Aggression,crying and physical contact in one-to three-year-old children

In a longitudinal study in which 59 first-born middle class children were observed in the company of other children of the same age and with their mothers, a high frequency of attacks on other children by children nearly two years old was correlated with absent or delayed response by the mother to the child's crying after falls, etc. Other aspects of mother's or child's behaviour were examined but all failed to explain away this correlation. Some routes by which the correlation could have arisen from immediate influences of the child's behaviour upon the mother were also excluded. Thus it was not true that “tough” kids fight a lot and stop crying quickly. Nor did mothers respond less to children who cried often.     

McDowell’s Alternative Conceptions of the World

Abstract

Feminists have interpreted Rousseau's attitudes to women as characteristic of a patriarchal ideology in which passion, nature and love are associated with the feminine and repressed in favour of masculine reason, culture and justice. Yet this reading does not cohere with Rousseau's adulation of nature, nor with the repression of writing and culture in favour of natural speech which Derrida finds in his texts. This paper uses Rousseau's accounts of his personal experiences to resolve this conflict and to develop a more complex understanding of Rousseau's attitudes to women. The reading emphasizes that Rousseau operated with a triadic picture in which reason, the passions of the heart and the passions of the body are distinguished. The discussion of Derrida's reading of Rousseau gives rise to some reflections on the relationship of speech and writing to subjectivity, autonomy and women's oppression.     

Visual influences on speech perception processes

An experiment is reported, the results of which confirm and extend an earlier observation that visual information for the speaker’s lip movements profoundly modifies the auditorv perception of natural speech by normally hearing subjects. The effect is most pronounced when there is auditory information for a bilabial utterance combined with visual information for a nonlabial utterance. However, the effect is also obtained with the reverse combination, although to a lesser extent. These findings are considered for their relevance to auditory theories of speech perception.     

Being Fit and Looking Healthy: Young Women’s and Men’s Constructions of Health and Fitness

We drew on Foucault's notion of ‘practices of the self’ to examine how young people take up, negotiate, and resist the imperatives of a public health discourse concerned with the relationships between health, fitness, and the body. We did this through a discussion of the ways young women and men talk about their own and others' bodies, in the context of a number of in-depth interviews conducted for the Life Activity Project, a study of the place and meaning of physical activity in young people's lives, funded by an Australian Research Council Grant. We found that the young women and men in the study engaged the health/fitness discourse very differently: for the young men, health conflated with fitness as an embodied capacity to do physical work; and for the young women, health was a much more difficult and complex project associated with managing and monitoring practices associated with eating and exercise to maintain an ‘appropriate’ body shape.     

Partial reinforcement effects and type of reward

In two experiments 68 rats were trained to bar press or run down a straight runway for food or for water under conditions of either continuous reinforcement or partial reinforcement. In both experiments, there was greater persistence of behavior which had been reinforced with food than with water. In Expt 2, the partial reinforcement extinction effect (PREE) was observed with food reward, but not with water.Within the context of the experimental procedures used, it can be concluded that the rat has mechanisms for developing persistence which are dependent on the specific motivational system involved. This conclusion is related to theories of partial reinforcement effects and to possible biological origins of the mechanisms.