Although it is not yet officially recognized as a clinical entity which is diagnosable, Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) has been included in section III for further study in the DSM-5 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 2013). This is important because there is increasing evidence that people of all ages, in particular teens and young adults, are facing very real and sometimes very severe consequences in daily life resulting from an addictive use of online games. This article summarizes general aspects (...) of IGD including diagnostic criteria and arguments for the classification as an addictive disorder including evidence from neurobiological studies. Based on previous theoretical considerations and empirical findings, this paper examines the use of one recently proposed model, the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model, for inspiring future research and for developing new treatment protocols for IGD. The I-PACE model is a theoretical framework that explains symptoms of Internet addiction by looking at interactions between predisposing factors, moderators, and mediators in combination with reduced executive functioning and diminished decision making. Finally, the paper discusses how current treatment protocols focusing on Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Internet addiction (CBT-IA) fit with the processes hypothesized in the I-PACE model. (shrink)

The importance of overt levers of business political influence, notably campaign donations and lobbying, has been overemphasized. Using executive branch policymaking during the Obama administration as a case study, this article shows that those paths of influence are often not the most important. It places special emphasis on the structural power that large banks and corporations wield by virtue of their control over the flow of capital and the consequent effects on employment levels, credit availability, prices, and tax collection. At (...) times, business disinvestment, combined with demands for government policy reforms, constitutes a conscious “capital strike,” which has the potential to shape political appointments, legislation, and policy implementation. At other times, the threat of disinvestment, the hint of a drop in “business confidence,” or rhetoric about job creation is sufficient to achieve those objectives. The present analysis has important implications for our understanding of political power and social change in capitalist economies. (shrink)

The stories people tell in the course of conversations are both implicated in and distinct from the occasions on which they are told. Their implication is a matter of context; their distinctness is a matter of frame. Contexts show up as continuities between stories, conversations, and storytelling occasions; frames mark discontinuities. By virtue of their frames, stories can be identified as a different order of event from the conversations in which they are enclaves and from the occasions of their telling, (...) an event with its own conventions of presentation. Stories are neither natural utterances in conversations nor are they ordinary events in everyday life. They are recountings of such events in the course of such conversations. Stories thus constitute a separate universe of discourse, a storyrealm embedded in the realm of conversation. The storyrealm, that segment of narrative discourse within conversation, in turn directs attention to a third realm, the realm of the events the story is about or taleworld. Events in the taleworld are framed by the storyrealm, itself framed by the realm of conversation. (shrink)

Family traditions take a somatic turn in a therapeutic practice that focuses on how bodies are passed down in families, not as assemblages of biological traits enjoined on the bodies of children by parents but as intentional fabrications devised by children out of the bodies of parents. Somatic psychology holds that parents offer children models of how to be embodied in the form of bodily attitudes. The body shapes I imitate and resist at every stage of life arise out of (...) the memory of the past, incarnate memory in the present, and project the memorial body toward its future. Taking up the techniques by which a person makes her body, the somatic psychologist induces her to unmake and remake it. This is a study of how the flesh remembers. (shrink)

Anhedonia is a risk factor for suicide and poor treatment response in depressed individuals. Most evidence-based psychological therapies target symptoms of heightened negative affect instead of deficits in positive affect and typically show little benefit for anhedonia. Viewing positive scenes through virtual reality has been shown to increase positive affect and holds great promise for addressing anhedonic symptoms. In this pilot study, six participants with clinically significant depression completed 13 sessions of exposure to positive scenes in a controlled VR environment. (...) Significant decreases were found in self-reported anhedonia, depression, anxiety, and impairments in functioning from baseline to 1-month follow-up. Negative affect decreased over all 13 sessions, and positive affect increased over sessions 8–13. Results suggest that positive experiences in VR may be a novel avenue for the treatment of anhedonia in depressed individuals. (shrink)

As one example of how modern Western societies are increasingly obliged to reconcile questions of civility and justice against common, indeed revered, practices that compromise nonhuman animals, this paper examines the recent history of public debate regarding the use of animals for public entertainment in the Canadian West. Using media-based public dialogue regarding the annual Calgary Stampede as a case study and couching the high-risk use of horses in the sociological language of “sports-related violence,” the paper explores the various arguments (...) for and against the continued use of horses at the self-proclaimed “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” despite unambiguous evidence of the harm that regularly, and sometimes graphically, occurs. (shrink)

Addressing religion and feminism on a global scale, this unprecedented book contains a nuanced and fine-tuned treatment of seven of the world's religions from a feminist perspective by leading women scholars. The fact that these authors share a dual but undivided commitment both to themselves as women and to their traditions as adherents imparts to their voices a prophetic quality, and if Mahatma Gandhi is to be believed, even scriptural value.

As a forum for philosophical discourse of religious studies as related to the world's women, the "Annual Review of Women in World Religions" fails. The first three issues display an unfortunately limited approach. Certain articles are promising, but editorial intellectual constraints appear to have circumscribed the philosophical latitude provided to contributors. In spite of the potential of the journal's topic area, it is doubtful it will soon succeed in emerging as a publication with adequate inclusionary liberality and ideal discursive freedom.

Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon--the legacy of P.T. Barnum's 'humbug' culminating with the currency of Donald J. Trump's 'fake news'. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, with race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and 'What (...) Is It?', an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans like Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. This brilliant and timely work asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of 'truthiness' where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art."--Dust jacket flap. (shrink)

This paper explicates a Marxian theory of management that suggests that the social relation to be managed in capitalism is the separation of the political from the economic. While it is commonly understood that this must be an active process of management taken up on behalf of modern capitalist states, this paper suggests that the market mechanism itself also assumes this role without the active intervention of any managerial direction. The intensive expansion of the market facilitates a management function of (...) subverting the political deliberation which challenges the political-economic separation that could otherwise be expected in neoliberal restructuring. Both the changing nature of consumption and the growth of the small business sector are cited as examples of ways in which neoliberalism reproduces itself in the presence of social contradiction but in the absence of any actively planned strategy of management to deal with those contradictions. (shrink)

The processes of state formation in the agrarian states of Southeast Asia lend themselves to fruitful comparative analysis using Eliasian concepts. However, in the difficult physical environment of a region endowed with plentiful land relative to population, the control of labour was more important than control of territory, as demonstrated by the cases of Siam and Java. Moreover, the religious, ceremonial and symbolic significance of kingship remained very important even when the coercive power of the centre was weak. Courts made (...) absolutist claims, but their dominance depended on symbolic power and on complex intrigues and networks of patronage. Elias is useful to analyse these endogenous processes of state formation. However, the modern states of the region were forged by colonialism, nationalist movements and the more recent technocratic developmentalist programmes of authoritarian elites. Rapid economic transformation and industrialization have brought new classes and new tensions to test the adequacy of state structures, now far removed from the elite territorial competition of the past. (shrink)

Many Roman Catholic female saints have been virgin martyrs whose lives exemplify a feminine Christian ideal. This article examines the legend of the modern virgin martyr Maria Goretti, a spiritual template whose sainthood can be said to institutionalize violence by defining women as sexualized beings and potential rape victims. The social and psychological effects of the legend of Goretti are discussed as a form of spiritual and sexual terrorism.