Memories of childhood in post-war Grimsby

This paper details the vivid memories of the author’s childhood in the fishing port of Grimsby, shortly after the Second World War. It was a time of shortages, overcrowding, improvisation and cannibalisation of anything that could be re-used. In time it became a period of reconstruction but not without its upheavals and difficulties. It begins in the ‘old town’ of workers’ small terrace houses, typically in a poor state of repair. Then it moves to the ‘new’ council estates. Similarly, the narrative also begins with a ‘Victorian’ technology of steam, coal and horses with very few petrol-engined vehicles and moves to the very beginnings of early consumer society. The principal analytic content of the paper concerns the status of what is clearly a ‘personal history’ – if that is not too great a contradiction – or as the author suggests: my story. The obvious ‘critical’ response – that it could have been otherwise – is contrasted against the suggestion that this story is a non-negotiable foundation of the author’s identity and that this ‘critical’ response is not appropriate. Some of the interdisciplinary options thrown up by this problem are considered

The relationship between early neural responses to emotional faces at age 3 and later autism and anxiety symptoms in adolescents with autism

Both autism spectrum (ASD) and anxiety disorders are associated with atypical neural and attentional responses to emotional faces, differing in affective face processing from typically developing peers. Within a longitudinal study of children with ASD (23 male, 3 female), we hypothesized that early ERPs to emotional faces would predict concurrent and later ASD and anxiety symptoms. Greater response amplitude to fearful faces corresponded to greater social communication difficulties at age 3, and less improvement by age 14. Faster ERPs to neutral faces predicted greater ASD symptom improvement over time, lower ASD severity in adolescence, and lower anxiety in adolescence. Early individual differences in processing of emotional stimuli likely reflect a unique predictive contribution from social brain circuitry early in life