Trade-offs between personal immunity and reproduction in the burying beetle, N. vespilloides

We know that parental investment and immune investment are costly processes, but it is unclear which trait will be prioritised when both may be required. Here we address this question using the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, carrion breeders that exhibit biparental care of young. Our results show that immunosuppression occurs during provision of parental care. We measured Phenoloxidase (PO) on Day 1-8 of the breeding bout and results show a clear decrease in PO immediately from presentation of the breeding resource onwards. Having established baseline immune investment during breeding we then manipulated immune investment at different times by applying a wounding challenge. Beetles were wounded prior to and during the parental care period and reproductive investment quantified. Different effects on reproductive output occur depending on the timing of wounding. Challenging the immune system with wounding prior to breeding does not affect reproductive output and subsequent Lifetime Reproductive Success (LRS). LRS is also unaffected by applying an immune elicitor prior to breeding, though different arms of the immune system are up/downregulated, perhaps indicating a trade-off between cellular and humoral immunity. In contrast, wounding during breeding reduces reproductive output and to the greatest extent if the challenge is applied early in the breeding bout. Despite being immunosuppressed, breeding beetles can still respond to wounding by increasing PO, albeit not to pre-breeding levels. This upregulation of PO during breeding may affect parental investment, resulting in a reduction in reproductive output. The potential role of juvenile hormone in controlling this trade-off is discussed

Vital spaces and mental health.

The impact of social and material conditions on mental health is well established but lacking in a coherent approach. We offer the concept of 'vitality' as means of describing how environments facilitate 'feelings of being alive' that cut across existing diagnostic categories. Drawing on the work of Stern, Fuchs, Worms and Duff, we argue that vitality is not solely a quality of an individual body, but rather emerges from attunements and resonances between bodies and materials. We use vitality as a lens to explore how movements within and between assembled sets of relations can facilitate or disable feelings and expressions of being alive. Building on extended discussions of both inpatient and community-based mental healthcare, we sketch out a research agenda for analysing 'vital spaces'

Dilemmas of memory: The mind is not a tape recorder

The dynamics of memory are broadly distributed across relationships, institutions, material affordances and, of course, discursive practices. The Chancellor's memory is an attempt to show how the subject matter parsed by cognitive psychology can be lifted wholesale into a discursive approach. Discursive Psychology has its roots in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, a discipline that was acutely aware of the vacuous nature of claims to systematicity, rigor, and most notoriously replication. Dave Middleton's early work shared a concern with the linguistic steering of children's activities, having been part of the group that refined the experimental demonstration of scaffolding in parent child interactions. These studies were critical to a move in developmental psychology of placing cognitive development in a sociocultural context. Edwards and Goodwin argue that lexical development in children is poorly grasped when it is treated in terms of gradual conceptual understanding, because this implies that thinking precedes doing

Multimodality, visual methods and lived experience

View from the Top from Prof Paula Reavey Paula Reavey is Professor of Psychology and Mental Health at London South Bank University. This interview took place at the Qualitative Methods in Psychology (QMiP) and History & Philosophy of Psychology (HPP) joint 2019 conference at Cardiff Metropolitan University where Paula led a workshop on visual methods and delivered a keynote speech. Best known for her pathbreaking work on visual methods and multimodality (Reavey, 2011), she has also distinguished herself with her innovative interdisciplinary work in the field of mental health, space and embodiment. Susanne Langer (Senior Lecturer in Psychology, MMU) and Deborah Bailey-Rodriguez (Lecturer in Psychology, Middlesex University), who are both associate editors of the QMiP Bulletin, asked the questions

Creativity and the computer nerd: an exploration of attitudes

This study arises from our concern that many of our best art and design students are failing to make the most of the opportunities provided by IT because of their fear or dislike of computers. This not only deprives them of useful skills, but, even more importantly, deprives many IT based developments of their input. In this paper we investigate the relationship between attitudes to creativity and to computers among students. We quickly discard an approach based on theories of personality types as philosophically and educationally problematic. An approach based on the self-concept of artists and designers, in relation to their own creativity and to their feelings about computers, offers more hope of progress. This means that we do not try to define the attributes of "creative people". Rather, we ask what creativity means to students of art and design and relate these responses to their attitudes to computers. Self-concept depends on how the subjects see themselves within society and culture, and is liable to change as culture changes. One major instrument of cultural change at the present time is the growth of IT itself. We then describe a first attempt at using a psychological method - Kelly's Repertory Grids - to investigate the self-concept of artists and designers. It is hoped to continue with this approach in further studies over the next few years

Remembering 7/7: The collective shaping of survivors’ personal memories of the 2005 London bombing

On 7th July 2005, four explosive devices exploded in central London, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds of others. The devices were carried in rucksacks onto the London Underground train network by four young British men (Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Germaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain). All four were also killed during the blasts. Three of the devices were detonated within a minute of each other on trains in tunnels between underground stations around 08.50. The fourth was set off an hour later by Hussain on a bus in Tavistock Square; he had apparently been forced to change his plans due to train delays. The bombings had an immediate impact, with nonstop news coverage and images of the scenes being immediately relayed as the nature of the events gradually emerged over the course of the day (see Lorenzo-Dus & Bryan 2011). In the following weeks of heightened security and anxiety, there was a second round of bombings on 21st July and a police shooting at Stockwell Underground Station, in which Brazilian national Jean Charles de Menezes died. Plain-clothed police had misidentified him as one of the 21/7 bombers