Trivial Events Research Articles

An experimental investigation of responsibility and reassurance: Relationships with compulsive checking.

Abstract Inflated perceptions of responsibility are hypothesized to contribute to compulsive checking. Reassurance seeking, proposed to be a form of checking, may exacerbate checking behaviour in long run. A sample of non-clinical participants (N = 100) performed a complex manual classification task under 1 of 4 experimental conditions: high responsibility-high reassurance, high responsibility-low reassurance, low responsibility-high reassurance, or low responsibility-low reassurance, and provided ratings of anxiety, urges to check, urges to seek reassurance, and confidence both before and after experimental manipulations were employed. Higher levels of perceived responsibility were associated with maintenance of compulsive urges and doubt. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive and behavioural models of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and in terms of directions for future research. Key words: Obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD, Responsibility, Reassurance, Checking, Neutralization. ********** Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by recurrent obsessions and/or compulsions that are time-consuming (lasting at least one hour per day) and which cause marked distress or significant impairment in functioning (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Cognitive conceptualizations of OCD (e.g., Rachman, 1976, 1993; Salkovskis, 1985, 1999) emphasize fundamental role of perceived responsibility in promoting obsessional phenomena. Responsibility, in this context, refers to the belief that one possesses pivotal power to provoke or prevent subjectively crucial negative outcomes (Salkovskis, Rachman, Ladouceur, & Freeston, 1992). The centrality of this construct was first highlighted in Salkovskis's (1985) cognitive theory of obsessions, which states that a primary distinction between non-clinical and clinical (i.e., OCD) populations is manner in which they interpret and appraise intrusive phenomena. This theory helped to explain two critical findings from early research on OCD-related cognitions: (i) 'normal' individuals routinely experience intrusions whose content resembles that of clinical obsessions (Rachman & De Silva, 1978; Salkovskis & Harrison, 1984), and (ii) unlike OCD sufferers, non-clinical populations can easily dismiss cognitive intrusions as senseless and trivial events (Salkovskis & Harrison, 1984). Salkovskis (1985, 1999) suggested that obsessionals frequently (mis)interpret their intrusive thoughts, images, and impulses as indicating that danger is imminent, and that they feel personally responsible for preventing any potential harm that might occur as a result of this threat. It was also hypothesized that OCD sufferers' negative interpretations of their intrusions would lead to discomfort which, in turn, would increase their subsequent urges to engage in various forms of anxiety-neutralizing behaviour (e.g., checking, reassurance seeking, washing, thought suppression, distraction, mental ritualization, etc.). Thus, an inflated sense of perceived responsibility has been hypothesized to increase both occurrence of obsessions and use of counterproductive neutralization strategies (Salkovskis et al., 2000). Several authors (e.g., Ladouceur et al., 1995; Lopatka & Rachman, 1995; Rachman, 1976, 2002; Rachman & Hodgson, 1980; Rheaume, Ladouceur, Freeston, & Letarte, 1995) have suggested that an exaggerated sense of responsibility for preventing harm may be particularly relevant to individuals with checking compulsions. For example, an individual pre-occupied with images of their children trapped in a fire might repeatedly check stove, gas taps, etc., to ensure that they have been properly shut off. However, a number of other factors, including exaggerated perceptions of threat and impaired meta-memory, may also contribute to doubting and checking activities (Rachman, 2002). Rachman's (2002) recent model of compulsive checking provides an outline of mechanisms purported to be involved in onset and maintenance of this behaviour. …

The PhotoMirror appliance: affective awareness in the hallway

This paper presents the design of PhotoMirror an intra-home communication appliance for supporting informal, lightweight communication and awareness between home inhabitants. The PhotoMirror captures and displays images of trivial daily events and rituals reflecting the commotion and activities of home inhabitants.

Troubles in Traumatology

(Can J Psychiatry 2005;50:815-816) No area within psychiatry has expanded as much as traumatology-the study of the causes and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite its phenomenal growth, traumatology has been wracked with controversy (1,2). From the beginning, critics of the PTSD diagnosis wondered whether its advocates had discovered a disease entity in nature or whether they had cobbled together a cluster of symptoms shared with other syndromes and then traced its etiology to the unpopular war in Vietnam (3). Was PTSD discovered by clinical scientists or created by them? Several years later, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment (NVVRS) study reported that 30.9% of all men who had served in that war-cooks and clerks as well as infantrymenhad developed PTSD and that another 22.5% had developed partial, subclinical PTSD (4, p 63). That over one-half of all who served developed at least the subclinical form of the dis ease should have been surprising, especially because only 15% of those who served in Vietnam were in combat units (5, I 209). The NVVRS suggested a hidden epidemic of untreated PTSD among Vietnam veterans, and funds poured into Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) hospitals to cope with the problem. However, few seemed to notice that the NVVRS reported that twice as many men developed PTSD as were assigned to combat units. The mystery behind the discrepancy in numbers of those with the disease and of those in combat remains unsolved today. Meanwhile, beginning in the 1980s, the notion that many adults harboured repressed (or dissociated) memories of their childhood sexual abuse (CSA) began to spread. Although architects of the PTSD diagnosis emphasized that traumatic events were remembered all too well, other traumatologists argued that the mind can protect itself by banishing horrific memories from awareness. Therapists began interpreting diverse symptoms as signs of inaccessible memories of trauma and began to use hypnosis and other methods to unlock and detoxify the supposed dissociated memories that were silently poisoning the mental health of victims. The movement to help survivors recall these allegedly repressed memories resulted in the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era. Therapy designed to recovered alleged repressed memories of trauma was based on misunderstandings of how memory works. The 2 articles in this issue were written to help counteract these misunderstandings. The first covers a multitude of errors that continue to plague the literature on trauma (6). Clinical theorists endorsing the concept of traumatic dissociative amnesia often misunderstand the very studies they cite in support of this alleged phenomenon. They often misinterpret diverse memory impairments as if they indicated an inability to remember the trauma itself. The second article reviews evidence that people can come to believe they experienced emotionally intense events that never happened (7). It refutes the claims that people can only develop false memories of trivial events devoid of emotional significance and that memories of trauma are invariably accurate. This article is cowritten by Elizabeth F Loftus, one of the great figures in the history of psychology-a recent empirical study ranked her 58th in a list of the 99 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century (8). Like a tsunami that has yet to strike shore, the impact of the most serious controversy in traumatology has yet to be felt. It concerns the validity of self-reported trauma exposure in American war veterans receiving service-connected disability payments for PTSD. Burkett and Whitley's award-winning book Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History (9) alerted the field to the possibility that many individuals diagnosed with PTSD may never have been exposed to trauma in the first place. Mainstream traumatologists, however, have either ignored Stolen Valor or privately maligned the authors ' motives without substantively rebutting Burkett and Whitley's critique of the field. …

Reactions to small pox vaccine in naïve and previously-vaccinated individuals

Two hundred health care workers in England and Wales were vaccinated with the Lister/Elstree strain of the vaccinia virus, and completed health diaries for 21 days or until the lesion had scabbed over. Pain and temperature were measured daily, and all other symptoms recorded freehand by the vaccinee. One hundred and forty two (71%) vaccinees reported pain, of which 25% considered it to be moderate or severe; 32 vaccinees (16%) recorded a temperature of >37.7 °C, two of which exceeded 39 °C. Other, mainly trivial, adverse events were common; itch was reported in 72%, erythema in 27%, axillary pain or lymphadenopathy in 38%, malaise or flu-like symptoms in 40% and headache in 23%. The incidences of minor adverse events were lower in re-vaccinees, compared with naïve vaccine recipients, significantly so in the case of erythema and general malaise ( p = 0.001 and 0.006, respectively), perhaps reflecting pre-existing immunity. Major adverse events occurred in two vaccinees (hospital admission, one with cellulitis and one with headache and possible encephalitis), and a further five were treated with antibiotics for local cellulitis. This is the first study to report results derived from active follow-up by diaries in recipients of the Lister/Elstree strain of vaccinia, and to document reductions in trivial adverse events in re-vaccinees.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (review)

Reviewed by: The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate Charles C. Howard The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. By Robert Caro. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002; pp ix + 1,143. $35.00. In the third volume of his epic on the life of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro covers Johnson's years as a U.S. senator from 1949 to the late 1950s. This mammoth volume, which was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, portrays the 36th president in a slightly different and more sympathetic light than did Caro's first two volumes. Unlike the spoiled child of The Path to Power or the brazen opportunist of Means of Ascent, this Lyndon Johnson is a more complex and fully rounded human being, with obvious flaws and talents. Those familiar with Caro's work will see many of the same strengths and weaknesses in this volume of the saga of Lyndon Johnson. Caro's attention to detail and passion for establishing scene and context are both breathtaking and distracting. The opening section of the book is a long dissertation on the history of the U.S. Senate. While passionate and articulate, these chapters read somewhat like a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington version of Senate history. Every Caro volume establishes a primary character to serve as a contrast with Lyndon B. Johnson. In The Path to Power it was Sam Rayburn, whose homespun wisdom and institutional loyalty was contrasted with Johnson's naked ambition. More controversial was Means of Ascent, in which the racist and reactionary Coke Stevenson was portrayed as Jeffersonian compared to Johnson. In this volume the character is Richard Russell, senator from Georgia and scion of the Southern bloc. Russell's accomplishments are well documented as well as his inherent and unshakeable racism. This racism contrasts well with the cruder and more calculating Johnson, who had a core belief in the equality of people and in fair treatment [End Page 241] for all races. In this book Johnson and Russell become mirror images, both with enormous talent and drive, both with national political ambitions, and both with powerful instincts about the running of the Senate. Yet Russell is doomed by his fidelity to Southern conventional wisdom and racist assumptions, while Johnson, free from those chains, will fulfill a national destiny. Caro's fascination with Johnson's dark side is well exhibited in this volume, but unlike in the other two the dark side does not overwhelm his characterization. The book focuses much of its attention on Johnson and the emerging civil rights movement of the 1950s. Here Caro documents Johnson's racist characterizations and his chameleon-like ability to appear sympathetic with both liberals like Helen Gahagan Douglas and reactionaries like Herman Brown. Yet another Johnson also appears in this book, one whom injustice and overt acts of discrimination instinctively and passionately outrage. Caro's ability to take small (sometimes trivial) events and people, and inject them with enormous significance, is also displayed in this book. His chapter "'Proud to Be of Assistance'" is the story of Johnson's efforts to have a Mexican-American war casualty buried in Arlington National Cemetery after the funeral home in his south Texas home refuses to allow their chapel to be used. This seemingly minor incident is one of great significance to Caro, for it shows the humanity of Johnson's instincts and the cold-blooded political calculations and hypocrisy of many of his actions. Johnson seems to change in Caro's eyes in the mid-1950s, especially during his recuperation from a heart attack he suffered in 1955. Yet, even if the near-death experience added substance to Johnson's towering ambitions, it did not keep the future president from falling into dark depressions or paranoia. The last section of Caro's book focuses on Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Here the author makes his strongest case for the changed Johnson. Even while castigating Johnson's compromises with the Southern bloc, Caro sees this as a turning point in Johnson's career. He writes, "Now he had the power. Power reveals. The compassion that had been hidden was to be revealed now—in...

Ethical issues in the design of osteoporosis clinical trials: the state of the question.

Ethical issues in the design of osteoporosis clinical trials: the state of the question.

Role of the Basolateral Amygdala in Memory Consolidation

Memories of emotionally arousing events tend to be more vivid and to persist longer than do memories of neutral or trivial events. Moreover, memories of emotionally influenced information may endure after a single experience. Recent findings strongly suggest that the influence of emotional arousal on memory consolidation is mediated by the release of adrenal stress hormones (epinephrine and glucocorticoids) and neurotransmitters that converge in modulating the noradrenergic system within the amygdala. Considerable evidence also indicates that amygdala activation influences memory by regulating consolidation in other brain regions. The findings suggest further that this memory-modulatory system may be involved in the formation of traumatic memories and posttraumatic stress disorder in human subjects.

Enlarging intramuscular hematoma and fibrinolytic parameters

AbstractWe describe eight patients with enlarging intra¬muscular hematoma who had no history of a bleeding tendency or trauma, other than for trivial incidental events of daily life. The hematoma gradually enlarged over 5-42 days and then diminished or disappeared within 3-5 months. This type of hematoma differs from both typical acute and chronic hematomas which were previously reported as a pseudotumor or a chronic expanding hematoma. The most important clinical task is to differentiate it from a malignant soft tissue tumor. A course in which the mass shrinks or disappears clinically, confirmed by magnetic resonance imaging findings, suggests the diagnosis. Laboratory tests, the bleeding time, and the blood coagulation time were normal in all patients, but the factor XIII concentration was slightly decreased. Depressed factor XIII concentrations may be an important etiologic factor in the genesis of this hematoma.

I Love To Hate You/All You Need Is Hate

I Love To Hate You/All You Need Is Hate

Reply to Dr. Cutting and Dr. Fabrega

Reply to Dr. Cutting and Dr. Fabrega

Loss of Recent Memory After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions

Loss of Recent Memory After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions

Patients' experience of being critically ill or severely injured and cared for in an intensive care unit in relation to the ICU syndrome. Part I

The intensive care unit (ICU) syndrome is regarded principally as a complex interaction of several contributory factors, all of which can be seen as partly responsible for the development of the syndrome. The purpose of this study was to describe and give a deeper insight into patients' experiences and memory recall, both during and after their stay in the ICU. Nineteen patients who had been respirator treated (ventilated), and had stayed at least 36 hours in the ICU, were interviewed about one week after discharge, and again 4-8 weeks after their discharge from the ICU. Patients' experiences are interpreted and related to previous views held concerning the syndrome, together with an awareness of other important and significant phenomena, i.e. a hermeneutic approach. This study partly confirms the findings of earlier studies concerning the ICU syndrome, but also reveals some new aspects, which have not previously been considered. The patients described themselves as experiencing some sort of state of chaos following the onset of their sickness, injury or accident, which resulted in feelings of extreme instability, vulnerability and fear, often experienced as prolonged inner tension. It was reported that even the most trivial events in circumstances or routines could trigger changes-either an increase or decrease-in patients' feelings of fear or inner tension. The caring relationship was perceived as providing an important degree of security and comfort. Nursing care actions can therefore be seen as vital factors in patients overcoming the accompanying horrific experiences to which they can be subjected. This state of chaotic feeling, and how it is combated and treated, appear to be one critical factor in the development and progression of the ICU syndrome.

The Dramatic Art of David Storey: The Journey of a Playwright (review)

Reviewed by: The Dramatic Art Of David Storey: The Journey Of A Playwright Stephen Di Benedetto The Dramatic Art Of David Storey: The Journey Of A Playwright. By Herbert Liebman. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, no. 71. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996; pp. 200. $45.00. David Storey was once considered a formidable force in British New Wave drama, on a par with John Arden, John Osborne and Harold Pinter. Yet despite his early success and his impressive output of over two dozen plays and novels, his work has inspired only a negligible amount of scholarly criticism. Herbert Liebman’s The Dramatic Art of David Storey is an admirable attempt to give Storey’s dramatic opus the attention it deserves. This book takes a more comprehensive approach than either John Russell Taylor’s biographical sketch or William Hutchings’s in-depth analysis of Storey’s plays. While Storey’s dramas are usually regarded as having little in common with each other, Liebman argues that all but two plays, Cromwell and Phoenix, revolve around three controlling thematic concerns—madness, work, and the family. He chronologically organizes the canon of plays within these three categories to examine “the development of Storey’s technique as a dramatist as well as his evolving understanding of the thematic material he is exploring” (2). “Plays of Madness” groups together The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, Home, Sisters, and Stage. Following the ideas laid out in Laura Weaver’s “Madness and the Family in David Storey’s Plays” (Hutchings, David Storey: A Casebook [New York: Garland, 1992]), his discussion uses British psychologist R. D. Laing’s understanding of madness to show how Storey pits the pressures of family and social norms against characters. “Plays of Work” examines The Contractor, The Changing Room, and Life Class. Storey creates symbolic metaphors out of seemingly trivial events: workmen constructing a wedding marquee, rugby players getting dressed, and art students sketching a nude study, in order to muse on aesthetics and the transience of life. In Celebration, The Farm, Mother’s Day, Early Days, and The March on Russia are examined together in “Family Plays.” In Celebration, The Farm, and The March on Russia specifically focus on the conflicts between working-class parents and their University-educated children. Liebman uses an intertextual analysis on the later plays to show Storey’s cynical perspective on the socio-economic changes caused by Britain’s post-war educational reform. The book’s last chapter, “A Tentative Assessment,” offers some concluding remarks on the strengths of Storey’s dramaturgy. Although Liebman [End Page 145] qualifies some plays as dramatic failures, his close readings of all the plays show how Storey’s entire playwriting career “has demonstrated a constant search for new structures” (156), highlighting Storey’s different approaches to the same subject matter. Moreover, Liebman posits Storey’s dramas work best onstage when a precise image, like the construction of the marquee, controls his thematic material. Liebman analyzes Storey’s plays astutely, but his approach to the work is to an extent limited by his desire to unify Storey’s drama into a cohesive whole. A more flexible structure could have enriched this study. Furthermore, Liebman only cursorily deals with the drama’s socio-political context at the end of his study, even while he classifies Storey as a working-class playwright. Though Liebman hints that Storey’s work documents “the painful division that exists between working-class parents and their educated and permanently alienated children” (164), he fails to consider how heavily an understanding of Britain’s historical situation during the post-war period weighs on all the plays. Nevertheless, these omissions by no means destroy the value of Liebman’s book as an introduction to Storey’s dramaturgy. The book integrates scattered scholarly opinions into a play by play analysis, and provides a bibliography of critical writings, as well as a complete listing of Storey’s dramatic and nondramatic works (including rare publication information on Phoenix). Hopefully, this book will help regenerate serious interest in David Storey’s plays, and provide a foundation for future scholarship. Stephen Di Benedetto Goldsmiths College, University of London Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Adverse Drug Events in Hospitalized Patients

<h3>To the Editor.</h3> —I noted with interest 3 articles^1-3dealing with adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and their consequences. Since the hospital to which I admit my patients has started what they describe as a mandatory ADR reporting system, I have 2 points. First, in our institution, trivial events are required to be reported as an ADR. If a cancer patient receiving chemotherapy has nausea or loses his or her hair, that is an ADR; if an asthmatic patient develops mild hyperglycemia from receiving steroids, that is a reportable ADR; if a patient is given antacids for an upset stomach and develops a mild case of selflimited diarrhea, that is a reportable ADR. There seems to be little rational consensus on what constitutes an ADR. The second point is that physicians are in a double bind. If we do not make a selective report to the pharmacy about a

Emotional expression and physical heath: Revising traumatic memories or fostering self-regulation?

Health benefits derived from personal trauma disclosure are well established. This study examined whether disclosing emotions generated by imaginative immersion in a novel traumatic event would similarly enhance health and adjustment. College women, preselected for trauma presence, were randomly assigned to write about real traumas, imaginary traumas, or trivial events. Yoked real-trauma and imaginary-trauma participants wrote about real-trauma participants' experiences. Imaginary-trauma participants were significantly less depressed than real-trauma participants at immediate posttest, but they were similarly angry, fearful, and happy. Compared with control group participants, both trauma groups made significantly fewer illness visits at 1-month follow-up; however, real-trauma participants reported more fatigue and avoidance than did the other groups. Imaginary-trauma group effects could reflect catharsis, emotional regulation, or construction of resilient possible selves.

Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (review)

Reviewed by: Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History Françoise Meltzer Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Michael André Bernstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. 181. $22.00. Michael Bernstein’s Foregone Conclusions makes a powerful argument against what he sees as the ethical and political consequences of foreshadowing. Bernstein persuasively shows that literary/textual foreshadowing frequently goes hand-in-glove with a superior hindsight; and that it can consequently give apparently trivial events predetermined, foreboding heaviness in a way that keeps reader and author nodding fairly contemptuously over the heads of the characters. Such hindsight, which Bernstein calls “backshadowing,” is a pervasive and especially pernicious variant of foreshadowing. I might add that this is precisely how Sartre formulated (in The Words ) the limitations of biography: as a predetermined “plot” that the author and reader winkingly share while the protagonist is left to struggle with what he or she thinks are random, open-ended incidents in a life. Indeed, predetermination is what Bernstein decries brilliantly and forcefully (and a bit repetitiously, one of the few real weaknesses in the book) precisely because, like foreshadowing—its narrative equivalent—it destroys the random and the everyday aspect of life and turns everything into necessity within the confines of a closed universe. Hence, Bernstein writes his book against what has become an “apocalyptic history.” To this supersessionist approach, Bernstein suggests “sideshadowing,” a term coined by Gary Saul Morson (who in turn gets it from Bahktin). Sideshadowing is the reminder of all the counterstories that might have occurred; of all the human narrative’s diversity and unpredictability. Thus sideshadowing resists the overdetermination and history-as-foreseeable-pattern that characterize foreshadowing/backshadowing. Sideshadowing, Bernstein argues, is between the “teleological determinism” of Marxism and the “radical undecidability” [End Page 137] of deconstruction. 1 It maintains the claims of both the event that did occur and the “unrealized alternative” that was just as plausible an outcome. The book, then, refutes narratives that reduce the individual to a passive victim moving ineluctably toward a preordained fate hinted at by signs and events, events that will be seen as inevitable and obvious within the scornful gaze of backshadowing, but which in fact can only be known retrospectively. Bernstein is at his most compelling when he describes the ethical and human consequences of backshadowing in narratives of the Shoah. Events in the past, he reminds us, were once in the future, and to fault the victims of the Shoah for remaining blind to “prophetic” signs around them is both to demean them and, given the predetermined universe that backshadowing delineates, ultimately to disallow grief itself. Bernstein convincingly argues that Shoah narratives, armed with such a sense of historical inevitability (at times unintentionally), fault the victims with a lack of prescience, thus trivializing both their lives and their fates at the hands of the Nazis. But those victims, Bernstein persuasively shows, just chose the “wrong prediction” at the time, an alternative prediction just as plausible as the one that ultimately was “right.” Bernstein’s point, made movingly and in powerful prose, is that the communities obliterated by the Shoah need to be rescued from the condescension of backshadowing. Thus just as it is ridiculous to see Kafka’s cockroach (Gregor Samsa) as a prophet of the Nazi period, so it is obscene to fault Hitler’s victims with a willful refusal to “see it coming.” Human existence may be a complex balance between freedom and necessity, but for Bernstein, to err on the side of necessity is to demean the horror of the Shoah and the significance of each individual life it annihilated. Bernstein goes on to show that after the Shoah, Israelis engaged in a strident callousness toward the refugees, seeing them as passive victims weakened by their life in the Diaspora, or by their futile fantasy of assimilation, and consequently unable and/or unwilling to see the “writing on the wall” (a metaphor that could serve as the motto for backshadowing). Even a writer like Aharon Appelfeld, who is himself articulate about the shocking Israeli attitude toward refugees of the war (an attitude that he himself, as a refugee, had endured)—even Appelfeld’s work ultimately demonstrates the same...

The Significance of Demographic Triviality: Minority Status and Zodiacal Fertility Timing Among Chinese Malaysians

The hypothesis that minority status creates social tensions that affect fertility behaviour attracted much attention during the late 1960s and 1970s, but then disappeared after 1980. This sudden exit was due to a combination of methodological difficulties in distilling the independent effects of minority status from other socio-economic factors, weaknesses or ambiguities in the empirical record, and other difficulties. This paper examines a natural experiment that serendipitously by-passes more of these problems than has been heretofore possible – the attempt by Chinese in Malaysia to time births into the auspicious Year of the Dragon. A multivariate model shows that this unique fertility behaviour was more common in Malaysian districts with smaller proportions of Chinese, which suggests that minority status can directly affect ethnic identity. The results also highlight a paradoxical solution to a grander problem facing socio-demographic theory. Before we can posit that culture or values play an independent role in transitions to lower fertility, we should first trace a baseline definition of these values from the study of demographically trivial events.

Quelques légendes contemporaines antiracistes

Contemporary legends are collective accounts, taken and transmitted by social groups which charge them with effects of truth and transmit them as information from a sure source. Three anti-racist contemporary legends, which are ironic about prejudice rather than justifying it in a roundabout way - as is generally the case - are presented here. They are all three part of oral tradition (including accounts of personal experience), but have also inspired literary creation and short films. A review is made of their appearances and their variations in the different media. The study then examines relations between these contemporary legends and similar narrative genres (exemple, fables, trivial events, jokes). It concludes with an in-depth analysis of their common themes, which in themselves are a comment on conditions of modernity and problems posed by the existence of non-lieux (literally "non-places") : the behaviour to adopt in the public sphere and the rules of social interaction in a pluri-ethnic and multicultural society.

Campaign Advertisements Versus Television News as Sources of Political Issue Information

Campaign Advertisements Versus Television News as Sources of Political Issue Information

Godfather's gossip

My attention to gossip as a notion worthy of reflection was attracted by a trivial detail: the English etymology of gossip isgod-sib, godfather, or, generally, god parent, ‘denoting—says the English Oxford Dictionary—the spiritual affinity of the baptized and their sponsor’. This intriguing origin alludes to gossip as the performing of an initiation ritual, the creation of an exclusive bond; above all, it bears an uncanny association with the mafia which happens to have been the topic of my research for sometime. I suppose I could have interpretedgod-sibthrough the obvious gender bias as deriving from godmother rather than from godfather; this tallies with the Italiancomareor the Frenchcommèrewhich can also denote a gossip. But I did not think of this possibility at first. Instead, carried away by linguistic speculation, I went to check the etymology of the main Italian word for gossip,pettegolezzo. I was not a little surprised to find that the word comes from a rather less inspiring source. It comes frompeto, to fart. In some northern Italian dialects, venetian, piedmontese and emilian, a common expression, ‘contar tutti i peti’, ‘to tell every fart’, refers to the habit of reporting and speculating about trivial events.