Skip to main content

Books in Social sciences and humanities

Life-Span Developmental Psychology
Normative Life Crises
1st Edition
October 22, 2013
Nancy Datan + 1 more
English
Life-Span Developmental Psychology: Normative Life Crises is a compilation of papers that deals with various points of view between the academic perspective — studies in developmental psychology and applied perspective — and the practical efforts of social workers to help individual clients. Part I discusses normative life crises from the two perspectives that include human behavior theory in social work education. This part also includes an interdisciplinary approach covering developmental, social, sociological, economic, and psychological fields. Part II covers the normative life crises in individual development such as discussions on death, ego development, and a practioner's response on models of ego development. The book also discusses an abstract model versus an actual individual experience in dealing with crises, as well as the meanings of adaptation and survival during old age. Part III presents the normative life crises in the family circle covering topics such as parenthood, sex roles, depression, widowhood, and an example of situational stress. Part IV deals with the normative life crises and the social system, including socialization, life course, changing work cycles, and public policy on death. This book will prove valuable for psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, and behavioral scientists.
Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence
1st Edition
October 22, 2013
John Billingham + 1 more
English
Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence is devoted to the concepts and studies related to the science, technology, and observational techniques of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI). Topics covered range from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) to the theory of interstellar communication; the problem of the origin of life; radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations; and interstellar communication by neutrino beams. An infinitely expandable space radiotelescope is also described. This book is comprised of 21 chapters and opens with a discussion on the CETI activities of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) from 1965 to 1976 and describes the outlook for the IAA CETI Standing Committee. The following chapters sketch the background and rationale for a SETI program; the significance of the detection of signals and of information that may be contained in signals from extraterrestrial civilizations; an extended Drake's equation, the longevity-separation relation, equilibrium, inhomogeneities, and chain formation; and the physical and psychological basis for the belief that a band of frequencies called the water hole is a prime band for SETI. This monograph will appeal to practitioners in the fields of astrophysics, astronomy, planetary formation, exobiology, and biological evolution.
Rational Techniques in Policy Analysis
Policy Studies Institute
1st Edition
October 22, 2013
Michael Carley
English
Rational Techniques in Policy Analysis covers the role of rational techniques in policy making process. This book is organized into two parts encompassing 12 chapters that consider the relationship of policy making and other approaches to rational analysis. Part I deals with the "disintegration" of rational policy analysis to find out what the pieces are, how they work, how the parts interact and how they relate to the wider policy making environment. Part II considers the types of rational analysis in more detail, and serves not only as a survey of rational techniques but as an introduction to the important literature in each field. This part specifically looks into the cost-utility techniques, social forecasting, and evaluation and social indicator research. This book is intended primarily for analysts, researchers, and students of the policy making process in university and government.
Evolution
Evolution
1st Edition
Volume 10
October 22, 2013
E. R. Trueman + 1 more
English
FROM THE GENERAL PREFACE: This multivolume work, The Mollusca, had its origins in the mid 1960s with the publication of two volumes entitled Physiology of Mollusca and edited by Wilbur and Yonge. In those volumes, 27 authors collaborated to summarize the status of the conventional topics of physiology as well as biochemistry, reproduction and development, and ecology. Within the past two decades, there has been a remarkable burgeoning of molluscan research generally and with it the development of new fields of investigation. During the same period, several excellent books on molluscs have appeared. However, they do not provide adequate information on the many recent advances or give the breadth of perspective of current knowledge of the phylum. Clearly, there was need for a larger work with a comprehensive treatment of major areas of molluscan research. The Mollusca, as a series of 12 volumes, attempts to fulfill this objective. Even here, practical considerations have meant that certain aspects of molluscan research have not been included.Each major area is treated by several authors, each reviewing his or her special field. The areas are structure and function, metabolic biochemistry, molecular biomechanics, environmental biochemistry, physiology, ecology, reproduction and development, neurobiology and behavior, and evolution. Throughout, the authors have given emphasis to recent advances and present status of molluscan biology. In so doing, directions of future research have become evident.The Mollusca is intended to serve several disciplines--zoology... biochemistry, physiology, and paleontology. It will prove useful to researchers and to all others with interests in molluscs.FROM THE PREFACE TO VOLUME 10: Recent events that have stimulated a great surge of investigation into the evolution of the Mollusca include the discovery of well-preserved microscopic molluscs at most levels of the Cambrian on five continents, the development of electron microscopy, the need to examine competing models of the early history of the phylum, new interest in interstitial fauna of littoral and near-littoral sands, and significant advances in our knowledge of shell ontogeny, construction, and evolution. It is timely that an up-to-date synthesis involving both paleontologists and zoologists should be published after a decade of such activity and advance when many of the long-held views on molluscan phylogeny have been overturned.This book deals with all molluscan classes except the Cephalopoda, which will be treated in Volume 12. The two books together provide an up-to-date introduction to the evolution of the Mollusca with adequate references to guide further work. They will be invaluable to specialists on molluscs, postgraduate research workers, and undergraduates with particular interests in this phylum. Authorities on the various molluscan groups were asked to express their views and to treat the subject as they wished; the book provides a valuable record of their opinions at this time.While the main groups are broadly and fully treated, focus has been narrowed toward a few selected minor groups of particular interest such as limpets, land snails, and the Anomalodesmata, in which recent work has been particularly significant.Because recent years have seen major revisions in classificatory terms, the editors have provided an outline classification into which the chapter topics fit.
Cultures in Contact
Studies in Cross-Cultural Interaction
1st Edition
October 22, 2013
Stephen Bochner
English
Cultures in Contact: Studies in Cross-Cultural Interaction provides an in-depth analysis of the processes that takes place in cross-cultural interaction. The title covers the outcomes of cross-cultural interaction along with the effect of such interaction to individuals involved. The text first details the social psychology of cross-cultural relations, and then proceeds to discussing the historical account of the development of research that tackles cross-cultural contact. Next, the selection deals with the processes that took place when individuals with different cultural background interact. The last part of the text tackles the implications of cross-cultural impact. The book will be of great use to psychologists. Sociologists and anthropologists will also benefit from the text.
The Gun Merchants
Politics and Policies of the Major Arms Suppliers
1st Edition
October 22, 2013
Cindy Cannizzo
English
The Gun Merchants: Politics and Policies of the Major Arms Suppliers focuses on the political and policy considerations in arms transfers, taking into consideration the positions of different arms-exporting countries on the control of conventional arms trade. The book first offers information on the trends in 20th-century arms transfers, including history of arms transfers, sophistication of arms, and transfer modes of arms. The text also underscores the position and influence of Jimmy Carter and the United States on the restraint of arms trade. The manuscript examines Soviet arms policy towards Africa, including the context of Soviet policy, factors influencing Soviet behavior, and the future of Soviet policy in Africa. The increase in the volume of arms sold in Africa is highlighted. The book also takes a look at domestic and international considerations of British arms sales; the policies of the Federal Republic of Germany and France on arms transfers; and evaluation of arms transfer control proposals. The publication is a dependable reference for readers interested in exploring the international policies and procedures in arms trade.
Anxiety
Psychological Perspectives on Panic and Agoraphobia
1st Edition
October 22, 2013
Bozzano G Luisa
English
This volume analyses the perplexing and often disabling form of distress known as anxiety from a psychological rather than a biomedical perspective, illustrating the rich contribution that psychological theory has made and is making to this topic.**The first section extensively examines the clinical literature, describing and delineating with case examples the cluster of characteristic features termed panic-anxiety. Research findings in other clinical areas such as alcohol dependence are shown to have conceptual and empirical links with panic-anxiety. The second section of the book reviews and evaluates the main theoretical approaches to anxiety, including specific models of panic and agoraphobia, challenging many traditional assumptions and advocating the analysis of anxiety as a socially constructed meaning imposed on experience rather than a theoretical concept or psychopathological state. The methodological implications are discussed and a schematic model of panic-anxiety is proposed.**The theoretical integration represents a major contribution to the resurgence of interest in this field and will be of relevance to all researchers and postgraduate students within the mental health professions.**FROM THE PREFACE: This book has two main objectives. The first is to describe a dimension of psychological distress I have called panic-anxiety. This takes up the first part of the book, which surveys literature that is primarily descriptive and psychiatric. The second objective is pursued in the second part of the book, in which I examine a large number of theories of anxiety to see what they might have to offer in explaining the panic-anxiety cluster of complaints. I am therefore concerned to apply psychological theory to a real-world problem, that is, to what people who seek professional help loosely describe as panic, anxiety and fears of public situations.**The theoretical and experimental literature on anxiety is so vast that I have had to be disciplined and in no small measure prejudiced in favour of a particular theoretical perspective. I have attempted as far as possible to treat anxiety as a lay construct, that is, as a social construction and not a scientific concept. For this reason, I have endeavoured to refer to reports of anxiety or to complaints of anxiety in order to avoid the common tendency to reify anxiety as a an entity which exists independently of the social origins of the term. Accordingly, I believe that the relevant question to ask is not, What is anxiety? but, What are the antecedents of reports (or complaints) of anxiety?**It is intended that this book should provide a coherent perspective on a common form of psychological distress, of value to therapists, researchers and students of abnormal psychology. In many ways, the problems for which people seek help do not define 'natural' areas of scientific research, and so it is difficult to combine theoretical and practical interests in one book. The complaints with which I am particularly concerned--panic and fears of public places--can be analysed to reveal scientific questions which have a significance much wider than the explanation of particular complaints made to professionals working in a clinical context. Apart from its obvious social significance, a clinical area is therefore simply a point of departure for scientific investigation. My intention, then, is to use this clinical area as an illustration of how such problems might be tackled from a theoretical perspective which is essentially psychological.**The theoretical position I have adopted owes much to the views of Sarbin (1964, 1968), Mandler (1975) and Averill (1980a,b). In taking anxiety to be a lay construct, I assume that the 'What is?' questions rightly belong to the sociology of knowledge. Of course, the applied psychologist also has substantive issues to consider. For example, How can this individual be helped to report calmness rather than anxiety? or, How can that individual be helped to travel freely on public transport? I suggest that the most positive contribution a social constructivist position has to offer is to dissuade researchers from regarding these real-life problems as reflecting an underlying emotion of anxiety, or, even less helpful, an anxiety disorder.**Biologica... and medical research on anxiety is also considered in this light. Reductive biological and pathological hypotheses are rejected, but an attempt is made to integrate the biological aspects at a higher level of analysis. For this reason, the book differs from others which tend to confine themselves to a description and explanation of postulated disorders or syndromes. Because the emphasis of this book is essentially conceptual, there is relatively little discussion of assessment and therapy, apart from a general critique of current approaches.**Most experiences described as fear or anxiety in an everyday context have an identifiable source or object. When these experiences are reported as unbearably intense or lead to the avoidance of various situations, they are generally referred to as phobias. In the past 20 years there has been a considerable advance in the technology of reducing and eliminating unwanted phobias. The new methods of imaginal and real-life confrontation are successful in the majority of cases when anxiety is reported in connection with specific eliciting stimuli. The same success cannot be claimed for methods of dealing with complaints of anxiety that appear to be unrelated to identifiable circumstances. In one form of these complaints, a person may suddenly feel overwhelmed by unpleasant sensations which are usually described as a panic attack. Panic and other complaints of anxiety which are perceived as irrational form the principal interest of this book. A second major concern is the problem of fears of public places, often referred to as agoraphobia. Typically, the person who complains of these fears is unable to leave the home unaccompanied, although travel by car, a 'safe' environment, is usually possible. Although agoraphobia is tied to situations, the fear is not reported to be about these situations but is usually expressed as a fear of experiencing a panic attack in these situations. As I will argue, fears of public situations appear to be associated with panic and complaints of anxiety of a nonspecific kind.**FROM THE FOREWORD: This book is a welcome addition to a growing literature that treats perplexing and sometimes disabling conduct from a psychological rather than a biomedical perspective. It is one of an increasing number of treatises that boldly assume that psychological events may be studied in their own right without reducing the phenomena to biological or mentalistic categories. Among other topics, Hallam critically reviews the clinical and experimental work on self-reported anxiety, panic and agoraphobia. He demonstrates with considerable force the disutility of the traditional practice of assigning such phenomena to a world of disordered minds.**Anxiety has been employed as a key concept in many psychoanalytic and psychological theories. Before its use as a theoretical construct, anxiety was a lay construct, a metaphor invented to communicate about vaguely perceived and poorly understood sensory experience. This lay construct, or metaphor, was metonymically transformed by certain theorists seeking a universal intervening variable to account for puzzling conduct. That is to say, the theorists transfigured anxiety to a cause from its original use as a metaphor for effects of interpersonal actions and physiological responses. As a staple of biomedical research and practice, anxiety is a reified metaphor. One of the results of the uncritical use of the reified metaphor was the creation of such unproductive diagnostic categories as anxiety neurosis, anxiety hysteria and anxiety state. Hallam's review of research and practice makes abundantly clear that this metaphor-to-myth transformation has little utility, either as a heuristic for research or as a model for therapy.**Many lessons are to be learned from this book, not the least of which is the demonstration that the lay construct, anxiety, is multireferential. When a clinician asks a client for referents for such complaints as, 'I am anxious' (or 'panicky' or 'agoraphobic'), the client's response is drawn from a limitless pool of vague and ambiguous descriptors. Examples of the interpretations offered by clients include such diverse referents as 'I had the feeling I was about to die', 'I was suffocating, gasping for air', 'My legs became rubbery', 'I was about to faint', 'My brain was racing ahead of my thought', and so on.**From Hallam's detailed analysis of the multireferential nature of anxiety complaints, one could formulate the following rule for praxis: When a client employs 'anxiety' or a similar descriptor in his or her self-report, regard it as metaphoric utterance, not as a statement that demands causal analysis. The metaphoric utterance, that is, the complaint, is a social construction whose building blocks include the client's beliefs, linguistic skills, purposes and concurrent existential or identity problems.**Another lesson to be learned from this book is the continuity of anxiety complaints as reported in clinical settings with those of persons who do not come to the attention of professional helpers. Such continuity is an argument against the identification of anxiety complaints as a psychiatric disorder. For example, the fear of strange places may be universal and not restricted to a clinical population if the definition of strange places is broad enough.**The author holds that the client, like the rest of us, constructs his or her world from perceptions, beliefs, imaginings and rememberings. Thus anxiety is a construction, and it is communicated to others (and to the self) with the aid of metaphoric and metonymic translations. This constructivist view is fast displacing the entrenched biomedical view that treats human beings as passive reactors to stimuli according to still-to-be discovered mechanistic laws. Metaphors drawn from physics, geology and technology, so tightly woven into the texture of the mechanistic world view, have lost the power to stimulate meaningful research and theory about the complexities of human action. As a result, social scientists are turning to humanistic disciplines for their working metaphors, among them, game playing, narrative, drama and rhetoric.**The use of such descriptive metaphors reflects a world view that is in sharp contrast to the mechanistic world view that has dominated scientific thought, including that of psychology and psychiatry, for so long. Contextualism is the name assigned to this alternative world view, and its root metaphor is the historical act. Among other things, this root metaphor entails that the actors who participate in the creation of historical acts are agents. They engage in intentional actions not only to solve problems of a practical nature, but also to maintain or enhance their identities. Toward this end, they construct their worlds. Some constructions provide the backdrop for personal drama, one outcome of which may be the self-report of anxiety. Another element of the contextualist metaphysic is that change and novelty, rather than invariance, are to be expected.**Hallam's critical review of the scientific literature on anxiety and emotion supports the conclusion that the failure of modern science to formulate a general theory of anxiety is traceable to the slavish (and often unrecognized) adherence to the biomedical model. The users of this model seek causality within the organism, either in the somatic networks or in the assumed mind-space. It is not an inappropriate strategy, given their stance that the objects of their attention are regarded as passive, not as active agents. The supporters of the biomedical model have failed to achieve a consistently workable theory as a basis for therapy because human beings are, in fact, agents. Thus, a clinican who reads this book and elects to apply its wisdom would not address a person's complaint of anxiety with the question, What is the cause of the anxiety? but rather with questions of this sort: What are the antecedent and concurrent interpersonal conditions that influence a person as agent to turn his or her attention to vaguely defined internal events, to choose the sick role or to describe perplexing happenings with particular metaphors or metonymies? What are his or her concerns about death and dying, being abandoned or loss of face? What are the person's power relations and how does the sick role influence his or her relative power? How does the person's self-narrative fit into the self-narratives of significant others?**In my own experience, I have found it useful to look upon complaints of anxiety as a form of attention deployment, not unlike the attention deployment of the classical hypochondriac. The broad focus on bodily symptoms, besides providing the basis for adopting the sick role, effectively supports efforts in the context of significant social relationships not to spell out certain imagined or perceived flaws in one's character. The question that guides the search for understanding is, What are the client's reasons for turning attention to complaints of anxiety? In this respect, the clinician might entertain the hypothesis of self-deception and its implications for discovering and formulating reasons for the client's attention deployment to events described as anxiety.**The foregoing remarks are but a sample of the clinical and theoretical notions generated in my reading of Hallam's treatise. A bountiful harvest of insights awaits both the practicing clinician and the laboratory scientist engaged in solving the mystery of anxiety. The rich yield is due in no small measure to the author's ability simultaneously to reflect his experience as clinician and as scientist. As clinician*b1scientis... he illuminates many puzzling observations and opens the way for a better understanding of human problems.
Cycles, Value & Employment
Responses To The Economic Crisis
1st Edition
October 22, 2013
Orio Giarini
English
An unconventional evaluation of the causes which, in the last ten years, have dramatically pushed down the rates of economic growth. The distinguished author, a member of the Club of Rome, argues that it is not simply a question of a new long term economic cycle of the types described by Schumpeter and Kondratieff, but is rather the effect of a fundamental change in the traditional, industrial modes of production. A clear evaluation of such change leads to the necessity of reformulating the notion of economic value, in order to find new strategies for developing a nation's wealth.
Handbook of the Psychology of Aging
3rd Edition
October 22, 2013
James E. Birren
English
Handbook of the Psychology of Aging, Third Edition describes the psychology of adult development and aging. This book is organized into four parts encompassing 28 chapters that cover the basic behavioral changes and capacities occurring with advancing age. The first part deals with the history, concept, and models of the psychology of aging. This part also examines the distinctions between physical, biological, psychological, and social time or age. The second part explores the influences of racial, ethnic, and cultural factors on biological/health, social, and psychological aging processes. This part also surveys gender differences in aging. The third part describes numerous behavioral processes, changes, and patterns in advancing age. This part specifically considers the motivation, cognitive and motor performance, attentional processes, learning, memory, personality, and wisdom in aging. The fourth part focuses on the applications of the concepts and principles of aging to the individual and society. This book will be of great value to psychologists, researchers, and graduate students.
Progress in Behavior Modification
Volume 5
1st Edition
October 22, 2013
Michel Hersen + 2 more
English
Progress in Behavior Modification, Volume 5, is a multidisciplinary serial publication that encompasses the contributions of psychology, psychiatry, social work, speech therapy, education, and rehabilitation. This serial aims to meet the need for a review publication that undertakes to present yearly in-depth evaluations that include a scholarly examination of theoretical underpinnings, a careful survey of research findings, and a comparative analysis of existing techniques and methodologies. The discussions center on a wide spectrum of child and adult disorders. The book opens with a chapter on the assessment and treatment of minimal dating behavior in college students. This is followed by separate chapters on methods of behavioral control of excessive drinking; behavioral analysis and treatment of child noncompliance to parental requests; and behavioral group therapy. Subsequent chapters deal with the conceptual underpinnings of research in children's self-management and treatment strategies; the assessment and therapeutic functions of self-monitoring; and behavioral treatment in homosexuality.

Related subjects