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How does the human brain absorb information and turn it into skills of its own in psychotherapy? In an attempt to answer this question, the authors will review the intricacies of processing channels in psychotherapy and propose the term transprocessing (as in transduction and processing combined) for the underlying mechanisms. Through transprocessing the brain processes multimodal memories and creates reparative solutions in the course of psychotherapy. Transprocessing is proposed as a stage-sequenced mechanism of deconstruction of engrained patterns of response. Through psychotherapy, emotional-cognitive reintegration and its consolidation is accomplished. This process is mediated by cellular and neural plasticity changes.

This chapter takes a critical look at the sociological notion of ‘medicalisation’ in relation to recent trends and developments in neuroscience, neurotechnology and society, taking memory, medicine and the brain as our prime focus and the disease category of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as our empirical case study. Five relational nexuses in particular are identified as relevant to these developments and debates, namely the bio-psych nexus, the pharma-psych nexus, the selves-subjectivity nexus, the wellness-enhancement nexus, and the neuroculture-neurofuture nexus. We show that developments in memory medicine and the shifting boundaries of cognitive health, as embodied and expressed in the case of MCI, shed further valuable light on these issues and the interconnectivity of these relational nexuses. As an emergent disease and susceptibility category, MCI illuminates not only the fuzzy boundaries between normal and abnormal cognitive functioning, but also the working of neuroscientific, neurocultural and pharmacological interests, which, in this case, are already claiming MCI as the next locus of enhancing the mind and optimising aging. Thinking both within and beyond medicalisation challenges us to find new ways to critically understand the ideas about life and health as they travel, translate or migrate from (neuro)scientific and clinical spheres to cultural life and patient experience.

Drastic reductions in financial and personal support for public education over the last years in Germany seem to open gateways to ‘new’ acceptance of punishment in the realm of pedagogy. This ‘discourse’ is clandestine in theory, hidden from the public but real in institutions of the child and young people welfare system. They intensify the penalisation of their ‘drop-out’ clientele. The special schools for pupils with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) tend to act in that way, too. Particularly children and young people living in poverty are on the agenda of this new trend to penalise ‘deviant’ behaviour.

Programmes, trainings and drills are available. They are meant to help social workers and teacher in their position with new aims and functions. In their daily routine, most of them are overburdened and overloaded, because classes are overfilled and the number of families in the communal welfare system is growing rapidly, due to the so-called ‘Hartz IV’ legislative for unemployed families. This new trend is also a market place for the media; they launched an emergency call on education.

Some punitive praxis is contradictory to the human rights and the children rights, so that all professors for SEBD in Germany published a public declaration against the breaking up of the agreement of an education without violence. There is no empirical evidence for any positive outcome of such ‘pedagogy’. Despite all ‘modern’ promises, working with fear, anxiety, shame and punishment doesn't pay in the long run.

This chapter clarifies the relationship between socio-economic development and this ‘law and order’ pedagogy, the loss of professional standards and the psychodynamic consequences for pupils labelled as ‘deviant’.

Purpose – In recent decades, some sociologists have turned to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to support, modify, and reconfigure existing social psychological theory. In this chapter, we build on this momentum by considering the relevance of current work in affective and cognitive neuroscience for understanding emotions and the self. Our principal aim is to enlarge the range of phenomena currently considered by sociologists who study emotion while showing how affective dynamics play an important role across most outcomes and processes of interest to social scientists.

Approach – We focus on the ways external social objects become essential to, and emotionally significant for, the self. To that end, we draw on ideas from phenomenology, pragmatism, classic symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. We show how basic affective systems graft on, build from, and extend current social psychological usages of emotions as well as the important sociological work being done on self, from both symbolic interactionist (SI) and identity theory (IT) perspectives. Finally, we turn to the promising directions in studying emotional biographies and various aspects related to embodiment.

Findings – Affective systems consist of brain networks whose connections deepen when activated, with interesting variations observable at the neural, individual, and social levels in which one or more system is more salient than others. Affective systems may come to saturate the construction and maintenance of an autobiography or collective biography, with consequences for self-projection, self-other attunement, and embodied action. In turning to embodiment, however, we consider aspects of cognitive neuroscience that can contribute to ongoing work in neurosociology building on symbolic interactionism.

Practical Implications – The focus on affective systems suggests new research agendas in leveraging emerging neurosociological methods in the laboratory, while pushing for novel, naturalistic observational strategies. The latter, in particular, may be key to deepening sociology's contributions to neuroscience, better positioned to bring the full disciplinary toolkit to bear on these questions.

Social Implications – In considering the embodied and projective aspects of the self, we show how work examining convergence and divergence between embodied and linguistic pathways opens up new insights into how the self develops or acquires behavioral repertoires. As such, this chapter points to the need for holistic approach to understanding the social actor and, thereby, how political, economic, historical, and cultural factors shape self as much as biogenetic and psychological.

Originality of the Chapter – Sociologists think of emotions as either dependent or intervening variables: (1) signaling identity or situational incongruence, (2) states to be managed, and (3) structural dimensions of superordinate–subordinate relationships. Our integration of the theory of affective systems emphasizes the causal primacy emotions have over other behavioral and cognitive functions, clarifying how they play into the construction and maintenance of self and social experience.

Informal conversational encounters are explored using free indirect discourse (FID) as a novel storytelling method to gain a multi-generational understanding of the experiences of women working in public relations (PR) in 1960s/1970s Britain.

Echoing a literary tradition, anonymised transcripts of recordings provide impressionist accounts that immerse the reader in the thoughts and feelings of novelistic characters. An informal network of women narrate their stories with a much younger listener enabling exploration of intergenerational relationships and the intersection of gender and age.

This unstructured approach develops a complex yet natural flow to create unique withness-understandings. The author/narrator introduces a conception of informal conversational encounters, supporting an organic approach of interweaving storying, everyday performance, situated accountings, narrative unfoldings and inside/outside points of view.

An interplay of multiple female voices reveals a degree of symmetry in fractal patterns of women's early career experiences over the duration of a generation. Facilitation of sense-making through intergenerational conversations connects with Mannheim's theory of generational unity.

Women's beginnings of PR careers in 1960s/1970s Britain demonstrate a liberal feminist perspective in taking responsibility for their careers and enjoyment beyond the workplace in a man's world.

This paper delves into evaluating the effectiveness of warning messages as a deterrent against excessive fat consumption. It examines how consumers perceive the fat content of food products when presented with two distinct label types: (1) a textual warning, providing succinct information about the fat content, and (2) a pictorial warning, offering a visual representation that immediately signifies the fat content.

Two quantitative studies were carried out. Study 1 employed a questionnaire to evaluate the efficacy of textual and pictorial warning messages on high- and low-fat food products. Similarly, Study 2 replicated this comparison while incorporating a neuromarketing instrument to gauge participants’ cerebral reactions.

Results indicate that pictorial warnings on high-fat foods significantly deter consumers’ purchasing intentions. Notably, these pictorial warnings stimulate the left prefrontal area of the cerebral cortex, inducing negative emotions in consumers and driving them away from high-fat food items.

While the influence of images over text in shaping consumer decisions is well understood in marketing, this study accentuates the underlying mechanism of such an impact through the elicitation of negative emotions. By understanding this emotional pathway, the paper presents fresh academic and managerial perspectives, underscoring the potency of pictorial warnings in guiding consumers towards healthier food choices.

1. Textual warnings do not seem to discourage high-fat product consumption.

2. A pictorial warning represents the fat content of an equivalent product.

3. Pictorial warnings decrease the intention to purchase a high-fat product.

4. Pictorial warnings determine an increase in negative emotions.

Textual warnings do not seem to discourage high-fat product consumption.

A pictorial warning represents the fat content of an equivalent product.

Pictorial warnings decrease the intention to purchase a high-fat product.

Pictorial warnings determine an increase in negative emotions.

This paper aims to review the theory and empirical evidence of institutional investor behavioral biases in the lenses of behavioral finance paradigm. It surveys the research specifically focusing on behavioral biases among institutional investors in investment management activities worldwide.

A literature survey is done to gather and synthesize evidence on behavioral biases of institutional investors.

The survey and analysis reveal the following findings. First, the theoretical underpinning of investors’ irrational behavior has been neglected in behavioral finance research. Second, the behavioral heuristics and biases are dynamic and complex. Third, understanding behavioral biases’ origin, causes and effects requires interdisciplinary perspectives from the fields of psychology, sociology and biology.

The analysis and alternative perspectives drawn in this paper provide new insights into the field of behavioral finance and aims to suggest researchers, practitioners and regulators on the next course of actions.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology for critical welfare practice research, “recollection-as-method”, and to use this to demonstrate the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The paper analyses a series of personal recollections from the author’s experiences of academic life and welfare work to establish a methodology for critical welfare practice research. This uses concepts memory, dirty work, shame and complicity, and is grounded in critical feminist and critical race work, and psychosocial and socio-cultural approaches to governance.

The paper establishes a methodology for critical welfare practice research by demonstrating the significance of using an ontologically driven approach to governance, to achieve a realistic and complex understanding of statutory welfare work.

Recollections are post hoc narrations, written in the present day. The ethics and robustness of this approach are deliberated in the paper.

The focus of the paper is on statutory welfare practice that involves the assessment and regulation of homeless people. Principles and arguments developed in this paper contribute to reflective and reflexive debates across “front-line” social welfare practice fields in and beyond homelessness. Examples include assessment of social groups such as unemployed people, refugees and asylum seekers. Arguments also have application for criminal justice settings such as for prison work.

This foregrounds practitioner ambivalence and resistance in order to theorise the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The recollection-as-method approach provides a methodology for critical practice research by demonstrating an alternative way to understand the realities of welfare work. It argues that understanding how resistance and complicity operate in less conscious and more structural ways is important for understanding the social relations of social welfare institutions and the role of good/bad feeling for these processes. This is important for understanding interventions required for anti-oppressive social change across the social worlds of policy-practice life.

For half a century, neuroscientists have used Shannon Information Theory to calculate “information transmitted,” a hypothetical measure of how well neurons “discriminate” amongst stimuli. Neuroscientists’ computations, however, fail to meet even the technical requirements for credibility. Ultimately, the reasons must be conceptual. That conclusion is confirmed here, with crucial implications for neuroscience. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Shannon Information Theory depends upon a physical model, Shannon’s “general communication system.” Neuroscientists’ interpretation of that model is scrutinized here.

In Shannon’s system, a recipient receives a message composed of symbols. The symbols received, the symbols sent, and their hypothetical occurrence probabilities altogether allow calculation of “information transmitted.” Significantly, Shannon’s system’s “reception” (decoding) side physically mirrors its “transmission” (encoding) side. However, neurons lack the “reception” side; neuroscientists nonetheless insisted that decoding must happen. They turned to Homunculus, an internal humanoid who infers stimuli from neuronal firing. However, Homunculus must contain a Homunculus, and so on ad infinitum – unless it is super-human. But any need for Homunculi, as in “theories of consciousness,” is obviated if consciousness proves to be “emergent.”

Neuroscientists’ “information transmitted” indicates, at best, how well neuroscientists themselves can use neuronal firing to discriminate amongst the stimuli given to the research animal.

A long-overdue examination unmasks a hidden element in neuroscientists’ use of Shannon Information Theory, namely, Homunculus. Almost 50 years’ worth of computations are recognized as irrelevant, mandating fresh approaches to understanding “discriminability.”

Mentalization is a psychodynamic concept that can help us to understand our emotional responses to others. The purpose of this paper to illustrate how the concept of mentalization may be applied in dementia care.

An autoethnographic account of the author’s experiences (first author), working as a project manager in which the author used the concept of mentalization to pay close attention to how the author’s emotional responses to people with dementia influenced thier communicative interactions.

This paper outlines how the author processed the author’s own internal experiences in both mentalizing and non-mentalizing modes, as the author wrestled with feelings of conscious incompetence. In the non-mentalizing mode, the author was pre-occupied with the author’s own anxieties. The author struggled to relate to or make sense of the experiences of the individuals with advanced dementia that the author engaged with. Moving towards a mentalizing stance helped the author to attune to the embodied experiences of the people with dementia and recognise the reciprocal nature of our communicative interactions.

This paper illustrates the role that mentalization may play in developing natural and authentic strategies to support communicative engagement in dementia care. These strategies may be of potential value to family carers. Family carers who can maintain a mentalizing stance may be more able to respond in empathic, person- centred ways to people who are living with dementia. On the other hand, non-mentalizing responses may be a root cause of mis-understanding and emotional disengagement.