Traumatisation,psychological defence style,coping, symptomatology,and social support in HIV-positive: A pilot study

This paper examines degree of traumatisation, defence styles, coping strategies, symptomatology, and social support in a small sample of HIV-positive men and women in an effort to ascertain the psychological implications of living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Traumatisation and the potentially mediating effects of defence styles have only been the subject of a few studies of HIV positives. The study is based on a socio-demographic questionnaire, the Impact of Event Scale, the Defence Style Questionnaire, the Coping Styles Questionnaire, the Trauma Symptom Checklist, and the Crisis Support Scale. A degree of traumatisation that warrants treatment was found together with an association between particular coping strategies and symptomatology, and particular defence styles and symptomatology, respectively. Social support had increased over time, which is contrary to other research findings on social support.     

The early resumption of employment by mothers: Implications for parent-infant interaction

Home observations of mother-father-infant interaction and mother-infant interaction were contrasted in middle-class families in which the mother was employed or a full-time caregiver. First-born infants and their parents were observed at 3 months. The results indicate that when mother, father, and infant were together parents in the single wage-earner families provided more tactile stimulation to their babies; fathers in single wage-earner families tended to interact more with their infants than did mothers, while in dual wage-earner families mothers tended to interact more than fathers; and fathers in single wage-earner families exceeded fathers in dual wage-earner families in interactions with their infants. By contrast, mothers in the two groups showed very little difference in their interactions with their babies. No significant differences were found for maternal behavior in the three-person observation, and a single behavior differentiated between the groups in the mother-baby observation, with homemaker mothers more often making visual contact with their babies. The implications of these findings are discussed, both with respect to further research, and with regards to the development of children of employed mothers.     

Undercover Education: Mice, Mimesis, and Parasites in the Teaching Machine

What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in service of the capitalist knowledge economy. This seemingly stable condition is however insecured by the animal rights activist as undercover learner and??worker, who enters education and research laboratories under false premises in order to extract the knowledge necessary to dismantle the logic of animal utility on which the scientific-educational apparatus rests. The present article is based on a semi-structured interview with an undercover worker. It draws on a synthesis of critical education and posthumanist theories to configure knowledge creation and subjectification processes in the ??negative spaces?? of education. The techne of undercover work includes mnemotechnical and prosthetic devices, calculation of risk, and mimetic labor. The article argues that the agenda of the undercover worker generates a multi-strained mimetic complex that composes a parasitic educational subject-assemblage redirecting scientific knowledge away from the animal stratification logic of the knowledge economy into different viral circuits; different lines of flight. It invites a rearticulation of the formal education state apparatus in more indeterminate directions, provoking scientific-educational knowledge-practices to become a catalytic impulse for their own disintegration.     

On the rationality of pluralistic ignorance

Pluralistic ignorance is a socio-psychological phenomenon that involves a systematic discrepancy between people’s private beliefs and public behavior in certain social contexts. Recently, pluralistic ignorance has gained increased attention in formal and social epistemology. But to get clear on what precisely a formal and social epistemological account of pluralistic ignorance should look like, we need answers to at least the following two questions: What exactly is the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance? And can the phenomenon arise among perfectly rational agents? In this paper, we propose answers to both these questions. First, we characterize different versions of pluralistic ignorance and define the version that we claim most adequately captures the examples cited as paradigmatic cases of pluralistic ignorance in the literature. In doing so, we will stress certain key epistemic and social interactive aspects of the phenomenon. Second, given our characterization of pluralistic ignorance, we argue that the phenomenon can indeed arise in groups of perfectly rational agents. This, in turn, ensures that the tools of formal epistemology can be fully utilized to reason about pluralistic ignorance.     

Cross-sequential analysis of genetic influences on cognitive ability in the swedish adoption/twin study of aging

Abstract

Cross-sequential methods of analysis were applied to cognitive data from the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging. Thirteen measures of cognitive ability assessing four major domains (verbal, spatial, memory, and perceptual speed) were collected at two times of measurement separated by a three-year interval. Data were available from 41 pairs of monozygotic twins reared apart (MZA), 54 pairs of monozygotic twins reared together (MZT), 86 pairs of dizygotic twins reared apart (DZA), and 73 pairs of dizygotic twins reared together (DZT) ranging in age from 41 to 84 years. Cross-sectional differences and longitudinal changes in total variance and sources of variance were examined. With a few exceptions, both cross-sectional and longitudinal stability were found for total variance. In addition, few cross-sectional differences and longitudinal changes were found for genetic and environmental components of variance.