‘Gushing Out Blood’: Defloration and Menstruation in<Emphasis Type="Italic"> Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure</Emphasis>

John Cleland’s 1740s pornographic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure repeatedly depicts and eroticises the act of defloration. As such it is a revealing illustration of what Ivan Bloch termed the ‘defloration mania’ of the eighteenth century. This article maps narrative events on to contemporary medical depictions of first intercourse to show the ways that the theories and ideas presented in medical and pseudo-medical texts transferred into erotic fiction and demonstrates how in some instances the bloody defloration scenes can be read as being sex during menstruation, an act which was culturally forbidden at this time.     

The probability of a given 1-choice structure

A 1-choice structure arises whenever each person in a group chooses exactly one other person according to some criterion. Our purpose is to study the situation in which these choices are made at random. As noted in Harary, Norman and Cartwright [2], such a structure can be represented by a directed graph in which the points represent people and the directed lines their choices. We first describe the shape of such a 1-choice structure, and define its symmetry number. With the help of these properties we are then able to develop and prove a formula which gives a probability of obtaining a given structure in the random choice situation. In order to supply data for these results, we include in the Appendix the diagrams of all 1-choice structures with at most 7 points and the probability of each.The preparation of this article was supported by Grant MH 10834 from the National Institute of Mental Health and Grant 1026-66 from the U. S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.     

Response patterns to repeated CO2 inhalation in individuals with high anxiety sensitivity.

The present report extends previous work which has documented two distinct response patterns to repeated presentation of interoceptive cues (using CO2 inhalation) in PD patients [Beck, J. G. & Shipherd, J. C. (1997). Repeated exposure to interoceptive cues: does habituation of fear occur in panic disorder patients? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 35, 551-557]. We were interested in determining if these two patterns of fear habituation and sensitization would be noted in panic-naive individuals who reported high levels of Anxiety Sensitivity. A second aspect of this report examined whether attention to bodily sensations versus to neutral material would impact fear habituation and sensitization. Participants included 43 panic-naive individuals who scored at least 1 standard deviation above norms on the Anxiety Sensitivity Index. Results indicated that 37% of the sample reported habituation of fear, 47% reported fear sensitization and 16% demonstrated relatively stable fear levels across 12 inhalations of CO2 during session 1. The attentional manipulation did not exert a pronounced influence on anxiety, panic symptom severity, skin conductance, or heart rate in either Habituators or Sensitizers during session 2. These results are discussed in light of their relevance in understanding fundamental psychopathological processes underlying Panic Disorder.     

Accuracy and Confidence in Person Identification: The Relationship Is Strong When Witnessing Conditions Vary Widely

We hypothesized that both accuracy and confidence in suspect identifications depend, in part, on participants' ability to identify the target, and that both accuracy and confidence therefore tend to be higher under conditions that lead to good memory for the target than under conditions that lead to poor memory for the target. Furthermore, we hypothesized that a substantial correlation between accuracy and confidence will be observed if, because of variations in conditions, there is considerable variability across participants in ability to identify the target. Consistent with these hypotheses, manipulations that affected accuracy also affected confidence in the same direction, and when data were collapsed across conditions the accuracy-confidence correlation was substantial (mean r = .59).     

Self-verification processes: How we sustain our self-conceptions

It is proposed here that individuals use their social interactions as opportunities to verify and confirm their self-conceptions. In a series of empirical investigations, three unique strategies of self-verification are examined. In Investigation I, participants were more likely to seek social feedback when they believed that it would confirm their self-conceptions. In Investigation II, participants elicited reactions from their interaction partners that confirmed their self-conceptions, especially when they suspected that their interaction partners' appraisals might disconfirm their self-conceptions. In Investigation III, participants preferentially recalled social feedback that confirmed their self-conceptions. Thus, within each of three distinct phases of the social interaction, people sought to verify their self-conceptions. The interplay of different strategies of self-verification and the conditions under which they will occur are discussed.     

Situation models and memory: the effects of temporal and causal information on recall sequence

Participants watched an episode of the television show Cheers on video and then reported free recall. Recall sequence followed the sequence of events in the story; if one concept was observed immediately after another, it was recalled immediately after it. We also made a causal network of the show's story and found that recall sequence followed causal links; effects were recalled immediately after their causes. Recall sequence was more likely to follow causal links than temporal sequence, and most likely to follow causal links that were temporally sequential. Results were similar at 10-minute and 1-week delayed recall. This is the most direct and detailed evidence reported on sequential effects in recall. The causal network also predicted probability of recall; concepts with more links and concepts on the main causal chain were most likely to be recalled. This extends the causal network model to more complex materials than previous research.     

Capacity estimates in working memory: Reliability and interrelationships among tasks

The concept of capacity has become increasingly important in discussions of working memory (WM), in so far as most models of WM conceptualize it as a limited-capacity mechanism for maintaining information in an active state, and as capacity estimates from at least one type of WM task—complex span—are valid predictors of real-world cognitive performance. However, the term capacity is also often used in the context of a distinct set of WM tasks, change detection, and may or may not refer to the same cognitive capability. We here develop maximum-likelihood models of capacity from each of these tasks—as well as from a third WM task that places heavy demands on cognitive control, the self-ordered WM task (SOT)—and show that the capacity estimates from change detection and complex span tasks are not correlated with each other, although capacity estimates from change detection tasks do correlate with those from the SOT. Furthermore, exploratory factor analysis confirmed that performance on the SOT and change detection load on the same factor, with performance on our complex span task loading on its own factor. These findings suggest that at least two distinct cognitive capabilities underlie the concept of WM capacity as it applies to each of these three tasks.