The Democratic Consequences of Dueling Facts

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Morgan Marietta ◽  
David C. Barker

Chapter 10 introduces the Consequences section of the book, providing an overview of the democratic consequences of dueling fact perceptions. The clear consequences include greater public ignorance, more entrenched policy gridlock, and the failure of deliberation. Some more controversial consequences include rising perceptions of mental illness, higher barriers to scandal, and divided perceptions of specific events. The authors examine empirical evidence from the 2013 national survey that suggests that perceptions of the Trayvon Martin incident are strongly connected to value priorities. The chapter concludes by introducing the focus in Part III—the social consequences of how citizens perceive and react to others who hold conflicting perceptions of reality.

Author(s):  
Rebecca Roache

This chapter examines the biopsychosocial model in psychiatry. The term ‘biopsychosocial’ is most strongly associated with George L. Engel, whose most famous article on the biopsychosocial model was published in 1977. In advancing the model, Engel aimed to make explicit how the biological, the psychological, and the social all had a place in conceptualizing mental disorder, and to systematize and enshrine this recognition in the way in which psychiatry is practised. In making decisions about how to treat mental illness, or a given patient, adopting a biopsychosocial approach should involve keeping in mind that the most effective treatment may involve a solely biological intervention, a solely psychological one, a solely social one, or a combination of these. Indeed, a useful and effective biopsychosocial approach reminds one to consider all of these possibilities, and select the most promising one, based on the available empirical evidence.


2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Thomas ◽  
Darryl Ribaux ◽  
Lisa J. Phillips

Background: Depressive symptoms are common in schizophrenia. Previous studies have observed that depressive symptoms are associated with both insight and negative appraisals of illness, suggesting that the way in which the person thinks about their illness may influence the occurrence of depressive responses. In affective disorders, one of the most well-established cognitive processes associated with depressive symptoms is rumination, a pattern of perseverative, self-focused negative thinking. Aims: This study examined whether rumination focused on mental illness was predictive of depressive symptoms during the subacute phase of schizophrenia. Method: Forty participants with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and in a stable phase of illness completed measures of rumination, depressive symptoms, awareness of illness, and positive and negative symptoms. Results: Depressive symptoms were correlated with rumination, including when controlling for positive and negative symptoms. The content of rumination frequently focused on mental illness and its causes and consequences, in particular social disability and disadvantage. Depressive symptoms were predicted by awareness of the social consequences of mental illness, an effect that was mediated by rumination. Conclusions: Results suggest that a process of perseveratively dwelling upon mental illness and its social consequences may be a factor contributing to depressive symptoms in people with chronic schizophrenia.


2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (S2) ◽  
pp. S26-S26
Author(s):  
F. Berna ◽  
M.C. Allé ◽  
J. Potheegadoo ◽  
C. Kber ◽  
P. Schneider ◽  
...  

The self or identity is often seriously challenged by the emergence of psychotic symptoms. A first reason for that is most likely due to the traumatic experience caused by the sudden emergence of hallucinations or persecutory ideas that challenge both the representation of oneself and that of the world and others. A second reason is linked to the social consequences of having a mental illness and of being assigned with the label of “mentally ill or disabled person”. A third relates to the patients’ cognitive impairment that alters their ability to take distance from these self-challenging events, to give a meaning to these experiences and to build coherent narratives of their life that integrate a great variety of personal experiences such as turning points or unpleasant events. For these reasons, recovering from a severe mental illness is a process through which the self evolves by integrating the lessons of past personal events, building new representations of oneself and looking to new directions for future projects. Excerpts of patients’ narratives collected in experimental setting will be presented in order to illustrate how indexes of recovery can be measured in self-narratives and how they help identifying the steps of self-recovery that have been identified in qualitative research on patients with schizophrenia .


2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan

This is a simple essay. It raises a familiar question about equality, adduces a very small amount of empirical evidence about the social consequences of equality as distinct from prosperity, and broods on the difficulty of providing a really persuasive answer to the question raised. I begin with the view that there simply cannot be anything intrinsically wrong with inequality, move on to the view that there are extrinsic reasons for anxiety, dividing these into conceptual and empirical reasons, though without any great commitment to the clarity of that distinction in this context, and end with some reflections on recent social and political theory. The essay thus begins with what I hope are clear and (what I am sure are) very simple thoughts, before muddying the water pretty thoroughly thereafter.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirko Uljarević ◽  
Giacomo Vivanti ◽  
Susan R. Leekam ◽  
Antonio Y. Hardan

Abstract The arguments offered by Jaswal & Akhtar to counter the social motivation theory (SMT) do not appear to be directly related to the SMT tenets and predictions, seem to not be empirically testable, and are inconsistent with empirical evidence. To evaluate the merits and shortcomings of the SMT and identify scientifically testable alternatives, advances are needed on the conceptualization and operationalization of social motivation across diagnostic boundaries.


1982 ◽  
Vol 27 (12) ◽  
pp. 1002-1002
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhibin Jiang ◽  
Fan Yang ◽  
Bu Zhong ◽  
Xuebing Qin

BACKGROUND The Covid-19 pandemic had turned the world upside down, but not much is known about how people’s empathy might be affected by the pandemic. OBJECTIVE This study examined 1) how empathy towards others might be influenced by the social support people obtained by using social media; and 2) how the individual demographics (e.g., age, income) may affect empathy. METHODS A national survey (N = 943) was conducted in China in February 2020, in which the participants read three real scenarios about low-income urban workers (Scenario I), small business owners in cities (Scenario II), and farmers in rural areas (Scenario III) who underwent hardship due to COVID-19. After exposure to others’ difficulties in the scenarios, the participants’ empathy and anxiety levels were measured. We also measured the social support they had by using social media. RESULTS Results show that social support not only positively impacted empathy, β = .30, P < .001 for Scenario I, β = .30, P < .001 for Scenario II, and β = .29, P < .001 for Scenario III, but also interacted with anxiety in influencing the degree to which participants could maintain empathy towards others, β = .08, P = .010 for Scenario I, and β = .07, P = .033 for scenario II. Age negatively predicted empathy for Scenario I, β = -.08, P = .018 and Scenario III, β = -.08, P = .009, but not for Scenario II, β = -.03, P = .40. Income levels – low, medium, high – positively predicted empathy for Scenario III, F (2, 940) = 8.10, P < .001, but not for Scenario I, F (2, 940) = 2.14, P = .12, or Scenario II, F (2, 940) = 2.93, P = .06. Participants living in big cities expressed greater empathy towards others for Scenario III, F (2, 940) = 4.03, P =.018, but not for Scenario I, F (2, 940) = .81, P = .45, or Scenario II, F (2, 940) = 1.46, P =.23. CONCLUSIONS This study contributes to the literature by discovering the critical role empathy plays in people’s affective response to others during the pandemic. Anxiety did not decrease empathy. However, those gaining more social support on social media showed more empathy for others. Those who resided in cities with higher income levels were more empathetic during the COVID-19 outbreak. This study reveals that the social support people obtained helped maintain empathy to others, making them resilient in challenging times.


Author(s):  
Louçã Francisco ◽  
Ash Michael

This book investigates two questions, how did finance become hegemonic in the capitalist system; and what are the social consequences of the rise of finance? We do not dwell on other topics, such as the evolution of the mode of production or the development of class conflict over the longer run. Our theme is not the genesis, history, dynamics, or contradictions of capitalism but, instead, we address the rise of financialization beginning in the last quarter of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. Therefore, we investigate the transnationalization of the circuits and processes of capital accumulation that originated the expansion and financialization of the mechanisms of production, social reproduction, and hegemony, including the ideology, the functioning of the states, and the political decision making. We do not discuss the prevailing neoliberalism as an ideology, although we pay attention to the creation and diffusion of ideas, since we sketch an overview of the process of global restructuring of production and finance leading to the prevalence of the shadow economy....


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