Compounding the Triple Jeopardy:

Over the last 15 years, societal awareness of spouse abuse has resulted in an extensive network of services, legislative reform, and research initiatives focused on increasing the public response to this serious social problem. More recently, battering in intimate lesbian relationships has gained the attention of women's and gay/lesbian organizations that deal with domestic violence issues. Lesbians in violent relationships differ significantly from heterosexual couples where battering occurs due to the powerful effect of societal homophobia that silences them from seeking help. This article will address the unique challenges faced by lesbians of color in violent relationships due to the interface not only between violence and homophobia, but racism as well. Analysis of community response by lesbians of color, and clinical issues presented in therapy by lesbians of color who are battered will also be discussed.     

Contextualising the Quebec Charter of Values: how the Muslim ‘Other’ is conceptualised in Quebec

At varying points in Quebec’s recent history, political parties have gained prominence through employing identity politics, framing Muslims as a threatening ‘Other’. This occurred during the Reasonable Accommodation debates from 2006 to 2008 and more recently in discussions over Bill 60, a proposed law that would have prohibited government employees or employees of state-funded institutions from wearing conspicuous forms of religious attire. This article attempts to contextualise the anti-Muslim fallout which resulted from Bill 60, arguing that it was symptomatic of pre-existing fears of a threatening ‘Other’. Through examining how Quebec identity was transformed in the 1960s, this article will demonstrate how the values proceeding from this era influenced state policies to preserve the white francophone majoritarian culture. In the post-9/11 context, this has resulted in Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Muslim bias permeating political and media discourses in Quebec on the grounds of asserting gender equality and secularist ideals.     

Accommodating variation: dialects, idiolects, and speech processing

Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether different kinds of variation lead to different cognitive and behavioral adjustments. Specifically, we compare adjustments to the same acoustic consequence when it is due to context-independent variation (resulting from articulatory properties unique to a speaker) versus context-conditioned variation (resulting from common articulatory properties of speakers who share a dialect). The contrasting results for these two cases show that the source of a particular acoustic-phonetic variation affects how that variation is handled by the perceptual system. We also show that changes in perceptual representations do not necessarily lead to changes in production.     

Impaired long-term potentiation and enhanced neuronal excitability in the amygdala of CaV1.3 knockout mice

Previously, we demonstrated that mice in which the gene for the L-type voltage-gated calcium channel Ca_V1.3 is deleted (Ca_V1.3 knockout mice) exhibit an impaired ability to consolidate contextually-conditioned fear. Given that this form of Pavlovian fear conditioning is critically dependent on the basolateral complex of the amygdala (BLA), we were interested in the mechanisms by which Ca_V1.3 contributes to BLA neurophysiology. In the present study, we used in vitro amygdala slices prepared from Ca_V1.3 knockout mice and wild-type littermates to explore the role of Ca_V1.3 in long-term potentiation (LTP) and intrinsic neuronal excitability in the BLA. We found that LTP in the lateral nucleus (LA) of the BLA, induced by high-frequency stimulation of the external capsule, was significantly reduced in Ca_V1.3 knockout mice. Additionally, we found that BLA principal neurons from Ca_V1.3 knockout mice were hyperexcitable, exhibiting significant increases in firing rates and decreased interspike intervals in response to prolonged somatic depolarization. This aberrant increase in neuronal excitability appears to be at least in part due to a concomitant reduction in the slow component of the post-burst afterhyperpolarization. Together, these results demonstrate altered neuronal function in the BLA of Ca_V1.3 knockout mice which may account for the impaired ability of these mice to consolidate contextually-conditioned fear.     

Near-field visual acuity of pigeons: effects of head location and stimulus luminance.

Two pigeons were trained to discriminate a grating stimulus from a blank stimulus of equivalent luminance in a three-key chamber. The stimuli and blanks were presented behind a transparent center key. The procedure was a conditional discrimination in which pecks on the left key were reinforced if the blank had been present behind the center key and pecks on the right key were reinforced if the grating had been present behind the center key. The spatial frequency of the stimuli was varied in each session from four to 29.5 lines per millimeter in accordance with a variation of the method of constant stimuli. The number of lines per millimeter that the subjects could discriminate at threshold was determined from psychometric functions. Data were collected at five values of stimulus luminance ranging from--0.07 to 3.29 log cd/m2. The distance from the stimulus to the anterior nodal point of the eye, which was determined from measurements taken from high-speed motion-picture photographs of three additional pigeons and published intraocular measurements, was 62.0 mm. This distance and the grating detection thresholds were used to calculate the visual acuity of the birds at each level of luminance. Acuity improved with increasing luminance to a peak value of 0.52, which corresponds to a visual angle of 1.92 min, at a luminance of 2.33 log cd/m2. Further increase in luminance produced a small decline in acuity.     

Subordinating Truth – Is <Emphasis Type="Italic">Acceptability</Emphasis> Acceptable?

Argumentation logicians have recognized a specter of relativism to haunt their philosophy of argument. However, their attempts to dispel pernicious relativism by invoking notions of a universal audience or a community of model interlocutors have not been entirely successful. In fact, their various discussions of a universal audience invoke the context-eschewing formalism of Kant’s categorical imperative. Moreover, they embrace the Kantian method for resolving the antinomies that continually vacillates between opposing extremes – here between a transcendent universal audience and a context-embedded particular audience. This tack ironically restores the very external mediation they thought to obviate in their aim to ‘dethrone’ the absolutism and totalitarianism of formal logic with a democratic turn to audience adherence, the acceptability of premises and inferential links, and a contextual, or participant-relative, notion of cogency.     

Reasonable Partiality and Animal Ethics

Moral psychology is often ignored in ethical theory, making applied ethics difficult to achieve in practice. This is particularly true in the new field of animal ethics. One key feature of moral psychology is recognition of the moral primacy of those with whom we enjoy relationships of love and friendship – philia in Aristotles term. Although a radically new ethic for animal treatment is emerging in society, its full expression is severely limited by our exploitative uses of animals. At this historical moment, only the animals with whom we enjoy philia – companion animals – can be treated with unrestricted moral concern. This ought to be accomplished, both for its own sake and as an ideal model for the future evolution of animal ethics.     

Loneliness and belonging in narrative environments

Loneliness and belonging are often framed as psychological states affecting individuals. Their family, friendship, psychological mindset, and acquaintance networks are seen as important factors shaping experiences of loneliness and belonging, but the role of place, culture, and institutional environments are often relegated to the periphery of attention. This article adopts the lens of narrative environment to highlight the importance of environments and cultures in storying experiences of loneliness and belonging, in this instance, among students enrolled at a UK university. Focusing especially on student accommodation and the university's links (or perceived lack thereof) with its locality and the university's infrastructure, we argue for the dialectic and reciprocal relationship between students and their environment in storying experiences of loneliness and belonging. Narrative environment, we argue, encapsulates the way in which some people negotiate a sense of belonging, moving the focus beyond individual psychology and immediate social networks, to the impact of institutional and environmental culture.     

志愿者在晚期肿瘤适度治疗中的重要作用

对于晚期肿瘤患者,舒缓治疗和宁养服务是WHO推荐的适度治疗,更是一种“积极治疗”,特别体现在提供社会、心理、灵性关怀及支持系统,帮助患者尽可能以积极的态度活着,直到死亡。本文探讨了志愿者在晚期肿瘤适度治疗中的重要角色,发挥作用的机制,并提出对我国舒缓治疗和宁养志愿服务发展的思考与建议。     

Success and the aftermath of surrender

This paper first argues that a state can justifiably fight a hopeless war of self-defense when its enemy determines to massacre its people after it surrenders or is defeated. The main reason is that, in this situation, even if the victim state surrenders, it still has to suffer from harms that are similar to or worse than the harms involved in fighting a hopeless war. This paper then discusses some complicated issues raised by applying this argument to various situations in which the victims of war and the victims of massacre are not identical. I argue that, when the victims of massacre are randomly chosen, the victim state can justifiably fight such a war. When the victims of massacre belong to a specific group of people, the victim state should not fight such a war, even though the victims of massacre can defend themselves. This paper finally comments on an alternative approach to addressing the same issue.