The effects of play materials on social play

To increase cooperative and social behaviors in children, contingency management programs have been successfully employed. This study examined the possibility that children's social behavior might also be significantly influenced by the nature of the available play materials. Children in an urban recreation center were systematically provided with toys designed for social or isolate play. It was found that social play occurred only 16% of the time when the children were provided with "isolate" toys, whereas social play occurred 78% of the time when children were provided with "social" toys. Thus, the selection of play materials should be an important consideration in any effort to teach children social behaviors.     

Planning and acting

A new theory of problem solving is presented, which embeds problem solving in the theory of action; in this theory, a problem is just a difficult action. Making this work requires a sophisticated language for-talking about plans and their execution. This language allows a broad range of types of action, and can also be used to express rules for choosing and scheduling plans. To ensure flexibility, the problem solver consists of an interpreter driven by a theorem prover which actually manipulates formulas of the language. Many examples of the use of the system six given. including an extended treatment of the world of blocks. Limitations and extensions of the system are discussed at length. It is concluded that a rule-based problem solver is necessary and feasible, but that much more work remains to be done on the underlying theory of planning and acting.     

Side-effect actions,acting for a reason,and acting intentionally

What is the relation between acting intentionally and acting for a reason? While this question has generated a considerable amount of debate in the philosophy of action, on one point there has been a virtual consensus: actions performed for a reason are necessarily intentional. Recently, this consensus has been challenged by Joshua Knobe and Sean Kelly, who argue against it on the basis of empirical evidence concerning the ways in which ordinary speakers of the English language describe and explain certain side-effect actions. Knobe and Kelly's argument is of interest not only because it challenges a widely accepted philosophical thesis on the basis of experimental evidence, but also because it indirectly raises an important and largely neglected question, the question of whether or in what sense an agent can perform a side-effect action for a reason. In this article, I address this question and provide a positive answer to it. Specifically, I argue that agents act for a reason whenever they perform side-effect actions as trade-offs. Thus, I claim that there are three distinct types of rational action: actions performed as ends in themselves, actions performed as means to further ends, and side-effect actions performed as trade-offs. Given this multiplicity of types of rational action, the question of whether or not actions performed for a reason are necessarily intentional is in need of refinement. The more specific question that lies at the heart of this article is whether or not side-effect actions performed as trade-offs are necessarily intentional. I conclude that, contrary to what Knobe and Kelly suggest, the question remains open.     

Dreams and acting out

Dreams can be used as containers that free patients from increased tension. This may be the principal function of certain types of dreams, called "evacuative dreams." They are dreams used for getting rid of unbearable affects and unconscious fantasies, or as a safety valve for partial discharge of instinctual drives. These dreams are observed primarily in borderline and psychotic patients, but can also be seen in the regressive states of neurotic patients during weekends and other periods of separation. Such dreams have to be differentiated from "elaborative dreams," which have a working-through function and stand in an inverse relationship to acting out: the greater the production of elaborative dreams, the less the tendency to act out, and vice versa.     

Analysis of play

Abstract

Play has long been considered a useful therapeutic tool when working with children. Even though play is used extensively by psychotherapists of various theoretical persuasions, relatively little is written concerning the nature and therapeutic value of play. In addition, the therapeutic significance of play in psychotherapy with adults is an area that has been neglected and under‐utilized. This paper will address the nature of play and what it is that makes play therapeutic within a conceptual framework derived from psychoanalytic theory, existentialism and phenomenology. In particular, the nature of play and its therapeutic value will be analyzed through three constitutive elements: the paradoxical nature of play, the role of the imagination and the symbolic, and the playful therapist.     

From acting out to verbalization

This paper examines acting out phenomena through different theoretical perspectives from the past to the present. Using case examples of child and adult patients, the author demonstrates how acting out can be viewed as an opportunity to observe what was pre-verbal and repressed in a patient's life history. Symbolism is seen as the bridge between action and language as well as between patient and therapist.