Experiential Dynamics Research Articles

Psychosis reactivity to cannabis use in daily life: an experience sampling study

Little is known about the experiential dynamics of the interaction between cannabis and vulnerability to psychosis. To examine the effects of cannabis on psychotic symptoms and mood in patients with psychosis and healthy controls. Patients with a psychotic disorder (n = 42) and healthy controls (n = 38) were followed in their daily lives using a structured time-sampling technique. Daily life cannabis use predicted subsequent increases in positive affect and in patients, but not in controls, decreases in negative affect. In patients, but not in controls, cannabis use predicted increased levels of hallucinatory experiences. Mood-enhancing properties of cannabis were acute, whereas psychosis-inducing effects were sub-acute. There was no direct evidence for self-medication effects in daily life. Patients with psychosis are more sensitive to both the psychosis-inducing and mood-enhancing effects of cannabis. The temporal dissociation between acute rewarding effects and sub-acute toxic influences may be instrumental in explaining the vicious circle of deleterious use in these patients.

“A little bit more mysterious…”: Ambience and Art in the Dark

“A little bit more mysterious…”: Ambience and Art in the Dark

‘I felt a funeral in my brain’: The politics of representation in HBO's Six Feet Under

From the isolation of the hospital bed to the specialization of the mortuary, the experiential dynamics of grief and dying are largely excluded from the American public sphere. And yet death persists and proliferates in the entertainment and news industries in the form of virtual spectacle. Through an examination of the popular television series Six Feet Under, this study explores the place of representation in inciting, challenging and sustaining expressions of anxiety and social repression surrounding the experience of death and grief in contemporary life. The work of theorist Fredric Jameson on the Freudian notion of historical figurability provides methodological grounding for understanding such works of mass culture as both expressive and productive of the political status quo.

Intervention with Abused Older Males: Conceptual and Clinical Perspectives

SUMMARY Men and women experience abuse in different ways and older men have particular treatment needs that must be addressed by clinicians. The current design and configuration of clinical services may create barriers to abused older men receiving treatment fully suited to their needs. In this article, the unique experiential dynamics and help seeking behaviors of older men who experience abuse are delineated and recommendations are given for structuring services to better meet their needs. Gender-sensitive clinical techniques and modalities are described and suggestions for interventions that could prove particularly efficacious in the treatment of older men are offered.

Prostitution indendørs. Massageklinikken som socialt rum

Cristina Alzaga: Indoor Prostitution: The Parlour as a Social Space This article presents a sociological hermeneutic analysis of the lived everyday working world of Danish indoor prostitutes. It draws upon observations and interviews, as well as documentary and experiential data, produced during a six-month period of ethnographic fieldwork at a Copenhagen massage parlour, where the author served as “telephone lady“. The article uncovers the social order (nomos) of this life world, its social relations and shared interpretations as well as organizational traits and practical-corporeal terms. It also discusses the variety and multidimensionality of the relations between prostitutes and clients. The article seeks to uncover the meanings of the distinct experiential dynamics and work experiences that take form within this particular working universe, and examines their contradictory relations to the dominant views and accounts of prostitution in the outside world, including the views pre¬sented by mainstream research on prostitution.

Holismo e investigación cualitativa en el marco de la antropología de la complejidad. Una reflexión sobre la pertinencia metodológica en ciencias socio-sanitarias y humanas

This study was organised around the following objectives: Relating the principle of methodological and instrumental pertinence to the characteristics of the object-subject on which research is done within the epistemological framework of a discipline, and Reflecting on the pertinence of qualitative research and historico-ethnographic sources in socio-sanitary sciences (particularly nursing) and human sciences (due to their holism) The theme development was structured through a process of analysis that focused on the three crucial phases in Edgar Morin’s work: the Dialectics between the real and the imaginary (anthropology of death); the anthropocosmological dialectics, and finally, the anthropo-bio-cosmic dialogics. Conclusions: From Morin on, the vision of reality became more multidimensional and holistic, since until well into the 20th century, knowledge had been based on abstraction, subdivision, simplification, reductionism, law generation, etc. Morin wanted to humanise science through a transdisciplinary anthropology in which the experiential dynamics of the human being was considered in a more global way starting from the paradigm of complexity, the qualitative methodology being a pertinent instrument for holistic clarification.

An examination of the theoretical perspectives underlying the ALSG Generic Instructors Course

The objective of this paper is to examine some theory that appears to make a contribution to the Generic Instructors Courses (GICs) offered by the Advanced Life Support Group and the Resuscitation Council, UK. Accordingly, it is not an empirical study: rather it is a critical assessment of the contribution made by studies in adult learning to what is perceived and generally presented as an atheoretical course. The course will be described and four contributory theories--experiential learning, group dynamics, situated learning and reflective practice--will be briefly explored. The paper will observe that each of these makes a contribution towards an understanding of the achievements of the GIC. The paper will conclude with a number of recommendations for some small-scale empirical work.

CULTURAL CRIMINOLOGY

▪ Abstract As an emergent orientation in sociology, criminology, and criminal justice, cultural criminology explores the convergence of cultural and criminal processes in contemporary social life. Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies, postmodern theory, critical theory, and interactionist sociology, and on ethnographic methodologies and media/textual analysis, this orientation highlights issues of image, meaning, and representation in the interplay of crime and crime control. Specifically, cultural criminology investigates the stylized frameworks and experiential dynamics of illicit subcultures; the symbolic criminalization of popular culture forms; and the mediated construction of crime and crime control issues. In addition, emerging areas of inquiry within cultural criminology include the development of situated media and situated audiences for crime; the media and culture of policing; the links between crime, crime control, and cultural space; and the collectively embodied emotions that shape the meaning of crime.

I COULD BE YOU: THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING

This paper discusses the phenomenological dimension of social understanding. The author's general hypothesis is that complex forms of social understanding that biological agents especially humans show are based on two mechanisms: 1 the bodily, experiential dynamics of emphatic resonance and 2 the biographic reconstruction of a communication situation. The latter requires the agent's bodily experiences as the point of reference for the reconstruction process. This hypothesis is derived from discussions in philosophy, natural sciences, and cognitive science on the social embodiment of cognition and understanding. Evidence comes from studies on social cognition in primates, infants, and autistic people that are interpreted in terms of the "mind-experiencing" hypothesis. The second part of the paper sketches an ''interactive'' experiment that investigates the dynamic coupling of a robot with its environment. This example is used to discuss the role of the human observer and designer as an active, embodied agent who is biased toward interpreting the world in terms of intentionality and explanation. The paper describes how this aspect can influence the processes of understanding and interpretation of the behavior of autonomous robotic agents. The author concludes by stressing the need to overcome the distinction between computationalism and phenomenology in order to develop complex artificial systems.

Masculinity and Cultural Change: Wild Men

New images of masculinity in Robert Bly's Iron John (1990/1991) are explored using versions of discourse analysis and psychoanalytic theory. Different discursively constructed forms of masculinity also reproduce forms of psychoanalytic knowledge (in this case Reichian and Habermasian forms), and the task of the analysis is to demonstrate how that knowledge is structured. The 'Wild Man' is the eruption into the body politic of a new version of psychoanalytic subjectivity. The analysis focuses on the meeting-point between discourses which supply surfaces of emergence for different models of the individual and experiential dynamics which are organized into different subjective configurations in and against language. This meeting-point is analytically decomposed into a series of 'discursive complexes'. Discursive complexes are both systems of statements (discourses) and psychoanalytic themes. This type of analysis is concerned in general with the workings of ideology, and in this particular case with authoritarianism. The ideological context is explored (through complexes of distortion, separation and castration) in order to understand the ways in which the social shapes and meanings of masculine authority are being transformed and reproduced.

The development within: An alternative approach to the study of lives

The idea of development in adulthood, rather than being conceived in terms of either already prescribed ends, as in normative models, or in terms of the absence of ends, as in those models seeking to equate development with history, may be better conceived in terms of the progressive transformation of ends. Along these lines, it is also argued that development may be better conceived within individuals than across them. By focusing on the experiential dynamics of the progressive transformation of ends, and by considering how this process emerges in the lives of different individuals, it may be possible both to discover new forms of development and to determine the means by which their attainment might be facilitated.