Emotional contagion and the infectious service smile: A response using parody

This short essay, with accompanying script, provides an example of using parody to critically engage with common management concepts. The target of the parody is the much researched phenomenon of emotional contagion, and the genre used in the parody is horror movies. The theoretical material used is a critique of capitalism and its relationship to cannabilsm by M. Lefebvre. The paper is provided in the May 2007 issue of Noteworks, and the link to this publication of the SCOS community is given above

The Real Affects of Change

Twelve sculptured faces articulate the impacts on locals when they experienced the merging of tertiary educational institutions of which they were staff members. The surreal images depicted in the photographs reveal the emotional, or “affective” responses, to the changes that were imposed on members of organisations, and the narratives that they constructed to make sense of the mergers. Central government initiatives based on a “bigger is better” mantra drove the need to offer relevant and cost-effective courses. However, little attention was paid to the needs of local staff who were mandated to enact the structural changes. The sculptures tell their stories

Pathogenetics of alveolar capillary dysplasia with misalignment of pulmonary veins.

Alveolar capillary dysplasia with misalignment of pulmonary veins (ACDMPV) is a lethal lung developmental disorder caused by heterozygous point mutations or genomic deletion copy-number variants (CNVs) of FOXF1 or its upstream enhancer involving fetal lung-expressed long noncoding RNA genes LINC01081 and LINC01082. Using custom-designed array comparative genomic hybridization, Sanger sequencing, whole exome sequencing (WES), and bioinformatic analyses, we studied 22 new unrelated families (20 postnatal and two prenatal) with clinically diagnosed ACDMPV. We describe novel deletion CNVs at the FOXF1 locus in 13 unrelated ACDMPV patients. Together with the previously reported cases, all 31 genomic deletions in 16q24.1, pathogenic for ACDMPV, for which parental origin was determined, arose de novo with 30 of them occurring on the maternally inherited chromosome 16, strongly implicating genomic imprinting of the FOXF1 locus in human lungs. Surprisingly, we have also identified four ACDMPV families with the pathogenic variants in the FOXF1 locus that arose on paternal chromosome 16. Interestingly, a combination of the severe cardiac defects, including hypoplastic left heart, and single umbilical artery were observed only in children with deletion CNVs involving FOXF1 and its upstream enhancer. Our data demonstrate that genomic imprinting at 16q24.1 plays an important role in variable ACDMPV manifestation likely through long-range regulation of FOXF1 expression, and may be also responsible for key phenotypic features of maternal uniparental disomy 16. Moreover, in one family, WES revealed a de novo missense variant in ESRP1, potentially implicating FGF signaling in the etiology of ACDMPV

Abdominal aortic aneurysm is associated with a variant in low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a common cause of morbidity and mortality and has a significant heritability. We carried out a genome-wide association discovery study of 1866 patients with AAA and 5435 controls and replication of promising signals (lead SNP with a p value < 1 × 10-5) in 2871 additional cases and 32,687 controls and performed further follow-up in 1491 AAA and 11,060 controls. In the discovery study, nine loci demonstrated association with AAA (p < 1 × 10-5). In the replication sample, the lead SNP at one of these loci, rs1466535, located within intron 1 of low-density-lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1 (LRP1) demonstrated significant association (p = 0.0042). We confirmed the association of rs1466535 and AAA in our follow-up study (p = 0.035). In a combined analysis (6228 AAA and 49182 controls), rs1466535 had a consistent effect size and direction in all sample sets (combined p = 4.52 × 10-10, odds ratio 1.15 [1.10-1.21]). No associations were seen for either rs1466535 or the 12q13.3 locus in independent association studies of coronary artery disease, blood pressure, diabetes, or hyperlipidaemia, suggesting that this locus is specific to AAA. Gene-expression studies demonstrated a trend toward increased LRP1 expression for the rs1466535 CC genotype in arterial tissues; there was a significant (p = 0.029) 1.19-fold (1.04-1.36) increase in LRP1 expression in CC homozygotes compared to TT homozygotes in aortic adventitia. Functional studies demonstrated that rs1466535 might alter a SREBP-1 binding site and influence enhancer activity at the locus. In conclusion, this study has identified a biologically plausible genetic variant associated specifically with AAA, and we suggest that this variant has a possible functional role in LRP1 expression

Shared Genetic Risk Factors of Intracranial, Abdominal, and Thoracic Aneurysms

Background: Intracranial aneurysms (IAs), abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs), and thoracic aortic aneurysms (TAAs) all have a familial predisposition. Given that aneurysm types are known to co‐occur, we hypothesized that there may be shared genetic risk factors for IAs, AAAs, and TAAs. Methods and Results: We performed a mega‐analysis of 1000 Genomes Project‐imputed genome‐wide association study (GWAS) data of 4 previously published aneurysm cohorts: 2 IA cohorts (in total 1516 cases, 4305 controls), 1 AAA cohort (818 cases, 3004 controls), and 1 TAA cohort (760 cases, 2212 controls), and observed associations of 4 known IA, AAA, and/or TAA risk loci (9p21, 18q11, 15q21, and 2q33) with consistent effect directions in all 4 cohorts. We calculated polygenic scores based on IA‐, AAA‐, and TAA‐associated SNPs and tested these scores for association to case‐control status in the other aneurysm cohorts; this revealed no shared polygenic effects. Similarly, linkage disequilibrium–score regression analyses did not show significant correlations between any pair of aneurysm subtypes. Last, we evaluated the evidence for 14 previously published aneurysm risk single‐nucleotide polymorphisms through collaboration in extended aneurysm cohorts, with a total of 6548 cases and 16 843 controls (IA) and 4391 cases and 37 904 controls (AAA), and found nominally significant associations for IA risk locus 18q11 near RBBP8 to AAA (odds ratio [OR]=1.11; P=4.1×10−5) and for TAA risk locus 15q21 near FBN1 to AAA (OR=1.07; P=1.1×10−3). Conclusions: Although there was no evidence for polygenic overlap between IAs, AAAs, and TAAs, we found nominally significant effects of two established risk loci for IAs and TAAs in AAAs. These two loci will require further replication

The Autobiography of Melanie Klein

This document consists of the first publication of Melanie Klein's draft of her autobiography beginning with a fragment dated June 1959

'Maenads dancing before the Martyrs' memorial': Oxford women writers and the classical tradition

For prominent Victorian women writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot some degree of classical education was closely associated with successful literary ambitions, but the schools and universities where the classics were taught remained closed to them. Women achieved full membership of Oxford university after the First World War, around the same time as the compulsory Greek element of the Oxford degree was abolished. Before this, many women students had to pursue intensive courses of Greek even when their main subject of study was English or history. Aspiring writers such as Vera Brittain and Dorothy L. Sayers rushed through classical texts like theIliad and theAeneid in the original languages, later producing imaginative and often challenging reworkings of classical texts which reflect the experiences of the modern, educated woman. The adaptation of epic themes to modern forms such as the First World War memoir and the detective story is an important similarity in Sayers’ and Brittain’s literary responses to classical literature

‘Dear Stokes’: Letters from Melanie Klein about writing, painting and psychoanalysis

In 1929 Melanie Klein (1882–1960), then relatively newly arrived from Berlin in London, began six years’ psychoanalytic treatment of the writer and painter, Adrian Stokes (1902–72). During and immediately following this treatment Stokes became critically acclaimed for his books applauding Renaissance and modern art, including the avant-garde creations of the ballets russes, for their form- rather than ideas-led inspiration and for their integration of parts as a whole in the mind of the observer. Through bringing his close friends, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, to live with him and his artist wife, Margaret Mellis, in Cornwall in 1939, Stokes became the catalyst of the subsequent transformation of St Ives into an international centre of modern art which he continued to promote after the war in books and articles in which he developed the ideas of Freud and Klein in terms of the integrating effect of art on the ego through inviting oneness with its separate otherness. (For further details about the life and work of Klein and Stokes, see Grosskurth, 1986; Sayers, 2000, 2011.) Unfortunately Klein retained scarcely any letters, even from her immediate family, and none from Stokes. He retained the following letters, the originals of which (as indicated in brackets after the title of each are now with Stokes’s son, Telfer, with the Tate Gallery in London or with Stokes’s widow, Ann. They begin with Klein’s response to a letter from Stokes about Telfer’s birth on 3 October 1940, written when she was staying with the family of one of her patients in Pitlochry in Scotland. Klein to Stokes, 21 November 1940 (Telfer) Ashbank Pitlochr

Psychoanalysing Patriarchy Ills

This article takes as its starting point the psychoanalytic work of Freud, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, and its feminist development in London and Paris by Juliet Mitchell, Julia Kristeva and others. Psychotherapist Janet Sayers goes on to cite cases from her own practice, together with parallels drawn from European literature and film, to highlight the damage done by four defences (repression, depression, mania, and obsessive and schizoid fragmentation) perpetuating inflated fantasies about men and masculinity spawned by patriarchal, male-dominated society. She accordingly concludes by stressing the continuing need to address, expose and challenge the roots of these fantasties both therapeutically and politically