In Search of Śiva: Mahādēviyakka's V&īraśaivism

Mahādēviyakka was a radical 12th century Karnataka saint of whom surprisingly little has been written. Considered the most poetic of the Vīra?aivas, her vacanas are characterized by their desperate searching for ?iva. I attempt to convey Mahādēvi's epistemology and its struggle to 'know' ?iva, necessitating a lifetime of searching for him; offer an interpretation of the innate presence of ?iva in the world and its consequences for epistemology; and explore the sense of tragic love inherent in devotional searching for ?iva. My primary goal is to offer a powerful and positive, yet critical, interpretation of Mahādēvi's beautiful prose on her relationship with ?iva.     

Repeated acquisition and performance chamber for mice: a paradigm for assessment of spatial learning and memory

Molecular genetic manipulation of the mouse offers the possibility of elucidating the function of individual gene products in neural systems underlying learning and memory. Many extant learning paradigms for mice rely on negative reinforcement, involve simple problems that are relatively rapidly acquired and thus preclude time-course assessment, and may impose the need to undertake additional experiments to determine the extent to which noncognitive behaviors influence the measures of learning. To overcome such limitations, a multiple schedule of repeated acquisition and performance was behaviorally engineered to assess learning vs rote performance within-behavioral test session and within-subject utilizing an apparatus modified from the rat (the repeated acquisition and performance chamber; RAPC). The multiple schedule required mice to learn a new sequence of door openings leading to saccharin availability in the learning component during each session, while the sequence of door openings for the performance component remained constant across sessions. The learning and performance components alternated over the course of each test session, with different auditory stimuli signaling which component was currently in effect. To validate this paradigm, learning vs performance was evaluated in two inbred strains of mice: C57BL/6J and 129/SvJ. The hippocampal dependence of this measure was examined in lesioned C57BL/6J mice. Both strains exhibited longer latencies and higher errors in the learning compared to the performance component and evidenced declines in both measures across the trials of each session, consistent with an acquisition phenomenon. These same measures showed little or no evidence of change in the performance component. Whereas three trials per session were utilized with C57BL/65 mice in each component, behavior of 129/SvJ mice could only be sustained for two trials per component per session, demonstrating differences in testing capabilities between these two strains under these experimental conditions and thus precluding the ability to make systematic strain comparisons of learning capabilities. Hippocampal lesions in C57BL/6J mice resulted in substantially longer latencies and increased errors in the learning but not the performance component, demonstrating the importance of this region to spatial learning as measured in the RAPC. In aggregate, this positive reinforcement-based operant paradigm to evaluate murine spatial learning detects strain differences and hippocampal dependence and permits explicit differentiation of the impact of noncognitive contributions to learning measures on a within-subject, within-session basis.     

Outcomes of teen parenting programs in New Mexico

Although teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. have recently declined, the need for programs for pregnant and parenting teens remains. This report presents information from 53 programs that served pregnant and parenting teens in New Mexico between 1997 and 2000. Data on 3,194 teens, including their characteristics, the services they received, and several key outcomes, are examined. These data indicate that the programs were successful in promoting educational attainment as well as gains in employment. Prevalence of late prenatal care and low birth weight babies was lower than statewide averages, and the rate of repeat pregnancy was lower than that reported by many other programs. How these programs achieved these results is discussed.     

Developmental change in the cross-modal Stroop effect

E. M. Elliott, Cowan, and Valle-Inclan (1998) reported a cross-modal Stroop-like interference effect in adults when an auditory distractor (a color or noncolor word) occurred simultaneously with a color patch to be named. Response times were slower with color as opposed to noncolor distractors. To distinguish two accounts of this phenomenon, we tested 4- to 11-year-olds and adults. The suppression hypothesis posits that the irrelevant word enters a phonological buffer and is injurious to color naming if the participant is unable to suppress its representation in time. The concurrent processing hypothesis states that interference occurs when the distractor and the color name are lexically accessed at the same time. Our finding that the cross-modal Stroop effect occurred in young children even with a distractor presented 500 msec in advance of the color patch favors the suppression account. Development in executive functioning may also contribute to the interference effect's becoming progressively weaker with age.     

The structure of child and adolescent psychopathology: generating new hypotheses

To begin to resolve conflicts among current competing taxonomies of child and adolescent psychopathology, the authors developed an interview covering the symptoms of anxiety, depression, inattention, and disruptive behavior used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994), the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10; World Health Organization, 1992), and several implicit taxonomies. This interview will be used in the future to compare the internal and external validity of alternative taxonomies. To provide an informative framework for future hypothesis-testing studies, the authors used principal factor analysis to induce new testable hypotheses regarding the structure of this item pool in a representative sample of 1,358 children and adolescents ranging in age from 4 to 17 years. The resulting hypotheses differed from the DSM-IV, particularly in suggesting that some anxiety symptoms are part of the same syndrome as depression, whereas separation anxiety, fears, and compulsions constitute a separate anxiety dimension.     

Visual body-size adaptation and estimation of tactile distance

Estimating the size of bodies is crucial for interactions with physical and social environments. Body-size perception is malleable and can be altered using visual adaptation paradigms. However, it is unclear whether such visual adaptation effects also transfer to other modalities and influence, for example, the perception of tactile distances. In this study, we employed a visual adaptation paradigm. Participants were exposed to images of expanded or contracted versions of self- or other-identity bodies. Before and after this adaptation, they were asked to manipulate the width of body stimuli to appear as ‘normal’ as possible. We replicated an effect of visual adaptation such that the body-size selected as most ‘normal’ was larger after exposure to expanded and thinner after exposure to contracted adaptation stimuli. In contrast, we did not find evidence that this adaptation effect transfers to distance estimates for paired tactile stimuli delivered to the abdomen. A Bayesian analysis showed that our data provide moderate evidence that there is no effect of visual body-size adaptation on the estimation of spatial parameters in a tactile task. This suggests that visual body-size adaptation effects do not transfer to somatosensory body-size representations.     

Stigma,Disclosure and Relationship Agency in Black Women’s Sexual Relationships with Behaviorally Bisexual Black Men

The health needs and relationships of Black women partnered with behaviorally bisexual Black men are under addressed in the public health literature. This paper explores the relationship dynamics of Black women’s sexual relationships with behaviorally bisexual Black men. We conducted thirty qualitative interviews with a group of HIV negative and HIV positive women partnered with behaviorally bisexual Black men in the San Francisco Bay Area. Women took part in a one-time qualitative interview that addressed relationships, bisexual partners, sexuality, HIV risk behaviors, and disclosure. Women described experiences of their own and their partner’s experiences of disclosure and sexual stigma, along with structural racism and masculine cultural norms that contribute to men’s non-disclosure of sex with men. The paper identifies the ways in which disclosure and stigma are experienced by a sample of women in relationships with behaviorally bisexual Black male partners, pointing to the ways in which these women demonstrate sexual agency in these relationships. These sexual narratives emphasize the ways in which Black women are at once agentic and also navigate gendered vulnerability in their relationships with bisexual men. These findings of Black women’s sexual agency present a call to develop health interventions resonant with Black women’s relationship experiences and structures of bisexual relationships.     

Re‐examination of Oostenbroek et al. (2016): evidence for neonatal imitation of tongue protrusion

The meaning, mechanism, and function of imitation in early infancy have been actively discussed since Meltzoff and Moore's (1977) report of facial and manual imitation by human neonates. Oostenbroek et al. (2016) claim to challenge the existence of early imitation and to counter all interpretations so far offered. Such claims, if true, would have implications for theories of social‐cognitive development. Here we identify 11 flaws in Oostenbroek et al.'s experimental design that biased the results toward null effects. We requested and obtained the authors’ raw data. Contrary to the authors’ conclusions, new analyses reveal significant tongue‐protrusion imitation at all four ages tested (1, 3, 6, and 9 weeks old). We explain how the authors missed this pattern and offer five recommendations for designing future experiments. Infant imitation raises fundamental issues about action representation, social learning, and brain–behavior relations. The debate about the origins and development of imitation reflects its importance to theories of developmental science.     

The Role of Language in Temporal Cognition in 6- to 10-Year-Old Children

The ability to recognize temporal patterns and position events in time emerges during the preschool years and is refined in middle childhood. This study explored individual differences in temporal cognition in relation to verbal and nonverbal abilities. Children (30 boys, 32 girls; M_age = 8;2, age range = 6;0?10;8) completed 3 temporal-cognition tasks measuring estimation of temporal distance (how far events are from the present), knowledge of conventional times of events (specific days or months of events), and flexibility in using the calendar system (arranging nonconsecutive months in order), along with assessments of nonverbal intelligence, verbal short-term memory, visual-spatial working memory, receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and reading mastery. Controlling for age, performance across temporal-cognition tasks correlated with language abilities; nonverbal abilities accounted for little to no additional variance. The findings link language skills with the acquisition of conventional time patterns; such patterns developed alongside the ability to gauge distances of events in the past or future and form an organized timeline.     

A survey of neuropsychologists’ use of validity tests with children and adolescents

A web-based survey of validity test use by North American neuropsychologists was conducted, with 282 participants meeting inclusion criteria. Respondents indicated that they use a median of one stand-alone performance validity test (PVT), one embedded PVT, and one symptom validity test (SVT) per pediatric assessment. The vast majority of respondents indicated they give at least one PVT (92%) and at least one SVT (88%) during each pediatric assessment. A meaningful difference in validity use (i.e., at least a medium effect size) was only found for those who engage in forensic work, with those clinicians giving more stand-alone PVTs than those who do not conduct forensic work. The most frequently used validity measures in pediatric assessments are presented, as are reasons participants reported for both using and not using validity tests. Limitations and qualitative comparisons to other surveys on validity test use with adults are discussed.