Tendency For People Research Articles

Perceived elderly traits and young people's helping tendencies in the U.S., Ireland, Nigeria & Brazil.

The traits young people (undergraduates) in the U.S., Ireland, Nigeria, and Brazil attribute to elderly people had implications on their tendencies to help or not to help them. Traits were classified as either "attractive" or "unattractive" and they fell under Positive Personal, Positive Interpersonal, and Positive Need on the one hand, and Negative Personal, Negative Interpersonal, and Negative Need on the other. The "attractive" elderly traits were more likely to influence young people's tendency to help elderly persons and elderly parents in both Western (the U.S.A. and Ireland) and non-Western societies (Nigeria and Brazil) societies. Although "unattractive" traits did not prevent young people from desiring to help their elderly parents in both Western and non-Western societies, it did have a strong influence in their tendency to not help the elderly. The results were discussed within the frame-work of individualism/collectivism, with suggestion made for future research.

Emotion and cognition in business ethics teaching

This paper focuses specifically on taughtcourses in business ethics for post-experiencestudents. The theme of this paper is thatvalues have a dual nature, involving bothemotional and cognitive elements. This dualnature is not always clearly acknowledged byparticipants in business ethics courses. Thisleads to a range of different ways in whichmisunderstanding can arise, and which is oftennot well handled in ethics classes. Twoparticular examples are considered: theseparation of personal and professional ethics,and the tendency for people to manage risk inprobabilistic terms rather than in human. TheKohlberg model is critiqued briefly, andpreference is given to Forsyth's model ofethical decision ideologies. The paperconcludes with some suggestions of positiveapproaches to business ethics teaching,involving virtue ethics and the critical theoryof Jurgen Habermas. This involves abandoningclassroom based tutition for a more personaldevelopment oriented approach.

A Matter of Colour

ABSTRACT South Africa's 'coloured people' have, insofar as they can be described as a distinctive group, tended historically to be viewed as a 'minority group' that does not warrant separate research attention. Many coloured people accepted the identity the government attempted to impose on all 'coloured people,' making it a hazardous research task to determine which identities dominate social formation among 'coloured people.' In spite of the apartheid government's attempts, however, today no single coloured identity or definition of colouredness can be identified; rather, there are multiple identities based on regionalism, language and ideology. The apartheid government attempted to impose its own ideas of what South Africans' identities were through legislation and policy. However, this did not work because ultimately the legislation and policies were clearly discriminatory against all people of colour. The identities of many people were not so much formed by the government's imposed views of 'separate' identities, but by resistance to those imposed identities. While there was a strong tendency for people to accept a separate 'identity' for 'coloured people' under the apartheid system of government, there is no longer any justification for this as the present government and South Africans in general have accepted a democratic constitution guaranteeing equal rights to all its subjects.

Searching the hypermedia Web: improved topic distillation through network analytic relevance ranking

The Web is a large hypermedia space that is generally explored using search engines. These search engines are evolving to make more effective use of the hypermedia structure of the Web. This paper contributes to this evolution by proposing new methods of topic distillation in structured search based on co-citation and network analysis. We describe a set of 21 network analysis measures of relevance in Web search output. These measures are then compared with human judgments in two studies. In the first study, we compare the average judged relevance of the top 20 search results selected by Google vs. the top 20 results as selected by each of the 21 network analysis measures. All but one of the network analysis measures (“inlink”) showed significantly (p<.05) better (as compared to Google) average judged relevance amongst their top 20 selections. Stepwise regression analysis was then used to identify a linear model with three network analysis measures as predictors, which accounted for roughly 17% of the variance in relevance judgments. In the second study the human judges compared ranked output from Google with the ranked output from the best fitting one- and three-predictor regression models. There was a tendency for people to prefer the ranked output from the three-predictor regression model. Only four of the 21 subjects made the Google output their first choice (out of the three options given to them). The output as ranked by the three-predictor model was also rated as having (within the top 20 ranked results) significantly more highly relevant results, and significantly fewer irrelevant results, than the corresponding ratings for Google. While these results need to be extended with more detailed analysis of a wide range of queries and topics, they suggest that network analysis of search output adjacency matrices (where adjacency/proximity is based on Web-wide co-citations) may significantly improve topic distillation by search engines.

Temporal factors in resource dilemmas

The conflict between present and future consumption lies at the heart of resource dilemmas (RDs), yet the role of time has received little attention in this research area. Emphasis was on factors related to the social rather than the temporal conflict inherent in an RD. We propose a model that deals explicitly with the temporal distribution of outcomes. The model combines three basic elements: a simple algebraic model, representing the RD's payoff structure; a growth function, reflecting the autonomous growth of the resource pool; and a discount function, describing how the temporal distance of outcomes affects their perceived value. The model provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the role of temporal factors in RD situations. It enables us to identify four relevant temporal RD characteristics (people's discount rates, their time horizon, the inter-trial delay, and the pool's growth rate) and to describe how these would be expected to affect people's tendency to cooperate. Theoretical, methodological and practical implications of the work are briefly discussed.

Third_Person Perception of Television Violence: The Role of Self_Perceived Knowledge

This study investigated the proposition that self-perceived knowledge or self-expertise is a primary theoretical construct in understanding third-person perception of television violence effects. Consistent with most past research, the findings confirm people's third-person tendencies to attribute greater media effects of television violence on other people than on themselves. As hypothesized, self-perceived knowledge was a stronger predictor of third-person perception than sociodemographic variables (demographics, ideology, and media use). The study also found that self-perceived knowledge was more likely to moderate than mediate the relationship between sociodemographic variables and third-person perception. Whereas a moderator affects the strength of the relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable, a mediator explains the relationship between the two variables. In sum, the findings indicate that respondents' judgments of their superior self-perceived knowledge of television violence might be of theoretical significance in third-person effect research.

A group size effect on personal risk judgments: implications for unrealistic optimism.

In Experiments 1 and 2, college students (N = 32 and N = 18, respectively) read heart attack risk profiles (i.e., lists of risk factors) for each of several employees at a series of fictional companies and judged the heart attack risk of the typical employee at each company. In both experiments, subjects' risk judgments increased as a function of the number of employees at the companies. In Experiments 3A and 3B, college students (N = 56 and N = 33, respectively) judged the heart attack risk of the typical employee at a company and also judged the risk of each individual employee. In these experiments, the typical employee was generally judged to be at higher risk than the individual employees. This group size effect might help to explain unrealistic optimism--people's tendency to judge themselves to be at lower risk than their peers for negative life events. Furthermore, it can be modeled successfully within Fiedler's (1996) BIAS framework.

Criteria for revealing family secrets

Because revealing family secrets can have substantial influences on individuals and their interpersonal relationships, the criteria people use when they consider whether to divulge a family secret are quite important. The current study was conducted to explore these criteria and to examine the factors that encourage people to employ some criteria as opposed to others. In the first stage of the investigation, a list of criteria was generated and initial evidence was presented for an association between the criteria individuals reported using and the likelihood they would reveal a family secret. In the second stage, the list of criteria was refined, the link between the criteria and people's tendency to reveal a family secret was confirmed, and factors associated with the use of some criteria over others were examined. The results of the study yielded 10 factors characterizing the criteria people used in deciding whether to divulge secret information about their family. These factors were, in theoretically interesting ways associated with individuals' tendency to reveal a family secret. Although the topic of people's secret was not related to any of the criteria, there were significant associations between several of the criteria and individuals' perceptions of their secret. More specifically, people who closely identified with their secret and who saw their family secret as intimate or as negatively valenced were more likely to endorse a number of the criteria. Finally, the quality of individuals' relationship with the potential target of their disclosure was linked to the criteria they reported using. Feeling psychologically close to the target was associated with several of the criteria-suggesting that even those in close relationships are quite mindful of the conditions under which they divulge a family secret.

Probability of reciprocation in repeated prisoner's dilemma games

Both social cooperation and self-control require reciprocation. In social cooperation situations a single person's cooperative act, if not reciprocated by others, would be unreinforced both immediately and in the long term. Similarly, a single act of self-control (refusing a single cigarette, for example), if not followed up by other such acts, would also be unreinforced immediately and in the long term. The present experiments varied probability of reciprocation in a prisoner's dilemma-like game that could resemble a social cooperation or a self-control situation. Participants earned points by playing against a computer. The computer offered the participant a choice between 5 or 6 points (‘cooperation’ by the computer) or between 1 or 2 points (‘defection’ by the computer). The participant's choice of the lesser alternative (‘cooperation’) or the greater alternative (‘defection’) on the current trial led, respectively, to cooperation or defection by the computer on the next trial with a probability (probability of reciprocation, PR) which could vary. When PR was greater than 63%, consistent cooperation maximized the participant's earnings. When PR was less than 63%, defection maximized earnings. Three conditions were studied: PR signaled by spinners; PR unsignaled; PR unsignaled with participants believing that they were playing with another person, not the computer. With PR = 100% (‘tit-for-tat’) and PR = 50%, the modal participant maximized earnings under all three conditions. With PR = 75%, participants maximized earnings only when PR was signaled. These results indicate that differences between people's tendency to cooperate with other people (social cooperation) and their tendency to cooperate with their own future interests (self-control) may lie in differences in subjective PR. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Freedom and Free Will in Spinoza and Santayana

Baruch Spinoza is known for his powerful notion of freedom, which consists in a certain partial autonomy firmly situated within his natu ralism. He offers the view that individuals have freedom of action, in a measure, because they have a place in nature, and, within that locus, they may exert a real influence, although that influence is not absolute and indeed is severely limited. It is through this influence that freedom has its relevance and moral significance. Our salvation will come, if it comes at all, through following the dictates of reason?the unique path to freedom. Only confusion and error can arise when the matter is dis cussed in terms of a free will based on indeterminism. Spinoza has an earnest skepticism about the reliability of the will and the commonsense notion of how thought leads to action. Indeed, the will is not a cause of action, but an aspect of mind, and the function of mind is solely to think. On all these points, George Santayana adopts very similar positions; indeed, one might conjecture that he developed his notion of freedom with that of Spinoza as the basic starting point. This would be unsur prising, since he acknowledged Spinoza as his master in many aspects of his thought.1 Most basic here is their shared opinion that human beings are a part of the natural physical cosmos and derive their incom plete autonomy through participation in it, not through an intervention from something beyond nature. Santayana endorses Spinoza's argu ments that a free will that appeals to randomness and indetermination is completely at odds with the tight economy and single-mindedness required for genuine and effective self-determination. Both disavow the ories that take will to be the fundamental concept in the analysis of free dom. Instead, they stress the tendency of people to delude themselves, and they adopt a more classical account of freedom in terms of self

Delinking Economic Growth from Environmental Degradation? A Literature Survey on the Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis

The effect of economic growth on environmental quality is much under dispute. A number of empirical studies have made the claim that there exist in some income ranges a positive relation between per capita income and some measure of environmental quality. According to this inverted U-shaped pattern of different pollutants relative to per capita incomes in different countries which is also called the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), environmental pressure increases up to a point as income goes up; after the turning point environmental quality improves as income keeps rising. Possible explanations for this pattern are seen in the progression of economic development, from clean agrarian economies to polluting industrial economies to clean service economies. This trend is enhanced through the transfer of cleaner technology from high-income countries to low-income countries and the tendency of people with higher income having a higher preference for environmental quality. Since this relationship is so fundamental to questions of economic development and sustainability it has provoked a vast load of research over the last seven years supporting but also heavily criticizing the results and conclusions. This paper gives an overview of the literature published on this topic to date and the conceptual, methodological and fundamental critique put forward.

Driver Misperception of Maneuver Opportunities and Requirements

Misperceptions of the time available or time required for various driving maneuvers under a range of conditions were studied. In the laboratory experiment, research participants viewed video scenes of a wide variety of situations and made judgments about when some event would occur (e.g., approaching vehicle reaches them) or when some maneuver would be completed (e.g., own vehicle clears roadway when making a crossing maneuver). Participants' judgments were compared with objectively determined values. A parallel on-road experiment, using similar procedures and a subset of the laboratory situations, was used to validate and benchmark the laboratory findings. The study found a general tendency for people to underestimate the time required for a maneuver. This misjudgment is safety-critical, because it may lead to decisions to accept maneuver opportunities that actually afford a smaller margin of error than the driver perceives. Such misestimates were particularly common for judgments of the time to achieve the prevailing traffic speed during turning or merging maneuvers, and for the time until one's vehicle reaches an intersection ahead. For judgments of the time available for a maneuver, people more frequently felt they had less time than they actually did, so would be less likely to attempt a maneuver. However, even for time available judgments, there were meaningful numbers of safety-critical errors. Some situations emerged as particularly meriting consideration for safety countermeasures. These included: (1) approach to signalized intersections; (2) turns onto higher-speed roadways; (3) freeway merges; (4) passing; and (5) headway maintenance. A number of promising countermeasure ideas addressing these issues were developed and recommended for formal evaluation.

When Words Hurt: The Effects of Perceived Intentionality on Interpersonal Relationships

Why is it that some hurtful messages have a greater impact on relationships than others? Theorists suggest that the way people interpret another individual's negative behavior can influence how close or distant they feel from that person, as well as the emotions they experience. The first study reported in this article was conducted to examine how judgments of intent affect individuals' tendency to distance themselves from someone who hurt them and how such judgments impact people's experience of hurt. Results indicated that people who judged something an individual said to them as intentionally hurtful felt the comment had more of a distancing effect on their relationship with the individual than did those who perceived the message as unintentionally hurtful. Furthermore, those who viewed the comment as intentionally hurtful tended to be less satisfied with the relationship they had with the person who hurt them and felt less close to the person than did those who saw it as unintentional. The findings also revealed that people's perceptions of messages they saw as unintentionally hurtful varied in theoretically important ways. To follow-up on the notion that there are qualities of messages viewed as unintentionally hurtful that contribute to relational distancing and hurt feelings, a second study was conducted. Findings indicated that the perception of messages as part of an ongoing pattern of hurtful communication - as relatively frequent and as part of a general tendency to hurt others was associated with relational distancing. Also, people's tendency to feel disregarded by the individual who hurt them was linked with relational distancing and hurt feelings.

Culture and Procedural Fairness: When the Effects of What You Do Depend on How You Do it

Previous research has shown that procedural fairness and outcome favorability interactively combine to influence people's reactions to their social exchanges. The tendency for people to respond more positively when outcomes are more favorable is reduced when procedural fairness (how things happen) is relatively high. This paper evaluates whether cultural differences in people's tendencies to view themselves as interdependent or independent (their self-construal) moderate the interactive relationship between procedural fairness and outcome favorability. In three studies, participants indicated their reactions to an exchange with another party as a function of the other party's procedural fairness and the outcome favorability associated with the exchange. In Study 1, participants' national culture was treated as a proxy for their self-construal. In Study 2, people's national culture and self-construal were assessed. In Study 3, participants were classified on the basis of their self-construals. Converging evidence across studies showed that the interactive relationship between procedural fairness and outcome favorability was more pronounced among participants with more interdependent forms of self-construal.

Assessing Hypochondriasis: Findings on the Survey of Health Concerns

We describe a brief self-report measure for assessing hypochondriacal fears in adults. Called the Survey of Health Concerns (SHC), the measure was developed using DSM IV criteria for diagnosing hypochondriacal disorder as a guide. The measure was standardized on a sample of 188 college students. It was shown to have good internal and temporal reliability over a 2-week period. Moreover, scores on the SHC correlated significantly with worry proneness as measured by the Penn State Worry Questionnaire, and with the Hs scale of the MMPI-2, which together support the convergent validity of the measure. While men and women scored the same, participants who were being treated for a medical condition scored higher than those who were not being treated. Men who were under a doctor's care scored especially high, although this was based on a small sample of men and the effect could be spurious. A principal component factor analysis revealed two primary factors: one that described participants who felt poorly, made frequent trips to the doctor, and were fearful of illness and dying, and another that described participants who were particularly fearful of infectious diseases and took active steps to avoid becoming sick. Relatively little is known about hypochondriacal disorder. One reason for the dearth of knowledge in this area is that there has been no practical and reliable way to assess hypochondriacal fears, or more generally speaking, people's tendency to worry about their health. The SHC may help to fill this void. Results are admittedly preliminary and further study in medical settings is needed.

Self-Orientations in Self and Social Judgment

The proposition that desires, needs, and goals influence people's thoughts, attitudes, and judgments is endemic to many social psychological theories. Researchers have continually struggled, however, to establish these motivational phenomena vis-a-vis alternative information-processing explanations. This struggle is necessitated by the difficulties that motivational theories have introduced throughout psychology's history. Instinct theories in the 1920s, for example, threatened to discourage investigation into other behavioral antecedents. Drive theories in the 1950s complicated functional behavioral laws and were difficult to confirm empirically. In fact, Skinner was able to forge a behavior theory that was arguably more powerful than those of his contemporaries while dispensing completely with motivational terms. Despite these difficulties, most psychologists, Skinnerians notwithstanding, have found the motivation concept indispensable. As the articles in this symposium demonstrate, motivational concepts are ascendant in social psychology. Social psychologists have deployed the motivation concept primarily to explain people's need to forge, maintain, or recoup positive self-concepts. In addition to self-enhancement and self-protection needs (Dunning, this issue), the authors in this symposium discuss the need to maintain favorable views of one's peers (Kunda & Sinclair, this issue) or relationship partners (Murray, this issue). Ultimately, these needs also subserve self-enhancement in that the desire to view close others positively accrues self-benefits. Having convincingly surmounted alternative explanations of motivational phenomena, researchers have begun to address the conditions in which different motives prevail. Sedikides and Strube (1995), for example, considered the circumstances under which four self-related motives-self-enhancement, self-verification, self-assessment, and self-improvement-are most likely to be activated. They assume, for example, that self-assessment needs predominate with highly diagnostic tasks, whereas self-enhancement prevails with ambiguous tasks. Presumably, diagnostic tasks enable accurate assessment of abilities and characteristics, whereas ambiguous tasks provide the latitude to define one's characteristics self-servingly. In addition to coordinating motives with situations, researchers have examined how different motives influence the kinds of information people seek. Taylor, Neter, and Wayment (1995), for example, showed that people seeking self-improvement tend to compare themselves with superior others, whereas those seeking self-enhancement prefer inferior comparison targets. In this article, I outline an expanded view of self-related motives couched in terms of six self-orientations. Self-orientations are evoked by challenges to the self s integrity or opportunities for self-advancement. The self-orientation perspective assumes that internal processes, such as thinking about one's behavior, characteristics, or circumstances, or external events, such as social or task feedback, evoke cognitive and emotional states that favor, but do not dictate, particular motivated strategies. A person who receives unfavorable social feedback, for example, may become sad, angry, or energized, leading to exceptional openness (e.g., self-evaluation or self-improvement motives) or defensiveness (e.g., self-verification or self-enhancement motives) in self-evaluations and social judgments. Whether a person favors relatively biased or unbiased selfand social judgments depends on the strength of the orientation, the type of information that is available to assess self and others, and personality factors. A single person may enter into different self-orientations within a relatively short time frame, and people vary in their chronic tendencies to occupy each self-orientation. The six basic self-orientations are the habitual self, the beleaguered self, the exalted self, the analytic self, the malleable self, and the existential self. The habitual self refers to people's usual selfand social judgment tendencies, whereas the other five orientations represent special self-threats or opportunities. In terms of the self-orientation approach, Kunda and Sinclair's target article in this issue describes circumstances in

Stigma consciousness: the psychological legacy of social stereotypes.

Whereas past researchers have treated targets of stereotypes as though they have uniform reactions to their stereotyped status (e.g., J. Crocker & B. Major, 1989; C. M. Steele & J. Aronson, 1995), it is proposed here that targets differ in the extent to which they expect to be stereotyped by others (i.e., stigma consciousness). Six studies, 5 of which validate the stigma-consciousness questionnaire (SCQ), are presented. The results suggest that the SCQ is a reliable and valid instrument for detecting differences in stigma consciousness. In addition, scores on the SCQ predict perceptions of discrimination and the ability to generate convincing examples of such discrimination. The final study highlights a behavioral consequence of stigma consciousness: the tendency for people high in stigma consciousness to forgo opportunities to invalidate stereotypes about their group. The relation of stigma consciousness to past research on targets of stereotypes is considered as is the issue of how stigma consciousness may encourage continued stereotyping.

“Forgivingness”: Factor Structure in a Sample of Young, Middle-Aged, and Elderly Adults

The effect of various circumstances known to moderate willingness to forgive was studied in a sample of adults whose ages ranged from 18 to 90 years. The factorial structure of these circumstances was shown, as well as the link between age and the different factors. Four factors were extracted: (1) A Revenge Versus Forgiveness factor reflecting a general tendency in people to forgive (or to seek revenge) regardless of circumstances. (2) A Personal and Social Circumstances factor synthesizing the effects of various incentives from the social environment of the person. (3) An Obstacle to Forgiveness factor synthesizing the effects of the circumstance linked to the offense. (4) A Forgiveness Block factor. Age appeared as the strongest determinant of forgivingness.

Continuity and the Persistence of Objects: When the Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

In three experiments, a total of 480 participants heard a version of the story of the ship of Theseus (Hobbes, 1672/1913), in which a novel object, labeled with a possessive noun phrase, underwent a transformation in which its parts were replaced one at a time. Participants then had to decide which of two objects carried the same possessive noun phrase as the original: the one made entirely of new parts (that could be inferred to be continuous with the original) or one reassembled from the original parts (that could not be inferred to be continuous with the original). Participants often selected the object made of new parts, despite the radical transformation. However, the tendency to do so was significantly stronger (1) if the object was described as an animal than if it was described as an artifact, (2) if the animal's transformation lacked a human cause than if it possessed one, and (3) if the selection was made by adults or 7-year-olds than if it was made by 5-year-olds. The findings suggest that knowledge about specific kinds of objects and their canonical transformations exerts an increasingly powerful effect, over the course of development, upon people's tendency to rely on continuity as a criterion for attributing persistence to objects that undergo change.

A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessA History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of ProzacWalter E. Barton, M.D.Walter E. BartonSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Sep 1998https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.49.9.1241AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail This is the right time for this new book, a social history of psychiatry that examines changing attitudes toward mental illness, the contributors to the changes, and the advances in clinical practice. Edward Shorter's history admirably meets these objectives. It is interesting, clear, and lively, and it answers the question "Why did the change occur?" In providing answers, the author is often opinionated and controversial. He is certain to get your attention and to make you think.The author has impressive credentials. He is the Hannah professor of the history of medicine at the University of Toronto. He has written several books on such medical topics as the modern family, bedside manners, women's bodies, and psychosomatic illness.Shorter develops his history of psychiatry in eight chapters. Some of the highlights are outlined here.The birth of psychiatry. Johann Reil coined the word "psychiatry" in 1816. The mad were cared for by their families, and jails took over when the family couldn't handle them. Monasteries and almshouses helped out when there was no family.The asylum era. One reason for the growth in numbers of patients in the asylums, Shorter says, was the admission of those who were already mad but had previously been cared for by families and almshouses. The author also writes about the handling of patients in the asylums, and why the asylum failed.The first biological psychiatry. Research and teaching in psychiatry were dominated by the Germans for 100 years, until 1933. The individuals who left their names on signs and syndromes are discussed. The reader can discover why Kraepelin and not Freud was the dominant historical figure.Nerves. In the second half of the 19th century, nerves, nervousness, and neurasthenia offered an escape from the asylum. Shorter describes how the spa became fashionable for psychiatric conditions, and he discusses the impact of Weir Mitchell's "rest cure."The psychoanalytic hiatus. This chapter covers the roots of Freudian concepts and how psychoanalysis made it possible to wrest treatment of patients from the neurologists. The author believes Freud was a disaster.Alternatives. Discussed here is the evolution of therapy for neurosyphilis, insulin coma therapy, lobotomy, and electroshock. The reader learns why the author thinks "the subject of community psychiatry in the United States was, and remains, a kind of grotesque joke."The second biological psychiatry. This chapter begins with the antecedents, such as early genetic studies, of the second biological psychiatry, which burst forth in the 1970s. By 1995 a gene defect in schizophrenia was tentatively located on chromosome 6. Research on the brain and the discovery of neurotransmitters are discussed. The excitement caused by chlorpromazine and the many drugs that followed is a fascinating account. The chapter also describes the rise of antipsychiatry and ends with the controversy over electroconvulsive therapy.From Freud to Prozac. Shorter notes that the end of the 20th century saw a new tendency for people "to psychologize distress, rather than to medicalize it," which increases the demand for psychologic therapy. Also evident is the extension of the boundary of what constitutes depression. Prozac is the drug that makes people feel better.Also discussed here is the recognition of the need for a reliable classification of diagnoses so what some scientists say means the same to all scientists. The chapter covers early DSM s, John Feighner's criteria published in 1972, DSM-III and DSM-III-R with Robert Spitzer, and the continuing evolution with DSM-IV.Edward Shorter's A History of Psychiatry is recommended reading for all psychiatrists and mental health professionals. The curious will discover the author's perception of the role of drug companies in creating a demand for their product, his view of why asylums were formed and why they failed, and why he thinks psychoanalysis and Freudian concepts were a disaster that slowed the discovery of neuroscience.The book is must reading for all who have an interest in medical history. Shorter tells a most readable story of change and development over 200 years.Dr. Barton is professor of psychiatry emeritus at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire. He is a past-president and former medical director of the American Psychiatric Association.by Edward Shorter; New York City, John Wiley & Sons, 1997, 436 pages, $30 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByUse of a decision support system for benchmarking analysis and organizational improvement of regional mental health care: Efficiency, stability and entropy assessment of the mental health ecosystem of Gipuzkoa (Basque Country, Spain)22 March 2022 | PLOS ONE, Vol. 17, No. 3 Volume 49Issue 9 September 1998Pages 1241-1242 Metrics History Published online 1 September 1998 Published in print 1 September 1998