Narrow Categories Research Articles

Learning the affective value of target categories: The role of category valence and the Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS)

Previous studies carried out within the rule-discovery paradigm demonstrated that people use different strategies depending on the affective value of the rule exemplars (i.e., whether they are sources of personal gains or losses). When learning positive categories, people tend to attach more weight to false positives than false negatives, resulting in overly narrow final categories (prevalence of sufficient over necessary categorization criteria), whereas when learning negative categories, the relative weights attached to the categorization errors are reversed, resulting in larger final categories and a prevalence of necessary over sufficient categorization criteria. This asymmetry is underlain by the affective negativity effect, responsible for risk aversion in decision making. In the present study, we tested the role of anxiety in categorization behaviour, operationalized within Gray’s theory of the behaviour inhibition system (BIS), and predicted intensification of the usual asymmetry in high BIS participants. Using the rule-discovery paradigm we manipulated the affective meaning of categories (gains vs. losses) and type of feedback for categorization decisions (full vs. incomplete feedback). Results confirmed positive–negative asymmetry in categorization. However, contrary to expectations, the high BIS persons placed in the incomplete feedback gain conditions were not more but less risk averse than were low BIS persons.

A relational conceptual framework for multidisciplinary health research centre infrastructure

Although multidisciplinary and team-based approaches are increasingly acknowledged as necessary to address some of the most pressing contemporary health challenges, many researchers struggle with a lack of infrastructure to facilitate and formalise the requisite collaborations. Specialised research centres have emerged as an important organisational solution, yet centre productivity and sustainability are frequently dictated by the availability and security of infrastructure funds.Despite being widely cited as a core component of research capacity building, infrastructure as a discrete concept has been rather analytically neglected, often treated as an implicit feature of research environments with little specification or relegated to a narrow category of physical or administrative inputs. The terms research infrastructure, capacity, and culture, among others, are deployed in overlapping and inconsistent ways, further obfuscating the crucial functions of infrastructure specifically and its relationships with associated concepts.The case is made for an expanded conceptualisation of research infrastructure, one that moves beyond conventional 'hardware' notions. Drawing on a case analysis of NEXUS, a multidisciplinary health research centre based at the University of British Columbia, Canada, a conceptual framework is proposed that integrates the tangible and intangible structures that interactively underlie research centre functioning.A relational approach holds potential to allow for more comprehensive accounting of the returns on infrastructure investment. For those developing new research centres or seeking to reinvigorate existing ones, this framework may be a useful guide for both centre design and evaluation.

Novelty Categorization Theory

Novelty Categorization Theory (NCT) attempts to predict when people perceive events as novel and how they process novel events across different domains. It is predicted that broad mental categories reduce the perception of an event being novel via inclusion processes, whereas narrow categories increase it via exclusion processes. Furthermore, based on a ‘motive to know’, when preparing for novel events, people broaden both perception and mental categories, because to understand novel information, it is essential to integrate it into pre-existing knowledge structures that are sufficiently broad. Over time, a ‘when-novel-then-process-globally’ routine develops that is automatically elicited when novelty is encountered. Self-protective motives can, however, counteract such processing styles so that threatening novelty leads to local processing. Relations to construal level theory and action identification theory and implications for future research are discussed.

Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (review)

Reviewed by: Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art Dana MacFarlane (bio) Martha Langford . Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2007. vi, 342. $55.00 Martha Langford's study of the importance of memory in contemporary Canadian photographic art employs the terms of a children's game - Scissors, Paper, Stone - to suggest some of the ways in which ideas about memory are implicated in the production and reception of photographic images. Beyond their imaginative suggestiveness, these terms [End Page 458] act as a conceptual scaffold for readings of a diverse range of visual work and texts. This is an ambitious book with ambitions for Canadian art, examples of which are beautifully represented in a large number of high-quality reproductions. As such this book will remain an important point of reference for the study of Canadian art, photography, and new media for years to come. Langford's selection of artists is bold, revealing the variety and richness of contemporary photographic work in Canada. What connects the various works of art gathered here, apart from their Canadian origins, is the way in which they are thought not just to thematize memory, but to reactivate it; as Langford insists, 'a rehearsal of memory must be conducted through the work.' What this means is articulated further when she states that she has looked 'for evidence that the activation of memory was anticipated by the artist and felt by others besides myself,' and further, that the 'spectator must be prompted visually to seek signs of mental activity and recognise the shift from the here and now into the realms of memory.' Inevitably such ambition brings its own challenges. It is not clear how these threads of intentionality and reception can be woven back together again through the act of criticism. Langford attempts something like this through exegeses of a wide range of philosophical, sociological, and art historical scholarship juxtaposed with her own, more personal, speculative excurses. On page 73, after a discussion of Donigan Cumming's work, Langford cites Jonathan Crary's analysis of 'attention and distraction,' glosses Nietzsche's 'species of history,' refers to Linda Bishai's use of Nietzsche, and then moves on to William Connelly's call for 'critical responsiveness.' Such a compressed textual space is typical in a book that covers too much ground too quickly, leading to rather superficial analyses. More seriously, and despite the intention to problematize received ideas of the relationship between memory and photography ('those who equate memories and photographs are not sane'), memory instead risks being hypostatized: we are told that 'memory itself is at a crossroads'; we wander through the 'realms of memory'; 'memories' are 'expressed photographically'; 'memory is close to history, to truth'; 'the expression of memory . . . is the very picture of mobility.' It may be that these are just turns of phrase - ways of emphasizing the complexity whereby memory is conceptualized, but in a book that draws on a vast body of literature, nearly all of which could be said to be concerned with exposing the construction of meaning, identity, social agency, and gender through language, this tendency to essentialize memory is worrying. Furthermore, Langford's own glossing of the terms she is using remains imprecise: 'Photographic work can be defined as participation to the best of its capabilities in whatever is going on'; or again, 'unconscious emulation, otherwise known as memory.' [End Page 459] Although the works themselves never become mere illustrations of philosophical theories, it is not clear in what way a desirable critical distance between the texts and work is created. A healthy disregard for aspects of the scholarly apparatus creates its own problems - the arbitrariness of the way in which texts and images are brought together only admits a partial coherence through Langford's authorial voice. This results in a seamless, open-ended, and yet curiously claustrophobic textual space in which the opportunity to open the discussion to broader but relevant issues is sometimes lost. While there is no mention in the title of the nationality of the artists - an omission that might lead one to expect the avoidance of narrow nationalistic categories - there is little...

Student Safety and the Reauthorization of No Child Left Behind

reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) is 3 years overdue, and the Obama administration, through Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has explained the urgency of revising and reauthorizing the law. Attention has been focused most acutely on the provisions that directly relate to academic performance and accountability (Dillon, 2010a, 2010b). Remaining under the radar, however, is the critical Unsafe School Choice Option (USCO), Section 9532 of NCLB. USCO states that students who attend schools or who themselves have been the victims of violent crime at school are eligible to transfer to another public school (U.S. Department of Education, 2004). USCO was the first federal educational legislation to recognize school safety concerns as grounds for school choice. Since its inception, however, USCO has been heartily criticized; its provision related to the identification of persistently dangerous schools has yielded the most discussion. Much of the critique has been prompted by the fact that so few persistently dangerous schools have actually been identified. At the time of its review, the Office of the Inspector General (2007) reported that the designation had been applied less than 200 times and often to the same schools year after year. Since USCO went into effect in the 2003-2004 school year, researchers have identified weaknesses, raised questions, and made suggestions for improvement (Education Commission of the States, 2004 (pp. 49-52); Gastic, 2007; Gastic & Gasiewski, 2008; Gooden & Harrington, 2005; Gooden, Harrington, Findlay, & King, 2008; Khashu & Salsich, 2005; Office of Inspector General, 2007; Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Advisory Committee, 2006; Zradicka, 2004). Taken together, this body of work describes how the current system by which states determine their criteria for persistently dangerous schools has contributed to USCO s limited relevance, as states have generated an idiosyncratic patchwork of regulations to measure school safety and risk. While that provision of USCO has been vetted, the shortcomings of the individual transfer option have gone relatively unexamined. In this essay I fill that gap and investigate how the individual transfer option fails to adequately protect the students who are at the greatest risk of being hurt at school. I also present specific recommendations for how the individual transfer option ofUSCO can be revised before NCLB is reauthorized. The first obstacle is that the individual transfer option is currently restricted to students who are victims of violent crime at school. Violent crime is (fortunately) one of the rarest forms of violence at school; it includes simple and aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and sexual assault (Dinkes, Kemp, & Baum, 2009). In 2007, 2% of students aged 12-18 reported these kinds of victimization at school. Albeit important, violent crime is a narrow category and therefore limited in its usefulness as a representative indicator of school safety. Use of this criterion effectively impedes a much larger population of students who have been otherwise significantly injured or hurt at school from exercising an option to transfer schools.

Poly-Victimization in a National Sample of Children and Youth

Most studies of children's exposure to violence focus on separate, relatively narrow categories of victimization (such as sexual abuse, physical maltreatment, or bullying), paying less attention to exposure to multiple forms of victimization. This study documents children's lifetime exposure to multiple victimization types (i.e., "poly-victimization") and examines the association between poly-victimization and extent of trauma symptomatology. Analyses were based on telephone interviews conducted between January 2008 and May 2008 with a nationally representative sample of 4053 children aged 2-17 years and their caregivers. Exposure to multiple forms of victimization was common. Almost 66% of the sample was exposed to more than one type of victimization, 30% experienced five or more types, and 10% experienced 11 or more different forms of victimization in their lifetimes. Poly-victims comprise a substantial portion of the children who would be identified by screening for an individual victimization type, such as sexual assault or witnessing parental violence. Poly-victimization is more highly related to trauma symptoms than experiencing repeated victimizations of a single type and explains a large part of the associations between individual forms of victimization and symptom levels. Studies focusing on single forms of victimization are likely to underestimate the full burden of victimization that children experience and to incorrectly specify the risk profiles of victims. Research, clinical practice, and intervention strategies are likely to improve with more comprehensive assessments of victimization exposure.

Integral Projection Models for trees: a new parameterization method and a validation of model output

Summary 1. Matrix models are popular tools for plant demographic studies, but their application to long‐lived, slow‐growing species is hampered by the fact that (i) model output is highly sensitive to category width and (ii) growth variation between individuals can only be partially accounted for. Integral Projection Models (IPMs) – an extension of matrix models – offer a solution to these problems. 2. Here, we introduce a new method to parameterize IPMs for trees – the ‘integration method’– which allows constructing IPMs for long‐lived, slow‐growing species. This approach is more suitable than the ‘midpoint rule’, which is customarily used. 3. We built IPMs for six tree species from Vietnamese (sub)tropical forests. For four of these species, population growth rate (λ) was highly sensitive to the number of categories in the transition matrix. Population growth stabilized for IPMs with 100–1000 categories, corresponding to categories of 0.1–1 cm in trunk diameter. This preferred width is much narrower than the 10‐cm‐wide categories customarily used in tree models. 4. The distribution of elasticity values over transition types (stasis, progression to next and further categories) is also highly sensitive to matrix dimension in IPMs. In addition, elasticity distribution is influenced by including or excluding growth variation. 5. Age estimates obtained from IPMs were also highly sensitive to matrix dimension: an IPM with 1000 size categories yielded 2–4 times higher age estimates for large trees than one with 10 size categories. Observed ages obtained from tree ring analyses for four of the study species allowed validating these estimates. IPMs with 10 categories strongly underestimated age, while those with 1000 categories yielded slight age overestimates. Underestimating age in small matrices is caused by the occurrence of unrealistically fast pathways through the life cycle and is probably widespread among tree models with broad categories. Overestimating ages in IPMs with narrow categories may be due to temporally autocorrelated growth or errors in fitting growth curves. 6. Synthesis. IPMs are highly suitable tools to analyse tree demography. We recommend that tree IPMs (and classical matrix models) apply narrow diameter categories (0.1–1 cm width) to obtain reliable model output.

Neural Coding: Non-Local but Explicit and Conceptual

Recordings from single cells in human medial temporal cortex confirm that sensory processing forms explicit neural representations of the objects and concepts needed for a causal model of the world.

Introduction to the Issue on High-Power Fiber Lasers

The 26 papers in this special issue focus on high-power fiber lasers. The papers can be grouped into three comparatively narrow categories: waveguide engineering and propagation; pulsed fiber lasers and amplifiers; and novel laser schematics, wavelengths, and materials.

Choosing Fagus sylvatica L. matrix model dimension by sensitivity analysis of the population growth rate with respect to the width of the diameter classes

In this study we use a projection matrix model of order n of an uneven-aged beech stand to analyse how the width of the diameter (physical tree diameter) classes d influence the population growth rate λ 0, and to obtain the sensitivity and the elasticity of λ 0 with respect to d. Numerical computations using systematic variations in d and n (where n represents the number of diameter classes), three levels of diameter growth, three levels of stand basal area, G = 20, 22 and 24 m 2/ha, and three levels of recruitment, R = 200, 520 and 840 stems/ha, were conducted. The lowest values for λ 0, sensitivities (∂ λ 0/∂ d) and elasticities (∂ λ 0/ λ 0)/(∂ d/ d), were obtained at the lowest width of the diameter classes, d = 5 cm. The results have also shown that: (a) the estimation of λ 0 was not significantly affected by small or even moderate changes in n and/or d; (b) (∂ λ 0/∂ d) and (∂ λ 0/ λ 0)/(∂ d/ d) increased with increasing d; (c) within each quality level (diameter growth level), λ 0 increased with increasing R and decreased with increasing G, (∂ λ 0/∂ d) decreased with increasing R and increased with increasing G, and (∂ λ 0/ λ 0)/(∂ d/ d) decreased with increasing R and increased with increasing G. We suggest that narrow size categories should be used in this model to obtain conservative estimates of λ 0 and sustainable harvest rates, with minimum sensitivities and elasticities, although the results were not substantially affected by small or even moderate changes in the width and/or number of the diameter classes.

6-Hour to 1-Year Variance of Five Global Precipitation Sets

Abstract Three-hourly time series of precipitation from three high-resolution precipitation products [Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) algorithm 3B-42, the Climate Prediction Center’s morphing method (CMORPH), and the Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information Using Artificial Neural Networks (PERSIANN)] and two reanalyses are examined for their frequency characteristics using broad and narrow variance categories. After isolating the diurnally forced peaks (at 24, 12, 8, and 6 h), the power spectra are divided into comprehensive broad bands comprising the annual (∼80 days–1 yr), intraseasonal (20 to ∼80 days), slow (6–20 days) and fast (36 h–6 days) synoptic, and high-frequency (6–36 h) periods. Global maps accounting for 100% of precipitation’s variance are analyzed to identify unique regional behaviors. Annual variability is strongest over regions affected by the seasonal migration of the intertropical convergence zone, as well as over monsoonal regions. The intraseasonal band displays off-equatorial evidence of the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO), particularly in the Indian Ocean, but the MJO’s rainfall is partially manifested in the slow synoptic band and at higher frequencies. The fast synoptic band is particularly strong over the oceans, while high-frequency variability is enhanced over land by more extreme surface gradients. Diurnal variance is strongest at low latitudes and is pronounced over regions with well-known diurnal circulations, including mountains and coastlines. Interproduct and intermodel differences also indicate biases of the precipitation product algorithms and convective parameterizations, including a strong bias toward low-frequency variability in the relaxed Arakawa–Schubert parameterization employed by one of the reanalyses, as well as increased white-spectral characteristics over land in the precipitation products.

Towards innovative international classification and diagnostic systems: ICD‐11 and person‐centered integrative diagnosis

Towards innovative international classification and diagnostic systems: ICD‐11 and person‐centered integrative diagnosis

Congruence effect in semantic categorization with masked primes with narrow and broad categories

In semantic categorization, masked primes that are category-congruent with the target (e.g., Planets: mars-VENUS) facilitate responses relative to category-incongruent primes (e.g., tree-VENUS). The present study investigated why this category congruence effect is more consistently found with narrow categories (e.g., Numbers larger/smaller than 5, Planets) than with broad categories (e.g., Animals). Experiments 1 and 2 used broad and narrow categories, respectively, and both experiments showed robust frequency effects for non-exemplar targets. This was in contradiction to Forster’s [Forster, K. I. (2004). Category size effects revisited: Frequency and masked priming effects in semantic categorization. Brain & Language, 90(1–3), 276–286.] category search hypothesis, which suggests that frequency-sensitive lexical access is by-passed for narrow categories. These experiments also showed that for non-exemplar targets, semantic feature overlap of non-exemplar primes (e.g., pistol-RIFLE vs. boots-RIFLE) facilitated NO decisions for a broad category but not narrow categories. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that non-exemplar primes which share features with members of narrow categories (e.g., Planets: moon), which we call impostors, facilitated responses to exemplar targets and interfered with responses to non-exemplar targets, relative to unrelated non-exemplar primes. These results suggest that category decisions are made by selectively monitoring semantic features relevant to, but not restricted to those that define, category membership, and they inform the debate regarding the extent to which masked primes are processed semantically.

Talking about Philip Roth

Talking about Philip Roth Elaine M. Kauvar (bio) Timothy Parrish , ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 179 pp. $75.00; $27.99 paper. Ross Posnock , Philip Roths Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. xx + 301 pp. $29.95. Controversy arises in the wake of every new book Philip Roth publishes. From the very beginning of his career, the novelist has earned praise; but he has never eluded censure. In 2002 he was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2005 he became the third living American writer to be included in the Library of America. Yet if not dissension, then contention still excites the reactions literary critics and general readers have to Roth: they respond passionately to his work, deeming it either an extraordinary achievement or else an egregious display of narcissism. The appearance of two recent critical books on Roth's career testifies to the disputes sparked by his work. The collection of essays The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, edited by Timothy Parrish, continues the "critical conversation" (7) on Philip Roth. However, Ross Posnock's Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity takes Roth criticism to a new realm, as Posnock discloses that Roth's eschewal of the consistency belonging to maturity and his espousal of the rudeness inhering in immaturity engender the truth the novelist is unafraid to reveal. Two great traditions promote the art of immaturity to which, Posnock believes, Roth subscribes: the American one that consists of Emerson, Melville, and Henry [End Page 613] James and a twentieth-century one that includes Eastern European writers like Milan Kundera. Such a discovery situates Roth not in the narrow category of American Jewish literature but in the pantheon of American letters. This conviction rests on the central issues Parrish locates at the core of Roth's work: "intertwining personal and communal identities, sexual politics and practice, the postmodern world and the place of America in that world, self-invention in the context of human annihilation and acts of terror, and racial and cultural pluralism," in short, the "realities of American culture" (3). The essays in The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth attest to Parrish's view, for they reflect the disparate approaches critics bring to Roth's work, affirming its contradictory and complex nature. What these essays also make apparent is how keenly author and reader interact and how robustly Roth's critics continue to debate the meaning of his work. Victoria Aarons's essay, "American-Jewish Identity in Roth's Short Fiction," begins the critics' conversation in the Cambridge collection. It is Aarons's contention that Eli Peck's obsession with his identity as a Jew in "Eli, the Fanatic" epitomizes Roth's protagonists, who constantly wonder "how Jewish is too Jewish?" (13). Having suppressed his own Jewish identity and reinvented himself as a Jew who is acceptable to Gentiles, Eli leads what Roth later calls a "counterlife," or what Aarons identifies as an "alternate reality" (10) contrived to avoid being a Jew. Like the rest of the characters in Roth's short fiction, Eli Peck exposes the ambivalence besetting the Jew in America after the Holocaust. The source of Roth's idea of a counterlife, Eli is as obsessed with Jewish identity as are all the characters in Goodbye, Columbus. The process of determining our identities, Derek Parker Royal avers, attaches Philip Roth more to intertexuality and metafiction than to a literary patrimony. Royal's essay, "Roth, Literary Influence, and Postmodernism," makes plain that ascertaining the influences on Roth's texts is unavailing. Without apprehension of its intertextuality, Roth's work, he argues, is simply incomprehensible. Royal draws on Michael Riffaterre's definition of intertextuality as "the perception of similar comparabilities from text to text," like the references to James's Portrait of a Lady that undergird the opening [End Page 614] pages of Roth's Letting Go.1 It is their reliance on intertextuality and the metafictional themes of the novelist's texts, not the simple identification of his sources, that illumine the hidden chambers of Roth's fiction. Showing us...

Legal Realism and The Taxonomy of Private Law

Legal taxonomy is frequently portrayed as a necessarily formalist (or doctrinalist) endeavor, which realists are likely to dismiss. This common wisdom is both mistaken and unfortunate. It is mistaken because realists should have a keen interest in the enterprise of legal categorization. Realists need not, to be sure, subscribe to the doctrinalist idea that the purpose of taxonomy is to organize the given terrain of legal rules. Rather, they can, and indeed should, reconstruct the role of taxonomy so as to incorporate their insights on the inherent dynamism of law and the important function of contextual normative analysis in the evolution of legal categories. This reconstruction implies that the main goals of legal categories are to consolidate expectations and to express the law's ideals with respect to distinct types of human interaction. Recasting legal categorization in these terms dramatically changes the nature of the taxonomic enterprise. Rather than aiming to refine some eternal descriptive truths, legal taxonomy in its realist rendition is an ongoing enterprise that is constantly reinventing itself. Rather than seeking to transcend context, realist taxonomies are sensitive to context and seek to generate relatively narrow legal categories. Finally, rather than aspiring to produce a map of mutually exclusive legal categories, a realist legal taxonomy recognizes and accommodates substantial (although never overwhelming) overlaps between the various legal categories.

Does object naming aid 12-month-olds' formation of novel object categories?

An experiment with 64 twelve-month-olds investigated the influence of object naming on their formation of novel object categories. Stimuli were constructed to represent 2 broad categories consisting of 3 narrow categories each. Objects representing the same narrow or broad category were presented with either a labelling or non-labelling phrase in a modified word extension procedure. Only infants in the narrow category-level condition who heard labelling phrases demonstrated categorization, and categorization performance in the narrow label condition was superior to that in the narrow no-label condition. Consistent with studies utilizing conventional objects, results indicate that object naming can facilitate infants' formation of novel object categories early in the process of lexical acquisition.

Contribution of the frontal lobe to externally and internally specified verbal responses: fMRI evidence

It has been suggested that within the frontal cortex there is a lateral to medial shift in the control of action, with the lateral premotor area (PMA) involved in externally specified actions and the medial supplementary motor areas (SMA) involved in internally specified actions. Recent brain imaging studies demonstrate, however, that the control of externally and internally specified actions may involve more complex and overlapping networks involving not only the PMA and the SMA, but also the pre-SMA and the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). The aim of the present study was to determine whether these frontal regions are differentially involved in the production of verbal responses, when they are externally specified and when they are internally specified. Participants engaged in three overt speaking tasks in which the degree of response specification differed. The tasks involved reading aloud words (externally specified), or generating words aloud from narrow or broad semantic categories (internally specified). Using fMRI, the location and magnitude of the BOLD activity for these tasks was measured in a group of ten participants. Compared with rest, all tasks activated the primary motor area and the SMA-proper, reflecting their common role in speech production. The magnitude of the activity in the PFC (Brodmann area 45), the left PMAv and the pre-SMA increased for word generation, suggesting that each of these three regions plays a role in internally specified action selection. This confirms previous reports concerning the participation of the pre-SMA in verbal response selection. The pattern of activity in PMAv suggests participation in both externally and internally specified verbal actions.

Early diagnosis of children with autism spectrum disorders

Research focusing on early development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has been of particular interest in recent years. A greater understanding of the accuracy of early diagnosis, as well as the developmental pathways that are observed in young children with ASD, is of both theoretical and practical importance. In accordance with these concerns, this review addresses questions about three topics: the reliability of early diagnosis, the validity of using narrow versus broad diagnostic categories, and trajectories of development in children with ASD. Findings from two prospective longitudinal studies are reviewed. The first investigation included children referred for ASD at age 2 who were followed for one year. The second study followed children referred for ASD at age 2 until age 9. Results suggested that early diagnoses can be made reliably, that there is no empirical evidence for using narrowly defined diagnostic categories within ASD and that trajectories of development showed considerable heterogeneity.

わが国における体育界とジェンダーに関する研究 : 女性体育教師のアイデンティティ・ポリティクスを中心に

The present study was carried out in order to examine critically, from a feminist perspective, the identity politics of female physical education (PE) teachers and its limitations. The points discussed include how female PE teachers have acquired their own territory in the cultural field of PE, the basis of the identity politics they face, and why the Japan Association of Physical Education for Women (JAPEW) has placed such high emphasis on dance-education. The present study was based on articles written by PE teachers in some PE journals. As pointed out by a number of researchers, there has been widespread and strong gender bias in the field of sport and PE in Japan. In this situation, female PE teachers have had to be politically active in establishing their own value and territory in the field of PE. Members of the JAPEW have considered dance-education to be an affirmative aspect of the organization, and have used it as a strategy to avoid being buried in the male-oriented field of PE. An important facet of this political view has been the concept of “the special character of the female”. However, the gender politics of female PE teachers have created a number of problems: First, female PE teachers have been placed in a very narrow category, dance-education. Second, this has led to the exclusion of female PE teachers who are not proficient in dance-teaching. Thus, a “center/periphery” hierarchy of female PE teachers has been created, and this has limited the identity politics of female teachers in the field of PE.

The Possibility of Nonsectarian Futures: Emerging Disruptive Identities of Place in the Belfast of Ciaran Carson'sThe Star Factory

In this paper I aim to excavate and interpret a series of ‘disruptive’ narratives of place in the novel The Star Factory by Ciaran Carson, a series of prose essays which construct an intimate, remembered, and defining vision of the city of Belfast (1997, Granta, London). I argue throughout that conflict in Northern Ireland is underwritten and informed by the imaginative geographies of rival, antagonistic, and sterile forms of sectarian nationalism, and that it is therefore necessary to seek alternative means of conceptualising social space and ‘the city’ which do not rely on narrow cultural categories and arbiters of difference. The text articulates an imaginative reinvention of the city of Belfast which goes beyond the traditional (and problematic) narratives of sectarianism, suggesting that place identity and the urban geographical experience are characterised by fluidity, hybridity, and changing perspectives.