Dying: A universal human experience?

This paper explores the question, “Is there a universal psychological experience suffered by all dying persons?” a question to which the popular theory of Kübler-Ross presupposes an affirmative answer. Our answer takes three steps: first, a comparison between the Kübler-Ross model of dying and that of the late medievalBook of the Craft of Dying centered upon the five Kübler-Ross “stages”; second, a philosophical critique of the terms of this comparison; and third, a revised look at the alleged similarities between the two models, providing a deeper look at the moral and spiritual assumptions behind each.     

The Anatomy of Revolutionists

A questionnaire containing 62 items relating to the New Left and 28 items measuring anomia, authoritarianism, and Machiavellianism was given to 153 entering freshmen at Columbia in the fall of 1968. The five factors emerging from a factor analysis of responses to the items were labeled: New Left Philosophy, Revolutionary Tactics, Machiavellian Tactics, Machiavellian Cynicism, and Traditional Moralism. Students who had been politically active prior to coming to college scored higher than the rest of the group on New Left Philosophy, Revolutionary Tactics, and Machiavellian Cynicism, but scored lower on Machiavellian'Tactics and Traditional Moralism. In the spring of 1969, a revised set of items was given to students in introductory psychology classes at Columbia University and New York University. While the findings from these subjects replicated those found with the Columbia freshmen, they showed subtle differences which led to speculations about the radicalization process. Also discussed are the relationships between the nature of political participation and all of the factors, with special emphasis on the discrepancy between Machiavellian Tactics and Cynicism.     

Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis: putting the personal in the political in feminist research

Discourse analysis is a useful and flexible method for exploring power and identity. While there are many forms of discourse analysis, all agree that discourse is the central site of identity construction. However, recent feminist concerns over power, agency, and resistance have drawn attention to the absence of participants’ first-hand experiences within broad discursive accounts (Lafrance &; McKenzie-Mohr 2014 Boonzaier, F 2014, ‘Talking against dominance: South African women resisting dominant discourse in narratives of violence’, in S McKenzie-Mohr &; MN Lafrance (eds.), Women voicing resistance: discursive and narrative explorations, Routledge, Hove, pp. 102–20.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Saukko 2008 Saukko, P 2008, The anorexic self: a personal, political analysis of a diagnostic discourse, State University of New York Press, Albany. [Google Scholar]). For those with an interest in power relations, such as feminist researchers, this is a problematic silence which renders the personal functions of discourse invisible. In this article, we argue that the “personal” and “political” are inextricable, and we make a case for putting the “personal” into broader discursive frameworks of understanding. Further, we assert that feminist research seeking to account for identity must more explicitly aim to capture this interplay. To this end, we argue that voice is the key site of meaning where this interplay can be captured, but that no clear analytical framework currently exists for producing such an account. In response, we propose Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis (FRDA) as a voice-centered analytical approach for engaging with experience and discourse in talk. We then set out clear guidance on how to do FRDA, as applied in the context of women working in U.K. policing. Finally, we conclude that by prioritizing voice, FRDA invites new and politicized feminist readings of power, agency, and resistance, where the voices of participants remain central to the discursive accounts of researchers.     

The cost in remembering of ruminating on negative memories

This study investigated retrieval mechanisms that may be involved in memory for distressing stimuli. Forty-one nonclinical participants watched a video clip depicting the immediate aftermath of a serious car accident. Following this, half of the participants were instructed to focus attention on the victims of the accident and to consider the negative sequelae of their injuries. The remaining participants were not given any instructions. Following the Victim Focus/Control period, all participants completed a cued-recall task assessing their memory of the video clip. Overall, victim-related details were better recalled than nonvictim related details. It is important to note that participants in the Victim Focus condition retrieved fewer peripheral details than participants in the Control condition. These results suggest that people focusing attention on distressing aspects of an event can experience a cost in remembering other aspects of the event. These findings may be interpreted in terms of enhanced recollection of central events or retrieval-induced forgetting mechanisms to explain patterns of diminished memory for aspects of distressing events.     

Rapid modulation of distributed brain activity by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of human motor cortex

This paper reviews the effects of single and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimuli (rTMS) delivered to one cortical area and measured across distributed brain regions using electrophysiological measures (e.g. motor thresholds, motor evoked potentials, paired-pulse stimulation), functional neuroimaging (including EEG, PET and fMRI) and behavioural measures. Discussion is restricted to changes in excitability in the primary motor cortex and behaviour during motor tasks following transcranial magnetic stimulation delivered to primary motor and premotor areas. Trains of rTMS have lasting effects on the excitability of intrinsic and corticofugal neurones, altering the responsiveness of local and remote sites. These effects lead to distributed changes in synaptic activity at rest, and during a range of motor tasks. It is possible to impair or improve performance following rTMS, but for most simple motor tasks performance is unaltered. Changes in distributed activity observed with functional imaging during motor behaviour may represent compensatory activity, enabling maintenance of performance; stimulation of additional cortical areas appears to impair performance. A detailed understanding of the distributed changes in excitability following rTMS may facilitate future attempts to modulate motor behaviour in the healthy brain and for therapeutic purposes.     

Effects of category diversity on learning,memory, and generalization

In this study, we examined the effect of within-category diversity on people's ability to learn perceptual categories, their inclination to generalize categories to novel items, and their ability to distinguish new items from old. After learning to distinguish a control category from an experimental category that was either clustered or diverse, participants performed a test of category generalization or old-new recognition. Diversity made learning more difficult, increased generalization to novel items outside the range of training items, and made it difficult to distinguish such novel items from familiar ones. Regression analyses using the generalized context model suggested that the results could be explained in terms of similarities between old and new items combined with a rescaling of the similarity space that varied according to the diversity of the training items. Participants who learned the diverse category were less sensitive to psychological distance than were the participants who learned a more clustered category.     

Redintegration and lexicality effects in children: Do they depend upon the demands of the memory task?

The effect of long-term knowledge upon performance in short-term memory tasks was examined for children from 5 to 10 years of age. The emergence of a lexicality effect, in which familiar words were recalled more accurately than unfamiliar words, was found to depend upon the nature of the memory task. Lexicality effects were interpreted as reflecting the use of redintegration, or reconstruction processes, in short-term memory. Redintegration increased with age for tasks requiring spoken item recall and decreased with age when position information but not naming was required. In a second experiment, redintegration was found in a recognition task when some of the foils rhymed with the target. Older children were able to profit from a rhyming foil, whereas younger children were confused by it, suggesting that the older children make use of sublexical phonological information in reconstructing the target. It was proposed that redintegrative processes in their mature form support the reconstruction of detailed phonological knowledge of words.