Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. By Heather Keenleyside. (review)

This is a review of Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century by Heather Keenleyside. It is to be published by Modern Language Review. Accepted for publication in August 2017

Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

This is a review of 'Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction' by J.C. Bernthal to be published in Modern Language Review. Submitted and accepted in April 2017

The "Caradoc Affair": An Argument for an Ethics of Place

This article develops an ethical reading of the work of Caradoc Evans focusing on My People and Taffy. My aim is to show that an ethical reading which assumes a microcosmopolitan perspective can show that the ‘Caradoc Affair’, the outrage with which Evans’s early work was received in Wales, arose from a misreading of My People. The ‘Caradoc Affair’ then acquired a life of its own and was at least partly determined by the commercial interests of the daily press, particularly the The Western Mail. Moreover, an ethical reading can show why Evans’s texts ultimately fail to engage with the Wales of his time in a meaningful way despite the great impact he had on generations of Welsh writers that followed, most notably on Dylan Thomas

Biased Recognition of Facial Affect in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder Reflects Clinical State

Cognitive theories of depression posit that perception is negatively biased in depressive disorder. Previous studies have provided empirical evidence for this notion, but left open the question whether the negative perceptual bias reflects a stable trait or the current depressive state. Here we investigated the stability of negatively biased perception over time. Emotion perception was examined in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and healthy control participants in two experiments. In the first experiment subjective biases in the recognition of facial emotional expressions were assessed. Participants were presented with faces that were morphed between sad and neutral and happy expressions and had to decide whether the face was sad or happy. The second experiment assessed automatic emotion processing by measuring the potency of emotional faces to gain access to awareness using interocular suppression. A follow-up investigation using the same tests was performed three months later. In the emotion recognition task, patients with major depression showed a shift in the criterion for the differentiation between sad and happy faces: In comparison to healthy controls, patients with MDD required a greater intensity of the happy expression to recognize a face as happy. After three months, this negative perceptual bias was reduced in comparison to the control group. The reduction in negative perceptual bias correlated with the reduction of depressive symptoms. In contrast to previous work, we found no evidence for preferential access to awareness of sad vs. happy faces. Taken together, our results indicate that MDD-related perceptual biases in emotion recognition reflect the current clinical state rather than a stable depressive trait

Individual Differences in Goal Pursuit Despite Interfering Aversion, Temptation, and Distraction

Self-control can be defined as the ability to exert control over ones impulses. Currently, most research in the area relies on self-report. Focusing on attentional control processes involved in self-control, we modified a spatial selective attentional cueing task to test three domains of self- control experimentally in one task using aversive, tempting, and neutral picture-distractors. The aims of the study were (1) to investigate individual differences in the susceptibility to aversive, tempting, and neutral distraction within one paradigm and (2) to test the association of these three self-control domains to conventional measures of self-control including self- report. The final sample consisted of 116 participants. The task required participants to identify target letters “E” or “F” presented at a cued target location while the distractors were presented. Behavioral and eyetracking data were obtained during the performance of the task. High task performance was encouraged via monetary incentives. In addition to the attentional self- control task, self-reported self-control was assessed and participants performed a color Stroop task, an unsolvable anagram task and a delay of gratification task using chocolate sweets. We found that aversion, temptation, and neutral distraction were associated with significantly increased error rates, reaction times and gaze pattern deviations. Overall task performance on our task correlated with self-reported self-control ability. Measures of aversion, temptation, and distraction showed moderate split-half reliability, but did not correlate with each other across participants. Additionally, participants who made a self-controlled decision in the delay of gratification task were less distracted by temptations in our task than participants who made an impulsive choice. Our individual differences analyses suggest that (1) the ability to endure aversion, resist temptations and ignore neutral distractions are independent of each other and (2) these three domains are related to other measures of self-control

The Pervasive Problem of Post Hoc Data Selection in Studies on Unconscious Processing

Studies on unconscious mental processes typically require that participants are unaware of some information (e.g., a visual stimulus). An important methodological question in this field of research is how to deal with data from participants who become aware of the critical stimulus according to some measure of awareness. While it has previously been argued that the post hoc selection of participants dependent on an awareness measure may often result in regression-to-the-mean artifacts (Shanks, 2017), a recent article (Sklar et al., 2021) challenged this conclusion claiming that the consideration of this statistical artifact might lead to unjustified rejections of true unconscious influences. In this reply, we explain this pervasive statistical problem with a basic and concrete example, show that Sklar et al. fundamentally mischaracterize it, and then refute the argument that the influence of the artifact has previously been overestimated. We conclude that, without safeguards, the method of post hoc data selection should never be employed in studies on unconscious processing

Charakterisierung von P2-Purinozeptoren am Herzen

UTP ist als intra- sowie extrazelluläres Molekül in allen Geweben von Säugetieren vorhanden. Die extrazelluläre Wirkung von UTP wird durch P2Y-Rezeptoren vermittelt. Extrazelluläre Stimuli aktivieren MAPK, daraus ergibt sich z. B. eine Induktion und Regulation des Zellzyklus. Extrazelluläres ATP und UTP aktiviert konzentrations- und zeitabhängig MAPK in neonatalen Ratten- sowie adulten Mauskardiomyozyten. Es wurden Antikörper für die phosphorylierte Form von p38 und ERK 1/2 eingesetzt. Durch den Einsatz von UTP und Rezeptorantagonisten konnte bei den adulten Mauskardiomyozyten eine spezifische Aktivierung bzw. Inhibition des MAPK-Signalweges gezeigt werden. Der Phosphorylierungszustand der MAPK durch UTP konnte im Vergleich zum Phosphorylierungszustand nach Inkubation mit Signalkaskadehemmstoffen reduziert werden. In den Kontraktionsuntersuchungen an menschlichen sowie Mausvorhöfen wurde kein Unterschied in der Kontraktionskraft bei KO-Mäusen sowie nach Einsatz spezifischer Rezeptorantagonisten festgestellt. ATP und UTP erhöhen den Phosphorylierungszustand von MAPK in isolierten menschlichen rechten Vorhöfen.UTP is present as an intra- and extracellular molecule in all tissues of mammals. The extracellular action of UTP is mediated by P2Y receptors. Extracellular stimuli activate MAPK, induction and regulation of the cell cycle, for example. Extracellular ATP and UTP activate MAPK in neonatal rat and adult mouse cardiomyocytes, depending on the concentration and time. Antibodies for the phosphorylated form of p38 and ERK 1/2 were used. Through the use of UTP and receptor antagonists, a specific activation or inhibition of the MAPK signal path could be shown in adult mouse cardiomyocytes. The phosphorylation state of MAPK by UTP could be reduced compared to the phosphorylation state after incubation with signal cascade inhibitors. In contraction studies on human and mouse atria, no difference was found in the force of contraction in knockout mice or after the use of specific receptor antagonists. ATP and UTP increase the state of phosphorylation of MAPK in isolated human right atria

"Berlin wählt - ich auch!"

"BERLIN WÄHLT - ICH AUCH!" "Berlin wählt - ich auch!" / Ihden-Rothkirch, Silke (Rights reserved) ( -