It\u27s My Centennial! said Tom Swiftly

Starting in 1910, boys grew up devouring the adventures of Tom Swift, a sterling hero and natural scientific genius created by Edward Stratemeyer. Many of Tom\u27s inventions predated technological developments in real life -- electric cars, seacopters, and houses on wheels. In fact, some say that the Tom Swift tales laid the groundwork for American science fiction

Young Tom Wharton

This working paper is a draft of the first three chapters of a biography of Thomas, 5th Baron, 1st Earl, and 1st Marquess of Wharton (1648-1715). It traces the development of young Thomas (Tom to his family and eventually to the political world of England) from his birth until his return from France in 1666. The reader may be relieved to know that the formidable array of genealogical notes in Chapter I will eventually be reduced into an appendix on the Wharton family and that the table of abbreviations covers the whole book, not merely the first three chapters. Some of the notes, it should be added, are made necessary by the vast amount of misinformation that has accreted around the Whartons. Nice people will not bother to read them

Processing of false belief passages during natural story comprehension: An fMRI study

The neural correlates of theory of mind (ToM) are typically studied using paradigms which require participants to draw explicit, task-related inferences (e.g., in the false belief task). In a natural setup, such as listening to stories, false belief mentalizing occurs incidentally as part of narrative processing. In our experiment, participants listened to auditorily presented stories with false belief passages (implicit false belief processing) and immediately after each story answered comprehension questions (explicit false belief processing), while neural responses were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). All stories included (among other situations) one false belief condition and one closely matched control condition. For the implicit ToM processing, we modeled the hemodynamic response during the false belief passages in the story and compared it to the hemodynamic response during the closely matched control passages. For implicit mentalizing, we found activation in typical ToM processing regions, that is the angular gyrus (AG), superior medial frontal gyrus (SmFG), precuneus (PCUN), middle temporal gyrus (MTG) as well as in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) billaterally. For explicit ToM, we only found AG activation. The conjunction analysis highlighted the left AG and MTG as well as the bilateral IFG as overlapping ToM processing regions for both implicit and explicit modes. Implicit ToM processing during listening to false belief passages, recruits the left SmFG and billateral PCUN in addition to the “mentalizing network” known form explicit processing tasks

What Am I Thinking Right Now?: Social Anxiety Symptomology and Its Impact on Theory of Mind Ability

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to accurately read other peoples’ minds, which includes their intentions, thoughts, and emotions (Buhlmann, Wacker, & Dziobek, 2015). Individuals with low ToM often experience anxiety in family and social life (Coupland, 2001; Ribeiro & Fearon, 2010), which is a common feature of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Because of this connection, the present study looks at the relationship between social anxiety and ToM. I hypothesized that individuals with greater SAD symptoms would exhibit decreased ToM ability, which was measured using the Hinting Task, the Story Comprehension Task, and the Reading the Mind with the Eyes Task. Furthermore, previous research has shown that individuals with SAD show an attentional bias towards negative facial expressions (Ribeiro & Fearon, 2010). Therefore, I hypothesized that individuals with greater SAD symptoms would exhibit attentional biases toward the negatively valenced expressions on the eyes task, resulting in decreased ToM ability. Results suggest that individuals with more avoidance of performance situations have difficulty understanding metaphorical expressions. This suggests that individuals with more social anxiety symptomology tend to exhibit decreased theory of mind ability in some aspects, partially confirming my hypothesis. Conversely, increased social anxiety symptoms were directly related to correctly identifying negatively valenced expressions on the Eyes task, suggesting that as SAD symptoms increased, so did the ability to identify negative emotions. This result, however, was only a trend. Together, the results suggest some support for the relationship between ToM and SAD and merit additional research

Spotlight: Tom Buchanan

The ICCTE-J editorial team is pleased to welcome Dr. Thomas Buchanan to the work of online journal publishing in service to the ICCTE community. Tom is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education at George Fox University

Lawyering for Social Justice

It is an honor, albeit a sad one, to be invited to write this Essay in commemoration of Tom Stoddard and as commentary on his final publication. I first met Tom in the late 1970s, when we both joined the Board of Directors of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. Both of us were American Civil Liberties Union staff attorneys, Tom for the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and I for the Reproducfive Freedom Project in the national office. Later, for the last half of the 1980s, Tom was the Executive Director of Lambda during the same period that I was Director of the ACLU Lesbian and Gay Rights and AIDS Projects. Much of my professional life has been spent in tandem with Tom\u27s, and his absence creates a giant gap in that world. Not many of us are pioneers, but Tom Stoddard was. He fought for equality for lesbian and gay Americans before it was respectable; he was proudly out as a gay man before it was professionally safe to be out; and he taught one of the first courses centering on the rights of lesbians and gay men in any American law school. He lived to see the lesbian and gay civil rights struggle take its place with others as a campaign for human dignity and justice

Ariel - Volume 4 Number 2

Editors David A. Jacoby Eugenia Miller Tom Williams Associate Editors Paul Bialas Terry Burt Michael Leo Gail Tenikat Editor Emeritus and Business Manager Richard J. Bonnano Movie Editor Robert Breckenridge Staff Richard Blutstein Mary F. Buechler Steve Glinks Len Grasman Alice M. Johnson J. D. Kanofsky Tom Lehman Dave Mayer Bernie Odd

Theory of mind in utterance interpretation: the case from clinical pragmatics

The cognitive basis of utterance interpretation is an area that continues to provoke intense theoretical debate among pragmatists. That utterance interpretation involves some type of mind-reading or theory of mind (ToM) is indisputable. However, theorists are divided on the exact nature of this ToM-based mechanism. In this paper, it is argued that the only type of ToM-based mechanism that can adequately represent the cognitive basis of utterance interpretation is one which reflects the rational, intentional, holistic character of interpretation. Such a ToM-based mechanism is supported on conceptual and empirical grounds. Empirical support for this view derives from the study of children and adults with pragmatic disorders. Specifically, three types of clinical case are considered. In the first case, evidence is advanced which indicates that individuals with pragmatic disorders exhibit deficits in reasoning and the use of inferences. These deficits compromise the ability of children and adults with pragmatic disorders to comply with the rational dimension of utterance interpretation

Bedlam in mind: seeing and reading historical images of madness

In this article I explore mythical Bedlam of popular imaginings. London's Bethlem Hospital was for centuries a unique institution caring for the insane and its alter ego 'Bedlam' influenced popular stereotypes of insanity. For instance, while the type of vagrant beggar known as a 'Tom of Bedlam' was said to have disappeared from English society with the Restoration, the figure of Mad Tom retained a visual and vocal presence within popular musical culture from the seventeenth century up to the present era. Using the ballad 'Mad Tom o' Bedlam' as a case study, I illustrate how an early modern stereotype of madness has maintained continuity within a popular song tradition whilst undergoing cultural change