Sexuality and cyberporn: Towards a new agenda for research

This article presents theoretical considerations based on cultural analysis approaches to studying pornography and sexuality as a means of starting to suggest a new agenda for cyberporn research. By bringing to the forefront concepts of how subjectivity and sexuality are produced within the computer/Internet apparatus, I hope to diversify the focus in cyberporn research away from social science approaches and pre-Foucaultian assumptions of the subject which obscure understandings of new media and cyberporn use. Through a summary of visual culture studies and reception studies of pornography, I argue that cyberporn must be understood as contingent within the encoding and decoding processes and discourses of sexuality (Foucault) in which it is produced and consumed. My focus here is the home office/terminal as the site of reception/cyberporn use. While there is potential for a great variety of cultural analytic approaches to the study of cyberporn and how new media use influences sexuality, I end with specific suggestions for researching cyberporn reception in the home. The computer’s allure is more than utilitarian or aesthetic; it is erotic. Instead of a refreshing play with surfaces, as with toys or amusements, our affair with information machines announces a symbiotic relationship and ultimately a mental marriage to technology. Rightly perceived, the atmosphere of cyberspace carries the scent that once surrounded Wisdom. The world rendered as pure information not only fascinates our eyes and minds, but also captures our hearts. We feel augmented and empowered. Our hearts beat in the machines. This is Eros. (Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality)     

Matters temporal

Current evidence suggests that neural Hebbian learning in cortical and hippocampal synapses is fundamentally predictive rather than conventionally correlational. Much attention is focussing on what sort of predictions are acquired, and in what neural architectures. A recent paper by Rao and Sejnowski has suggested an interesting interpretation in terms of a popular predictive algorithm that has roots in psychology, computer science and engineering.     

A naturalistic longitudinal evaluation of counselling in primary care

This study evaluated the effectiveness of generic counselling in a primary healthcare setting during three months of counselling and followed up the patients' progress after counselling had finished for the next twenty-one months. Questionnaires were completed by patients within the Dorset Primary Care counselling service on referral to counselling and at set points afterwards. A naturally occurring waiting-list group was compared with patients receiving counselling at baseline and three months. Measurements were taken of patients' psychiatric symptomatology, quality of life (QOL) and self-esteem. Patients who received counselling made highly significant improvements compared with those on the waiting list. These improvements were maintained throughout the long-term follow-up. This would indicate that generic counselling has positive effects that can be maintained for a long period of time after counselling has been completed.     

Effects of acoustic degradation on syntactic processing: implications for the nature of the resource system used in language processing

This study investigated the effect of noise masking on on-line syntactic processing. Ninety college students were tested on measures of working memory and on-line sentence comprehension. Subjects were divided equally into three listening conditions: no noise masking, -3 dB signal-to-noise ratio (S:N), -4.5 dB S:N. The auditory moving windows (AMW) paradigm was used to measure on-line sentence processing. In the AMW paradigm, subjects pressed a button for the successive presentation of each phrase in two types of sentences (syntactically simple and complex), and listening times were recorded for each phrase. Previous studies have shown that the verb in the more complex sentence type is the most capacity demanding portion of the sentence. Listening times were longer overall with increased noise masking, and listening times were longer overall at the verb of the harder sentence type. However, the increase at the verb was not larger with increased noise masking. All three groups showed similar effects of syntactic structure in the on-line data. The on-line syntactic effects were not due to problems in word recognition. Correlational analyses did not indicate a relationship between the increase in processing time at the capacity demanding region of the harder sentence types and any of the measures of working memory capacity in any of the three listening conditions. Results indicate that on-line sentence processing is not affected by noise masking if lexical access (e.g., word recognition) remains intact.     

The history of couple therapy: a millennial review

In this article, we review the major conceptual and clinical influences and trends in the history of couple therapy to date, and also chronicle the history of research on couple therapy. The evolving patterns in theory and practice are reviewed as having progressed through four distinctive phases: Phase I–Atheoretical Marriage Counseling Formation (1930–1963); Phase II–Psychoanalytic Experimentation (1931–1966); Phase III–Family Therapy Incorporation (1963–1985); and Phase IV–Refinement, Extension, Diversification, and Integration (1986–present). The history of research in the field is described as having passed through three phases: Phase I–A Technique in Search of Some Data (1930–1974), Phase II–Irrational(?) Exuberance (1975–1992), and Phase III–Caution and Extension (1993–present). The article concludes with the identification of Four Great Historical Ironies in the History of Couple Therapy.     

Sex differences in performance on three novel continuous response tasks

The Dynavision apparatus was used to assess psychomotor differences between men and women first-time users. Subjects, 50 men and 76 women, were tested on three 60-sec. Dynavision response tasks of graded difficulty. An analysis of variance with repeated measures indicated that men performed significantly better than women on all tasks. Performances on all tasks were also significantly different from each other within both sexes (p < or = .05). Furthermore, a significant interaction between sex and task was based on a greater drop in performance on the most complex task for women than for men.