Everyday Action Research Articles

Comparing action disorganization syndrome and dual-task load on normal performance in everyday action tasks

The term ‘action disorganization syndrome’ has been used to describe patients with selective impairments in carrying out multi-step everyday tasks, which are not linked to motor deficits. We used a range of everyday life tasks to examine the effects on a patient with ADS of having related distractors present during task performance. The presence of related distractors increased omission errors in the patient. In a second experiment we assessed whether we could mimic this pattern of deficit when normal participants carried out the everyday tasks and a secondary task was imposed to place demands on executive processes. Secondary task load produced a general increase in errors in the controls and reduced the number of self-correcting responses, but there were no proportional increases in omission errors. Control participants and patients with ADS may suffer from demands on different processes involved in the performance of everyday actions. We discuss the implications for understanding everyday actions.

Exploring the Temporal Dimension in Cancer Patients' Experiences of Nonbiomedical Therapeutics

To date, research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use by cancer patients has tended to provide a "snapshot" of experience, with little attention given to the evolution of experience over time. Drawing on data from solicited diaries, this article examines individual cancer patients' temporal experiences of CAM. Our findings suggest that experiences of CAM are variable over time and space, and furthermore, that the everyday act of "doing CAM" is considerably more problematic than is often reported in face-to-face interview or survey studies. This is explored in relation to the tension between the perceived need for restrictive self-discipline alongside a sense of the emancipatory potential of CAM; the role of CAM therapists in reconceptualizing disease; and the complex interplay between CAM-derived notions of self-healing and acceptance of individual mortality. We argue that an emphasis on the temporality of cancer patients' CAM engagement is necessary to access a more nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of cancer patients.

The situated aspect of creativity in communicative events: How do children design web pages together?

This paper looks at the collaborative construction of web pages in History by a Year-4 group of children in a primary school in the UK. The aim of this paper is to find out: (a) How did children interpret their involvement in this literacy practice? (b) How the construction of web pages was interactionally accomplished? and (c) How can creativity be identified in interaction? Using an ethnographic approach to the study of communication, it is argued that the collective and creative construction of meaning can be understood in terms of relationships amongst components of communicative acts. The analysis of these components reveals how participants shape their utterances as they are engaged in the pursuit of shared goals in a situated activity system. It is argued that participants strive to become members of a community of practice designing web pages. Members of this community showed their understanding in relation to the way they interpreted the design rules for a multimodal text, the means for working together in collaboration and distributing roles, as well as their interpretation of what counts as historical knowledge. Also, in terms of creativity, participants managed to communicate and negotiate their intentions by using several figures of speech and language games, as well as contextually framing their positions as participants in a dialogue. That is, children and teacher demonstrated their creative abilities in a textual, contextual and critical level. It is concluded that creativity is not a gifted capacity; it is an everyday act which is interactionally accomplished in the context of social participation as members of a community. Members creatively display their intentions and negotiate new alternatives for the interpretation of actions in situated activity systems.

The colour flows back: Intention and interpretation in literature and in everyday action

The notion of the author's intention is logically tied to the interpretation we give to her work, as the notion of the agent's intention is logically tied to the interpretation we give to her action. When we find a discrepancy between what the author or agent says and the meaning we find in her work or the sense we make of what she does, this does not show that the intention is irrelevant in determining this meaning or sense. As Frank Cioffi has argued, we are rather favouring one criterion of intention over another. Taking a close look at the early criticism surrounding The Turn of the Screw I draw attention to this phenomenon — much discussed by Wittgenstein — of favouring one criterion of intention over another. Because Wittgenstein's views, though mentioned frequently, are still ill-understood, I go on to tease out the philosophical assumptions that lurk in the background of disputes about the relevance of intention for interpretation.

Maxim Gorky: Russian Dramatist by Cynthia Marsh (review)

536 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 One suspects that the limitations in this study have arisen in large part (and perhaps justifiably) from an approach heavily focused on the personal experience of the author. Van deWater admits thatpart three ismuch more 'subjective' in focus, largelybecause she attended many of theproductions she discusses. (This perhaps also explains why there is much more detailed discus sion of productions in the 1990s than in the Soviet era, and why her discussion is limited to these two particular theatres.) Yet, despite these shortcomings, this work isa useful contribution to scholarship on Soviet/Russian theatre and on the litde-studied area of theatre for young people in general. London Kate Sealey Rahman Marsh, Cynthia. Maxim Gorky:Russian Dramatist. Peter Lang, Oxford, Berlin, Vienna and New York, 2006. 382 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. ?42.00 (paperback). This is the firstmajor study in English devoted exclusively to Gor'kii the dramatist rather than the prose writer and, as such, is a very welcome addition to studies of a writer whose former status as a Soviet icon is undergoing reas sessment both in his home country and elsewhere. The emphasis on his place as a specificallyRussian (rather than Soviet) dramatist is strategically designed to rescue Gor'kii from his former domestic champions and to locate him within a tradition of Russian realist dramatic writing from Ostrovskii to the present which, whilst owing a debt to late-nineteenth century European naturalist dramatists, counteracted their generally pessimistic perspectives by lending their stage naturalism a more political, and therefore ameliorative, coloration. Cynthia Marsh's qualifications for the task include a number of articles on Gor'kii the dramatist as well as, crucially, practical work with students. The result is a work which attempts to place the emphasis on Gor'kii's skills as a dramatist firmly within the context of performance, analysing the ways in which stage space is deployed as a means of dramatizing conflictswhich are articulated in terms of linguistic and spatial relations and where matters of power and social class, which might otherwise appear crudely schematized, are seen to be handled with far greater subtlety than hitherto imagined. The clash between everyday naturalistic action and melodramatic incident, to which are added a degree of grotesquerie and elements of fairground entertainment, far from being matters on which Gor'kii might be indicted, become, in Marsh's sympathetic view, consciously contrived features of a skilled dramatist's manipulation of generic collisions which mirror profound conflicts in the social world of pre-revolutionary Russia. The treatment of the plays is chronological, beginning with Gor'kii's firstplays written for theMoscow Art Theatre, including The LowerDepths, followed by those plays written before 1905which focus on the plight of the Russian intelligentsia, of which Summerfolkis probably the best known. The theme of exile is then given thematic importance, viewed as consonant with Gor'kii's own position between 1906 and 1917when he lived abroad and reviews 537 where a play likeEnemies discloses a sharper emphasis on political conflict as well as evincing the emergence of a distinctive feministperspective which, in Marsh's view, is as ambiguous as Ibsen's and foreshadows Gor'kii's treatment of powerful matriarchs such as Vassa Zheleznova. The study concludes with Gor'kii's return to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s with the dramatic emphasis now on powerful men, as depicted in plays such as Egor Bulychev and the Others, who epitomize the ambivalence of Gor'kii's contempt for an enervated, dying pre-revolutionary regime coupled with his admiration for its neurologically and physiologically stronger representatives. At one point the status of a number of defining categories deployed in the study are described as being intelligibly 'obvious' to audiences at the time whilst, in a post-Soviet climate, these terms are now seen to be 'largely academic' (p. 125). However, the discussion tends to lean rather heavily on the continuing validity of portmanteau terms such as 'bourgeois' and 'bourgeoisie' and, consequently, reads at times like a slightly tendentious version of Soviet style literarycriticism yoked to a less than rigorously theorized systemof stage semiotics. This may derive from a degree of uncertainty about the kind...

A Tale of Autistic Experience: Knowing, Living, Telling in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Taking its starting point from Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , a novel featuring an autistic first-person narrator, this paper explores the capabilities and limits of narrative as a cognitive instrument with special attention to the connection between knowing, living, and telling. In the novel the impairments connected with autism, affecting social interaction and the understanding of other persons as beings with minds of their own, influence both the narrator's style of telling his story and his way of using narrative thinking to plan the future and conceive of the past. The discussion focuses on both these issues, arguing that narrative is not only a cultural technique which enables orientation in time and space as well as the understanding of other agents as intentional —that it is a highly social art, of vital importance for everyday action and interaction in a web of social relations.

Coffee with jelly or unbuttered toast: Commissions and omissions are dissociable aspects of everyday action impairment in Alzheimer's disease.

Relative to our understanding of the memory and language deficits associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD), little is known about problems with everyday action performance (i.e., meal preparation, grooming). The resource theory proposes that everyday action problems are best explained by a unitary deficit in general cognitive resources. However, recent research suggests that omission and commission errors may reflect dissociable aspects of action impairment, with only omissions associated with resource limitations. This study examined everyday action performance in 70 participants with AD who also underwent a neuropsychological evaluation. First, correlation and principal component analyses were performed to examine the construct(s) that might explain everyday action impairment. Second, relations between everyday task component(s) and neuropsychological tests were examined by using correlation and regression analyses. Third, differences in everyday action error patterns were examined among participants of comparable overall impairment levels. Results showed omission and commission errors were uncorrelated and distinct components of everyday action performance, predicted by different neuropsychological tests, and differentially distributed even among participants with comparable overall impairment.

The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland (review)

Reviewed by: The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland J. Brian Sheehan The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland. By William F. Kelleher Jr . ( Ann Arbor : The University of Michigan Press , 2003 . Pp. xiv + 257 , preface, notes, glossary, references cited, index.) In The Troubles in Ballybogoin, William Kelleher explores how space, history, and memory are contested in Northern Ireland. Kelleher’s work in Ballybogoin began during the Troubles in the mid-1980s and continued through the relatively more peaceful time of 1999. The site of Kelleher’s research is Ballybogoin, a fictitious name for a real town in the western region of Northern Ireland. Located west of the River Bann, which marks the dividing line between the rural west and the relatively industrialized eastern section of Northern Ireland, Ballybogoin lies less than fifteen miles from the contested border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the state to which the vast majority of local Irish nationalists desire to belong. Ballybogoin is a socially and politically divided place; Catholics slightly outnumber Protestants in the town but form a clear majority in its hinterland. The Irish Catholic nationalists become the main subject matter of the book. Despite his lengthy residence in the area, Kelleher never became very familiar with the Protestants, a fact that he admits but does not explain in great depth. He does suggest that the people of Ballybogoin identified him as a Roman Catholic. Although Kelleher’s book is about identity in Northern Ireland, and although he delineates and interprets a number of sites where the work of identity formation takes place, he largely skips over the question of his own identity. However, it is but a minor gap in an impressive interpretive account of the riven social and political postcolonial landscape of Ballybogoin. Questions of identity dating from seventeenth- century colonial times are paramount in Ballybogoin. “Telling,” a practice carried out by both Catholics and Protestants, refers to the attempt to determine whether strangers are Catholic or Protestant. Using cues such as names, place of residence, schools attended, and class appearance, Ballybogoin Catholics said their interpretations of sectarian identity were correct over 90 percent of the time. In Ballybogoin, telling was a continual, everyday social action that affected interactions and social relations. Kelleher states that telling was a struggle over classification, helping to sustain a discourse that had its roots in colonial power and showing that colonial relations continued in the 1980s in Ballybogoin. Kelleher’s research asserts that “manhood” is a strategy of colonial resistance, as he describes and probes workers’ gendered identities on the shop floor of a Ballybogoin glassworks factory. One of the Catholic nationalist enterprises inspired by the social justice movements in and around Ballybogoin in the 1960s, the glassworks factory became the site of a fiveweek strike in 1985. Kelleher shows how social memory enters the workaday world to hinder communication and stymie progressive change. The workers’ inability to win the strike was not simply a failure of will but rather, according to Kelleher, an indicator of other struggles under way in Northern Ireland. At the glassworks and during the strike, class relations were worked out in terms of ethnicity or race, and no successful class-based strategy developed. Kelleher writes, “The workers’ attitudes toward class issues were profoundly affected by the culture and politics they brought through the door. Political and class identities were negotiated simultaneously and none was determining” (p. 150). [End Page 243] Given the entrenched nature of the sectarian divide, the cautionary words with which Kelleher closes his book seem well chosen. He states that decolonization in places like Ballybogoin in Northern Ireland is a huge task. The legacy of past violence from all three sides—the British state, Ulster unionists and loyalists, and Irish nationalists—lies heavy on the land. Kelleher’s book is a positive contribution toward increasing the understanding of the complexity of the Troubles. Such an understanding is an important component of any peaceful resolution of the entrenched conflict in the north of Ireland. Kelleher’s book is a contribution not only to Irish studies but also to anthropology and postcolonial studies in general. J. Brian Sheehan Fairleigh...

Best Review Practices: Support Nurse Authors with Compassionate Critique

Best Review Practices: Support Nurse Authors with Compassionate Critique

1. NARRATIVE EXPLANATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS

ABSTRACTIn this paper I look at narrative as a mode of explanation and at various ways in which the explanatory value of narrative has been criticized. I begin with the roots of narrative explanation in everyday action, experience, and discourse, illustrating it with the help of a simple example. I try to show how narrative explanation is transformed and complicated by circumstances that take us beyond the everyday into such realms as jurisprudence, journalism, and history. I give an account of why narrative explanation normally satisfies us, and how or in what sense it actually explains. Then I consider how narrative is challenged and rejected as a mode of explanation in many scientific and other contexts and why attempts are made to replace it with something else. I try to evaluate the nature and sources of these challenges, and I describe this controversy over narrative against the historical background of its emergence. My paper ends with a pragmatic defense of narrative explanation against these challenges.

From social talk to social action: Shaping the social triad with emotion sharing.

Seemingly trivial social talk provides fertile ground for emotion sharing (a narrator and audience's realization that they experience the same emotional response toward a target), which in turn creates a coalition between the narrator and the audience, configures the narrator and audience's relationship with the target, and coordinates their target-directed action. In this article, the authors use 4 studies to investigate this thesis. In Studies 1 and 2--where participants rated scenarios in which narrators told them anecdotes--the authors found that when there was emotion sharing (a) participants were more bonded with narrators, (b) the narrator and audience's relationship with the target (as reflected in action tendencies) was determined by the emotionality of the anecdotes, and (c) they coordinated their target-directed actions. Study 3 demonstrated that this effect was indeed due to emotion sharing. Study 4 provided behavioral evidence for the effects of emotion sharing using a 2-person trust game. Together, these studies reveal that the everyday act of social talk is a powerful act that is able to shape the social triad of the narrator, the audience, and the social target, with powerful consequences for social structure and group action.

The case of the unfamiliar implement: Schema-based over-riding of semantic knowledge from objects in everyday action

We examined the role of schema knowledge in everyday action by assessing the use of unfamiliar implements by patients with subcortical and frontal lobe damage. Although the patients were relatively good at naming or showing how the unfamiliar implements could be used outside of the task context, the patients omitted using the objects in everyday life tasks more often than control participants--either omitting the action step involving the objects or performing the action using a familiar object that was not normally used for this purpose. The data suggest that knowledge about objects in the context of a task can play a determining role in how objects are used in everyday action. In patients with reduced attentional resources, the task schema can over-ride weak bottom-up cueing of action from the objects, with the result that unfamiliar implements are not used.

Developing organizational practices of ecological sustainability

PurposeThis article aims to discuss issues and strategies of developing practices of ecological sustainability in organizations. Three questions guide the discussion: how are practices of social responsibility and ecological sustainability developed and maintained in organizations? What learning in particular is involved in developing practices of ecological sustainability in organizations? How might this learning be fostered by organizational leaders?Design/methodology/approachThe article draws from literatures in ecology, ecological learning and corporate social responsibility to describe the nature of ecological sustainability, intents and approaches of organizations developing it, and their challenges. Case examples drawn from studies of small business are examined to explore successful strategies of developing practices of ecological sustainability. These examples are analysed from a learning perspective.FindingsChallenges that hinder adoption of ecological sustainability practice include low stakeholder understanding and support, low management focus and strategy, and insufficient cost‐benefit analysis. Organizations confronted these challenges by emphasizing education and enabling conditions that fostered learning in everyday action (decentralization, diversity, connections, shared focus, constraints, and feedback).Research limitations/implicationsThe discussion shifts the emphasis from corporate social responsibility (CSR) – which has become a broad, contested area of multiple meanings – to ecological sustainability, and shifts the focus from measurement and reporting (prominent in CSR literature) to learning.Practical implicationsStrategies are suggested for organizational leaders to enable conditions for learning that support practices of ecological sustainability.Originality/valueWith the learning perspective, and particularly with the focus on ecological learning models based in complexity science, the article demonstrates a unique link between learning approaches and practices of ecological sustainability.

The Coffee Challenge: A new method for the study of everyday action errors

Errors in everyday activities pose significant consequences for individuals with mild cognitive deficits. However, there are few performance-based methods available to study action in these populations; the Coffee Challenge (CC) was designed for this purpose. Experiment 1 examined CC performance in healthy participants across 10 practice trials. Analyses showed evidence for routinization after 10 trials. In Experiment 2, CC performance was disrupted by dividing attention. Errors increased significantly, but performance was not qualitatively different from baseline. The results shed light on action impairments in patient populations and validate the CC as a promising new tool for future studies.

Everyday action in schizophrenia: Performance patterns and underlying cognitive mechanisms.

Everyday action is impaired among individuals with schizophrenia, yet few studies have characterized the nature of this deficit using performance-based measures. This study examined the performance of 20 individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder on the Naturalistic Action Test (M. F. Schwartz, L. J. Buxbaum, M. Ferraro, T. Veramonti, & M. Segal, 2003). Performance was coded to examine overall impairment, task accomplishment, and error patterns and was compared with that of healthy controls (n = 28) and individuals with mild dementia (n = 23). Additionally, 2 competing accounts of everyday action deficits, the resource theory and an executive account, were evaluated. When compared with controls, the participants with schizophrenia demonstrated impaired performance. Relative to dementia patients, participants with schizophrenia obtained higher accomplishment scores but committed comparable rates of errors. Moreover, distributions of error types for the 2 groups differed, with the participants with schizophrenia demonstrating greater proportions of errors associated with executive dysfunction. This is the 1st study to show different Naturalistic Action Test performance patterns between 2 neurologically impaired populations. The distinct performance pattern demonstrated by individuals with schizophrenia reflects specific deficits in executive function.

Environmental adaptations improve everyday action performance in Alzheimer's disease: Empirical support from performance-based assessment.

Neuropsychologists often recommend that patients with dementia and their caregivers use environmental adaptations to improve everyday functioning. Although these recommendations are intuitive (e.g., reduce clutter), most have never been experimentally tested. This study examined whether and how environmental adaptations improved everyday action in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Forty-six outpatients completed the Naturalistic Action Test (NAT; M. F. Schwartz, L. J. Buxbaum, M. Ferraro, T. Veramonti, & M. Segal, 2003), which requires completion of 3 everyday tasks. The NAT was administered under 2 conditions: standard and user centered. The standard NAT followed the procedures of the manual; object placement was standardized, but objects were not meaningfully arranged on the tabletop. In the user-centered NAT, objects were arranged in the order needed in the task, and a visual cue to monitor performance was placed on the table. These conditions were counterbalanced across participants. The user-centered condition improved performance on all NAT items and reduced commission and omission error rates. However, post hoc examination of commission error types showed improvement of substitution and off-task errors but no difference in anticipation and perseveration errors. Thus, environmental adaptations improved everyday performance in AD by facilitating task accomplishment, object selection, and task-congruent actions.

Relationship between Unconstrained Arm Movements and Single-Neuron Firing in the Macaque Motor Cortex

The activity of single neurons in the monkey motor cortex was studied during semi-naturalistic, unstructured arm movements made spontaneously by the monkey and measured with a high resolution three-dimensional tracking system. We asked how much of the total neuronal variance could be explained by various models of neuronal tuning to movement. On average, tuning to the speed of the hand accounted for 1% of the total variance in neuronal activity, tuning to the direction of the hand in space accounted for 8%, a more complex model of direction tuning, in which the preferred direction of the neuron rotated with the starting position of the arm, accounted for 13%, tuning to the final position of the hand in Cartesian space accounted for 22%, and tuning to the final multijoint posture of the arm accounted for 36%. One interpretation is that motor cortex neurons are significantly tuned to many control parameters important in the animal's repertoire, but that different control parameters are represented in different proportion, perhaps reflecting their prominence in everyday action. The final posture of a movement is an especially prominent control parameter although not the only one. A common mode of action of the monkey arm is to maintain a relatively stable overall posture while making local adjustments in direction during performance of a task. One speculation is that neurons in motor cortex reflect this pattern in which direction tuning predominates in local regions of space and postural tuning predominates over the larger workspace.

Family of users of a psychosocial attention center: a comprehensive analysis in Schütz - preview note

Introduction: Because of the recent advances reached by Brazilian Psychiatric Reform movement, it becomes important to evaluate the alternative services, amongst them, the Psychosocial Attention Centers (CAPS), in the family of the user’s point of view about these services. Objective: Understanding the perception of the user’s family about a CAPS, concerning to the team work. Methodology: The study follows a qualitative and phenomenological approach. After the approval of the ethics committee, data collection was made in “CAIS Mental Centro” CAPS, in Porto Alegre city, Rio Grande do Sul State, during October and November, 2006, with the following guiding question: “Talk about the work of the team of CAIS Mental Centro - Psychosocial Attention Center.” Results: We carried through 13 interviews with the familiars that were more interested in the treatment of the user. Information analysis will be developed according to the comprehensive interpretation, from the following analysis categories: social everyday, intersubjectivity, typification, social relations and social action. So, we will search for the comprehension on how the familiar one experience the work of the team in a CAPS, using as support the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz. Conclusion: We will deepen the analysis later, however, we can stand out that this research will be important because it will be able to contribute for the improvement of the mental health assistance of the users and families that use the CAPS, beyond serving as knowledge source for the construction of possible actions in mental health.

Konstruktion oder Evolution der Zeit?

As there are no time-independent biological processes, time seems to be a biological phenomenon kat echen. This statement is true not only for developmental or evolutionary transformations, which show specific temporal and spatial patterns, but for all known physiological, genetic or molecular-biological as well as ecological or populational processes. The remarkable time dependency of all life-processes attracted the attention of biologists and philosophers – Whitehead’s concept of actual entities which constitute the monad-like centrepoints of his Leibnizian universe provide a perfect example. Despite the relevance of temporal descriptions, their methodological status in the sciences is often unclear.The aim of this paper is to present at least some of the most important non-empirical aspects of any scientific treatment of temporal phenomena. Following a constructivist approach, the introduction of temporal language particles is traced back to explicit contexts of human everyday life practices and action. »Time« is considered to represent a specific façon de parler, which allows us to deal with temporal aspects of processes and world-states, which themselves are the very subject-matter of scientific descriptions. Following this line of argument, the attempt to derive time as an epistemological precondition of subjective knowledge on grounds of biological descriptions in the perspective of an »evolutionary concept of knowledge« (Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie) is rejected by proving the pre-empirical, categorical status of temporal concepts. Accordingly, an evolutionary derivation of time is shown to be impossible: in contrast to naturalistic approaches, time is either to be understood as a condition of the possibility of knowledge itself (i. e. of scientific knowledge a fortiori) or it designates temporal aspects of natural processes, which are described in reference to the presupposed categories of knowledge. In both cases, »time« is neither a »natural« nor a biological object.

Socialism on the Ground

Harry and Paul—but especially Harry—were occasionally criticized by some on the left for a seeming contradiction between their advocacy of socialism and their support for what were thought to be reformist measures like single-payer universal health insurance, something that MR has supported for at least a quarter century. For Harry socialism was not only a theoretical construct or merely a tool for the analysis of the iniquities of capitalism. It was all of these things of course, but it was a guide to everyday action; in other words, a kind of socialism on the ground.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.