His fanatical attention to period detail — polyester shirts and short shorts, the hairstyles and the men with hair dryers, the dances and even the postures and gestures that bristle with the mood of the times — seems no mere decorative affectation but a material reconstruction of what the historians call mentalities.
The call-centre mentality of the modern government worker is rather an easy target.
But she has little patience for what she calls the "mentality of the apocalypse" that ensued: "mindless, random, dumb, a nonnegotiable demand to dismantle the human experiment and begin again".
Even as Feig plays gentrification for laughs, his movie slickly embodies what the writer Sarah Schulman has called "gentrification mentality," the desire to replace the city's "complex realities with simple ones".
If cuteness does become a field of academic study, then much credit has to be given to the feminist pushback against what Hiroto Murasawa of Osaka Shoin Women's University calls "a mentality that breeds non-assertion".
They were responding to the human impact of the housing bubble, what Rameau calls a mentality of "gentrification: buy low, fix up, sell high".
Forget the so called hard mentality.
The committee defended itself against what its chairman, Edward Boisselle, called a "mob mentality," fended off calls that officials resign and reiterated that members of the school staff had not known the extent of Ms. Prince's torment.
It's called herd-mentality behavior, a term coined by Dr. Paul Dholakia, a researcher at the University at Buffalo School of Management, to describe the urge that causes bidders to gravitate toward items that at least one other person has bid on.
"I wouldn't call it mob mentality," he said.
