AIDS and Its Treatments: Two Doctors' Narratives of Healing, Desire, and Belonging

In this essay, I analyze two memoirs--Rafael Campo's The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS--which describe the effects of treating HIV/AIDS on each doctor's identity, on his desire for community and belonging, and on his identification and/or disidentification with the medical profession in the United States. My readings of Campo and Verghese revolve around three key terms provided by Campo's subtitle: identity, empathy, and desire. I shift the order of these terms in Campo's subtitle because I want to read identity, empathy, and desire in Campo and Verghese through and along with the theoretical "pragmatics" of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.     

Subordinate male mice show long-lasting differences in spatial learning that persist when housed alone

In the wild, house mice live in social groups, whereas in the laboratory male mice are often singly housed. Environmental enrichment such as that provided by social housing has been argued to improve the cognitive performance of laboratory animals in experimental tests. The aim of the present study was to test the cost of aggressive social interactions on learning in male CD-1 mice. We found that subordinate mice from more aggressive dyads showed spatial learning impairment, measured as alternation on a T-maze. Learning impairments in subordinates have hitherto been presumed attributable to the animals' exposure to, and relative standing within, the social group. By contrast, the impairment we observed could not have been the result of recent social defeat because it persisted weeks later when the mice were housed alone. Elevated urinary corticosterone predicted later subordination, though paradoxically these abnormally high levels were reduced by pair housing.     

The Walter Reed palm-held psychomotor vigilance test

This field-portable reaction time test and analysis software run on devices using the Palm operating system. It is designed to emulate a test and commercial device widely used in sleep deprivation, shift work, fatigue, and stimulant drug research but provides additional capabilities. Experimental comparisons with the standard commercial device in a 40-hour total sleep deprivation study show it to be comparably sensitive to selected experimental variables. A Pocket PC-compatible version is under developement.     

A prospective study of factors that lead to body dissatisfaction during pregnancy

This study examined changes in body image and predictors of body dissatisfaction during pregnancy. It was expected that higher levels of depression, social comparison tendencies, teasing, societal pressure to be thin and public self-consciousness would predict body dissatisfaction prospectively. Healthy pregnant women (n = 128) completed questionnaires on three occasions during their pregnancies reporting on a total of four time points: 3 months prior to pregnancy (retrospectively reported), in the early to mid-second trimester, the late-second/early-third trimester, and the latter part of the third trimester. For the most part women reported adapting to the changes that occurred in their body; however, women were most likely to experience higher levels of body dissatisfaction in early to mid-second trimester. Findings related to predictors of body dissatisfaction revealed that both social and psychological factors contributed to body image changes in pregnancy. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Sentence comprehension and relative pronouns

Doubly self-embedded sentences, differing only in whether the relative pronouns were present or deleted, were presented to two groups of Ss who were required to respond to a word beginning with a particular letter in each sentence and to paraphrase the sentence. The results of both the phoneme monitor task and the paraphrase task indicated that comprehension was better when the relative pronouns were present than when they were deleted. These results are consistent with earlier results for the paraphrase task but are not consistent with earlier results for the phoneme monitor task. Possible reasons for the inconsistency were considered. It was concluded that the phoneme monitor task does reflect comprehension difficulty in a manner consistent with the paraphrase task and that deleting the relative pronouns does make comprehending self-embedded sentences more difficult.