Research has shown schizophrenia to be more common among people at the lower end of the social scale than at the upper. But is lower status the cause or the result of the disease? Dr. Thomas Arie of the London Hospital Medical College reviews the evidence and finds strong support for the view that schizophrenia brings about a downward drift. Schizophrenic patients occupy about one-seventh of al...

We define the concept of mental health on the basis of the realization that mental health is not just a health phenomenon anymore, but also a social and psychological one. By defining mental health separately from mental illnesses, it is placed into the concept of public health, which exceeds the medical definition of the determination of a “mental illness”. The anthropology of health defines t...

Accumulating neuroscience evidence indicates that human intelligence is supported by a distributed network of frontal and parietal regions that enable complex, goal-directed behaviour. However, the contributions of this network to social aspects of intellectual function remain to be well characterized. Here, we report a human lesion study (n = 144) that investigates the neural bases of social p...

We put forward the idea that to achieve robotic social navigation, it is necessary to consider different points of view (e.g. passenger and passer-by). We explore this idea in the context of controlling an intelligent powered wheelchairs in an environment with other pedestrians. We present results for a pilot study showing that the assessment of robot behaviour is dependent on these points of v...

Modern societies have given rise to a number of technical artefacts, which have become paradigmatic during the time of their expansion. One of late modernity's most recognised and contested objects is the automobile. In its current technical formation, the automobile has become the prime means of transportation in most of the industrialised countries. It both signifies a distinct way of moving ...

We examined social problem solving in schizophrenia. Twenty-seven schizophrenic patients in an acute hospital, 19 patients with bipolar disease, and 17 demographically matched nonpatient controls were tested on an empirically developed problem-solving battery that assessed the ability to generate solutions to problems, the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of solutions, and the ability to i...