Pathways to Problems – The Evolution of 'Pathology'

This paper describes a qualitative research study which compared accounts from interviews with families where difficulties had evolved into serious problems with those where an escalation into pathology has been avoided. These accounts confirm that family life is commonly seen to be problematic and stressful, particularly during transitional stages. Specifically, it appears that it is not simply the severity of the initial stresses and problems that distinguishes families, but the meanings that these evoke and the corresponding patterns of responses, especially the 'attempted solutions' that are set in motion. These responses, fuelled by external interventions, can launch families along pathological pathways. It is suggested that the meanings ascribed to difficulties and the ensuing responses are predominantly shaped and constrained by three factors: the dominant societally shared discourses of mental health and distress; the emotional resources and attachments of family members; and systemic interpersonal processes. Some therapeutic implications, especially the importance of assisting families to resist pathologizing processes are indicated.     

Intuitive Perceptions of Decision-making Strategy: Naive Assessors' Concepts of Integrative Complexity

Although there are measurable differences in integrative complexity among solutions that individuals generate in dealing with problems, it is uncertain to what extent people comprehend, recognize, and have preferences among different levels of complexity. Integrative complexity is a function of differentiation (the perception of several attributes within, or perspectives about, a topic) and integration (combining the differentiated characteristics in an interactive or synthesizing solution). The current paper reports two experiments dealing with how university students perceive, interpret, and choose among solutions differing in complexity. Experiment 1 showed that subjects accurately rated the complexity of described solutions differing along the continuum, but that their assessment of their own responses differed from the results of expert scoring. Their self-estimated complexity was highly correlated with their preferences, and preferred complexity was reliably higher than either expert- or self-assessed complexity of subject-generated solutions. Subjects were able to hypothesize quite accurately about environmental and endogenous factors likely to affect complexity. Experiment 2 found that in response to problem scenarios, solutions selected as being potentially most effective were consistently more complex than solutions that participants considered themselves most likely to use. The idea of complexity seems to be intuitively recognizable and understandable by untrained subjects: They can and do distinguish among problem solutions (self-generated or presented) that vary on that dimension, and are able to assess accurately the effects of relevant variables. Such subjects also share the bias shown by experts in favour of the superiority of more complex approaches.     

EDITORIAL Building bridges with mixed methods research?

Mixed methods refers to the use of both qualitative and quantitative approaches and methods in one study or sequentially in two or more studies. Without a mixed methods approach there is – to our minds ‐ a risk that only part of a phenomenon or experience is being explored. Our own involvement in mixed methods research has grown out of a shared interest in the concept ‘research‐practitioner’. Psychotherapy is a notoriously complex and ever‐developing field, and our growing sense has been that mixed methods research can contribute to a more complete – both broad and deep ‐ sense of knowledge and understanding.     

Unpicking the semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease: qualitative changes with disease severity

Despite a vast literature examining semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD), consensus regarding the nature of the deficit remains elusive. We re-considered this issue in the context of a framework that assumes semantic cognition can break down in two ways: (1) core semantic representations can degrade or (2) cognitive control mechanisms can become impaired. We hypothesised and confirmed that the nature of semantic impairment in AD changes with disease severity. Patients at mild or severe stages of the disorder exhibited impairment across various semantic tasks but the nature of those deficits differed qualitatively for the two groups. Commensurate with early dysfunction of the cognitive control, temporoparietal-frontal-cingulate network, characteristics of deregulated semantic cognition were exhibited by the mild AD cases. In contrast, the severe AD group reproduced features of additional degradation of core semantic representations. These results suggest that spread of pathology into lateral anterior temporal lobes in later stage AD produces degradation of semantic representations, exacerbating the already deregulated system. Moreover, the dual nature of severe patients' impairment was highlighted by disproportionately poor performance on tasks placing high demand on both conceptual knowledge and control processes--e.g., category fluency.     

Camus’s Algerian in Paris: A Prose Poetic Reading of <Emphasis Type="Italic">L’Étranger</Emphasis>

This paper demonstrates that L'étranger, Camus's famous novel about an outsider, had by as early as 1946 become just as much of an 'insider' in terms of its affiliation to the Parisian literary tradition. More than an insider simply by virtue of its contemporary place in the French canon, then, the novel is also intertextually bound to a tradition of oxymoronic poetics dating back to Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen (Les Petits poèmes en prose). I shall examine the way in which L'étranger performs its prose poetics, thereby establishing it as exemplary of a Parisian model of modernity. Additionally, the famous scene on the beach will be considered as a liminal space and as a literary translation of Paris into the desert, which, once a joke for Paris's relationship to provincial France, became after the Second World War a new allegory for the capital's self-alterity.     

Eye movements during transitive action observation have sequential structure

In this paper, we explore how observers of a reach-to-grasp action can identify and distinguish between the agent and patient (i.e. target) of the action. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a characteristic sequential structure to the observer’s pattern of saccades, with the agent being fixated first, and then the target. We report an experiment which indicates that this sequence of saccades, while not ubiquitous, is overwhelmingly more likely than chance. The experiment also sheds some light on the mechanisms which allow the observer to saccade from the agent of the action to the target.     

Book reviews

Arvind Sharma, The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedānra: A Comparative Study in Religion and Reason. University Park, Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, viii+232 pp., £29.50, $32.50. ISBN 0 271 01032 0.

Niels C. Nielsen Jr (ed.), Christianity After Communism: Social, Political and Cultural Struggle in Russia. Boulder, Westview Press, 1994, ix+171 pp., £37.00, $49.95. ISBN 0 8133 2365 7.

Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, xi+744 pp., £45.00, $49.95. ISBN 0 521 43405 X.

Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, 312 pp., $48 (hardback) ISBN 0 1226 32738 8, $16.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 226 32738 6.

Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1995, 198 pp., $27.50. ISBN 0 674 00871 5.

William Hamilton, A Quest for the Post-Historical Jesus. New York, Continuum, 1994, 304 pp., $27.50. ISBN 0 8264 0641 6.

Valerie J. Hoffman, Sufism, Mystics, and Saints in Modern Egypt. University of South Carolina Press, 1995, 377 pp.+ notes and index. ISBN 1 57003 055 3.

Margaret H. Case (ed.), Heinrich Zimmer: Coming Into His Own. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994, vi+ 148 pp., $24.95. ISBN 0 691 03337 4.

Tessa J. Bartholomeusz, Women Under the Bō Tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka. (Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions 5.) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, xx+284 pp., £37.50, $59.95. ISBN 0 521 46129 4.

Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, xiii+ 218 pp., £35. ISBN 0 521 45371 2.

George W. Stocking, Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, London, Athlone Press, 1996, xx+441 pp., $40. ISBN 0 485 30072 9.

P. F. Kornicki and I. J. McMullen (eds), Religion in Japan: Arrows to Heaven and Earth. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, xxv+315 pp., £40. ISBN 0 521 55028 9.

Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni 1081–1261. 605 pp., $89.95 (cloth). ISBN 0521 26432 4.

David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996, ix+301 pp., $29.95, £23.95. ISBN 0 691 03375 7.     

Modeling without representation

How can mathematical models which represent the causal structure of the world incompletely or incorrectly have any scientific value? I argue that this apparent puzzle is an artifact of a realist emphasis on representation in the philosophy of modeling. I offer an alternative, pragmatic methodology of modeling, inspired by classic papers by modelers themselves. The crux of the view is that models developed for purposes other than explanation may be justified without reference to their representational properties.