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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

Durkheim’

Islamification: Europe’s Challenge #2

PART 2 Preparing for change British Home Secretary Theresa May was vilified by much of the media for her 6 October speech at the Conservative Party conference for saying (amongst other things):  “… when immigration is too high, when the pace of change is too fast, it’s impossible to build a cohesive society.” (The Guardian’s Alan Travis called it a “new low in politics of migration”.) However, May was merely echoing the Functionalist argument of Talcott Parsons (1966) that sudden large-scale change disrupts the equilibrium of society and leads to dysfunction. Parsons postulates that social change is necessary for a society to renew and refresh itself but at a gradual pace which the institutions of society can adjust to and cope with. The disruption of equilibrium brought on by significant sudden large-scale change can bring about conflict. Over the past half-century Western Europe has been flooded with migrants. Their cultures were initially marginalised and disregarded – and then, through Multiculturalism, given nominal equal status with the host majority and a degree of positive discrimination to help foster that equality. A half-century is a relatively short amount of time to assimilate such large-scale changes. In retrospect, it’s surprising that there hasn’t been more overt conflict… Read More

Mental Health

These pages consider the concepts of mental health and mental illness and how they are classified from an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective. 2 specific mental health issues, Depression and stress, are dealt with in more detail. Those who support the Integrated approach and are interested in such matters are invited to submit pieces for publication here as ‘guest features’ or ‘guest reports’. Please get in touch with your ideas via the Contact page. What is Mental Illness?       14/12/20 Pages considering approaches to defining mental illness and some of the issues concerning the applicability of these approaches On Being Sane in Insane Places David Rosenhan’s classic 1973 study of pseudopatients gaining access to psychiatric wards and describing the conditions they experienced Suicide? Piece exploring the nature and causes of suicide, based in large part on Émile Durkheim’s classic study Depression Diagnosis of Depression Page outlining diagostic criteria for Clinical Depression and making the case for treatment Can vMEMES cause Clinical Depression…? Detailed discussion of the symptoms and causes of Major Depression, with a particular emphasis on the functioning of vMEMES and how that functioning can be related to mood  Stress What is Stress?    An exploration of the nature of stress from both cognitive and… Read More

Social Change

Updated: 25 August 2020   Social change means some aspect of society, culture or sub-culture changes. The changes may be overt and dramatic and obvious to everyone or they may be more discreet and less obvious…until people come to a realisation society around them has already changed. An example of this is the attitude of the general public in the UK towards welfare and benefits. As Elizabeth Clery shows in the results of the 2012 British Social Attitudes survey (BSA)– see graphic left – there has been an increased perception that people on welfare are over-reliant on their benefits and that cutting benefits won’t harm too many people too badly. The following 2 years’ surveys  showed only the most marginal reversal (3%) of this trend (Sarah Alcock, 2015) and the election in 2015  of a Tory government determined to cut even more could be seen as voter approval of these strategies. This was actually a major attitudinal shift in a country that, for many years, had largely prided itself on a generous attitude to welfare. Yet these more subtle changes in public perception often only become news when surveys like the British Social Attitudes annual survey pick them up. How complex… Read More

Suicide?

Updated: 20 July 2013 Early in 2013 The Guardian’s James Meikle, based upon data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), reported that 6,045 suicides were recorded in the UK among people aged 15 and over during 2011. This figure represented a significant rise that, unfortunately, was part of an upward trend. (In 2001, Kevin Brewer noted that suicides in the UK were about 4,000 per year.) The suicide rate was 11.8 deaths per 100,000 people, the highest since 2004. In England, the suicide rate was 10.4 deaths per 100,000; highest in the north-east, at 12.9, and lowest in London, at 8.9. In Wales, the suicide rate was 13.9, up from 10.7 in 2009. Meikle acknowledged that suicide rates were slightly lower in Northern Ireland  – ie: 289 suicides in 2011, down from 313 in 2010 – and Scotland, though clearly still concerning. The ONS figures reveal an effect of age and gender:- The male suicide rate in 2011 was the highest since 2002, and among 45-59-year-old men the highest since 1986. For men, the suicide rate was 18.2 per 100,000 population. The rate was highest among males aged 30-44, at 23.5 per 100,000. Among 45-59-year-old men the figure was 22.2… Read More

What makes People vote Republican?

by Jonathan Haidt September 2008 annotated by Bruce L Gibb, September 2008 [Reference update: April 2009] Jonathan Haidt is associate professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and author of ‘The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom’ (2005) . He wrote this piece for www.edge.org. Bruce L Gibb is an organisational psychologist in private practice in Ann Arbor and an adjunct professor in the School of Natural Resources & the Environment at the University of Michigan. He is also a frequent contributor to the Spiral Dynamics e-lists. While a commentary on the current American presidential election is clearly highly topical and would normally be more appropriate for the Blog, what gives this piece a more permanent currency is Bruce’s Spiral Dynamics-based annotation. Haidt’s article read together with Gibb’s footnotes provides an excellent and more generalised explanation for the points I raised in the September 2008 Blog: Should the Democrats have chosen Hilary? Jonathan has kindly given explicit written permission for his work to be used in this way. What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies?… Read More

Bibliography D

A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H    I    J    K    L    M    N    O    P-Q    R    S     T     U    V    W    X-Y-Z d’Ancona, Matthew (2018): ‘Enoch Powell is gone, but his Hateful Tricks are still with Us’ in The Guardian (16 April) Dabbs, James, Timothy Carr, Robert Frady & Jasmin Riad (1995): ‘Testosterone, Crime and Misbehaviour among 692 Male Prison Inmates’ in Personality & Individual Differences #18 Dabbs, James, F J Bernieri, R K Strong, Rebecca Campo & R Milun (2001): ‘Going on Stage: Testosterone in Greetings and Meetings’ in Journal of Research in Personality 35/1 Dabbs, James, Robert Frady, Timothy Carr & Norma Besch (1987): ‘Saliva Testosterone and Criminal Violence in Young Adult Prison Inmates’ in Psychosomatic Medicine #49 Dabbs, James, & Marian Hargrove (1997): ‘Age, Testosterone and Behaviour among Female Prison Inmates’ in Psychosomatic Medicine 59/5 Dabbs, James, Gregory Jurkovic & Robert Frady (1991): ‘Salivary Testosterone and Cotisol among Late Adolescent Male Offenders’ in Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology #19 Daily Mail Reporter (2008): ‘Youngsters “Turning to Gangs instead of Parents”’ in Daily Mail (7 August) Daily Telegraph (2014): ‘MH17: Dutch PM urges Ukraine to stop fighting near Crash Site’ (29 July) Daily Telegraph (2017): ‘More than… Read More

Crime & Deviance – the Difference

12 June 2020 Crime can be defined as the form of deviance that involves an infraction of the criminal law and is subject to official punishment. Not all laws are criminal – civil law and constitutional law are 2 other key areas of the law. Not all illegal acts are necessarily deviant – eg: in the UK it is illegal to use your mobile phone (without it being handsfree) while driving but the sheer number of people who do so suggests that they do not see that behaviour as deviant. Sociologists have suggested 2 distinct definitions of deviance: normative and relativistic. Deviance: the Normative Definition This definition can be summed up as ‘the violation of social norms’. Thus, deviance is culturally determined. Deviance is often thought of in terms of deviation from accepted social standards – eg: certain kinds of sexual behaviour or drug use. However, people who are mentally ill are often treated as deviants. (See What is Mental Illness? ) Even harmless eccentrics may be considered deviant – or, according to Erich Goode (2008), people who have been heavily tattooed or pierced. In some cultures, deviation from a strict political and/or religious orthodoxy is considered deviant and may invoke penalties under… Read More

Functionalism

Updated: 18 May 2017 Functionalism is a Structuralist theory – hence it is sometimes known as Structural Functionalism. It is a ‘top-down’ theory that focuses on society rather than the individuals within it. As such, it is a powerful concept for exploring the Lower Right in 4Q/8L and how it influences and is influenced by the Lower Left – structuration, in Anthony Giddens’ (1984) terms. In Functionalism society is the focus because the individual is produced by society – ‘social products’, as George Herbert Mead (1913) termed them. People are the product of all the social influences on them: their family, friends, educational and religious background, their experiences at work, in leisure, and their exposure to the media. All of these influences make them who and what they are and how they perceive themselves: the confluence of schemas in their selfplexes. In this view, people are born into society, play their role in it – like cogs on a wheel – and then die. However, the deaths of individuals do not mean the end of society. Society continues long after they are gone. According to Émile Durkheim (1893), beliefs and moral codes are passed on (memetically) from one generation to the next.… Read More

4Q/8L

Updated: 16 May 2017 It was in 1996 that Ken Wilber, arguably America’s leading contemporary philosopher, first made public his notion of All Quadrants/All Levels (AQ/AL). It was a heroic attempt to create a grand overarching theory of human experience, motivation and interaction, based on the intersection of two key dimensions: Tangible-Intangible (or Objective-Subjective) and Individual vs Collective. This created quadrants of :- Upper Right – Exterior Individual: can be read as the individual’s own observed behaviour (considered objectively) but is used more often to describe the physical development of the individual’s brain and nervous systems Upper Left – Interior Individual: the individual’s subjective consciousness – which can go from pre-cognitive sensory awareness through the development of cognition and motivation and can include the transpersonal (spirit) Lower Right – Exterior Collective: considers the structures and systems in which people live and operate, from the family to the planet Lower Left – Interior Collective: represents the cultural values, meanings, worldviews and ethics shared by the members of any form of collective grouping. All ‘lines’ – eg: social, cognitive, emotional, spiritual, etc – and levels or stages of development in whatever domain can, in Wilber’s paradigm – be run through at least one… Read More