Psychology

Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy (DIT) is a brief psychodynamic psychotherapy developed for the treatment of mood disorders. It is being rolled out as part of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative as the psychodynamic model for the treatment of depression. This book is a practical guide for the implementation of a brief psychodynamic intervention in routine clinical practice as well as in research protocols. It sets out clearly the theoretical framework, as well as the rationale and strategies for applying DIT with patients presenting with mood disorders (depression and anxiety). Throughout, it is illustrated with examples that help with implementing the approach in practice.

When we try to remember whether we left a window open or closed, do we actually see the window in our mind? If we do, does this mental image play a role in how we think? For almost a century, scientists have debated whether mental images play a functional role in cognition. The Case for Mental Imagery presents a complete and unified argument that mental images do depict information, and that these depictions do play a functional role in human cognition. It outlines a specific theory of how depictive representations are used in information processing, and shows how these representations arise from neural processes. To support this theory, it weaves together conceptual analyses and the many varied empirical findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In doing so, the book presents the conceptual grounds for positing this type of internal representation, summarizing and refuting arguments to the contrary. Its argument also serves as a historical review of the imagery debate from its earliest inception to its most recent phases, and provides evidence that significant progress has been made in our understanding of mental imagery. In illustrating how scientists think about one of the most difficult problems in psychology and neuroscience, this book goes beyond the debate, to explore the nature of cognition and to draw out implications for the study of consciousness.

An understanding of cause-effect relationships is fundamental to the study of cognition. In this book, chapters based on comparative psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and philosophy present the newest developments in the study of causal cognition and discuss their different perspectives. They reflect on the role and forms of causal knowledge, both in animal and human cognition, on the development of human causal cognition from infancy, and on the relationship between individual and cultural aspects of causal understanding. This book presents an informative, insightful, and interdisciplinary debate.

This book outlines the recent revolutionary work in cognitive science formulating a “probabilistic model” theory of learning and development. It provides an accessible and clear introduction to the probabilistic modeling in psychology, including causal model, Bayes net, and Bayesian approaches. It also outlines new cognitive and developmental psychological studies of statistical and causal learning, imitation and theory-formation, new philosophical approaches to causation, and new computational approaches to the representation of intuitive concepts and theories. This book brings together research in all of these areas of cognitive science, with chapters by researchers in all these disciplines. Understanding causal structure is a central task of human cognition. Causal learning underpins the development of our concepts and categories, our intuitive theories, and our capacities for planning, imagination, and inference. This new work uses the framework of probabilistic models and interventionist accounts of causation in philosophy in order to provide a rigorous formal basis for “theory theories” of concepts and cognitive development. Moreover, the causal learning mechanisms this interdisciplinary research program has uncovered go dramatically beyond both the traditional mechanisms of nativist theories such as modularity theories, and empiricist ones such as association or connectionism. The chapters cover three topics: the role of intervention and action in causal understanding, the role of causation in categories and concepts, and the relationship between causal learning and intuitive theory formation. Though coming from different disciplines, the chapters converge on showing how we can use our own actions and the evidence we observe in order to accurately learn about the world.

Following World War II, unparalleled economic prosperity, along with the largest cohort of American youth, gave rise to a new teen market and a new media landscape defined by television and radio. These influences in turn gave rise to a youth culture that found expression in the mass media, and which emphasized the virtues of a consumerist ethos made possible by an ever-expanding economy. Advertising became a vehicle for advancing this new consumer culture that enabled youth to become a major audience for entertainment media, and which gave unprecedented voice to their interests and concerns. With the advent of the Internet, media have again afforded young people with even greater opportunities to create and disseminate their own content. This has led to a transformation in both how youth are portrayed in the media and how American culture has been influenced in turn. This book describes these changes since 1950, with a focus on the role of the mass media as both an influence on youth socialization and as an evolving expression of youth concerns. Experts from various fields of media studies discuss these changes in chapters that focus on different aspects of adolescent portrayal, including: the history of the emergence of youth culture; youth representation in popular music and music videos; increasing portrayal of health risk behaviors in popular movies, advertising, and other media since 1950; changes in portrayal of gender roles, body image, and different ethnic groups; and the role of new and evolving media such as video games and the Internet. The book concludes with a discussion of potential policy directions for ameliorating harm from problematic media content, and the potential use of media literacy and other strategies to encourage healthier adolescent development.

This book is a handbook of musical development from conception to late adolescence. Within twenty-four chapters it celebrates the richness and diversity of the many different ways in which children can engage in and interact with music. Arranged in five sections, the first section examines the critical months and years from conception to the end of infancy. It looks at how the musical brain develops, ways of understanding musical development, and the nature of musicality. Section two scrutinizes claims about the non-musical benefit of exposure to music, for example that music makes you smarter. Section three focuses on those issues that help explain and identify individual differences. It includes chapters examining how children develop their motivation to study music, and two chapters on children with special needs. Section four covers skills that can develop as a result of exposure to music. The final section of the book discusses five different contexts and includes: a chapter on historical perspectives providing information for making comparisons between how children have learned and developed their musical capacities in the past, with current opportunities; two additional chapters that focus on children's involvement in music in non-Western cultures; and two final chapters focusing on youth musical engagement and the transition from child to adult.

Interest in the problem of children who resist contact with or become alienated from a parent after separation or divorce is growing, due in part to parents' increasing frustrations with the apparent ineffectiveness of the legal system in handling these unique cases. There is a need for legal and mental health professionals to improve their understanding of, and response to, this polarizing social dynamic. This book is a critical, empirically based review of parental alienation that integrates the best research evidence with clinical insight from interviews with leading scholars and practitioners. The text draws upon the growing body of mental health and legal literature to summarize the historical development and controversies surrounding the concept of “alienation” and explain the causes, dynamics, and differentiation of various types of parent-child relationship issues. The chapters review research on prevalence, risk factors, indicators, assessment, and measurement to form a conceptual integration of multiple factors relevant to the etiology and maintenance of the problem of strained parent-child relationships. A differential approach to assessment and intervention is provided. Children's rights, the role of their wishes and preferences in legal proceedings, and the short- and long-term impact of parental alienation are also discussed.

The conditional, if…then, is probably the most important term in natural language and forms the core of systems of logic and mental representation. It occurs in all human languages and allows people to express their knowledge of the causal or law-like structure of the world and of others' behaviour. The way in which the conditional is modelled also determines the core of most logical systems. Unsurprisingly, it is also the most-researched expression in the psychology of human reasoning. This book brings together recent developments in the cognitive science and psychology of conditional reasoning. Over the last ten to fifteen years, research on conditionals has come to dominate the psychology of reasoning, providing a rich seam of results that have created new theoretical possibilities. This book shows how these developments have led researchers to view people's conditional reasoning behaviour more as successful probabilistic reasoning rather than as errorful logical reasoning. It shows how the multifarious, and apparently competing, theoretical positions developed over the last fifty years in this area — mental logics, mental models, heuristic approaches, dual process theory, and probabilistic approaches — have responded to these insights. Its organisation reflects the view that an integrative approach is emerging that may need to exploit aspects of all these theoretical positions to explain the rich and complex phenomenon of reasoning with conditionals. It includes an introductory chapter relating the development of the psychology of reasoning to developments in the logic and semantics of the conditional.

The topic of consciousness is truly multidisciplinary, attracting researchers and theorists from diverse backgrounds. It is now widely accepted that previously disparate areas all have contributions to make to the understanding of the nature of consciousness. Thus, we now have computational scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers all engaged in the same effort. This book illustrates these three approaches. The first section is concerned with philosophical approaches to consciousness. One of the fundamental issues here is that of subjective feeling or qualia. The second section focuses on approaches from cognitive neuroscience. Patients with different types of neurological problems, and new imaging techniques, provide rich sources of data for studying how consciousness relates to brain function. The third section includes computational approaches looking at the quantitative relationship between brain processes and conscious experience.