Monkey Grip

245 hlm;20,5 c

The circus and modernity: a commitment to "the newer" and "the newest"

This article examines the ways in which high-profile circuses of the long nineteenth century demonstrated a commitment to innovation that embraced many of the ideas and socioeconomic processes now generally accepted as belonging to or emerging out of modernity. The economic drives of capitalism, the development of the individual, and an enthusiastic embrace of new technology were all transmitted to vast audiences through the operations, performances, and linguistic declarations of the leading circuses of the period. Mobilizing the historiography of Thomas Frost and his first diachronic history of the British circus, Circus Life and Circus Celebrities, first published in 1875, the author examines the ways in which leading nineteenth-century circuses in several Western industrialized nations embodied ideas about what it was to be modern, functioning as a metonym for modernity. The article proposes moreover that the circus’s demonstrations of modernity in action contributed to the genre’s immense popularity

Oxytocin and vasopressin in the human brain: social neuropeptides for translational medicine

The neuropeptides oxytocin ( OXT ) and arginine vasopressin ( AVP ) are evolutionarily highly conserved mediators in the regulation of complex social cognition and behaviour. Recent studies have investigated the effects of OXT and AVP on human social interaction, the genetic mechanisms of inter-individual variation in social neuropeptide signalling and the actions of OXT and AVP in the human brain as revealed by neuroimaging. These data have advanced our understanding of the mechanisms by which these neuropeptides contribute to human social behaviour. OXT and AVP are emerging as targets for novel treatment approaches — particularly in synergistic combination with psychotherapy — for mental disorders characterized by social dysfunction, such as autism, social anxiety disorder, borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia