Reckonings with the past: a cultural geography of (re)narrating women's histories through popular culture

Pivoting on the creation of a feminist revisionist history, this project establishes a cultural geography of the narration or re-narration of the histories, lives and achievements of female historical figures through different forms of popular culture. To achieve this, this project explores the We Are Bess photography exhibition, the children’s non-fiction book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, and the film Hidden Figures. Focusing its attention on the present-day engagement with history, this project explores the successes, complexities and critiques of creating a feminist revisionist history; illustrates how individual histories can be used to discuss broader theoretical ideas in feminist geography; and reveals the interconnected nature of women’s experiences past and present

Acute alcohol administration dampens central extended amygdala reactivity.

Alcohol use is common, imposes a staggering burden on public health, and often resists treatment. The central extended amygdala (EAc)-including the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST) and the central nucleus of the amygdala (Ce)-plays a key role in prominent neuroscientific models of alcohol drinking, but the relevance of these regions to acute alcohol consumption in humans remains poorly understood. Using a single-blind, randomized-groups design, multiband fMRI data were acquired from 49 social drinkers while they performed a well-established emotional faces paradigm after consuming either alcohol or placebo. Relative to placebo, alcohol significantly dampened reactivity to emotional faces in the BST. To rigorously assess potential regional differences in activation, data were extracted from unbiased, anatomically predefined regions of interest. Analyses revealed similar levels of dampening in the BST and Ce. In short, alcohol transiently reduces reactivity to emotional faces and it does so similarly across the two major divisions of the human EAc. These observations reinforce the translational relevance of addiction models derived from preclinical work in rodents and provide new insights into the neural systems most relevant to the consumption of alcohol and to the initial development of alcohol abuse in humans

Failure to Filter: Anxious Individuals Show Inefficient Gating of Threat from Working Memory

Dispositional anxiety is a well-established risk factor for the development of psychiatric disorders along the internalizing spectrum,including anxiety and depression. Importantly, many of the maladaptive behaviors characteristic of anxiety, such as anticipatory apprehension, occur when threat is absent.This raises the possibility that anxious individuals are less efficient at gating threat’s access to working memory, a limited capacity work space where information is actively retained, manipulated, and used to flexibly guide goal-directed behavior when it is no longer present in the external environment. Using a well-validated neurophysiological index of working memory storage, we demonstrate that threat-related distracters were difficult to filter on average and that this difficulty was exaggerated among anxious individuals. These results indicate that dispositionally anxious individuals allocate excessive working memory storage to threat,even when it is irrelevant to the task at hand. More broadly,these results provide a novel framework for understanding the maladaptive thoughts and actions characteristic of internalizing disorders

Maritime Stock Prices and Information Flows: A Cointegration Study

In this study, the issue of how global maritime stock prices influence the stock prices of large transportation companies in the U.S. and other large markets is examined. Maritime stocks are chosen because they are central in global trade and thus may be good indicators of future global stock market and economic trends. Maritime companies are often owned by families or governments and are traded in stock markets with lower standards of accountability, hence information flows from maritime stocks may be slower than flows from other stocks. Cointegration and vector error-correction analysis is used to analyze the short-term and long-term relationships between maritime stocks, rail stocks, and trucking stocks. Evidence is found of a gradual diffusion of information from maritime stock prices to large rail or trucking stocks. This suggests that price changes in maritime stocks may help predict changes in prices in non-maritime transportation stocks

Neural circuitry governing anxious individuals’ mis-allocation of working memory to threat

Dispositional anxiety is a trait-like phenotype that confers increased risk for a range of debilitating neuropsychiatric disorders. Like many patients with anxiety disorders, individuals with elevated levels of dispositional anxiety are prone to intrusive and distressing thoughts in the absence of immediate threat. Recent electrophysiological research suggests that these symptoms are rooted in the misallocation of working memory (WM) resources to threat-related information. Here, functional MRI was used to identify the network of brain regions that support WM for faces and to quantify the allocation of neural resources to threat-related distracters in 81 young adults. Results revealed widespread evidence of mis-allocation. This was evident in both face-selective regions of the fusiform cortex and domain-general regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices. This bias was exaggerated among individuals with a more anxious disposition. Mediation analyses provided compelling evidence that anxious individuals’ tendency to mis-allocate WM resources to threat-related distracters is statistically explained by heightened amygdala reactivity. Collectively, these results provide a neurocognitive framework for understanding the pathways linking anxious phenotypes to the development of internalizing psychopathology and set the stage for developing improved intervention strategies

Moving beyond the ‘language problem': developing an understanding of the intersections of health, language and immigration status in interpreter-mediated health encounters

Health systems internationally are dealing with greater diversity in patient populations. However the focus on ‘the language problem’ has meant little attention is paid to diversity within and between migrant populations; and how interpreted consultations are influenced by intersecting migratory, ethnicity and sociodemographic variables. Our analysis of the experiences of patients, health care providers and interpreters in Scotland evidences the need to move beyond language, addressing multiple hidden inequalities in health care access and provision that operate in both clinic and, especially, home-based settings. We call for a practice-evidenced research agenda promoting cultural communication across health care and home settings, acknowledging immigration status as a social determinant of health. Sur le plan international, des systèmes de santé font face à une diversité croissante dans ses populations de patients. Cependant, l’accent sur ‘le problème de langue’ se traduit dans une manque d’attention à la diversité a l’intérieur même et entre des populations des migrants; et la façon par laquelle des variables migratoire, ethnique et sociodémographique influencent elles-mêmes des consultations interprétées. Notre analyse des expériences des patients, des professionnels fournissant de soins de santé et des interprètes offre des preuves du besoin de dépasser le problème de langue. Et en faisant cela, nous adressons des multiples inégalités, souvent cachées dans des contextes de soins de santé, dans les milieux clinique et domicile. Nous proposons un programme de recherche basé sur la pratique, qui favorise la communication culturelle dans des milieux clinique et domicile, et qui reconnait le statut d’immigration comme un déterminant social de la santé

Alphabeasts

This book was created for Jan Baker\u27s artists\u27 book class. Drawings by Wheeler School kindergartners: Vincent Erfe, Ariana Rork, Adam Wartman, Hal Woodcome, Danny Zinnohttps://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_bookmark_animals/1015/thumbnail.jp

Distinct processing of aversive experience in amygdala subregions

Background The amygdala is an anatomically complex medial temporal brain structure whose subregions are considered to serve distinct functions. However, their precise role in mediating human aversive experience remains ill understood. Methods We used functional MRI in 39 healthy volunteers with varying levels of trait anxiety to assess distinct contributions of the basolateral (BLA) and centromedial amygdala (CMA) to anticipation and experience of aversive events. Additionally, we examined the relationship between any identified functional subspecialisation and measures of subjective reported aversion and trait anxiety. Results Our results show that the CMA is responsive to aversive outcomes, but insensitive to predictive aversive cues. In contrast, the BLA encodes an aversive prediction error that quantifies whether cues and outcomes are worse than expected. A neural representation within the BLA for distinct threat levels was mirrored in self-reported subjective anxiety across individuals. Furthermore, trait-anxious individuals were characterised by indiscriminately heightened BLA activity in response to aversive cues, irrespective of actual threat level. Conclusions Our results demonstrate that amygdala subregions are distinctly engaged in processing of aversive experience, with elevated and undifferentiated BLA responses to threat emerging as a potential neurobiological mediator of vulnerability to anxiety disorders