Does Thor ask Iron Man for Help? Examining Help-Seeking Behaviors in Marvel Superheroes

Men seek help for problems less often and more hesitantly than women across a wide range of contexts. While there are many potential sources for this gender discrepancy, one possibility is that masculine attitudes and behaviors discourage help-seeking behaviors and create help-seeking barriers. As the superhero genre often changes over time to reflect current social attitudes, the current study explores patterns, contexts, and rewards of help-seeking behaviors portrayed by men in a genre of media frequently consumed by men: superhero films. Twenty-three Marvel Cinematic Universe films were coded for superhero men’s help-seeking behaviors, as well as patterns in context and outcomes around help seeking. Overall, we found that superhero men displayed the help-seeking behaviors of approaching problems and collaboration with others most often, followed by the maladaptive coping strategy violence. In addition, help-seeking behaviors were most often displayed when the superhero was acting in his personal/self, capacity and superhero men were most often confronted with physical problems. Furthermore, we found that most of the help-seeking behaviors coded were rewarded only about half of the time. Finally, we found several differences in patterns of help-seeking displayed by various specific heroes. Other patterns and implications are discussed.

     

Handheld Devices: The Barrier for Parents with Mental Health Difficulties in Child Outcomes

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The parenting landscape has changed dramatically over the last decade with the increasing prevalence of screen time. There is a growing body of evidence that...     

Is There a Relationship between Suicidal Intent and Lethality in Deliberate Self‐Poisoning?

The relationship between suicidal intent and lethality of deliberate self‐poisoning (DSP) episodes and their associations with suicide have yielded contradictory findings. The aims of this study were to investigate the association between patients’ suicidal intent and independently rated lethality of DSP episodes, and whether the association changes over time. Eighty‐nine DSP patients were investigated longitudinally. Self‐reported suicidal intent, including perceived likelihood of dying, wish to die, and whether or not the DSP was considered a suicide attempt, was measured at the time of the index episode (t1), 3 months (t2), and 12 months (t3) later. Lethality was assessed independently by three clinical toxicologists. Lethality was significantly associated with patients’ reported wish to die (p = .01) and perceived likelihood of dying (p = .04) at t1, but not at t2 and t3. No association was found between whether the episode was considered a suicide attempt or not and lethality at t1, t2, or t3. Lethality and suicidal intent should be considered as largely separate dimensions of self‐harm. Clinicians should bear this in mind during clinical assessment, especially regarding historical information.     

Book reviews

Hearing Haggerd, M. P. & Evans, E. F. (Eds.). 1987. British Medical Bulletin, 43 (4), 775-1037. ISBN 0-443-02899-6. £22.50.

Perlmutter, M. (Ed.) (1986). Perspectives on intellectual development : The Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology. Vol. 19. Hillsdale,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Pp. 261. ISBN 0-89859-784-6. £19.95.

Ellis, H. D., Jeeves, M. A., Newcombe, F., & Young, A. (Eds.) (1986). Aspects of face processing. Bordrecht : Martinus Nijhoff. Pp. 509. ISBN 90-247-3357-X. £80.25.

Gabrielsson, A. (Ed.) (1987). Action and perception in shythm and music. Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Music. Pp. 237. ISBN 91-85428-51-5.

Dowling, John E. (1987). The Retina. Cambridge, MA, and London :Belknap Press. Pp. xiv + 282. ISBN 0-674-76680-6. $29.95.

Foorman, B. R. & Siegel, A. W. (1986). Acquisition of reading skills : Cultural constraints and cognitive universals. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Pp. 168. ISBN 0-89859-642-4. £15.00.

Stillings, N., Feinstein, M., Garfield, J., Rissland, E., Rosenbaum, D., Weisler, S., & Baker-Ward, L. (1987). Cognitive science : An introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 533. ISBN 0-262-19257-8. £22.50.

Kapur, N. (1988). Memory disorders in clinical practice. London:Butterworths. Pp. 289. ISBN 0-407-00712-1. £39.50.

Bussis, A. M., Chittenden, E. A. Amarel, M. & Klausner, E. (1985). Inquiry into meaning: An invetigation of learning to read. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Pp. 367. ISBN 0-89859-504-5. £32.95.     

Book reviews

Gordon, I. E. (1989). Theories of visual perception. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 273. ISBN 0-471-92196-3. £12.50.

Shepp, B. E. & Ballasteros, S. (Eds.) (1989). Object perception: Structure and process. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pp. 431. ISBN 0-8058-0060-3 (hardback) £44.95; ISBN 0-8058-0333-5 (paperback) £22.95.

Frith, U. (1989). Autism: Explaining the enigma. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Pp. 204. ISBN 0-631-15833-2. £25.00 (hardback); £8.95 (paperback).

Rollins, M. (1989). Mental imagery: On the limits of cognitive science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pp. 170. ISBN 0-30-04491-7. £18.00.

Lloyd, D. (1989). Simple minds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pp. 266. ISBN 0-262-12140-9. £22.50.

Howard, D. & Franklin, S. (1988). Missing the meaning? A cognitive neuropsychological study of the processing of words by an aphasic patient. Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press. Pp. xix + 171. ISBN 0-262-08178-4. £22.50.

Evans, J. St. B. T. (1989). Bias in human reasoning. Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Ltd. ISBN 0-86377-106-8. £14.95 (hardback) ISBN 0-86377-156-4. £8.95 (paperback).

Clark, A. (1989). Micorcognition: Philosophy, cognitive science, and parallel distributed processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books. Pp. 226. ISBN 0-262-03148-5. £14.95.     

Prosopagnosia: A reclassification

We report a quantitative investigation of three patients who presented with a profound prosopagnosia. They were tested on a series of tests of face perception, face recognition, and paired associate learning using faces. A patient with marked perceptual difficulties but no difficulty whatever in recognizing faces was tested as a control. The control patient's performance was as bad or worse on the tests of perception of faces, and it is concluded that impaired performance on tests of face perception does not contribute to difficulties in recognizing familiar faces. The major difference between the three prosopagnosic patients was the evidence of covert recognition in two of these cases but not in the third. We use this evidence to argue that the perceptual/mnestic distinction is an inappropriate classification and would suggest instead that the two types may be described in terms either of a disconnection of the face recognition units or of damage to the units themselves.     

Caudate-putamen lesions in the rat may impair or potentiate maze learning depending upon availability of stimulus cues and relevance of response cues

In Experiment 1 rats were required to learn a Y-maze in which reward was made available after a given response (e.g. a left turn) regardless of which arm was used as the start-box. Subjects with lesions of the caudate-putamen showed a deficit on this response-learning task compared with control subjects (unoperated animals and rats having lesions of the posterior cortex). In Experiment 2 rats with caudate-putamen lesions were unimpaired when the direction of the turn required to reach the correct goal-box (identified by means of a salient visual intra-maze cue) varied from trial to trial. In the absence of salient intramaze cues, but with enriched room (extra-maze) cues, the rats with caudate-putamen lesions were superior to controls on this task. It is argued that caudate-putamen lesions disrupt a mechanism responsible for processing information about responses, but that the other (spatial) mechanisms responsible for maze-learning remain intact and that caudate-putamen lesions may enhance performance on spatial tasks for which information about responses is irrelevant.