Statelessness and the Politics of Misrecognition

This article focuses on the account of disrespect found in Honneth’s theory of recognition. In it, I am particularly interested in the form of misrecognition or disrespect which is the negation of respect, and which is clearly represented by statelessness. Respect, for Honneth, is closely connected to legal recognition. Guided by Honneth’s view of critical theory as ‘not entirely without a foundation in social reality’, the article puts together an analysis of the political dynamics of his model of disrespect. This analysis is used to challenge certain aspects of Honneth’s political theory and in particular the implications of his conception of the state. The article argues that the way in which the state is used has the effect of obscuring significant political obstacles to recognition, and in particular, the way in which the state limits respect.     

Convergent validity of and bias in maternal reports of child emotion

This study examined the convergent validity of maternal reports of child emotion in a sample of 190 children between the ages of 3 and 6. Children completed a battery of 10 emotion-eliciting laboratory tasks; their mothers and untrained na?ve observers rated child emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, and anger) following each task, and trained coders rated videotapes of each task for the same emotions. Consistent with studies using other designs, maternal reports demonstrated weak to moderate convergence with the other rating methods. Extending prior research, a number of maternal characteristics (particularly lifetime psychiatric diagnoses and personality traits) were associated with their reports of child emotions in the lab, above and beyond the effects of objective coding and observer reports of child emotions. For some emotions, mothers' mental health and dispositional variables were more strongly related to their reports of the child's emotions than were objective indices of the child's observable emotional behavior.     

Chronically stressed female rats show increased anxiety but no behavioral alterations in object recognition or placement memory: a preliminary examination

Stress, depending on intensity and duration, elicits adaptive or maladaptive physiological effects. Increasing evidence shows those patterns of advantageous versus deleterious physiologic stress effects also exist for some brain functions, including learning and memory. For example, short stress enhances, while chronic stress impairs, performance on numerous cognitive tasks in male rats. In contrast, performance of female rats is enhanced, or not altered, following both short-term and long-term stress exposure on the same behavioral tasks. The current study was designed to better characterize the behavioral effects of sustained chronic restraint stress in female rats. Female Sprague Dawley rats were assigned to a stress (restraint, 6 h/day, 35 days) or control (no stress) condition, weighed weekly, and then tested on open field (OF), object recognition (OR) and object placement (OP) tasks. Stressed females gained less weight during stress than controls. On the OF, there were no group differences in locomotor activity, but stressed females made fewer inner visits than controls, indicating increased anxiety. Both groups successfully performed the OP and OR tasks across all inter-trial delays, indicating intact non-spatial and spatial memory in both control and stress females. The current results provide preliminary evidence that the commonly used chronic restraint stress model may not be an efficient stressor to female rats.     

An Analysis on the Research Ethics Cases Managed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Between 1997 and 2010

The growing emphasis on the importance of publishing scientific findings in the academic world has led to increasing prevalence of potentially significant publications in which scientific and ethical rigour may be questioned. This has not only hindered research progress, but also eroded public trust in all scientific advances. In view of the increasing concern and the complexity of research misconduct, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was established in 1997 to manage cases with ethical implications. In order to review the outcomes of cases investigated by COPE, a total of 408 cases that had been managed by COPE were successfully extracted and analysed with respect to 7 distinct criteria. The results obtained indicate that the number of ethical implications per case has not changed significantly (p?>?0.01) since the year COPE was instigated. Interestingly, the number of ethical cases, and to some extent, research misconduct, is not diminishing. Therefore, journal editors and publishers need to work closely together with COPE to inculcate adoption of appropriate research ethics and values in younger researchers while discouraging others from lowering standards. It is hoped that with a more concerted effort from the academic community and better public awareness, there will be fewer incidences of ethically and scientifically challenged publications. The ultimate aim being to enhance the quality of published works with concomittant public trust in the results.     

Black Parenting Couples’ Ethnic-Racial Socialization Profiles: Associations with Sociodemographic and Race-Related Correlates

Journal of Child and Family Studies - In light of the continued racism and oppression experienced by Black Americans in the United States, ethnic-racial socialization—explicit and implicit...     

Spatial Skills and Self-Perceived Masculinity: Considering College Major STEM-ness,Directionality, and Gender

Sex Roles - The sex-role mediation hypothesis suggests that a masculine self-concept promotes male-typed cognition, including spatial skills. Support for the hypothesis is mixed, limited by small...     

Fourier components of moving gratings

In designing experiments in which the proximal stimulus is a moving grating (including cases in which the distal stimulus is stationary but eye movements play a significant role), one must consider the effects of the motion of the stimulus on its Fourier components in the spatiotemporal frequency domain. Some of these effects are unexpected and counterintuitive. For example, the Fourier components of a moving grating do not include its stationary (or “instantaneous”) spatial frequency. Thus there is no linear filter that can extract a stationary grating from a moving one. Several useful relations are given for analyzing such stimuli.