A Descriptive Diagnosis or a Causal Explanation? Accuracy of Depictions of Depression on Authoritative Health Organization Websites.

INTRODUCTION: Psychiatric diagnoses are descriptive in nature, but the lay public commonly misconceives them as causal explanations. It is not known whether this logical error, a form of circular reasoning, can sometimes be mistakenly reinforced by health authorities themselves. In this study, we investigated the prevalence of misleading causal descriptions of depression in the information provided by authoritative mental health organizations on widely accessed internet sites. METHODS: We searched for popular websites managed by leading mental health organizations and conducted a content analysis to evaluate whether they presented depression accurately as a description of symptoms, or inaccurately as a causal explanation. RESULTS: Most websites used language that inaccurately described depression as a causal explanation to depressive symptoms. CONCLUSION: Leading professional medical and psychiatric organizations commonly confound depression, a descriptive diagnostic label, with a causal explanation on their most prominently accessed informational websites. We argue that the scientifically inaccurate causal language in depictions of psychiatric diagnoses is potentially harmful because it leads the public to misunderstand the nature of mental health problems. Mental health authorities providing psychoeducation should clearly state that psychiatric diagnoses are purely descriptive to avoid misleading the public.

[Addressing the issue of seclusion and restraint in psychiatry]. / Envisager la question de l'isolement et de la contention en psychiatrie.

In an ever-changing environment, the question of the meaning of care within a caring, ethical framework is of paramount importance. The development of a patient-centred approach relies on an understanding of the Other. Caring and empathy are the essential foundations of this approach. An attempt to analyze practices through a few notions of ethics can be proposed.

Psychiatric comorbidity: a concept in need of a theory.

Despite being a relatively new concept, psychiatric comorbidity, i.e. the co-occurrence of two or more mental disorders, has become widespread in clinical practice and psychiatric research. In this article, we trace the origin of the concept of psychiatric comorbidity, discuss the conceptual literature and point to basic problems concerning inadequate definition of the concept, differential diagnostic issues, and reification of mental disorders. We illustrate how these problems may have consequences for diagnostic assessment in current clinical practice and psychiatric research. To address some of the problems related to psychiatric comorbidity, we discuss potential principles for assessing psychiatric comorbidity. Inspired by Feinstein's original concept of comorbidity in general medicine and his differential diagnostic principles, we emphasize the importance of independence of mental disorders when assessing psychiatric comorbidity. We suggest that knowledge of trait v. state conditions and of the multitudinous clinical manifestations beyond what is captured in the diagnostic manuals may be helpful for assessing the independence of mental disorders and thus psychiatric comorbidity. We further argue that a more hierarchical diagnostic system and explicit exclusionary rules could improve clinical practice and research by reducing informational complexity and combating unwarranted psychiatric comorbidity.

The Reification of Non-Human Animals.

This paper takes up Axel Honneth's suggestion that we, in the 21st century Western world, should revisit the Marxian idea of reification; unlike Honneth, however, this paper applies reification to the ways in which humans relate to non-human animals, particularly in the context of scientific experiments. Thinking about these practices through the lens of reification, the paper argues, yields a more helpful understanding of what is regarded as problematic in those practices than the standard animal rights approaches. The second part of the paper offers ways of overcoming reification that go beyond Honneth's idea of recognition by introducing Iris Murdoch's idea of attention. This proposed strategy makes the ethical relevance of reification more salient and makes it possible to counter reification through a practice such as attention which, unlike recognition, can be consciously established.

Complete tooth loss as status passage.

The aim of this article is to add to the literature on the sociology of oral health and dentistry by presenting the relevance of status passage to the study of complete tooth loss. The article reports on an analysis of data taken from participants residing in the Nelson region of New Zealand. In total the data include interviews from 20 participants, all of whom had their remaining natural teeth removed before 1960. In total, 12 women and eight men were interviewed. All were from a European background with an age range of 71 to 101 years. Following a narrative approach, participants were interviewed on the nature of the social factors that resulted in complete tooth loss by starting with their family history and then focusing on the factors and events leading up to their total tooth loss. Data were analysed using the methods and techniques of grounded theory. This article provides an outline of the importance of scheduling, prescribing, social factors, 'compound awareness contexts' and reversibility to the status passage into complete tooth loss. We conclude by arguing that the theory of status passage may enable a detailed analysis of the 'time-space extensionality' of trajectories into complete tooth loss.

Mixed Methods Research: The "Thing-ness" Problem.

Contemporary mixed methods research (MMR) veers away from a "loosely bounded" to a "bounded" concept that has important negative implications for how qualitatively driven mixed methods approaches are positioned in the field of mixed methods and overall innovation in the praxis of MMR. I deploy the concept of reification defined as taking an object/abstraction and treating it as if it were real such that it takes on the quality of "thing-ness," having a concrete independent existence. I argue that the contemporary reification of mixed methods as a "thing" is fueled by three interrelated factors: (a) the growing formalization of mixed methods as design, (b) the unexamined belief in the "synergy" of mixed methods and, (c) the deployment of a "practical pragmatism" as the "philosophical partner" for mixed methods inquiry.

A post-genomic surprise. The molecular reinscription of race in science, law and medicine.

The completion of the first draft of the Human Genome Map in 2000 was widely heralded as the promise and future of genetics-based medicines and therapies - so much so that pundits began referring to the new century as 'The Century of Genetics'. Moreover, definitive assertions about the overwhelming similarities of all humans' DNA (99.9 per cent) by the leaders of the Human Genome Project were trumpeted as the end of racial thinking about racial taxonomies of human genetic differences. But the first decade of the new century brought unwelcomed surprises. First, gene therapies turned out to be far more complicated than any had anticipated - and instead the pharmaceutical industry turned to a focus on drugs that might be 'related' to population differences based upon genetic markers. While the language of 'personalized medicine' dominated this frame, research on racially and ethnically designated populations differential responsiveness to drugs dominated the empirical work in the field. Ancestry testing and 'admixture research' would play an important role in a new kind of molecular reification of racial categories. Moreover, the capacity of the super-computer to map differences reverberated into personal identification that would affect both the criminal justice system and forensic science, and generate new levels of concern about personal privacy. Social scientists in general, and sociologists in particular, have been caught short by these developments - relying mainly on assertions that racial categories are socially constructed, regionally and historically contingent, and politically arbitrary. While these assertions are true, the imprimatur of scientific legitimacy has shifted the burden, since now 'admixture research' can claim that its results get at the 'reality' of human differentiation, not the admittedly flawed social constructions of racial categories. Yet what was missing from this framing of the problem: 'admixture research' is itself based upon socially constructed categories of race.

Opportunity abandonment: Why are entrepreneurs vulnerable to type I and II errors?

Opportunity actualization is a critical competency attributed to entrepreneurs, which has received widespread attention in the entrepreneurship literature. However, the knowledge of Entrepreneurial Opportunity Abandonment (EOA) decisions is limited. We, therefore, explore the relatively under-studied EOA, analyzing why entrepreneurs commit decision errors, abandon potentially viable opportunities (type I error) or pursue non-opportunity spaces (type II error), and ultimately forsake them later. Through a scoping literature review, we highlight more profound psychological variables that shape entrepreneurial opportunity behavior triggering EOA decisions. We discuss entrepreneurial cognitive limitations in articulating, concretizing, and communicating the opportunity. We argue that varying construal mindsets cause reification fallacies and create perceptual blocks in enunciating an opportunity idea. Further, subjective stakeholder feedback and biased information exchange largely shape EOA decisions, which are mediated through the information processing capacity of entrepreneurs. Finally, we propose four entrepreneurial decision-limiting hypotheses which require an empirical investigation.

Where in the brain is creativity? The fallacy of a creativity faculty in the brain.

The neuroscience of creativity is built on a tacit and near universal assumption that is false. Paradoxically, this is not contentious; once made explicit, the assumption is readily conceded as false. Psychology regards creativity as made up of many complex, multifaceted, and varied cognitive and emotional processes deployed across many different domains. But we instead think of, and treat, creativity as if it were a single, separate, cohesive, and discrete thing-as in, Einstein had it. In a straightforward extension of this fallacy, cognitive neuroscientists have looked for uniquely creative cognition that (1) is distinct from all other kinds of cognition and (2) has a proprietary neural substrate. In other words, a standalone and monolithic creativity faculty in the brain that manages only creativity and all creativity. First, this paper brings into sharp focus the nature and ubiquity of this fallacy. It then outlines the alternative theoretical position that is (1) based on fundamental neural principles and (2) predicated on taking seriously the concept of creativity as complex and diverse. Like morality or secretiveness, it holds that creativity does not exist as its own, specialized entity in the brain. Instead, its neurocognitive mechanisms are distributed, embedded, and varied; that is, creativity is everywhere and multiply realizable.

Hallucinations of the "China Dream": Forbidden Voice, Articulation, and Schizophrenia in China.

I analyze the contents of voices heard by people diagnosed with schizophrenia in China. Rather than pathologizing these contents as symptoms of psychiatric disease, I examine them as a form of disinhibited voice and articulation. Drawing on the literature on ideological reification and articulation, I show that the specificity and contents of heard voices are connotatively or evocatively linked to the "China Dream," particularly ideologies of the Dream that distort reality. Through these voices, those with schizophrenia articulate their dissent or divergence from the illusory collective world depicted by "China Dream" discourse.

Recognition of Children's Learning in Educational Research, Policy and Practice: Herbison Invited Lecture, NZARE Annual Conference 2022.

For Jean Herbison, learning in her early 20th century childhood world was relatively uncomplicated and predictable. Life was shaped by unambiguous family, faith and settler colonial prescriptions about how children should behave and what they should become. Approaching the centenary of her birth, children today must navigate a very different society of 'unlimited can'; an achievement society that generates a debilitating compulsion to self-improve (Byung Chul-Han). In this Herbison lecture, I offer a personal reflection on the contemporary 'triangle' of education research, policy and practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Viewed as a culturally and historically specific 'form of life' (Rahel Jaeggi), I ask whether, over the last thirty five years, this triangle may have unwittingly contributed to a collective failure to give adequate recognition to children's learning. Despite our best intentions, have we simply reified students and in doing so alienated them from learning in all its complexities and dimensions (Knud Illeris)? More than mere acknowledgement of 'the other', recognition theory highlights the importance of socially developed qualities such as confidence, respect and esteem (Axel Honneth) to each child's capacity to develop meaningful relationships to or 'resonance' with an ever accelerating and uncontrollable world (Hartmut Rosa) and the people and communities in it. In practical terms, then, what can we draw on that is already immanent in our research, policy and practice triangle to transform children's institutionalised learning?

Beyond central-tendency: If we agree discrete vegetation communities do not exist, should we investigate other methods of clustering?

Clustering is indispensable in the quest for robust vegetation classification schemes that aim to partition, summarise and communicate patterns. However, clustering solutions are sensitive to methods and data and are therefore unstable, a feature that is usually attributed to noise. Viewed through a central-tendency lens, noise is defined as the degree of departure from type, which is problematic since vegetation types are abstractions of continua, and so noise can only be quantified relative to the particular solution at hand. Graph theory models the structure of vegetation data based on the interconnectivity of samples. Through a graph-theoretic lens, the causes of instability can be quantified in absolute terms via the degree of connectivity among objects. We simulated incremental increases in sampling intensity in a dataset over five iterations and assessed classification stability across successive solutions derived using algorithms implementing, respectively, models of central-tendency and interconnectivity. We used logistic regression to model the likelihood of a sample changing groups between iterations as a function of distance to the centroid and degree of interconnectivity. Our results show that the degree to which samples are interconnected is a more powerful predictor of instability than the degree to which they deviate from their nearest centroid. The removal of weakly interconnected samples resulted in more stable classifications, although solutions with many clusters were apparently inherently less stable than those with few clusters, and improvements in stability flowing from the removal of outliers declined as the number of clusters increased. Our results reinforce the fact that clusters abstracted from continuous data are inherently unstable and that the quest for stable, fine-scale classifications from large regional datasets is illusory. Nevertheless, our results show that using models better suited to the analysis of continuous data may yield more stable classifications of the available data.

Why mental disorders are brain disorders. And why they are not: ADHD and the challenges of heterogeneity and reification.

Scientific attempts to identify biomarkers to reliably diagnose mental disorders have thus far been unsuccessful. This has inspired the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach which decomposes mental disorders into behavioral, emotional, and cognitive domains. This perspective article argues that the search for biomarkers in psychiatry presupposes that the present mental health categories reflect certain (neuro-) biological features, that is, that these categories are reified as biological states or processes. I present two arguments to show that this assumption is very unlikely: First, the heterogeneity (both within and between subjects) of mental disorders is grossly underestimated, which is particularly salient for an example like Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Second, even the search for the biological basis of psychologically more basic categories (cognitive and emotional processes) than the symptom descriptions commonly used in mental disorder classifications has thus far been inconclusive. While philosophers have discussed this as the problem of mind-body-reductionism for ages, Turkheimer presented a theoretical framework comparing weak and strong biologism which is more useful for empirical research. This perspective article concludes that mental disorders are brain disorders in the sense of weak, but not strong biologism. This has important implications for psychiatric research: The search for reliable biomarkers for mental disorder categories we know is unlikely to ever be successful. This implies that biology is not the suitable taxonomic basis for psychiatry, but also psychology at large.

Varying Degrees of Animal Reification by Stakeholders in Experimental Research.

The attitude towards animals in research depends on both the role of the stakeholder and their personal characteristics. Most studies on the subject have been carried out on stakeholders from biomedical research institutes with comparatively few sociological studies on stakeholders from agricultural research centers. Previous findings suggest that animal caretakers at agricultural research centers felt undervalued by the hierarchy, and that animal reification was present in the sector. This may indicate that a lack of consideration for the animal subjects correlates with an inadequate sensitivity towards humans. Since these findings were published twenty years ago, there has been an increasing emphasis on the importance and actions of ethics committees in research, animal welfare bodies, and public concern for animals, which may have impacted the current perspective. To better understand current degrees of animal reification amongst stakeholders of agricultural research, we conducted semi-directive interviews at a leading agricultural research institute in France (INRAE). The interviews targeted both animal caretakers and researchers who were involved in the study of infectious diseases in livestock, or the behavior of horses and quails. After having transcribed the recorded interviews into text, semi-automatized analyses were carried out to categorize them into distinct groups, from which the most characteristic words and sentences were extracted. Three groups of stakeholders were identified: (i) animal caretakers involved in invasive infectious disease research; (ii) animal caretakers involved in behavioral research; and (iii) researchers. The findings show that animal caretakers felt acknowledged by their hierarchy. It is possible the increased skill criteria for people recruited into this position over the years, combined with greater prospects for continuous learning and development in the profession, may have fostered a more respectful regard across the hierarchy. The animal caretakers clearly expressed that their primary objective was to successfully execute the research protocols and that the animals were viewed as prototypes for research, with which they could, on occasion, develop a bond with. The bond was more important for animal caretakers involved in behavioral studies than for those involved in the study of infectious diseases, where invasive biological sampling and restraining of the animals is required. Researchers prioritized the procurement of robust data to test hypotheses, analyze phenomena, and publish their results. Their concern for the animals rather reflected the views of the general public opposed to thought-out personal opinions on the matter; this is possibly due to their comparatively limited interaction with the animals. They considered the animals in abstract terms that were indicative of reification. This study concludes that animal reification is still present, albeit to varying degrees amongst the stakeholders.

The Dilemma of Postmodern Business Ethics: Employee Reification in a Perspective of Preserving Human Dignity.

Management practices prevailing in business organizations receive considerable criticism for often treating the employee as one of many resources or an instrument to achieve the organization's goals. As employee reification has so far been largely investigated in the scientific literature from the perspective of neo-Marxist approach, this article seeks to broaden the discussion by showing how social teaching of the Catholic Church can serve to solve the problem of reification. Although there is no doubt that universal norms of business ethics can serve as protection of the employee dignity from the individual's reification tendencies, moral relativism operating in postmodern life tends to call into question any universal moral norms. Therefore, this article discusses how responses to challenges posed by moral relativism can be obtained by applying methodological approaches proposed by the neo-Marxist classics Lukács, Honneth, and Catholic Social Teaching. The similarities and differences of these approaches are identified, and attention is also drawn to the possibilities and limitations of their application in business ethics practice. It is also demonstrated how understanding of human dignity and the attitude to a virtue, offered by social teaching of the Catholic Church, broadens the discussion on addressing the dangers posed by the person's reification in organizations.

ADHD and reification: Four ways a psychiatric construct is portrayed as a disease.

Introduction: The descriptive classification Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is often mistaken for a disease entity that explains the causes of inattentive and hyperactive behaviors, rather than merely describing the existence of such behaviors. The present study examines discourse on ADHD to analyze how authors passively and actively contribute to reification-a fallacy in which a concept is represented as a thing existing on its own. Methods: Critical Discourse Analysis and Qualitative Content Analysis of academic textbooks, scientific articles, websites and videos were used to analyze how ADHD is reified. Results: The analyses reveal four ways in which inattentive and restless behaviors are presented as an entity by means of the ADHD classification: language choice, logical fallacies, genetic reductionism, and textual silence. First, language choice, such as medical jargon and metaphors aid in representing ADHD as a disease entity. Second, several logical fallacies do the same, including the relatively unknown "ecological fallacy" that refers to the erroneous belief that average group findings, such as average brain size of groups of those with an ADHD classification, can be applied on an individual level. Third, genetic reductionism is often achieved by overstating the results of twin studies and being silent about the disappointing molecular genetic research. Such textual silence is the last identified mechanism of reification and includes instances in which societal factors that affect the ADHD construct are often omitted from texts, thereby obscuring the extent to which ADHD is a limited heuristic. Discussion: It is essential that discourse communities do not repeat these four ways of reifying behavior and social relations into an alleged entity with the acronym ADHD. The errors and habits of writing may be epistemologically violent by influencing how laypeople and professionals see children and ultimately how children may come to see themselves in a negative way. Beyond that, if the institutional world shaped to help children is based on misguided assumptions, it may cause them harm and help perpetuate the misguided narrative. To counter the dominant, reifying and medicalizing view, guidelines such as the recently published "Dutch ADHD Psychoeducation Guidelines" might be helpful.

Personal Need for Structure and Fractions in Mathematical Education.

The research was aimed at finding relations between mathematical knowledge and cognitive individual variable. We realized the experiment with 162 students of the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia. We had two variables-the personal need for structure (PNS) as a cognitive-individual variable and knowledge of the fraction as a mathematical variable. The relationships between the factors of the personal need for structure scale and the knowledge of fractions were determined by the IRT model. We have proven a negative correlation between the successful solving of fraction test and score in the PNS scale. This means that the higher the success rate of solving the fraction tasks, the lower the overall score on the personal need for structure scale and its subfactors.

An empirical study on Resource Description Framework reification for trustworthiness in knowledge graphs.

Knowledge graph (KG) publishes machine-readable representation of knowledge on the Web. Structured data in the knowledge graph is published using Resource Description Framework (RDF) where knowledge is represented as a triple (subject, predicate, object). Due to the presence of erroneous, outdated or conflicting data in the knowledge graph, the quality of facts cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, the provenance of knowledge can assist in building up the trust of these knowledge graphs. In this paper, we have provided an analysis of popular, general knowledge graphs Wikidata and YAGO4 with regard to the representation of provenance and context data. Since RDF does not support metadata for providing provenance and contextualization, an alternate method, RDF reification is employed by most of the knowledge graphs. Trustworthiness of facts in knowledge graph can be enhanced by the addition of metadata like the source of information, location and time of the fact occurrence. Wikidata employs qualifiers to include metadata to facts, while YAGO4 collects metadata from Wikidata qualifiers. RDF reification increases the magnitude of data as several statements are required to represent a single fact. However, facts in Wikidata and YAGO4 can be fetched without using reification. Another limitation for applications that uses provenance data is that not all facts in these knowledge graphs are annotated with provenance data. Structured data in the knowledge graph is noisy. Therefore, the reliability of data in knowledge graphs can be increased by provenance data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that investigates the method and the extent of the addition of metadata of two prominent KGs, Wikidata and YAGO4.

How Do Social Structures Become Taken for Granted? Social Reproduction in Calm and Crisis.

This paper identifies experiential processes through which social structures become taken for granted, termed processes of "structure marginalization". Passive processes of structure marginalization relegate social structures to the margin of experience without the use of higher-order cognitive acts such as evaluation and reflection. Examples include adapting to social structures via routine and habitual practices (material reification), a lack of conscious awareness of the complexity, historical formation, and other details of social structures (ignorance), and rendering social structures irrelevant when they are unreflectively judged to be of no value for achieving ends (nullification). Active processes of structure marginalization reflectively and discursively relegate social structures to marginal consciousness. Examples include the use of naturalistic and necessitarian explanations for the social order that implicitly justify it as inalterable or "just the way things are" (discursive reification), normative justifications for the status quo (legitimation), and conscious awareness of one's powerlessness to control social-structural conditions (helplessness). Active processes of structure marginalization originate in passive processes. The goal of the typology is to explain, at the level of experience, why social structures typically remain unproblematic and unnoticed in everyday life, even during periods of social crisis and change or when existing structures produce harmful effects.

A User's Guide to Metaphors In Ecology and Evolution.

Biologists energetically debate terminology in ecology and evolution, but rarely discuss general strategies for resolving these debates. We suggest focusing on metaphors, arguing that, rather than looking down on metaphors, biologists should embrace these terms as the powerful tools they are. Like any powerful tool, metaphors need to be used mindful of their limitations. We give guidance for recognizing metaphors and summarize their major limitations, which are hiding of important biological detail, ongoing vagueness rather than increasing precision, and seeming real rather than figurative. By keeping these limitations in mind, metaphors like adaptive radiation, adaptive landscape, biological invasion, and the ecological niche can be used to their full potential, powering scientific insight without driving research off the rails.