Enactments of Race in the UK’s Blood Stem Cell Inventory

Recent sociological analyses of the intersections of race and science recognise race’s quality as an enacted object. Through this analytic lens, race is always materialising in the practices and processes that enrol it and therefore enjoys a kind of multiplicity. The context of blood stem cell transplantation, a scientific domain marked by a more and less explicitly racialised logic, offers an opportunity to see the conceptual assertion of race’s multiplicity play out. Indeed, an exploration of the UK’s stem cell inventory reveals—through analysis of interviews, policy and parliamentary meetings—how race materialises in the various practices that comprise this increasingly popular cancer treatment option. Looking at practices of recruitment, inventory management and tissue selection in particular provides an interesting window to look upon race and the many signifiers that implicate it. These cases reveal moments of race’s stablisation and silencing; its oscillation between the status of vital information to the life of a public stem cell inventory, and of secondary data that provides little useful information to clinicians selecting tissue. Adopting an analytic lens that attends to race’s multiple enactments allows us to begin asking why enactments take the shape they do, and why the particular practices that mobilise them come to be.     

Between Ethics and Right: Kantian Politics and Democratic Purposes

Force and Freedom insists that, ‘Freedom, understood as independence of another person's choice, is [all] that matters’. In this paper I suggest that this premise leads Ripstein to an instrumentalization of democracy that neglects a properly public and collective notion of freedom. The paper first criticizes Ripstein's key argument against any extension of public purposes beyond the upholding of persons’ ‘independence of others’ choice’. More constructively, the paper then suggests that a space of public freedom is opened up when people deliberate in order to form and pursue democratic purposes. Citizens may act together to promote ends that they think are worthwhile, without dominating one another or restricting individual freedom.     

Frequent false hearing by older adults: the role of age differences in metacognition

In two experiments testing age differences in the subjective experience of listening, which we call meta-audition, young and older adults were first trained to learn pairs of semantic associates. Following training, both groups were tested on identification of words presented in noise, with the critical manipulation being whether the target item was congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to prior training. Results of both experiments revealed that older adults compared to young adults were more prone to "false hearing," defined as mistaken high confidence in the accuracy of perception when a spoken word had been misperceived. These results were obtained even when performance was equated across age groups on control items by reducing the noise level for older adults. Such false hearing is shown to reflect older adults' heavier reliance on context. Findings suggest that older adults' greater ability to benefit from semantic context reflects their bias to respond consistently with the context, rather than their greater skill in using context. Procedures employed are unique in measuring the subjective experience of hearing as well as its accuracy. Both theoretical and applied implications of the findings are discussed. Convergence of results with those showing higher false memory, and false seeing are interpreted as showing that older adults are less able to constrain their processing in ways that are optimal for performance of a current task. That lessened constraint may be associated with decline in frontal-lobe functioning.     

Affording Emerging Adulthood: Parental Financial Assistance of their College-Aged Children

The purpose of this study was to examine parents’ attitudes about and patterns of providing financial assistance to their children during college, and how varying levels of parental financial support were related to children’s beliefs (e.g., perceptions of adulthood), behaviors (e.g., work hours, drinking, and drug use), and identity development. The sample consisted of 402 undergraduate students (62% women) recruited from four college sites across the United States (M age = 19.89), and one of their parents (310 mothers and 92 fathers). Using cluster analysis, results suggested four distinct approaches to parental financial involvement and found that emerging adults’ beliefs, behaviors, and identity development differed as a function of parents’ cluster membership. Discussion focuses on implications for emerging adult children whose parents endorse varying levels of financial involvement.     

Nitric oxide synthesis in the basolateral complex of the amygdala is required for the consolidation and expression of fear potentiated startle but not shock sensitization of the acoustic startle

Nitric oxide (NO) is synthesized as a result of N-methyl-d-asparate (NMDA) receptor activation, it acts as an retrograde neurotransmitter freely diffusing across cell membranes interacting with its targets in a non-synaptic manner. Consequently, NO has been described as an extension of NMDA receptor activation. The targets of NO include cellular components within the basolateral complex of the amygdala (BLA) that are necessary for the consolidation of conditioned fear as well as targets that can significantly modulate neurotransmission associated with its expression. Given that both are NMDA receptor associated processes, this implies that NO may be an important intermediary of NMDA receptor activation and both fear memory consolidation and expression. The current study sought to examine this using visual fear conditioning and fear potentiated startle. Three experiments were conducted, rats received intra-BLA microinfusions of the global nitric oxide synthase inhibitor l-NAME either prior to fear conditioning, or expression of learned fear. Furthermore, NO's ability to modulate a NMDA receptor independent fear process was assessed by microinfusing l-NAME into the BLA prior to examination of the shock sensitization of the acoustic startle affect. The results indicated that NO was, indeed, required for both the consolidation and expression of learned fear, whereas it was not required for NMDA independent shock enhanced startle responding. This study illustrates that NO plays a pivotal role in the examined NMDA associated fear processes.     

Social anxiety mediates the effect of autism spectrum disorder characteristics on hostility in young adults

Problems with social anxiety are frequently reported in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It is possible that social anxiety, when present, exacerbates the experience of hostility and other forms of aggression in relation to ASD symptoms. This study sought to determine if social anxiety symptoms mediate the relationship between features of ASD and feelings of hostility in young adults. Self-report measures of social anxiety, ASD, and facets of aggression were collected in a non-clinical sample (n = 618) of college students. Social anxiety was found to partially mediate the relationship between ASD features and self-reported hostility. There was also evidence for inconsistent mediation, such that social anxiety dampened the strength of the relationship between ASD symptoms and verbal and physical aggression. Findings highlight the potential influence of associated psychiatric symptoms in people with ASD. In addition, dimensional conceptualization of ASD symptoms, as opposed to a categorical approach solely, may be a useful approach to studying complex personality processes.     

Perceptions of physical and psychological aggression in close relationships: A review

This review of the literature examines the effect of contextual variables (i.e., characteristics of the perpetrator and victims, observer characteristics) on perceptions of physical and psychological aggression in close relationships. Observers view physical aggression as more serious, harmful, abusive, and more deserving of punishment than psychological aggression, male aggression as more serious than female aggression, and aggression in committed, exclusive relationships as more serious than aggression in casual ones. Victims of psychological aggression, however, perceive it as more harmful than physical aggression and consider the effects to be longer-lasting. The disparity between observer and victim perceptions of physical and psychological aggression extends to mental health professionals, who tend to judge the severity of aggressive behaviors based on frequency and duration of the actions instead of perpetrator intent. This difference of opinion may influence the reporting of and intervention in physically or psychologically aggressive situations, and how these types of aggression are treated by legal professionals, especially if those legal professionals are informed about aggressive romantic relationships by third-party observers whose opinions of the situation differ from those of the victims.