Aging as a Social Form: The Phenomenology of the Passage

If philosophers have discussed life as preparation for death, this seems to make aging coterminous with dying and a melancholy passage that we are condemned to survive. It is important to examine the discourse on aging and end of life and the ways various models either limit possibilities for human agency or suggest means of being innovative in relation to such parameters. I challenge developmental views of aging not by arguing for eternal life, but by using Plato’s conception of form in conjunction with Simmel’s work and Arendt’s meditation on intergenerational solidarity, to evoke a picture of the subject as having capacities that offer avenues for improvisational action. This paper proposes a method for analyzing any social form as a problem-solving situation where the real “problem” is the fundamental ambiguity that inheres in the mix between the finite characteristics of the action and its infinite perplexity. I work through the most conventional chronological view of aging to show how it dramatizes a fundamental ethical collision in life that intensifies anxiety under many conditions, always raising the question of what is to be done with respect to contingency, revealing such “work” as a paradigm of the human condition.     

Systems Training for Emotional Predictability and Problem Solving (STEPPS) in the United Kingdom: A Preliminary Report

The authors report the results of a pilot project to introduce the STEPPS (systems training for emotional predictability and problem solving) treatment program for persons with borderline personality disorder (BPD) to the United Kingdom. STEPPS combines cognitive-behavioral principles and skills training with a systems component that includes family members and significant others. STEPPS was developed to supplement the patient’s ongoing treatment program (e.g. medication, individual therapy, case management) and boost its effectiveness, but not replace it. Thirty-eight subjects agreed to participate at six sites in West Sussex, England. A pre- and post-intervention comparison design was used, and over the 20 week program were found to have significant improvement in their mood, BPD-related symptoms (including affective, cognitive, and impulsive domains), and both negative and positive affectivity. Subjects reported high levels of satisfaction with the program. This study provides further evidence that STEPPS, a relatively brief fully manualized group treatment program, may be used in other countries and achieves high levels of acceptance from patients and therapists.     

Structural properties of spatial representations in blind people: Scanning images constructed from haptic exploration or from locomotion in a 3-D audio virtual environment

When people scan mental images, their response times increase linearly with increases in the distance to be scanned, which is generally taken as reflecting the fact that their internal representations incorporate the metric properties of the corresponding objects. In view of this finding, we investigated the structural properties of spatial mental images created from nonvisual sources in three groups (blindfolded sighted, late blind, and congenitally blind). In Experiment 1, blindfolded sighted and late blind participants created metrically accurate spatial representations of a small-scale spatial configuration under both verbal and haptic learning conditions. In Experiment 2, late and congenitally blind participants generated accurate spatial mental images after both verbal and locomotor learning of a full-scale navigable space (created by an immersive audio virtual reality system), whereas blindfolded sighted participants were selectively impaired in their ability to generate precise spatial representations from locomotor experience. These results attest that in the context of a permanent lack of sight, encoding spatial information on the basis of the most reliable currently functional system (the sensorimotor system) is crucial for building a metrically accurate representation of a spatial environment. The results also highlight the potential of spatialized audio-rendering technology for exploring the spatial representations of visually impaired participants.     

The seriousness of crime: A study of popular morality

This article reports the findings from a study that explored how lay people determine the seriousness of criminal offenses. While previous research on this topic has assumed that the perceived seriousness of crimes was primarily determined by differences in physical injury and economic loss, the results of this study indicate that offense seriousness is also affected by judgments subjects make about intent, motive, purpose, “fair play”, and “real harm”.     

Quantification of dislocation structures at high resolution by atomic force microscopy of dislocation etch pits

Atomic force microscopy of dislocation etch pit structures is a convenient means of characterising the dislocation structure in etchable materials at high resolution for dislocation spacing extending down to 25 nm . This is demonstrated for single crystals of CaF₂. The local deformation zone generated around nanoindents at ambient temperature and the low-angle boundaries generated in the bulk during uniaxial compression at elevated temperatures are presented as examples.