sentences (the sort of materials used in previous experiments), or (3) the quality of the same metaphors in various extended, natural contexts. Average ratings of all three variables were determined for each metaphor. In all four experiments, similarity was highly positively correlated with the quality of metaphors in isolated, formulaic contexts, but similarity was either not correlated highly (Experiment 3) or not correlated at all (Experiment 1,2 & 4) with the quality of metaphors in extended, natural contexts. In three of the experiments, the quality of metaphors in isolated, formulaic sentences was not significantly correlated with the quality of metaphors in extended context.