OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to describe and understand experiences of healthy dieting in male college students with obesity. METHODS The interview data were collected from nine male students and analyzed by using descriptive phenomenology of Colaizzi. The procedural steps described the phenomenon of interest, collected participants' descriptions of the phenomenon, extracted the m...

Research on collaborative learning currently emphasises the need to understand the processes at work in communicative interactions between learners, as a means of discovering interactive learning mechanisms. Within this general research programme, we concentrate on the specific case of argumentative interactions, with the aim of describing how they can be constructive. A constructive interactio...

The complexity of a mental disorder such as depression is such that a way of interlinking the neural, mental and interpersonal levels is needed. This paper proposes that a theoretical framework which distinguishes, and relates, macro-theory and micro-theory at these levels can serve this purpose. The 'Interacting Cognitive Subsystems' approach to mental architecture is used to show how, via the...

Children encounter metaphor in all aspects of their daily lives, including the spoken and written discourse of school, and metaphor can be one of the routes through which socio-cultural norms are appropriated. The use of metaphor seems to be a basic human skill, which develops in interaction with developing world knowledge and linguistic skills. Both use of metaphor and the development of metap...

A view of human-human interaction is presented and its implications for human-computer interaction discussed. Two propositions are advanced. The first is that interaction with computer systems is properly seen as mediated discourse, more akin to reading books and notices than interpersonal dialogues. The second proposition is a consequence of this, namely that unconstrained natural language is ...

Interpersonal relationship require sophisticated competences of cohabitation. However, the availability of training tools to develop conflict management skills is limited and problematic. The prisoner's dilemma game (PDG), the most widely known example of game theory, a nonzero-sum game, has been used, in higher education, to provide students with an opportunity of active learning and for under...

Bishop (2000) has recently raised the question of discriminating between grammatical SLI, pragmatic impairment, and social cognition problems linked to a spectrum of autistic behaviour. In this paper we report pilot findings which indicate that grammatical SLI may be associated with a lexical deficit in verbs that involve interpersonal action, and in particular verbs whose meanings involve ment...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To explore Korean American women's symbolic meanings related to their breasts and cervix, to examine attitudes and beliefs about breast and cervical cancer, and to find relationships between the participants' beliefs and their cancer screening behaviors. RESEARCH APPROACH Descriptive, qualitative analysis. SETTING Southwestern United States. PARTICIPANTS 33 Korean-born ...

One of the distinguishing features of advanced-level L2 learners is that they can “direct their writing to specific audiences, and they demonstrate an ability to alter style, tone, and format according to the specific requirements of the discourse” (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 2001, p. 2) and use “language flexibly and effectively for social purposes, including emotio...