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The current paper presents a five-factor measurement model of anger summarizing scores on public-domain self-report measures of anger. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of self-report measures of anger (UK

Stigma is detrimental to persons experiencing mental distress, as it impacts on their social inclusion, quality of life, and recovery. In this article, we present the self-presentation strategies employed by persons with psychosis to manage internalized stigma. A study of the life trajectories of persons with psychosis analyzed 27 biographical interviews and identified five types of biographical trajectories. This article focuses on one biographical type, represented by six narratives. Participants placed in this biographical type struggle to portray a socially acceptable self through concealing experiences of distress and distancing the self from the psychiatric label they entail. This was achieved through several strategies, including the normalization of prior life, unwillingness to disclose psychotic experiences, unquestioning compliance with psychiatric medication, and presenting oneself as an ordinary person. Fostering more adaptive coping strategies to reduce internalized stigma may be a potential goal for psychosocial interventions.

Introduction Neurocognitive models of hallucinations posit theories of misattribution and deficits in the monitoring of mental or perceptual phenomena but cannot yet account for the subjective experience of hallucinations across individuals and diagnostic categories. Arts-based research methods (ABRM) have potential for advancing research, as art depicts experiences which cognitive neuropsychiatry seeks to explain. Methods To examine how incorporating ABRM may advance hallucination research and theories, we explore data on the lived experiences of hallucinations in psychiatric and neurological populations. We present a multiple case study of two empirical ABRM studies, which used participant-generated artwork and artist collaborations alongside interviews. Results ABRM combined with interviews illustrated that hallucinations were infused with sensory features, characterised by embodiment, and situated within lived circumstances. These findings advance neurocognitive models of hallucinations by nuancing their multimodal nature, illustrating their embodied feelings, and exploring their content and themes. The process of generating artworks aided in disclosing difficult to discuss hallucinations, promoted participant self-reflection, and clarified multimodal details that may have been misconstrued through interview alone. ABRM were relevant and acceptable for participants and researchers. Conclusion ABRM may contribute to the development of neurocognitive models of hallucinations by making hallucination experiences more visible, tangible, and accessible.

The “Power Threat Meaning Framework” attempts to provide a coherent basis for conceptualizing clinical distress, troubled and troubling behavior in ways that avoid attributing it to unproven and hy...

The Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), published by the British Psychological Society (BPS) in 2018, is an attempt to address the question of how we might understand problems in living other th...

This is a follow up paper to a previous Special Issue (January 2019) of Forum about the Power Threat Meaning Framework. It offers a viewpoint from two contributors about some of the Framework’s roots in pre-Socratic philosophy.

Background Research and practice typically focus upon unimodal hallucinations, especially auditory verbal hallucinations. Contemporary research has however indicated that voice-hearing may co-occur within a broader milieu of feelings, and multimodal hallucinations may be more common than previously thought. Methods An observational design asked participants to prospectively document the feeling and modality of hallucinations for one week prior to an interview. Novel visual diary methods involving drawing, writing and body-mapping generated 42 MUSE maps (multimodal unusual sensory experience), analysed with a participatory qualitative method. Twelve people took part: all experiencing hallucinations daily, accessing early intervention in psychosis services, given psychotic-spectrum diagnoses, and living in the community. The study took place during a seven-month period in 2018 at Leicestershire and Rutland's Psychosis Intervention and Early Recovery service (UK). Findings All documented hallucinations co-occurred with bodily feelings. Feelings were localised to specific body areas, generalised across the body and extended beyond the body into peripersonal space. Co-occurring emotional feelings most commonly related to confusion, fear and frustration. Interpretation Hallucinations were characterised by numerous feelings arising at once, often including multimodal, emotional, and embodied features. Within this study, the immediate feeling of hallucination experiences were readily communicated through prospective, visual, and ecological information gathering methods and particularly those which offer multiple modes of communication (e.g. body-map, visual, written, oral). Uptake of visual, ecological and prospective methods may enhance understandings of lived experiences of hallucinations. Funding: University of Leicester.

We introduce this special issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology by discussing four themes which, in our view, characterise the collective significance of the papers in this special issue. Even in highlighting these thematic similarities, however, we point to important differences in their manifestation across different papers. In discussing bodies, we highlight an underexplored distinction between the body as ground of experience and the body as the enabler of experience. We also draw attention to three issues relating to (linguistic) representations of feelings, emotions and affect: the problem of ineffability; the role of naming feeling; and how to methodologically and analytically account for differences in the ways that feelings are talked about and named. Regarding situatedness in space and time, we note at least four analytical positions, which frame and reveal different aspects of affective phenomena. Finally, with respect to affective practices we identify two quite different approaches that, whilst sharing some characteristics, are different enough to warrant further specification when researchers deploy this term. Whilst welcoming the apparent trend away from purely language-based methods, we also offer some suggestions for how researchers can move further down this path. Nonetheless qualitative research on feeling, affect and emotion is in fine fettle. As the contributions attest, the time is ripe for this special issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology.

This chapter investigates the changing patterns of clinical Misery (depression, anxiety disorders), through patterns of Antidepressants and Anxiolytics (AD) prescribing rates (prescriptions per person). Misery measured in this way, has increased >40% nationally with greater increases in some areas. Rates were linked to individual deprivation domain scores (housing, crime, employment, etc), which in 2010 were evenly associated with AD prescribing rates. The impacts of austerity policies are evident in the increases in the association of Barriers to Housing and Services and Health, Deprivation and Disability deprivation scores with AD prescribing rates since 2015, and with Employment in 2019. The discussion describes a detailed research agenda for examining Misery, noting the need to shift narratives away from flimsy concepts of Well-being, and number of key rubrics for big data analysis are outlined. In these, the importance of data folding, investigation and visualizations are emphasized - 10km hexbins were used here to summarise annual prescribing rates. These form a key sequence in big data analysis of View -> Identify -> Refine -> Zoom.

In order to mark the significance of John Shotter’s life and work, this paper sets out and reflects upon two of his central concepts and emphasises their ongoing relevance. Shotter’s work is first situated in its intellectual and cultural-historical contexts. His linked concepts of ‘joint action’ and ‘knowing of the third kind’ are then briefly explained, and their relevance for recent social science developments including the ‘new materialism’ and the ‘affective turn’ is highlighted. We conclude that, in these turbulent times, Shotter’s is a legacy of hopeful aspiration.

Neuroscience and schizophrenia are densely entangled and mutually supporting, such that a critical evaluation of schizophrenia is, effectively, an evaluation of applied aspects of contemporary neuroscience. A critical historical account of the development of schizophrenia is therefore followed by an overview of current issues and debates. A summary of possible future research directions then identifies a range of extant research strategies which already undercut or exceed this diagnosis. It is concluded that the example of schizophrenia functions more generally to illustrate how neuroscience need not rely upon poorly supported psychiatric concepts of mental illness.

Background: Epigenetic research in mental health has grown exponentially during the last decade and holds what some claim are “revolutionary” potentials for the development of new interdisciplinary models of mental ill health. Schizophrenia is the most appropriate diagnosis against which to assess progress in this regard.\ud Method: Papers on epigenetics and schizophrenia identified in a systematic literature search are subject to a conceptually-driven narrative review that assesses the relations between schizophrenia and epigenetics; considers some issues associated with empirical studies; and thereby identifies key assumptions guiding this research.\ud Findings: The revolutionary potentials of epigenetics are thus far not being realised due to various influences, including a preponderance of hypotheses that begin from a primarily biological question; the “condensation” of environmental influences and their effective reduction to their molecular consequences; and a frequent reliance upon animal studies that effectively preclude some important influences already established as relevant to this diagnosis.\ud Conclusion: Epigenetic research in schizophrenia (and mental health generally) could benefit from being more thoroughly interdisciplinary, from testing hypotheses that foreground social as well as biological influences, and from reconsidering its reliance upon psychiatric diagnoses.

In recent years, the “affective turn” has permeated the arts, humanities, social sciences, and psychology, but like any influential academic movement, has not escaped critique. We outline and agree in general terms with a critique by Leys which emphasises the influence of the basic emotion paradigm; the dualisms that accompany its deployment; and concerns regarding intentionality and meaning. We then propose an alternate approach to affect and feeling, derived from the philosophies of Whitehead and Langer; demonstrate how this avoids the endorsement of cognitivism to which Leys, critique succumbs; illustrate the strengths of this approach with respect to analyses of former U.S. President Reagan; and highlight two strengths of affect theory which are compatible with it. We conclude that our approach closes the intentionality gap that Leys identifies whilst retaining a fruitful emphasis upon the affective realm.

Epigenetics has considerable potential to transform social science by embedding mutually regulative reciprocal connections between biological and social processes within the human activities it stu...

For many decades, the study of society and the study of biology have been estranged from one another. This Handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of the extent to which, and how quickly, we are moving beyond the charged debates that characterized much of the biological and social thought of the twentieth century. In this Handbook we show how nuanced attention to both the biological and the social sciences opens up novel perspectives on some of the most significant sociological, anthropological, philosophical, and biological questions of our era. Our central assertion is that the life sciences, broadly conceived, are currently moving toward a more social view of biological processes, just as the social sciences are beginning to reincorporate notions of the biological body into their investigations.

his comprehensive handbook synthesizes the often-fractured relationship between the study of biology and the study of society. Bringing together a compelling array of interdisciplinary contributions, the authors demonstrate how nuanced attention to both the biological and social sciences opens up novel perspectives upon some of the most significant sociological, anthropological, philosophical and biological questions of our era. The six sections cover topics ranging from genomics and epigenetics, to neuroscience and psychology to social epidemiology and medicine. The authors collaboratively present state-of-the-art research and perspectives in some of the most intriguing areas of what can be called biosocial and biocultural approaches, demonstrating how quickly we are moving beyond the acrimonious debates that characterized the border between biology and society for most of the twentieth century.This landmark volume will be an extremely valuable resource for scholars and practitioners in all areas of the social and biological sciences.

Since Judith Butler (1993), it has become somewhat cliched to say that bodies matter. As this edited volume nevertheless shows, in a moment when President Trump’s “promise to ‘Make America Great Ag...

A short report is provided of a meta–study of methodological pluralism in qualitative research; that is, of the use of two or more qualitative methods to analyse the same data set. Ten eligible papers were identified and assessed. Their contents are described with respect to theory, methods and findings, and their possible implications discussed in relation to a series of wider debates in qualitative research more generally.

The current age of ‘austerity’ is associated with neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism can be understood as a form of governmentality – a way of reconfiguring selves and the social order in accord with the demands of market economies. A recent UK policy initiative by the Coalition government’s Behavioural Insights Team required benefit claimants to submit to online psychometric testing. We examine this policy in some detail, arguing that this use of psychometric testing is flawed, unethical, and unlikely to help claimants to find work. Our analysis of the test procedure and its results suggests that the policy functions primarily as a means whereby benefit claimants can be ‘nudged’ towards acceptance of the precepts of neoliberal subjectivities.

Measuring and mapping happiness has become a popular and potentially market-shaping activity, and a core governmental concern. In this chapter, we explore whether the “happiness industry” can be rightly considered as a neoliberal phenomenon. We examine happiness and well-being through the analytic of assemblage in order to focus attention on alternative and place-based approaches to happiness, which signify an alternative to dominant neoliberal framings. We compare the research approaches provided through geo-informatic analyses of urban psychophysiology, community activism associated with participatory happy cities initiatives and critical psychologists and geographers who focus in particular on interpretive accounts of emotional subjectivity. The idea of a “critical social psychological geography” is put forward as a way to provide new understandings of the political significance of happiness measurement and mapping.

Joint Action: Essays in honour of John Shotter brings together a cross-disciplinary group of fifteen respected international scholars to explain the relevance of John Shotter’s work to emerging concerns in twenty-first century social science.Shotter’s work extends over forty years and continues to challenge conventional scientific thinking across a range of topics. The disciplines and practices that Shotter’s work has informed are well established throughout the English-speaking world. This is the first publication to examine the importance of his influence in contemporary social sciences and it includes authoritative discussions on topics such as social constructionism, democratic practice, organisational change, the affective turn and human relations. The geographical diversity and disciplinary breadth of scholarly contributions imbues the book with international scope and reach.Joint Action presents a contemporary reflection on Shotter’s work that demonstrates its influence across a range of substantive topics and practical endeavours and within disciplines including management studies and philosophy as well as psychology. As such, it will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students of social sciences and related disciplines, as well as to those who have heard of Shotter’s work and want to know more about its utility and value in relation to their own research or practice.

For some time, conceptual unity in psychology has been seen as both a scientific “holy grail” and a feared hegemonic project—see, for example Observer (1982), Kantor (1984), and Dixon (1983). This may be because a focus on integration, perhaps paradoxically, may intensify various tensions within a psychology whose sub-disciplinary constitution actually reflects fault lines and dualisms in the organization of knowledge more generally. In recent years, we have seen new areas of theory and methods, including enactivism, embodied cognition, discursive psychology, second-person neuroscience, developmental systems theories, and a stunning growth in the neurosciences, genetics, and epigenetics. Our contributors explore whether such advances have helped synthesize the diverse understandings of mind within psychology. In so doing they frequently emphasize the unifying prospects of dynamic, adaptive, action-orientated, “socialized,” systems-based, and embodied approaches, and are correspondingly critical of reductionist, mechanistic approaches. The articles are of two kinds. The first deals directly with the integration of the sciences of mind and cognition as a broad project (Marshall; Stam; Andringa et al.). The second focuses on prospects for synthesis within specific contexts of theory, method, and practice, including reciprocity (Berra) psychiatric theory, and diagnosis (Castiglioni and Laudisa; Di Francesco and Marraffa) methods for investigating consciousness (Olivares et al.); theories of vision (Laurent) and argumentation (Lillo-Unglaube et al.). Marshall's proposal concerns relationships between “levels” in psychological understanding, arguing that combining an embodied approach with a developmental systems account, within a relational worldview, overcomes the conceptual “splitting off” of mind from brain and body. He highlights the vital role that “pattern explanation” (akin to Aristotle's formal cause) has in a relational developmental systems approach, because it allows increased conceptual clarity over the relations between a system's organization and its activity and thus avoids reductionism. With a similar focus on the integration of levels of explanation, Di Francesco and Marraffa consider the relationship between consciousness (personal level) and the unconscious (sub-personal level). They argue that, contra an eliminativist perspective, some personal level concepts such as “motivation” and “attachment” can, in dialectical relationship with neuroscientific findings, provide a useful indication of how personal and sub-personal levels of explanation can operate together. Relatedly, Castiglioni and Laudisa reject what they see as the reductionist, biological underpinnings of the DSM-5 approach to psychiatric diagnosis. Their article speaks to a context where consistent evidence for the biological deficits purportedly associated with the functional psychiatric diagnoses remains elusive, and where major funders such as NIMH no longer rely upon these diagnoses. Focusing on the DSM categorization of depressive disorders and the removal of the “bereavement exclusion clause”—and thus the continuing conflation of “endogenous” and “reactive” categories of depression—they show that reducing experiences of distress to quasi-medical symptoms actually undermines theoretical and clinical accuracy. Digging further into neurological findings, Laurent proposes a new “Multiscale Enaction Model” of visual perception that challenges a hard-wired, modular account. He suggests that converging data indicate a need to acknowledge the multiple systems at various scales that interconnect to create visual experience. With a similar focus on the relations between neurological findings and phenomenological experience, Olivares et al. examine the potential for “second-person methods” (through interviews) to fulfill the promise of a unified neurophenomenology. They argue that such methods provide more systematic data than do direct first-person methods (e.g., introspection in both its strong and weak forms) and can help bridge experiential and neurological descriptions of conscious experience. Berra addresses the important phenomena of altruism and reciprocity in primate social groups. The aggregation of individuals into socially-bonded and cooperative groups, she argues, is best explained by emotional tracking of interactions—rather than the more cognitively “expensive” bookkeeping of expectations of rewards suggested in other theories. Her parsimonious approach facilitates consistent explanations of social reciprocity throughout primate groups that exhibit various levels of cognitive capacity. It also suggests a theoretical synthesis of emotional processes with the requirements of complex and dynamic adaptive social behavior. For humans, cooperation also often involves debates and the making of arguments. As discursive psychology demonstrates, these psychological processes are simultaneously fundamental to political, legal, scientific, and educational discourse. The potential synthesis of normative (“classical”) and cognitive approaches to understanding human argumentation is investigated by Lillo-Unglaube et al. They examine two argumentative fallacies (the “slippery slope” argument, and the ad hominem argument), and conclude that descriptive and experimental studies could potentially integrate normative and cognitive research traditions to produce an integrated body of theory on the psychology of argumentation. In their ambitious contribution, Andringa et al. provocatively suggest that all cognition derives from two general modes that are based on common tendencies in all life forms: the coping mode, and the co-creation mode. The first is structured around the goal of meeting immediate needs while the second operates to construct environments within which pressing needs are less likely to arise. The selection concludes with Stam's insightful argument over the very idea of conceptual synthesis in the sciences of mind. He proposes that psychology is in fact already relatively unified methodologically, through the adoption of an “indeterminate functionalism.” He then argues that the neurosciences, while not acting to synthesize psychology, will nevertheless, influence our understanding of being human—perhaps by coming to see the brain as a technology that we use, but do not fully understand. What, then, are the prospects for this “Modern Synthesis,” and how should we best “go on?” Unsurprisingly, these papers provide no unequivocal answer to these questions. What does emerge, however, is that posing them raises many challenges—across theory, method, and practice, and at a range of scales. It is also clear that raising the issue of conceptual synthesis reveals significant bumps and hollows in our understanding of mind, and inspires innovative responses to those challenges.

Psychology, including health psychology, frequently invokes the concept of belief but almost never defines it. Drawing upon scholarship associated with the ‘affective turn’, this article argues that belief might usefully be understood as a structure of socialized feeling, contingently allied to discursive practices and positions. This conceptualization is explained, and its implications for health psychology discussed with respect to research on religiosity and spirituality and debates about the value of social cognition models such as the theory of planned behaviour.

A set of commentaries on Cromby (2012) are considered with respect to three themes: the relations between feeling and thinking, between theory and empirical research, and between health beliefs and beliefs in religion/spirituality. Clarifications of key issues are suggested, and the difference between health and other beliefs is briefly illustrated with reference to beliefs associated with smoking tobacco.

Evidence generated within the emotional disclosure paradigm (EDP) suggests that talking or writing about emotional experiences produces health benefits, but recent meta-analyses have questioned its efficacy. Studies within the EDP typically rely upon a unidimensional and relatively unsophisticated notion of emotional inhibition, and tend to use quantitative forms of content analysis to identify associations between percentages of word types and positive or negative health outcomes. In this article, we use a case study to show how a qualitative discourse analysis has the potential to identify more of the complexity linking the disclosure practices and styles that may be associated with emotional inhibition. This may illuminate the apparent lack of evidence for efficacy of the EDP by enabling more comprehensive theorisations of the variations within it.

Qualitative clinical research is valued because of its ability to engage with meaning and experience. The affective, “feelingful” aspects of meaning and experience are important in clinical work and are at the core of the emergent “affective turn” in social science, but their investigation using language-based qualitative methods is troubled by issues of ineffability, interpretation and the contingent relations between talk and experience. Qualitative research using visual methods, physiological measures and mixed with quantitative research may begin to address these problems.

Both in the UK and internationally, governments are setting out to measure well-being, life satisfaction and happiness. Whilst this might seem to offer opportunities for psychology, their chosen method – self-report questionnaires – is problematic. Happiness questionnaires are troubled by problems of definition, introspection, memory and insight; their population-level summation is grossly inaccurate as a representation of everyday emotional experience; and both their reliability and their validity might be better accounted for as products of their ability to model, rather than to measure, psychological processes. Psychology therefore runs the risk of discrediting itself if it becomes too closely associated with these initiatives.

In this paper, we explore some of the tensions involved in the process of engaging with embodiment research. Although a significant volume of discursive work on “the body” and its role in social relations now exists, there is little in the way of empirical research that moves the focus away from discourse alone to concentrate on other modalities, such as embodied feelings, sensations, and engagements with the world. We begin by briefly reviewing the turn to embodiment across the social sciences and the manner in which this has been taken up in psychology. We then outline our attempts as a research collective to develop methodologies and research activities that can produce meaningful data on embodied experience. The outcomes of one of these tasks are then described in detail, along with reflections on the difficulties and limitations that emerged. Finally, we attempt to conceptualize the challenge of researching embodiment by returning to the late 19th century psychology of John Dewey, which, we argue, neatly summarizes some of the problems to be addressed by any researchers engaged in the “turn to the body.”

The ‘affective turn’ is a contemporary movement within the humanities, social science, and psychology to investigate affect, emotion, and feeling as hybrid phenomena jointly constituted from both biological and social influences. Health and illness are themselves jointly constituted in this way, and many of the topics, concerns, and methods of health psychology are strongly permeated by affective phenomena. Qualitative research in health psychology might therefore benefit by engaging with this work. This paper describes some features of the affective turn and suggests theories, terminology, and methods that might be useful.

Research into emotion, crime and anti-social behaviour has lacked psychological input and rarely considered the multi-directional associations between emotion, crime and morality. We present a study analysing audio recordings of two community groups meeting in a deprived inner-city area with high rates of crime, using conversation analytic and discursive psychological techniques to conduct an affective–textual analysis that draws out aspects of participants’ moral reasoning 10 and identifies its emotional dimensions. Moral reasoning around crime and anti-social behaviour took three forms (invoking moral categories, developing moral hierarchies, invoking vulnerable others) and was bound up with a wide range of emotional enactments and emotion displays. Findings are discussed in relation to contemporary government policy and possible future research.

Although social science work on the body has demonstrated its thorough socialisation, social psychology has barely recognised the mutual interdependence of the physical body and the social world. Accordingly, we propose that social psychology might be enriched and extended by detailed investigation of changes in the activity of the empirical body alongside processes of meaning-making during social interaction. We illustrate our proposal with a case study of changes in blood pressure during conversation, explored in conjunction with analyses using four discursive frames: gaining voice, identity negotiation, joint action ⁄knowing of the third kind and positioning theory. We argue that this approach challenges the artificial separation of social psychology from other sub-disciplines, might inform social psychological analyses of emotion and belief and allows it to address substantive topics, such as psychopathology, which it typically largely excludes.

The emotional disclosure paradigm (EDP) associates better health with repeated disclosure of emotional experiences. However, disclosure does not bring health benefits for all, and neither does the EDP adequately specify embodied mechanisms or neural pathways whereby benefits might be produced. This paper addresses these issues by offering more sophisticated notions of emotional inhibition and cognitive reappraisal. It then outlines aspects of the somatic marker hypothesis which supports a more comprehensive conceptualization of the processes that may enable both the positive and negative health effects of disclosure.

Both psychology and psychiatry are dominated by individualistic accounts of paranoia (and, indeed, other forms of distress). As a corrective to these, this paper provides a social account of paranoia grounded in a minimal notion of embodied subjectivity constituted from the interpenetration of feelings, perception and discourse. Paranoia is conceptualized as a mode or tendency within embodied subjectivity, co-constituted in the dialectical associations between subjectivity and relational, social and material influences. Relevant psychiatric and psychological literature is briefly reviewed; relational, social structural and material influences upon paranoia are described; and some implications of this account for research and intervention are highlighted.