Convivial Acts for an Ecosensual Labyrinth

Abstract

This paper addresses queer conviviality across Crab & Bee’s “Plymouth Labyrinth” project (2018–19); a 6-month activity including group walks, ritual sharings, group readings, postal art, poetry groups, site-specific dance, exhibition and making workshops. Based around convivial web-walking, the account examines how, through spinning out of collaborations and unfolding new forms, a web of work and activity was generated to support intensity and connectivity. The paper attends to queer aspects of conviviality, such as attention to unhuman partners, becoming-animal, simultaneity/plateauing in haecceity, dispersals of subjectivity and relations of threads (lines of desire) to web making.     

Interference with judgements of control and learning as a result of prior exposure to controllable and uncontrollable feedback during concept-learning tasks

Two experiments examined whether exposure to an uncontrollable relationship between an action and its outcome during a nonaversive pretreatment phase would attenuate subsequent ratings of control given to actions emitted by subjects. In Experiment 1, such an interference effect was demonstrated relative to a group that received prior training with a controllable action- outcome relationship, and relative to a group not exposed to any prior relationship. In Experiment 2, these effects were replicated, and interference was also found to occur when learning a maze task. Thus, the effects of helplessness were shown to be quite general, to be produced by a nonaversive induction procedure, and to occur most readily when the current contingency between action and outcome was weakest.     

Depression and Hostility in Self-Mutilation

The presence of depression and hostility among self-mutilating patients is investigated. Mutilators, depressives and controls comprised the research samples. Non-significant differences in intropunitive hostility and depression were found between the clinical groups. Specific item differences in the depression assessment indicated a definite qualitative rather than quantitative difference in depressive symptomatology between the clinical groups. The interaction between hostility and depression and the implications for management based on these results is discussed.