Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010

Jerwood Contemporary Makers showcases work by the new generation of UK makers. Selected by Hans Stofer (chair), Richard Slee and myself, the exhibition investigates the notion of making by bringing together a broad range of work from across craft and the visual arts. Twenty-nine makers took part, each exhibiting one work and receiving an equal share of the £30,000 prize fund. Supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. A catalogue in the form a newspaper broadsheet was produced with an essay, ‘The Making Game’ commissioned from Jeanette Winterson. A series of Monday evening events accompanied the exhibition. These included Emmanuel Cooper (ceramicist and craft writer) in conversation with Hans Stofer, Richard Slee and myself also a panel discussion exploring the notion of amateur making, chaired by Stephen Knott, (PhD student, School of Applied Art, RCA) with the research student that I supervise Emma Shercliff, (PhD student, School of Fashion & Textiles, RCA). At the National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland I conducted a gallery tour and delivered a lecture and workshop on Curating Contemporary Craft alongside curator David Littler. The exhibition received considerable press including Crafts, July/August 2010 (Dr.Jessica Hemmings), Design Week, 27 May 2010 and The Independent, 29 June 2010 (Michael Glover)

Is high self-esteem beneficial? Revisiting a classic question

Debates about the benefits of self-esteem have persisted for decades, both in the scientific literature and in the popular press. Although many researchers and lay people have argued that high self-esteem helps individuals adapt to and succeed in a variety of life domains, there is widespread skepticism about this claim. The present article takes a new look at the voluminous body of research (including several meta-analyses) examining the consequences of self-esteem for several important life domains: relationships, school, work, mental health, physical health, and antisocial behavior. Overall, the findings suggest that self-esteem is beneficial in all these domains, and that these benefits hold across age, gender, and race/ethnicity, and controlling for prior levels of the predicted outcomes and potential third variable confounds. The meta-analytic estimates of self-esteem effects (which average .10 across domains) are comparable in size to estimates for other hypothesized causal factors such as self-efficacy, positive emotionality, attachment security, and growth mindset, and larger than some generally accepted pharmaceutical interventions. Discussion focuses on several issues that are critical for evaluating the findings, including the strength of the evidence for making causal inferences, the magnitude of the effects, the importance of distinguishing between self-esteem and narcissism, and the generalizability of the results. In summary, the present findings support theoretical conceptions of self-esteem as an adaptive trait that has wide-ranging influences on healthy adjustment and adaptation, and suggest that interventions aimed at boosting self-esteem might, if properly designed and implemented, benefit individuals and society as a whole. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

The benefits of self-esteem: Reply to Krueger et al. (2022) and Brummelman (2022)

Krueger et al. (2022) argue that our review (Orth & Robins, 2022) finds benefits of self-esteem primarily for subjective outcomes and largely fails to demonstrate any "objective" benefits. We disagree with this portrayal of the findings and highlight research that provides evidence for the benefits of self-esteem using objective measures. We also address Krueger et al.'s claim that positivity bias in self-reports can account for the effects of self-esteem on subjectively assessed life outcomes, and explain how the statistical analyses used to document these effects substantially control for this bias. We maintain that there is now a large body of evidence from meta-analyses and large-scale longitudinal studies demonstrating that high self-esteem has adaptive consequences for social relationships, school, work, mental health, physical health, and antisocial behavior. Brummelman (2022) presents a compelling theoretical framework that can guide the design of interventions to improve children's self-esteem. We agree with his concerns about the need for randomized controlled trials to evaluate the efficacy of self-esteem interventions and the importance of ensuring that children's self-esteem can be raised without causing them to become narcissistic. The research reviewed in our article indicates that high self-esteem is adaptive for children, adolescents, and adults, suggesting that well-designed and effective self-esteem interventions might be beneficial for individuals of all ages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Channeled Whelk Assessment

The channeled whelk, Busycotypus canaliculatus, was sampled from three in‐shore commercially harvested resource areas in the US Mid‐Atlantic: off Ocean City, Maryland (OC); Eastern Shore of Virginia (ES); and Virginia Beach, Virginia (VB). The largest whelk measured 230mm shell length (SL) and was recorded from OC. Mean SL was largest in OC site (158.1mm), followed by ES (137.6mm), then VB (132.4mm). Both VB and ES populations showed a unimodal length‐frequency distribution with the single peak at shell length less than MLS for those regions, while OC population showed a bimodal (two peaks) distribution with the smaller peak at shell length less than the MLS for that region and larger peak at shell length greater than the MLS. Growth rate coefficient (k) was higher in males than females from all areas, and highest for both sexes in VB (Male 0.245, Female 0.155), followed by ES (Male 0.220, Female 0.151), then OC (Male 0.112, Female 0.100). The median size (SL) at 50% mature varied between resource area and sex. Males from ES and VB reached maturity at a smaller size (123mm and 121mm, respectively) than OC (134mm). Females from VB reached maturity at a smaller size (148.9mm) than ES (157.6mm) and OC (158.6mm). Fisheries recruitment was estimated to occur at corresponding age ~6 years for VB and ~ 7‐8 years for ES and OC using estimates from the von Bertalanffy growth model. Under current MLS for each area, whelk harvested from VB recruited into the fishery at a much younger age to those from OC. The probability of females reaching MLS prior to sexual maturity is quite low given current MLS

Low self-esteem prospectively predicts depression in adolescence and young adulthood

Low self-esteem and depression are strongly correlated in cross-sectional studies, yet little is known about their prospective effects on each other. The vulnerability model hypothesizes that low self-esteem serves as a risk factor for depression, whereas the scar model hypothesizes that low self-esteem is an outcome, not a cause, of depression. To test these models, the authors used 2 large longitudinal data sets, each with 4 repeated assessments between the ages of 15 and 21 years and 18 and 21 years, respectively. Cross-lagged regression analyses indicated that low self-esteem predicted subsequent levels of depression, but depression did not predict subsequent levels of self-esteem. These findings held for both men and women and after controlling for content overlap between the self-esteem and depression scales. Thus, the results supported the vulnerability model, but not the scar model, of self-esteem and depression

A proof of Bell\u27s inequality in quantum mechanics using causal interactions

We give a simple proof of Bell\u27s inequality in quantum mechanics which, in conjunction with experiments, demonstrates that the local hidden variables assumption is false. The proof sheds light on relationships between the notion of causal interaction and interference between particles

Discussion of 'Estimating time-varying causal excursion effect in mobile health with binary outcomes' by T. Qian et al

We discuss the recent paper on "excursion effect" by T. Qian et al. (2020). We show that the methods presented have close relationships to others in the literature, in particular to a series of papers by Robins, Hern\'{a}n and collaborators on analyzing observational studies as a series of randomized trials. There is also a close relationship to the history-restricted and the history-adjusted marginal structural models (MSM). Important differences and their methodological implications are clarified. We also demonstrate that the excursion effect can depend on the design and discuss its suitability for modifying the treatment protocol.Comment: Submitted to Biometrika as an invited discussio

Unique behavioral and neurochemical effects induced by repeated adolescent consumption of caffeine-mixed alcohol in C57BL/6 mice.

The number of highly caffeinated products has increased dramatically in the past few years. Among these products, highly caffeinated energy drinks are the most heavily advertised and purchased, which has resulted in increased incidences of co-consumption of energy drinks with alcohol. Despite the growing number of adolescents and young adults reporting caffeine-mixed alcohol use, knowledge of the potential consequences associated with co-consumption has been limited to survey-based results and in-laboratory human behavioral testing. Here, we investigate the effect of repeated adolescent (post-natal days P35-61) exposure to caffeine-mixed alcohol in C57BL/6 mice on common drug-related behaviors such as locomotor sensitivity, drug reward and cross-sensitivity, and natural reward. To determine changes in neurological activity resulting from adolescent exposure, we monitored changes in expression of the transcription factor ΔFosB in the dopaminergic reward pathway as a sign of long-term increases in neuronal activity. Repeated adolescent exposure to caffeine-mixed alcohol exposure induced significant locomotor sensitization, desensitized cocaine conditioned place preference, decreased cocaine locomotor cross-sensitivity, and increased natural reward consumption. We also observed increased accumulation of ΔFosB in the nucleus accumbens following repeated adolescent caffeine-mixed alcohol exposure compared to alcohol or caffeine alone. Using our exposure model, we found that repeated exposure to caffeine-mixed alcohol during adolescence causes unique behavioral and neurochemical effects not observed in mice exposed to caffeine or alcohol alone. Based on similar findings for different substances of abuse, it is possible that repeated exposure to caffeine-mixed alcohol during adolescence could potentially alter or escalate future substance abuse as means to compensate for these behavioral and neurochemical alterations. © 2016 Robins et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited