Beyond Consumptive Solidarity: An Aesthetic Response to Human Trafficking

A disturbing economic reality confronts consumers today: thousands of farm workers are enslaved in U.S. agricultural fields, forced to work without pay amid deplorable conditions and under the constant threat of violence. If structural economic injustices perpetuate modern‐day agricultural slavery, then it is necessary to promote consumer practices that resist these abusive dynamics. But a consumption‐oriented strategy does not necessarily restore either personal agency or communal relations damaged by agricultural trafficking. This essay proposes a framework for aesthetic solidarity that cultivates affective bonds necessary for building communities of resistance characterized by mutuality, equality, and participation.     

Über die Wirkung figuraler Merkmale auf das Entstehen der „Induzierten Bewegung“

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Occupational Therapy Services to Promote Occupational Performance,Performance Satisfaction,and Quality of Life in University Freshmen: A Pilot Study

Mental health impacts success for many university students. Occupational therapists can intervene during the transition to university to promote mental health. A 5-week, occupation-based group was provided to a group of freshmen university students to encourage short-term improvements in occupational performance (OP), performance satisfaction (PS), and quality of life (QOL). Statistically significant results were obtained for OP and PS (p < 0.05). However, no significant results were obtained when assessing QOL (p > 0.05). Further research, including long term follow-up, about the impact of occupation-based groups with transitioning freshmen is recommended.     

Both Risk and Reward are Processed Differently in Decisions Made Under Stress

Years of research show that stress influences cognition. Most of this research has focused on how stress affects memory and the hippocampus. However, stress impacts other regions involved in cognitive and emotional processing, including the prefrontal cortex, striatum, and insula. New research examining how stress affects decision processes reveals two consistent findings. First, acute stress enhances selection of previously rewarding outcomes but impairs selection of previously negative outcomes, possibly due to stress-induced changes in dopamine in reward-processing brain regions. Second, stress amplifies gender differences in strategies during risky decisions, with males taking more risk and females less risk under stress. These gender differences in behavior are associated with differences in activity in the insula and dorsal striatum, brain regions involved in computing risk and preparing to take action.     

Modifications of Yalom's interactional group therapy model as a mode of treatment for alcoholism

As a result of a review of the literature and especially Brown and Yalom's (1977) clinical report, it is suggested that the preferred mode of treatment for alcoholism is group psychotherapy. The group's ability to provide support, structure and reinforcement for abstinence make it a powerful catalyst in the recovery process. In measures of time, efficacy and recovery, group psychotherapy generally succeeds where other treatment modalities frequently fail.     

Orthographic and phonological activation in recognizing Chinese characters

This paper is a contribution to the study of whether visual contact with lexical units in any writing system necessarily arouses their corresponding phonological information. In two experiments it was investigated whether phonological information is automatically activated during the semantic processing of Chinese characters. In these experiments, both using a semantic-categorization task, subjects produced the same proportion of false positive categorization errors and showed the same decision latencies on homophone foils and their non-homophonic controls, thus indicating that phonological information does not seem to affect the semantic task. Experiment 2 further revealed that subjects made more errors and produced longer response times on graphemically similar foils than on the corresponding controls. The absence of phonological effects and the presence of clear effects of visual similarity for Chinese characters in semantic tasks can be taken to indicate that phonological information may not be automatically activated during the processing of meanings of Chinese characters. The present results also cast serious doubts on the hypothesis that phonological activation is a universal principle of lexical processing.     

Lexical decomposition of complex Kanji characters in Japanese readers

Summary The study investigates the question whether during recognition of a complex Kanji character readers also access the meaning of opaque components of the character. The experiment used a speeded semantic-categorization task of two characters, in which readers were requested to decide whether two characters represented words related in meaning or not. The control pairs consisted of (a) graphically similar, but semantically unrelated, characters, and (b) a simple character and a complex character, of which the simple character was a component (part-whole relation), the two characters being again semantically unrelated. The critical pairs consisted of two characters unrelated in meaning, one of which contained an opaque component element related in meaning to the other character. A corresponding trial with English and its alphabetic system would be to ask a subject to decide whether boycott is related in meaning to girl or not. In this condition the subject is expected to give a No response, but if the pseudocomponent boy is activated, interference could occur. (If boy is recovered during recognition of the pseudocompound boycott, the appropriate No response for boycott-girl could become more difficult to take.) The result of the experiment indicated interference in all three conditions (graphically similar characters, part-whole related characters, and opaque-component related characters. Thus, in an analogous task with alphabetic material, it would be more difficult to say No about the existence of a semantic relation between (a) tree and free, (b) boy and boycott, and (c) boycott and girl. The last result can be interpreted as offering evidence for the activation of the opaque component upon recognition of the complex character.This account is somewhat oversimplified. It is not always easy to determine which is a radical in a complex character. A higher radical can in fact be a combination of a lower radical with the addition of one or more strokes.