A Deleuzian rethinking of time in healthy lifestyle advice and change

Time is a powerful but under‐examined element in healthy lifestyle advice, particularly in the promise of stable states of future health achievable through sustained lifestyle change. But such linear, sequential time frames reinforce notions of rational choice, personal control, and responsibility despite common experiences of diet and exercise regimens as non‐linear, effortful, and difficult to maintain. An over‐simplification of time thus contributes to the logic of blame when people fail to achieve healthy lifestyle goals, producing spoiled health identities and abject bodies as people struggle to sustain what can be unsustainable. Addressing these problems, we argue that Deleuze's philosophy offers tools to develop an alternative approach in health promotion. Deleuze affords a conceptualisation of multidimensional, embodied, and affective temporalities of health, which give rise to plural subjectivities and disrupt linear models of time. This framework affords a recognition of multiple time frames, such as histories and imagined futures that form part of a living present and shape lifestyle behaviours and identities. Deleuzian concepts that tie into his philosophy of time and form his process ontology, including monism and rhizomes, affect, becoming, and assemblages, are discussed in relation to health promotion. The article concludes that Deleuze offers a critical theory of time that enables a mapping of the ways that people embody multiplicity, non‐linearity, and fluidity as they negotiate healthy lifestyle advice. His concepts illuminate ways in which people can be oppressed and limited by discourses of healthy living, but also point to new, more affirmative directions for health promotion and healthy lifestyle advice.     

Evaluating Creativity Through the Degrees of Solidity of Its Assessment: A Relational Approach

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to creativity assessment. Arguably, one of the main obstacles to creativity assessment is that creativity criteria are likely to change depending on what is assessed and who is making the assessment. We argue that we might be able to solve this problem by adopting a relational ontology, i.e., an ontology according to which beings of the world acquire their properties by relating to other beings. First, we present the main consequences of this ontological approach for creativity assessment: (a) Accounting for the creativity of a given object involves retracing the beings (including criteria) that relate it to its alleged creativity; (b) One can assess the creativity of this object by looking at the number of beings that substantiate this relation, i.e., by looking at what we call the “degree of solidity” of the relation; (c) One can thus account for the specificity of various forms of creativity and, at the same time, compare them in terms of solidity. Building on these ontological assumptions, we then present a new assessment technique, the Objection Counting Technique, before putting it to the test using an excerpt taken from a naturally occurring brainstorming session.     

First suckling: a crucial event for mother-young attachment? an experimental study in horses (Equus caballus)

This study investigates the consequences of interference during first suckling for subsequent mare-young attachment in horses (Equus caballus). Foals brought to their dams' teats appeared, at later ages (1-3 months), to remain closer to their dams and to play less than control foals that had been allowed to suckle spontaneously. Higher levels of play and distance initiatives from the mother are considered criteria for secure attachment in horses, humans, and other species. As this unique handling was the only event that distinguished experimental from control groups, the authors concluded that first suckling is a crucial event in the development of secure dam-young attachment. These results could have important implications for all mammal species, including humans.     

Robust dimensions of anxiety sensitivity: development and initial validation of the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3

Accumulating evidence suggests that anxiety sensitivity (fear of arousal-related sensations) plays an important role in many clinical conditions, particularly anxiety disorders. Research has increasingly focused on how the basic dimensions of anxiety sensitivity are related to various forms of psychopathology. Such work has been hampered because the original measure--the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI)--was not designed to be multidimensional. Subsequently developed multidimensional measures have unstable factor structures or measure only a subset of the most widely replicated factors. Therefore, the authors developed, via factor analysis of responses from U.S. and Canadian nonclinical participants (n=2,361), an 18-item measure, the ASI-3, which assesses the 3 factors best replicated in previous research: Physical, Cognitive, and Social Concerns. Factorial validity of the ASI-3 was supported by confirmatory factor analyses of 6 replication samples, including nonclinical samples from the United States and Canada, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain (n=4,494) and a clinical sample from the United States and Canada (n=390). The ASI-3 displayed generally good performance on other indices of reliability and validity, along with evidence of improved psychometric properties over the original ASI.     

Effects of experience on the coordination of internally and externally timed soccer kicks

The authors investigated differences in the soccer kick between 8 experienced and 10 less experienced participants in 2 different task conditions (kicking a stationary ball or a moving ball at a target). The experienced participants were more accurate than their less experienced counterparts, whereas there were no differences in maximum foot velocity between groups or between conditions. When compared with their performance in the stationary condition, participants kicked the moving ball with a smaller range of movement at the knee of the kicking leg, maintaining a proximodistal coordination pattern. Because of their significantly shorter knee-flexion phase, the participants in the experienced group displayed a significantly shorter time between initiation of the forward swing of the kick and ball contact than that of those in the less experienced group. The rapid knee flexion may have been a strategy of exploiting passive dynamics to increase accuracy rather than velocity. Members of both groups showed a proximodistal initiation sequence in the kicking leg, which suggests that players can acquire that coordination pattern with relatively little structured practice and that further practice leads to improvement possibly through the increased exploitation of passive dynamics.     

La socialisation des émotions chez le nourrisson: le rôle des expressions faciales contingentes des mères

Although maternal contingent responses to their infant's facial expressions of emotions is thought to play an important role in the socialization of emotions, available data are still scarce and often inconsistent To further investigate how mothers' contingent facial expressions might influence infant emotional development, we undertook to study mother‐infant dyads in four episodes of face‐to‐face interaction during the first year. Mothers' facial expressions were strongly related to their infant's facial expressions of emotions, most of their contingent responses being produced within one second following infants' facial expressions Specific patterns of responses were also found. The impact of maternal contingent responding on infants' expressive development was also examined.     

The contribution of short-term memory for serial order to early reading acquisition: evidence from a longitudinal study

Early reading acquisition skills have been linked to verbal short-term memory (STM) capacity. However, the nature of this relationship remains controversial because verbal STM, like reading acquisition, depends on the complexity of underlying phonological processing skills. This longitudinal study addressed the relation between STM and reading decoding acquisition by distinguishing between STM for item information and STM for order information based on recent studies showing that STM for item information, but not STM for order information, recruits underlying phonological representations. If there is a specific link between STM and reading decoding acquisition, STM for order information should be an independent predictor of reading decoding acquisition. Tasks maximizing STM for serial order or item information, measures of phonological abilities, and reading tests were administered to children followed from kindergarten through first grade. We observed that order STM capacity, but not item STM capacity, predicted independent variance in reading decoding abilities 1 year later. These results highlight the specific role of STM for order in reading decoding acquisition and argue for a causal role of order STM capacity in reading acquisition. Mechanisms relating STM for order information and reading acquisition are discussed.     

Inter-limb coupling in bimanual rhythmic coordination in Parkinson's disease

Recently, it has been shown that rhythmic inter-limb coordination is disturbed in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). The present study aims to investigate whether this coordination deficit is primarily the result of an impaired coupling, related to hypoactivation of the supplementary motor area (SMA), or primarily the indirect result of an asymmetrical distribution of PD symptoms over the left and right limbs (a peripheral process). Thirty PD patients and 30 matched control participants tapped with the index fingers anti-phase and left and right leading gallop patterns in four visual feedback conditions. Symmetrically affected participants performed significantly worse than asymmetrically affected and control participants in the gallop patterns. This result suggested that the central deficit has a stronger effect on inter-limb coupling in PD than the neuromuscular and biomechanical asymmetry between the limbs. Detailed analysis of inter-tap intervals (variability and correlation) suggested that this deficit leads to a compensatory asymmetrical inter-limb coupling in the primarily right-affected patient group, and under specific circumstances also in the primarily left-affected patient group. The difference in coordination strategy between left- and right-affected patients suggested that pre-morbid hand preference is an important structural constraint on the coupling strategies available to the participants.