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.     

Baseball outfielders maintain a linear optical trajectory when tracking uncatchable fly balls

The authors investigated whether behavior of fielders pursuing uncatchable fly balls supported either (a) maintenance of a linear optical trajectory (LOT) with monotonic increases in optical ball height or (b) maintenance of optical acceleration cancellation (OAC) with simultaneous lateral alignment with the ball. Past work supports usage of both LOT and OAC strategies in the pursuit of catchable balls headed to the side. When balls are uncatchable, fielders must choose either optical linearity or alignment at the expense of the other. Fielders maintained the LOT strategy more often and for a longer period of time than they did the OAC alignment strategy. Findings support the LOT strategy as primary when pursuing balls headed to the side, whether catchable or not.     

How dogs navigate to catch frisbees

Using micro-video cameras attached to the heads of 2 dogs, we examined their optical behavior while catching Frisbees. Our findings reveal that dogs use the same viewer-based navigational heuristics previously found with baseball players (i.e., maintaining the target along a linear optical trajectory, LOT, with optical speed constancy). On trials in which the Frisbee dramatically changed direction, the dog maintained an LOT with speed constancy until it apparently could no longer do so and then simply established a new LOT and optical speed until interception. This work demonstrates the use of simple control mechanisms that utilize invariant geometric properties to accomplish interceptive tasks. It confirms a common interception strategy that extends both across species and to complex target trajectories.     

A linear optical trajectory informs the fielder where to run to the side to catch fly balls

P. McLeod, N. Reed, and Z. Dienes (2002) argued that the linear optical trajectory (LOT) strategy incorrectly cues fielders to run forward for balls headed beyond them. The authors of this article explain that the downward optical curvature found for balls landing beyond the fielder's initial position occurs because the balls reorient the direction the fielder is facing during pursuit. Thus, when downward optical curvature begins, the ball is headed to land in front of where the fielder is facing and running. This investigation of open-loop failure conditions has led to new insights such as the reorientation of the fielder, and it supports the use of maintaining matching rates of vertical and lateral optical ball movement consistent with primacy of the LOT control mechanism even when interception is unachievable.     

Tops are more salient than bottoms.

Past research has verified that observers assume that objects are reliably oriented with respect to a gravitationally centered coordinate system. Observers also appear to attend more to specific parts of objects, like faces, that typically are closer to the top. In the present work, we explored whether or not observers have a generic bias to view tops as being more salient than bottoms. In three experiments, observers indicated whether random shapes appeared to be more similar to comparison shapes that shared identical tops rather than bottoms. Observers exhibited a reliable tendency to match figures with similarly shaped tops. Matching choice was also a function of global shape attributes such as axis of elongation or size. The findings are consistent with the notion that, in nature, tops tend to be the most visible part and to provide the best information with respect to important aspects of objects such as animal intentionality and artifact functionality.     

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.