Handedness and social anxiety:using Bryden's research as a catalyst to explore the influence of familial sinistrality and degree of handedness

Phil Bryden's work has impacted on many areas of laterality, including degree and measurement of hand preference, as well as influences of familial sinistrality (FS). For example, Bryden[(1977). Measuring handedness with questionnaires. Neuropsychologia, 15, 617–624] is a well-cited and influential paper that remains relevant to this day. Inspired by this we extended our analysis of the relationship between handedness and anxiety in a number of ways. We used familial handedness and strength of handedness to examine their potential influences on anxiety, and extended our research by exploring their relationship to social anxiety, using the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN). Inconsistent left-handers (ILH) were found to be more socially anxious. In all categories of SPIN except avoidance, ILH were significantly more anxious than consistent right- and left-handers. There were FS differences between ILH with a first degree left-handed relative (FS+) compared to ILH with no first degree left-handed relative (FS−) on all categories of anxiety scores. Within FS+ participants, ILH had significantly higher anxiety scores, compared with consistent handers across all categories. This suggests that ILH's social anxiety may be influenced by a close left-handed relative. Inspired by examining Bryden's work for this special issue, we will continue to add both strength of preference and familial handedness to our work

Review of 'The Complete Stories' and 'Ransom' by David Malouf.

Review of David Malouf's 'Complete Stories' and his novel 'Ransom'

The social construction of identity in nineteenth century geography schoolbooks

This study analyzes the social construction of identity in geography schoolbooks published in the United States between 1802 and 1897. A growing literature on recognizing differences among varying and shifting identities informs this dissertation. During the nineteenth century, the United States was in the process of constructing a self-image or national identity, and the social, cultural, political, and economic interests of this time shaped the character of this national identity. The public education system was one site where this image construction took place. Through its construction and maintenance in schools, particularly in textbooks, a national identity was passed on to succeeding generations. Geography schoolbooks emphasized people and places, delineating identities by establishing a Eurocentric, middle-class, masculinist, Protestant norm, and then specifying variance and deficiencies from and to that norm. After examining over three-hundred geography schoolbooks, I chose nineteen textbooks that I decided reflect the overall character of nineteenth century geography schoolbooks published in the United States for common schools. Geared towards younger learners, these books contained representations of the world for the student. Content analysis of visual and written representations allows us to see how the variables of class, religion, gender, and race intersected and influenced each other as they were used to construct an ideal national identity for the United States. Visual imagery often regarded as decorative enhancement for the written text receives much attention in this study because visuals convey immediate information. Graphic images in these schoolbooks sometimes enhanced written text, but quite often they stood alone as the single source of information, thus they deserve critical analysis. vu Representations both visual and written, were used to construct a national identity that encouraged the nation\u27s youth to see explicitly what they were and what they were not. Through the images depicted of the United States and the world beyond, geography schoolbooks molded Americans\u27 views of themselves by describing and defining the United States as well as by highlighting supposed differences between their country and other parts of the world

The home fronts of Iowa, 1940-1945

Iowa\u27s citizens during World War II became soldiers in their loyalty, energy, and commitment as they fought on one or more of the home fronts. These four home fronts (historic terms) were the farm, production, community, and kitchen fronts. The farm front as part of the Food for Freedom campaign produced corn, soybeans, eggs, pork, beef, milk, and hemp for the Armed Services and the Allies. Iowa\u27s farmers faced labor and machinery shortages yet produced record amounts of crops and animals. This prosperity, however, cost Iowa some of its valuable topsoil and initiated a turn toward a factory perspective of farming. The production front manufactured bombs at the Iowa Ordnance Plant and machine-gun bullets at the Des Moines Ordnance Plant along with various sub-contracts at factories located throughout the state. Iowans were extremely productive soldiers of war, producing such items as mule packs, airplane parts, and highly-purified uranium. The community front supported the eight national war bond drives through various campaign tactics and conducted assorted scrap drives for iron, paper, and rubber among other items. Iowa\u27s small towns provided the organizational structures and personal motivation to ensure success in these monetary and salvage contributions for the national war effort. The community front, as a collection of families, sent young men to serve as soldiers and sailors as its greatest sacrifice to the war. And the kitchen front conserved valuable food resources through national rationing efforts, produced fruits and vegetables with Victory gardens, and preserved garden produce by home canning as well as contributing to fat and metal drives. Wartime housewives, complete with military imagery and acronyms, provided the necessary nutritional meals, despite shortages and rationing, for Iowa\u27s war workers. This complete involvement of Iowa\u27s citizens in the war effort through the four home fronts complemented the political and emotional support of the Second World War

College Experiences of Individuals with Mild to Moderate Intellectual Disabilities: Stories of Our Success

College Experiences of Individuals with Mild to Moderate Intellectual Disabilities: Stories of Our Succes

Effects of Disability Disclosure and Acknowledgment on Ratings of Interviewees with Visible Disabilities

While some authors stress the benefits of disclosing one\u27s disability prior to the interview in order to eliminate interviewer surprise, attention-related research suggests that such disclosure is likely to result in self-focused thinking by the interviewer, reducing the ability to judge performance accurately. Similarly, verbal acknowledgment of a visible disability during an interview has been predicted to reduce interviewer anxiety, yet some authors contend that acknowledgment is a violation of the rules of interviewing and adds to discomfort. The present research addressed the question: What are the effects of an applicant\u27s pre-interview disability disclosure and disability acknowledgment during the interview? Using a selection simulation, Study 1 (n=109) examined the effects of both disability disclosure and acknowledgement on post-interview ratings. Study 2 (n=126) isolated disability disclosure prior to the interview and examined only its pre-interview effects. Study 1 results revealed a main effect of disclosure for males, such that they rated the applicant as more anxious when she disclosed than when she did not. A disclosure x acknowledgment interaction indicated that the personality of the applicant who disclosed prior to the interview was rated more positively by male interviewers when she did not acknowledge during the interview, as compared to when she acknowledged. A second interaction revealed that for both male and female participants, the applicant who did not disclose received more favorable communication skills ratings when she acknowledged at some point during the interview, as compared to not acknowledging

Mis-Education and the Crisis in Male Subjectivity: William Godwin’s Middle Novels, 1799–1817

In the tumultuous period of the 1790s, the English anarchist philosopher William Godwin was a seminal figure whose 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness stood as a touchstone for the reform movement in Britain. Godwin is primarily known today as the author of Political Justice and Things As They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a 1794 novel which many readers, past and present, have regarded as a fictionalized allegory of the philosophical claims outlined in Political Justice. Although his fame as a novelist largely rests on this one popular novel, Godwin wrote and published five more novels after Caleb Williams: St. Leon (1799); Fleetwood (1805); Mandeville (1817); Cloudesley (1830); and, finally, Deloraine (1833). Other than Caleb Williams, however, Godwin’s novels are little read today, even by specialists in the literature of the period. Moreover, relative to Caleb Williams, these other novels have received only marginal critical attention. The bulk of the scholarly work on Godwin still tends to focus on either his Political Justice or Caleb Williams. Furthermore, most earlier studies of Godwin’s novels have placed his texts in an almost exclusive dialogue with the radical “jacobin” political climate of 1790s England, or with the philosophical rationalism of Political Justice. My own examination of Godwin’s fiction differs in emphasis from most of these earlier studies in its sustained focus on the development of masculine identity within the context of personal agency, language, and modes of self-expression. I take as my starting point Godwin’s Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, a 1797 collection of essays in which he puts forth an educational theory for the proper development of virtue, benevolence, and rational potential in the young mind. In the Enquirer, Godwin details the pedagogical and social conditions necessary for the creation of an “active” and “well regulated” mind committed to benevolence and reason. He also acknowledges, however, the blighting effects of “unfavourable circumstances” in childhood-the range of unpropitious pedagogical and social conditions that conspire to produce a mind that is not “well regulated.” As I argue in this study, Godwin’s educational theory carries within it a model of ww-education that serves as a productive framework for examining his fiction. In this study, I provide readings of four of Godwin’s novels—Caleb Williams, St. Leon, Fleetwood, and Mandeville—examming how this model of “mis-education” operates in all four texts in distinctly different ways, shaping the psychological development of the protagonists in such a way that their later years are marked by crises in their experience of identity and, more specifically, in their sense of masculine authority. Although a handful of critics have briefly examined the forms of “miseducation” experienced by each of these Godwinian heroes, none has explored the effects of such mis-education within the context of identity formation-that is, on the hero’s ability to self-actualize without the experience of profound personal and social alienation. This study thus offers a detailed examination of a cluster of interdependent themes that has received little or no critical attention in the scholarly examinations of these four novels: the central role that education, as the totalizing effect of one’s childhood lessons and experiences, has on the moral and psychological development of the subject, and-more specifically-how unfavourable circumstances conspire, in these texts, to create forms of “mis-education” that lead to later crises in identity and subjectivity; the importance of personal agency in the development of the subject-specifically, the ability to have “authorship” over the narratives of one’s life; the roles that language, self-expression, the imagination, and social convention play in the development of such agency and in the formation of an especially masculine identity; and, finally, the mediating function of women in the development of this masculine identity. The readings offered in this study should enrich the critical discussion of Godwin’s fiction, especially as such discussion relates to themes of gender and identity formation