Exploring the Lived Experience of Female Users of Online Sexual Activities in the UK

The Internet has long been considered a platform that provides easy access to sexual content, while also offering anonymity and affordability. In spite of its increased prevalence, an insufficient number of studies have focused on the experiences of females who participate in online sexual activity. It may be necessary for therapists to support females who present with concerns regarding cybersex usage; however, research indicates clinical practitioners do not consider themselves suitably prepared to work effectively with such clients, due to insufficient training and a general lack of empirical research in the literature. Thus, it appears there is a need for further research in this field to offer insight and guidance for clinicians. This qualitative research aimed to explore how females within the United Kingdom experience their online sexual lives, and the positive and negative feelings that such experiences engender. The phenomenological epistemology and relativist ontology underpinning this research focused on comprehending the participants’ subjective lived experiences; this emphasis appears to be in line with the philosophical basis of counselling psychology. Four female participants, all older than 18 years old, who had been online in the previous three months to engage in online sexual activity, took part in online, semi-structured interviews. Interview transcripts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, which generated three master themes: 1) an enticing space; 2) paradoxical attitudes; and 3) the painful ramifications. Each theme contained a number of sub-themes. Novel insights with regard to the interplay between how women make meaning and their responses emphasise the multifaced and complicated experience of participants with respect to online sexual activity. The study findings are reviewed with respect to the broader literature. Various consequences for practice are considered, including that clinicians should be encouraged to diverge from a pathological model to one that promotes the well-being of women and validates their emotions and experiences. It is expected that giving insight into the lived experiences of women who participate in online sexual activity could enable practitioners to empathise with and show more understanding of them when they are seeking support

The empirical fluctuation pattern of E. coli division control

In physics, it is customary to represent the fluctuations of a stochastic system at steady state in terms of linear response to small random perturbations. Previous work has shown that the same framework describes effectively the trade-off between cell-to-cell variability and correction in the control of cell division of single cells. However, previous analyses were motivated by specific models and limited to a subset of the measured variables. For example, most analyses neglected the role of growth rate variability. Here, we take a comprehensive approach and consider several sets of available data from both microcolonies and microfluidic devices in different growth conditions. We evaluate all the coupling coefficients between the three main measured variables (interdivision times, cell sizes and individual-cell growth rates). The linear-response framework correctly predicts consistency relations between independent experimental measurements, which confirms its validity. Additionally, the couplings between the cell-specific growth rate and the other variables are typically non zero. Finally, we use the framework to detect signatures of mechanisms in experimental data involving growth rate fluctuations, finding that (1) noise-generating coupling between size and growth rate is a consequence of inter-generation growth rate correlations and (2) the correlation patterns agree with a near-adder model where the added size has a dependence on the single-cell growth rate. Our findings define relevant constraints that any theoretical description should reproduce, and will help future studies aiming to falsify some of the competing models of the cell cycle existing today in the literature

Artificially decreasing cortical tension generates aneuploidy in mouse oocytes

Human and mouse oocytes’ developmental potential can be predicted by their mechanical properties. Their development into blastocysts requires a specific stiffness window. In this study, we combine live-cell and computational imaging, laser ablation, and biophysical measurements to investigate how deregulation of cortex tension in the oocyte contributes to early developmental failure. We focus on extra-soft cells, the most common defect in a natural population. Using two independent tools to artificially decrease cortical tension, we show that chromosome alignment is impaired in extra-soft mouse oocytes, despite normal spindle morphogenesis and dynamics, inducing aneuploidy. The main cause is a cytoplasmic increase in myosin-II activity that could sterically hinder chromosome capture. We describe here an original mode of generation of aneuploidies that could be very common in oocytes and could contribute to the high aneuploidy rate observed during female meiosis, a leading cause of infertility and congenital disorders

Mean ± SD alongside individual values for the two sets of <i>W</i>>CP and <i>W’</i>.

<p>Mean ± SD alongside individual values for the two sets of <i>W</i>>CP and <i>W’</i>.</p