It’s not a virus! Reconceptualizing and de-pathologizing music performance anxiety

Music Performance Anxiety (MPA) is one of the most widespread and debilitating challenges facing musicians, affecting significant numbers of performers in terms of both their personal and professional functioning. Although numerous interventions exist to target MPA, its prevalence remains unchanged since the first large-scale studies of the 1980s, indicating that available interventions are having limited impact. This review synthesizes and critiques existing literature in order to investigate possible reasons for the limited efficacy of current approaches to managing MPA. Key concepts discussed include conceptual and methodological challenges surrounding defining MPA, theoretical perspectives on MPA’s etiology and manifestation, and the coping strategies and interventions used to manage MPA. MPA has predominantly been investigated pathologically and defined as a negative construct manifesting in unwanted symptoms. Based on this conceptualization, interventions largely seek to manage MPA through ameliorating symptoms. This review discusses possible reasons why this approach has broadly not proved successful, including the issue of relaxation being both unrealistic and counterproductive for peak performance, issues associated with intentionally changing one’s state creating resistance thus exacerbating anxiety, and focusing on the presence of, rather than response to, symptoms. Despite 50 years of research, MPA remains an unsolved enigma and continues to adversely impact musicians both on and off the stage. Reconceptualizing MPA as a normal and adaptive response to the pressures of performance may offer a new perspective on it, in terms of its definition, assessment and management, with practical as well as theoretical implications

Using a Blended Learning Approach to support Women returning to STEM

This paper examines a blended learning model designed to support women returning to STEM after a career break and its delivery in a unique partnership between an online distance education provider and a community based equality organisation. Through this partnership additional activities such as networking events, returnships, career clinics and webinars were used in addition to a structured online Badged Open Course (BOC), which enabled a successful return to employment for many of the participants. This paper outlines the results and implications of an evaluation of this integrated model and argues that blended learning approaches need to be flexible and adaptable to be able to incorporate the needs of different groups of learners at different life-course stages, taking into consideration gender and other diversity characteristics

Senator James O. Eastland; Herman E. Talmadge; Bob Dole; Dick Clark; Edward Zorinsky; Walter D. Huddleston; S.I. Hayakawa; James B. Allen; Dick Stone; Hubert H. Humphrey; John Melcher; George McGovern; Carl T. Curtis; Milton Young; Patrick Leahy; Jesse Helms; & Richard Lugar to President Jimmy Carter, 20 October 1977

Copy typed letter signed dated 20 October 1977 from Eastland; Herman E. Talmadge; Bob Dole; Dick Clark; Edward Zorinsky; Walter D. Huddleston; S.I. Hayakawa; James B. Allen; Dick Stone; Hubert H. Humphrey; John Melcher; George McGovern; Carl T. Curtis; Milton Young; Patrick Leahy; Jesse Helms; & Richard Lugar to Carter, re: agricultural exports, farm prices, Commodity Credit Corporation; 2 pages.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/joecorr_h/1075/thumbnail.jp

Book Reviews

Review of the following books: Archaeological Excavations at Pemaquid, Maine 1965-1974 by Helen B. Camp; Colonial New England: A Historical Geography by Douglas R. McManis; Madawaska: A Chapter in Maine-New Brunswick Relations by Charlotte L. Melvin; The Flight of the Grand Eagle: Charles G. Bryant, Maine Architect and Adventurer by James. H. Mundy and Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.; The Emergence of Provincial New Hampshire, 1623-1741 by David E. Van Devente

Narration and Focalization : A Cognitivist and an Unnaturalist, Made Strange

Any new narratological theory faces the test of being applicable to much-analyzedclassics of prose fiction and of yielding new insights into narratives that have served as textbook examples of narrative strategies for decades. This essay is a constructed dialogue between imaginary narratologists who are paradigmatic proponents of two schools of thought in postclassical narratology: the cognitive and the unnatural. The two narratologists juxtapose their respective concepts and methodologies in an analysis of William Golding's late modernist classic The Inheritors, especially the narrative dynamics of "alien" Neanderthal focalization versus "naturalizing" Homo sapiens narration. Ultimately, The Inheritors reminds the cognitivist of how language-bound the readerly effects of estrangement and integration in internal focalization can be. Conversely, the same novel serves as an example for the unnaturalist of the paradoxical necessity for perceptual and emotional familiarization in our attempts to understand fundamental alterity. The parameters of cognitive and unnatural narratology may seem divergent at the outset, but in this essay their representatives find a common ground in an estranging reading of the enactive immersion in The Inheritors. Here the extraordinary embodiedness of the Neanderthal focalization is a key to a literary-allegorical reading of the Neanderthal mind as imagined by Golding. This reading, accomplished through a constructed debate between two paradigms, reflects the actual positions of the authors of this essay: Makela and Polvinen are both proponents of an approach that acknowledges the inherent syntheticity and linguistic overdeterminedness of a literary narrative as well as its "natural" enactivist pull toward bodily immersion.Peer reviewe

Limited Transcriptional Responses of Rickettsia rickettsii Exposed to Environmental Stimuli

Rickettsiae are strict obligate intracellular pathogens that alternate between arthropod and mammalian hosts in a zoonotic cycle. Typically, pathogenic bacteria that cycle between environmental sources and mammalian hosts adapt to the respective environments by coordinately regulating gene expression such that genes essential for survival and virulence are expressed only upon infection of mammals. Temperature is a common environmental signal for upregulation of virulence gene expression although other factors may also play a role. We examined the transcriptional responses of Rickettsia rickettsii, the agent of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, to a variety of environmental signals expected to be encountered during its life cycle. R. rickettsii exposed to differences in growth temperature (25°C vs. 37°C), iron limitation, and host cell species displayed nominal changes in gene expression under any of these conditions with only 0, 5, or 7 genes, respectively, changing more than 3-fold in expression levels. R. rickettsii is not totally devoid of ability to respond to temperature shifts as cold shock (37°C vs. 4°C) induced a change greater than 3-fold in up to 56 genes. Rickettsiae continuously occupy a relatively stable environment which is the cytosol of eukaryotic cells. Because of their obligate intracellular character, rickettsiae are believed to be undergoing reductive evolution to a minimal genome. We propose that their relatively constant environmental niche has led to a minimal requirement for R. rickettsii to respond to environmental changes with a consequent deletion of non-essential transcriptional response regulators. A minimal number of predicted transcriptional regulators in the R. rickettsii genome is consistent with this hypothesis