However, Asian patients who were English speaking showed significantly higher levels of anxious preoccupation compared with Caucasian patients (P=0.014), an effect not seen when English- and non-English-speaking subgroups were combined.
Postapocalyptic times, and their singular preoccupation with survival, look easy compared with this journey to the end game.
Assume that however alien your subject's life has been compared with yours, the same basic preoccupations will have underpinned it: love, money, death and ambition.
Largely because of its preoccupation with violence as entertainment, "Funny Games" has been compared with Stanley Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange".
"Seeing ourselves as separate entities, rather than as connected parts of a larger whole, reduces the search for purpose to a preoccupation with how well our self is doing compared with others.
Patients seeing a medical oncologist showed larger scores on the helpless/hopeless (F 1, 130)=7.1, P<0.01), anxious preoccupation (F 1, 130)=12.3, P<0.01) and avoidance scales (F 1, 130)=4.5, P<0.05), compared with radiation oncologists.
Further, compared with the unipolar group, the bipolar group reported greater preoccupation with suicide-related images.
It's fair to say that the Korean War does not occupy a pivotal place in the collective American memory, certainly not compared with the sweep of World War II or the national preoccupation with the war in Vietnam.
For McQuaid, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, answering those questions soon had him fully immersed in the study of taste, a sense that, compared with sight or smell, had long been ignored by scientists despite our cultural preoccupations with it.
The work might have been based on images from actual archaeological excavations, but its decorously bathing nudes speak more to 19th-century preoccupations with hygiene – Roger Fry compared his work to "highly scented soap" – and the marble architecture is as much grand London bank as Roman frigidarium.
