I found this book to be a big disappointment. It attempts to elaborate and defend David Rosenthal's (1986, 1990, 1993) "higher-order thought" theory of consciousness, the idea that to be in a conscious mental state is to be thinking (correctly) that one is in a mental state. To have a conscious sensation of red is to be perceiving red and simultaneously to be perceiving the perception as a perc...

Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi-pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically con...

Karl Jaspers' theory on the incomprehensibility of psychotic disorders has become the reference point for many critical studies in the field of contemporary psychopathology. According to Jaspers, it is impossible to understand any of the serious mental disorders often referred to as 'psychosis' because of their unreasonableness, a truth that is revealed when one attempts to empathize with the m...

The sociology of mental health focuses on the epidemiology, etiology, correlates, and consequences of mental health (i.e., psychiatric disorder and symptoms, psychological distress, and subjective well-being) in an attempt to describe and explain how social structure influences an individual's psychological health. Critical race theory describes and explains iterative ways in which race is soci...

The recovery alliance theory (RAT) is a mid-range theory of mental health nursing based on humanistic philosophy. The conception of the RAT was the outcome of collaboration among service users, practising mental health nurses, educationalists and managers and was developed in the context of a number of political and social changes as well as changes in the mental health field. The theory is com...

The aim of this work in progress is to implement a generative and validated model of Theory of Emotional Mind in a knowledge-based system. Model requirements are elucidated via human subject responses to autism therapy exercises. Theory of Emotional Mind (Baron-Cohen 1997) posits a mental module, the Theory of Mind ]Mechanism (ToMM), tasked with attributing mental states to social agents so as ...

Working memory involvement in propositional reasoning was explored after different kinds of training. The training conditions aimed to reduce the impact of non-analytic heuristics and to enhance analytic inference processes according to mental logic theories, the mental model theory, and the theory of pragmatic reasoning schemata. Following an initial training phase, secondary task interference...

The criminal law is centrally concerned with culpability or mens rea— roughly, the mental (or quasi-mental) components of blame. But culpability has at least two dimensions. Narrow culpability involves the purpose, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence required by statute for each material element. What Joshua Dressler aptly calls broad culpability involves the other mental (or quasi-mental) c...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between working memory span and syllogistic reasoning performance. In addition, performance for the reasoning task was compared to predictions made by mental model theory and the probability heuristics model. According to mental model theory, syllogisms that require the use of more mental models are more difficult. According to the probabili...

A theory of ironic processes of mental control is proposed to account for the intentional and counterintentional effects that result from efforts at self-control of mental states. The theory holds that an attempt to control the mind introduces 2 processes: (a) an operating process that promotes the intended change by searching for mental contents consistent with the intended state and (b) a mon...