Bodily Features Research Articles

Leg Loss and Fitness in Female Green Lynx SpidersPeucetia viridans(Araneae: Oxyopidae)

The relationship between the extent of leg loss and female fitness was investigated in the green lynx spider Peucetia viridans (Hentz, 1832). Adult females and their egg sacs were collected at nine sites in southern California and three measures of bodily characteristics (carapace width, weight, residual index) and three measures of reproductive performance (egg sac weight, egg number, mean sac weight per young) were determined for each spider. Of the 344 spiders sampled, 17.1% were missing one or more legs, with the frequency of leg loss showing no significant differences with respect to the eight limb positions or the four limb pairs among spiders missing one leg. While female size did not differ among leg-loss groups, females which were intact or which had lost one leg were generally heavier and in better body condition than females which had lost two or three legs. Such eight- and seven-legged females also produced heavier egg sacs and more eggs than six-legged females. These findings do not support Guffey's (1999) prediction that female arachnids which lose two legs experience minimal costs, but they are consistent with Brueseke et al. (2001)'s suggestion that reproductive output might be reduced for female spiders which have lost legs. Why females missing three or more legs did not exhibit a comparable, if not more severe, reduction in egg sac weight and egg number than six-legged females is unknown, though it may be related to the small size of this group (8) and peculiarities of the few spiders in it.

Some psychoanalytical meanings of the skin in the book of Job

Traditionally, there has been a tension between psychology and religion because of the Freudian critique of religion. This research intends to show that a deeper understanding of religion leading hopefully to an even deeper religiosity can be achieved by studying bodily features portrayed in a (religious) text from a psychoanalytic perspective. Just as any literary character can be ‘psychoanalysed’ to produce new perspectives on it and on the narrative as a whole, the personality of Job invites the postmodern reader to continue understanding this book on new levels. From this approach, it becomes clear that the protagonist struggles with boundaries and individuation because of his depressive tendencies experienced in issues with reality’s harsh touch, nakedness and distance. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Just as any literary character can be ‘psychoanalysed’ to produce new perspectives on it and on the narrative as a whole, the personality of Job invites the postmodern reader to continue understanding this book on new levels. From this approach, it becomes clear that the protagonist struggles with boundaries and individuation because of his depressive tendencies experienced in issues with reality’s harsh touch, nakedness and distance.

Transforming the Rocks – Time and Rock Art in Bohuslän, Sweden

Human representations are one of the most important groups of depictions in rock art in southern Scandinavia. These humans have long been discussed as complete, stable, and temporally-fixed images. The results of a new survey challenge this view. Recording rock art with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) enabled us to discern a possible sequence of production of individual human representations, their bodily features, and associated objects. Figures from a rock art site in Finntorp (Tanum, Sweden) will be used as an example. Differences in the dimensions of the engraved lines, the chronology of the depicted objects, and the placement of body parts suggest that several individuals may have been involved in making human representations on the rocks, and that their appearance as complete figures is the result of repeated transformations. The results presented demonstrate that Scandinavian rock art is not stable in time. We suggest that rock art is best understood as the creation of communities over time, which enables them to engage with the past by transforming the rocks.

“We’re Only Monsters”: Punk Bodies and the Grotesque in 1970s Northern Ireland

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when cross-community contact was relatively uncommon in Northern Ireland, the punk subculture attracted both young Catholics and Protestants who temporarily set aside their political, religious and class differences. These young people signalled their participation in the subculture by adopting a dress style which, at the time, was considered shocking. Indeed, punk bodies were interpreted by observers and constructed by punks themselves in terms that evoked the grotesque, the abject and the monstrous. Such bodies were also a common feature in punk iconography and appeared in punk rock songs. In this paper I aim to show how Northern Irish punks, by displaying and celebrating these bodily characteristics in a society where they were generally used to identify and describe the “other” in a sectarian framework, threatened to disturb order and encouraged or at least enabled the transgression of gender and sectarian boundaries.

Situatedness and Embodiment of Computational Systems

In this paper, the role of the environment and physical embodiment of computational systems for explanatory purposes will be analyzed. In particular, the focus will be on cognitive computational systems, understood in terms of mechanisms that manipulate semantic information. It will be argued that the role of the environment has long been appreciated, in particular in the work of Herbert A. Simon, which has inspired the mechanistic view on explanation. From Simon’s perspective, the embodied view on cognition seems natural but it is nowhere near as critical as its proponents suggest. The only point of difference between Simon and embodied cognition is the significance of body-based off-line cognition; however, it will be argued that it is notoriously over-appreciated in the current debate. The new mechanistic view on explanation suggests that even if it is critical to situate a mechanism in its environment and study its physical composition, or realization, it is also stressed that not all detail counts, and that some bodily features of cognitive systems should be left out from explanations.

Motor experience influences object knowledge.

An object's perceived readiness-for-action (e.g., its size, the degree of rotation from its canonical position, the user's viewpoint) can influence semantic knowledge retrieval. Yet, the organization of object knowledge may also be affected by body-specific sensorimotor experiences. Here, we investigated whether people's history of performing motor actions with their hands influences the knowledge they store and retrieve about graspable objects. We compared object representations between healthy right- and left-handers (Experiment 1), and between unilateral stroke patients, whose motor experience was changed by impairment of either their right or left hand (Experiment 2). Participants saw pictures of graspable everyday items with the handles oriented toward either the left or right hand, and they generated the type of grasp they would employ (i.e., clench or pinch) when using each object, responding orally. In both experiments, hand dominance and object orientation interacted to predict response times. In Experiment 1, judgments were fastest when objects were oriented toward the right hand in right-handers, but not in left-handers. In Experiment 2, judgments were fastest when objects were oriented toward the left hand in patients who had lost the use of their right hand, even though these patients were right-handed prior to brain injury. Results suggest that at least some aspects of object knowledge are determined by motor experience, and can be changed by new patterns of motor experience. People with different bodily characteristics, who interact with objects in systematically different ways, form correspondingly different neurocognitive representations of the same common objects. (PsycINFO Database Record

Typology of Dress in Contemporary Fashion

This study categorizes the formative aspects of dress and their implications according to the extent of revealing or concealing corporeality based on body perceptions. By considering the notion of dress as bodily practice to be a theoretical and methodological framework, this study combines a literature survey and case analysis to analyze and classify the forms of women`s dress since the 1920s when contemporary fashion took hold. As examined in this study, the typology of dress was categorized as body-consciousness, deformation, transformation, and formlessness. Body-consciousness that is achieved through tailoring, bias cutting, and stretchy fabric displays corporeality focusing on the structure and function of the body as an internalized corset. Deformations in dress are categorized into two different subcategories. One is the expansion or reduction of bodily features based on the vertical or horizontal grids of the body, which visualizes the anachronistic restraint of the body through an innerwear as outerwear strategy. The other is exaggerations of the bodily features irrelevant to the grid, which break from the limitations and constraints of the body as well as traditional notions of the body. Transformations of the body refer to as follows. First, the deconstruction and restructuring of the body that deconstruct the stereotypes in garment construction. Second, the abstraction of the body that emphasizes the geometrical and architectural shapes. Third, transformable designs which pursue the expansion and multiplicity of function. Formlessness in dress denies the perception of three-dimensionality of the body through the plan-arization of the body.

The "Hermeneutic Imperative" and Victorian Word Portraits

This article introduces the "word portrait," a subgenre of life writing often focused on depicting famous writers. These portraits emphasized visuality through a "hermeneutical" insistence on connecting visible bodily features with authors' creative productions. This subgenre frequently appeared in middlebrow periodicals of the mid-and late Victorian period. I argue that we can nuance our understanding of the relationship between highbrow intellectual tendencies and less culturally authorised critical practices by taking stock of the word portrait's operations and logic.

Identifying Impressions of Baba Yaga: Navigating the Uses of Attachment and Wonder on Soviet and American Television

Baba Yaga. Her name conjures up images of dark forests, glowing skulls, grotesque bodily features, cannibalism, and her iconic flying mortar-and-pestle and chicken-legged hut. Many of these images were introduced to Western audiences through the exquisite artwork of fin de siecle Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, and her stories reached Western audiences through translations of Aleksandr Afanasyev's Narodnye russkie skazki (Forrester, xiii). Baba Yaga is the most popular and complex figure in Russian truly national Russian, and virtually all Russians are familiar with her through books and animated films (Balina et al. 13). Her story has been passed down through generations, wars, and revolutions. Although Baba Yaga is firmly associated with Slavic traditions, her popularity and presence have been on the rise globally at least since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, facilitated by print and audiovisual media forms.Baba Yaga is probably the most well-known and evocative Russian folklore character in the West. Although she rarely is the protagonist, her presence is felt and appreciated in books and film and on television and the Internet- from children's TV and supernatural drama to fairy-tale blogs, YouTube channels, and GoodReads comments. Online blogs and reviews develop recurring theme of Baba Yaga appreciation and fascination. People identify her as an intriguing, ambiguous, dangerous, and memorable figure. For instance, GoodReads reviewers point out the ongoing ambiguity and enjoyment evoked by Gregory Maguire's Baba Yaga in his 2014 middle-grade novel Egg and Spoon. A few readers complain that contemporary American references, such as when Baba Yaga anachronistically mentions the breakfast cereal Cheerios, are a bit jarring or ring false because they do not represent her in her native Russia. Still, most of the reviewers claim her as favorite character (I loved every scene with Baba Yaga), with several lamenting that she does not appear until later in the book (Egg and Spoon Reviews).1 In an interview Maguire also relished Baba Yaga's eccentric character and confessed that he himself took dictation whenever Baba Yaga decided she had something to say (Diaz, n.p.).2There could be many reasons for Baba Yaga's enduring presence and popularity. One cause is pure curiosity and wonder about her character. Baba Yaga is ambiguous, and her personality and function change from to tale (E. Warner 73). She can be child-eating ogress in one tale, and in the next she can possess the knowledge of immortality or help the protagonist find his missing bride. Baba Yaga herself encompasses the paradoxes of nature: life and death, destruction and renewal, the feminine and the masculine (Balina et al. 13). Perhaps for this reason readers and viewers of Baba Yaga are, as Sibelan Forrester suggests, intrigued by Baba Yaga's potent dualities (death/ life, senility/fertility, destruction/renewal, villainy/benevolence, masculine/ feminine) and thus seem as responsive to her magic as previous generations (xlv).3Baba Yaga certainly does leave an impression on readers and viewers in the twenty-first century, and her popularity and presence on television allow us to explore viewing associated with an intriguing and powerful traditional character. In her book Fairy Tales Transformed? Cristina Bacchilega discusses fairy-tale web that analyzes and writing practices through intertextual associations, media adaptations, and cultural critique (ix). Although there is wonder in reading traditional tales and their contemporary adaptations, there is also power in viewing stories. Viewing requires intertextual, and intermedial, to analyze and interpret how and why stories, particularly fairy tales, continue to leave impressions on their audiences. How audiences identify with specific characters relates to the variety of viewing afforded by film and television. …

İskelet Kalıntılarından Ölüm Zamanı Tayininde Radyoizotop Analizleri

Ölüm zamanı tayini adli olgularda en önemli sorunlardan biridir. Cesedin taze olduğu veya yumuşak dokusunun henüz mevcut olduğu durumlarda ölüm zamanını tespit etmek nispeten daha kolaydır. Ancak cesetlerin dekompozisyon seviyesi ilerlediğinde veya iskeletleşme gerçekleştiğinde ölüm zamanı aralığını tespit etmek daha komplike bir hale gelmektedir. Cesedin dekompozisyon aşamaları değerlendirilirken çevresel şartlar, cesedin bulunduğu konum ve cesedin beden özellikleri gibi farklı kriterlerin birlikte incelenmesi gerekir. Ölüm zamanı tayini öncelikle makroskobik olarak morfolojik değişimlere göre yapılmaktadır. Ancak, özellikle ölümün üzerinden uzun süre geçtiği ve iskeletleşmenin gerçekleştiği durumlarda çeşitli histolojik, kimyasal veya fiziksel yöntemler de ölüm zamanının tespit edilmesinde kullanılabilir. Bu yöntemlerden radyoizotop analizleri, çevresel faktörlerden etkilenmemesi bakımından en çok üzerinde durulan yöntemler olmuştur. Yarılanma ömürlerinin kısa olması sebebiyle özellikle Sr90 ve Pb210radyonüklidlerinin ölçümleri ile yapılan analizler ölüm zamanı aralığının tespitinde başarılı sonuçlar vermiştir.

Parasympathetic cardio-regulation during social interactions in individuals with obesity-The influence of negative body image.

Individuals with obesity in Western societies often face weight-related stigmatization and social exclusion. Recurrent exposure to prejudice and negative social feedback alters one's behavior in future social interactions. In this study, we aimed to investigate autonomic nervous system and affective responses to social interactions in individuals with obesity. Women and men with (n = 56) and without (n = 56) obesity participated in episodes of social inclusion and social exclusion using a virtual ball-tossing game. During the experiment, heart rate was measured and parasympathetic activity (overall high-frequency power and event-related cardiac slowing) was analyzed. Our results show that in novel social interactions, women with obesity, relative to the other groups, exhibited the strongest increase in parasympathetic activity. Furthermore, parasympathetic activity was related to a more negative body image in individuals with obesity, but not in lean individuals. Additionally, women with obesity reported a stronger decrease in mood after social exclusion than did the other participants. Our results demonstrate influences of objective and subjective bodily characteristics on parasympathetic cardio-regulation during social interactions. In particular, they show behavioral and physiological alterations during social interactions in women with obesity.

Recent Advances in Science and Technology of Single and Multi Wall Carbon Nanotubes and their Composites

Subsequent to their first perception more than two decades ago, Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) have formed the epicenter for numerous important studies. Various researchers and scientists have stated striking bodily and perfunctory features for this unique form of carbon. These exhibit one of a kind microelectronic features and thermal conductivity greater than diamond and also mechanical features where the mechanical and electrical features, quality and flexibility surpasses any present material, study of CNTs offers many options for the improvement on a very basic level of new material frameworks. Specifically, the excellent mechanical features of CNTs, consolidated with their small width, propose degree aimed at advancement of Nanotube strengthened compound resources. The scope for nanocomposites strengthened with carbon tubes having remarkable improved mechanical features offer a lot of scope of rapid development in the field of science. This research study gives compact assessment of late developments in CNTs and related compounds. Also presented in this paper are details regarding configuration and handling of CNTs.

Reading words hurts: the impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words

abstractThis study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like ‘syringe’, ‘wound’, ‘knife’, and ‘cactus’ are considered to be more pain-related for those who are more pain-sensitive. These findings dovetail with recent studies suggesting that certain bodily characteristics influence the way people form mental representations (Casasanto, 2009). We discuss three mechanisms which could potentially account for our findings: attention and memory bias, prototype analysis, and embodied cognition. We argue that, whereas none of these three accounts can be ruled out, the embodied cognition hypothesis provides a particularly promising view to accommodate our data.

Physiognomy and the Treatment of Beauty in Jane Eyre

Like much nineteenth-century English fiction, Jane Eyre is conspicuous for reflecting the influence of physiognomy on everyday life and culture during that period. This is evident enough from the heroine’s presentation as an observer with a remarkable capacity for interpreting the facial and bodily features of her fellow creatures. It is, nevertheless, curious to note, more especially through her portrait of Rochester, that, where beauty is concerned, Jane is not only uncomfortable with the standards thereof generally upheld by the society of her day, but seems to flout a central principle as asserted by well-known physiognomists down the ages. All this raises the question of how far Jane’s standpoint in such respects is due among other things to her character and her social circumstances. Be that as it may, there can be little doubt that Charlotte Brontë’s treatment of beauty here is one of the most important aspects of her art as a novelist.

Atypical Self-Focus Effect on Interoceptive Accuracy in Anorexia Nervosa.

Background: Interoceptive abilities are known to be affected in anorexia nervosa (AN). Previous studies could show that private self-focus can enhance interoceptive accuracy (IAcc) in healthy participants. As body dissatisfaction is high in AN, confrontation with bodily features such as the own face might have a directly opposed effect in AN. Whether patients with AN can benefit from self-focus in their IAcc and whether this pattern changes over the time-course of cognitive behavioral therapy was investigated in this study.Methods: Fifteen patients with AN from the Psychosomatic Clinic in Windach were assessed three times in the time course of a standardized cognitive-behavioral therapy. They were compared to 15 controls, recruited from Ulm University and tested in a comparable setting. Both groups performed the heartbeat perception task assessing IAcc under two conditions either enhancing (“Self”) or decreasing (“Other”) self-focused attention. Furthermore, body dissatisfaction was assessed by a subscale of the Eating Disorder (ED) Inventory 2.Results: Patients with AN scored higher in IAcc when watching others’ faces as compared to one’s own face while performing the heartbeat perception task. The opposite pattern was observed in controls. IAcc remained reduced in AN as compared to controls in the time-course of cognitive-behavioral therapy, while body-dissatisfaction improved in AN. High body dissatisfaction was related to poorer IAcc in the “Self” condition.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that using self-focused attention reduces IAcc in AN while the opposite pattern was observed in controls. Confronting anorexic patients with bodily features might increase body-related avoidance and therefore decrease IAcc. The current study introduces a new perspective concerning the role of interoceptive processes in AN and generates further questions regarding the therapeutic utility of methods targeting self-focus in the treatment of AN.

Las cosas naturales y las cosas no naturales; las fronteras de lo hereditario en el siglo XVIII

<p class='p1'>Este artículo intenta delimitar el espacio conceptual en el que se concibió la transmisión hereditaria de peculiaridades físicas y morales durante el siglo XVIII europeo. El terreno de lo hereditario en ese periodo estaba vinculado a la comunicación, de padres a hijos, de componentes accidentales del cuerpo, que podían de algún modo transmitirse usando las vías de la reproducción biológica. Al mismo tiempo, todo lo que tenía que ver con la reproducción de los rasgos esenciales del cuerpo estaba, conceptualmente, fuera del alcance de la noción de lo hereditario. Las diferentes teorías dieciochescas de la reproducción asumieron esta dicotomía, que representaba una frontera interna para la noción de herencia. El predominio en el mismo periodo del esquema galénico de las cosas naturales y las cosas no naturales permite una exploración complementaria de la frontera externa para la transmisión hereditaria. La posibilidad de que el cuerpo (la constitución, el temperamento) pudiera transformarse por influencias externas, y que estos cambios en ciertas circunstancias pudieran a su vez comunicarse a la descendencia, definió la negociación de esta segunda frontera.</p>

Dissolving Identities: The Representation of Alzheimer's in Marie Laberge's Oublier (1987), Robert Gravel's Il n'y a plus rien (1992) and Michel Tremblay's L'Impératif présent (2003)

Of all the degenerative diseases, Alzheimer's has a particular grip on the public interest and the collective imagination of the ageing populations of Western societies. In Québec the number of people affected currently stands at some 20,000, with a quarter of a million sufferers predicted in twenty years’ time. The failure of memory, the loss of social connection, the disappearance of self- and social awareness and the collapse of identity, all of them outrunning other bodily failures, are disturbing and harrowing features of the illness for sufferers themselves in the first instance, and increasingly, as degeneration runs its unstoppable course, for those around them. At the same time, the physiological particularities of the disease link into broader philosophical, psychological and social questions about the role of the memory in the constituting of individual and social identity, and about the conflicting pressures of autonomy and dependence in the field of personal and social interaction. These questions have always greatly interested creative writers, and the intensity of their refraction through the lens of Alzheimer's thus has a wide-ranging general relevance as well as being peculiarly topical. Representation of the illness on stage to a theatre audience poses however ethical and artistic challenges that substantially exceed the private, intimate modes of the novel and poetry. Some of the different ways in which playwrights in Québec have responded to these challenges, and their varying emphases on the complex impacts of the illness are examined here through a comparative and contrastive analysis of Marie Laberge's Oublier (1987), Robert Gravel's Il n'y a plus rien (1992) and Michel Tremblay's L'Impératif présent (2003).

Shaping men's memory: the effects of a female's waist-to-hip ratio on men's memory for her appearance and biographical information

Previous research has shown that people are better at remembering attractive faces than unattractive faces, possibly because physical attractiveness is a sign of increased mate value. However, perceivers may rely on additional appearance cues (e.g., bodily features, dress) when assessing mate value. Thus, men may remember more about a female target when she possesses more attractive bodily features, such as a waist-to-hip ratio that approaches the optimal .70. Two studies were conducted to examine whether female waist-to-hip ratio influences the number of details men recall and recognize about a female target. Study 1 utilized a free recall method, whereas Study 2 consisted of a recognition method. Results indicated that men who viewed a female target with a waist-to-hip ratio of .50 or .90 recalled and recognized significantly fewer details than men who viewed a female target with a waist-to-hip ratio of .60, .70, or .80. These data illustrate adaptive memory, whereby perceivers better remember information of greater adaptive value to them, because this information may lead them to make better fitness-related decisions about whom to potentially mate with. Limitations regarding the realism of the photographs and generalizability of the data are also discussed.

Some psychoanalytical meanings of the skin in Leviticus 13�14

�Psychoanalysing� the different forms of �scale disease� dealt with in Leviticus 13�14 can shed some light on the way the skin can be interpreted in this context. The eight psychic functions of the skin identified by Anzieu reveal how individuals meet collective anxieties on the surface of the skin where unconscious conflicts about identity boundaries are projected and inscribed.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Traditionally there has been a tension between psychology and religion, due to the Freudian critique of religion. This research intends to show that a deeper understanding of religion leading hopefully to an even deeper religiosity can be achieved by studying bodily features portrayed in a (religious) text from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Mapping female bodily features of attractiveness.

“Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye” (Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost), but the bodily features governing this critical biological choice are still debated. Eye movement studies have demonstrated that males sample coarse body regions expanding from the face, the breasts and the midriff, while making female attractiveness judgements with natural vision. However, the visual system ubiquitously extracts diagnostic extra-foveal information in natural conditions, thus the visual information actually used by men is still unknown. We thus used a parametric gaze-contingent design while males rated attractiveness of female front- and back-view bodies. Males used extra-foveal information when available. Critically, when bodily features were only visible through restricted apertures, fixations strongly shifted to the hips, to potentially extract hip-width and curvature, then the breast and face. Our hierarchical mapping suggests that the visual system primary uses hip information to compute the waist-to-hip ratio and the body mass index, the crucial factors in determining sexual attractiveness and mate selection.