The Wesleyan Connection

Together with two former members of her lab, Hilary Barth, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, had a paper published in the February 2013 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Titled, “Developmental Change in Numerical Estimation,” the paper was also written by Emily Slusser, formerly a post-doctoral fellow in psychology and now a faculty member at San Jose State University, and Rachel Santiago ’12. The paper represents a challenge to a prominent theory of how children’s numerical thinking changes throughout the preschool years and into childhood.

The article is available to purchase here.

James McGuire

James McGuire, professor and chair of government, professor of Latin American studies, tutor in the College of Social Studies, recently had a book chapter and an article published.

The chapter, titled, “Social Policies in Latin America: Causes, Characteristics, and Consequences,” appeared in Routledge Handbook of Latin American Politics, edited by Peter Kingstone and Deborah J. Yashar and published March 8 by Routledge. The chapter classifies the main social policies enacted in Latin America from 1920 through 2010, explores the effects of those policies on the well-being of the poor, and outlines some of the forces and circumstances that led to the policies. Its main findings are that social assistance and public provision of many basic social services improved in Latin America after about 1990, even as the coverage of social insurance programs fell; that democracy and authoritarianism played an important and multifaceted role in shaping and constraining social policymaking in the region; and that a full explanation for why Latin American social policies evolved in the way that they did requires taking into account a wider range of factors than are usually invoked to explain the origins and evolution of welfare states in advanced industrial countries.

In March, McGuire also had an article, titled, “Political Regime and Social Performance,” published in Contemporary Politics. In this article, McGuire examines the association between political regime form and social performance, as measured by the infant mortality rate, using time-series cross-sectional regression analysis of 155 to 180 countries observed annually from 1972 to 2007. Controlling for other factors likely to affect infant mortality, democracies are found to have lower infant mortality rates than authoritarian regimes, and long-term democratic experience is found to matter more than short-term democratic practice. Among authoritarian regime types, one-party regimes have lower infant mortality rates than military or limited multiparty regimes, which have lower infant mortality than monarchies.

Book by Jeanine Basinger.

Jeanine Basinger, the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, is the author of I Do and I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies, published by Knopf in January 2013.

This extensively researched and illustrated book examines “the marriage movie;” what it is (or isn’t) and what it has to tell us about the movies—and ourselves. As long as there have been feature movies there have been marriage movies, and yet Hollywood has always been cautious about how to label them—perhaps because, unlike any other genre of film, the marriage movie resonates directly with the experience of almost every adult coming to see it. Here is “happily ever after”—except when things aren’t happy, and when “ever after” is abruptly terminated by divorce, tragedy . . . or even murder.

Basinger traces the many ways Hollywood has tussled with this tricky subject, explicating the relationships of countless marriages from Blondie and Dagwood to the heartrending couple in the Iranian A Separation, from Tracy and Hepburn to Laurel and Hardy (a marriage if ever there was one) to Coach and his wife in Friday Night Lights. The volume contains a treasure trove of movie stills, posters and ads.

Book translated by Norman Shapiro.

Norman Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, translated Comtesse Anna de Noailles’ A Life of Poems, Poems of a Life. The poetry collection was published by Black Widow Press in 2012.

A poet whose reputation has lasted beyond the popularity of her actual works, de Noailles was respected and beloved by France’s literary and lay population alike, counting among her admirers such figures as Proust, Cocteau, Colette and many others. Seemingly unconcerned with the tenets of this or that poetic school, she tuned the traditional elements of French prosody to her personal lyrical use, refusing however to be straitjacketed by their limitations. Without abandoning its meters and rhymes, she was not against taking liberties with both when the flow of her inspiration demanded; an inspiration often lush and musical, often visual, now synesthically sensual and even erotic, as much at home in evoking the eternal as in rhapsodizing briefly on the Parnassian plasticity of her cat. Noailles’ technique and talent transcended her gender. When an article in the London Times, in 1913, called her “the greatest poet that the 20th century has produced in France-perhaps in Europe,” and when the poet Leon Paul-Fargue supposedly referred to her as “our last inspired poet,” neither saw fit to modify the word “poet” with the word “woman.”

A paper co-authored by Rich Olson, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, and Sophia Levan ’12 was published in The Journal of Molecular Biology, March 2013. The article is titled, “Vibrio cholerae Cytolysin Recognizes the Heptasaccharide Core of Complex N-Glycans with Nanomolar Affinity.”

The human intestinal pathogen Vibrio cholerae secretes a pore-forming toxin, V.cholerae cytolysin (VCC), which contains two domains that are structurally similar to known carbohydrate-binding proteins. Olson and Levan used a combination of structural and functional approaches to characterize the carbohydrate-binding activity of the VCC toxin.

At Wesleyan, Levan was the recipient of the Butterfield Prize, the Graham Prize and she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She’s currently a student at Harvard University.

The journal Cognition and Emotion published a new paper by Assistant Professor of Psychology Patricia Rodriguez Mosquera and former post-doctoral fellow in psychology Toshie Imada. The paper, titled, “Perceived social image and life satisfaction across cultures,” studies the relationship between perceived social image and life satisfaction for Indian, Pakistani/Bangladeshi, White British and European American men and women. Participants completed a survey on the cultural importance of social image, positive and negative emotions, academic achievement and perceived social image. For Indian and Pakistani/Bangladeshi participants, who generally valued social image more than White British and European American participants, positive perceived social image predicted life satisfaction above and beyond the effects of emotions and academic achievement. Academic achievement only predicted satisfaction among White British and European American participants. Emotions were significant predictors of life satisfaction for all participants.

Read the full article here.

Matthew Kurtz

Matthew Kurtz, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, has published an article in the March 2013 issue of Scientific American Mind magazine. Kurtz, who studies schizophrenia, writes about the less-well-known symptoms of the disease, which include cognitive and social deficits. These troubles make it difficult for people with schizophrenia to maintain meaningful relationships, hold jobs and live independently. Sadly, drugs used to treat the hallucinations and delusions in schizophrenia do nothing to improve patients’ quality of life in these other areas.

In the article, Kurtz describes some of the new psychological interventions shown to improve cognitive and social skills in people with schizophrenia. One such therapy, called cognitive remediation, uses computer software or paper-and-pencil exercises to improve patients’ ability to concentrate, remember, plan and solve problems. Other treatments, called social cognitive or “social skills” training programs, work to improve social skills by helping patients to decipher emotional cues and take another person’s perspective. Remarkably, these therapies appear to create visible changes in brain activity.

The full article can be viewed online (a fee applies for non-Wesleyan-network readers).

In addition, Kurtz, together with students in his lab, recently had two academic papers on schizophrenia published.

On Dec. 30, 2012, the paper, “Cognitive and social cognitive predictors of change in objective versus subjective quality-of-life in rehabilitation for schizophrenia,” was published in Psychiatry Research. Written by Kurtz, psychology major Melanie Bronfeld ’12, and Research Professor of Psychology Jennifer Rose, the paper explores the role of cognitive, social cognitive and symptom factors as predictors of response to psychosocial rehabilitation in schizophrenia. Somewhat different patterns of factors predicted change in objective indices of quality-of-life, (eg. work success, number of friends, etc.) and subjective quality-of-life indices (ie. personal satisfaction with these same life domains—vocational status and social life, etc.)  More specifically, social cognitive factors only played a role in predicting  improvements in objective quality-of-life while verbal memory predicted improvement in both domains.

Also, on Feb. 1, Kurtz, Rose and neuroscience and behavior major Rachel Olfson ’14 had a paper, “Self-efficacy and functional status in schizophrenia: Relationship to insight, cognition and negative symptoms,“ published in Schizophrenia Research. The authors studied the role of self-efficacy—defined as  one’s belief in his or her ability to accomplish a goal–in helping explain the relationship of cognition and negative symptoms to outcome in schizophrenia.  They found that self-efficacy only plays a role in outcome in patients with good illness insight. When illness insight is poor, self-efficacy has minimal value as a meaningful psychological construct explaining outcome in the disease.

Learn more about Kurtz’s research in this Wesleyan video.

Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy, is the co-author of “Probing potassium in the atmosphere of HD 80606b with tunable filter transit spectrophotometry from the Gran Telescopio Canarias,” published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 419, pages 2233-50, 2012.

An article by Ethan Kleinberg, director of the Center for the Humanities, professor of history, professor of letters, is featured in the 50th anniversary issue of Perspectives on History, the monthly publication of the American Historical Association. The article, titled “Academic Journals in the Digital Era”  is part of a forum on “The Future of the Discipline” edited by Lynn Hunt. View the full list of contributors online.

Book translated by Krishna Winston.

Krishna Winston, the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, is the translator of Patrick Roth’s Starlight Terrace, published by Seagull Books in 2012.

In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building—the titular Starlite Terrace—Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth’s dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation.

In “The Man at Noah’s Window,” Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In “Eclipse of the Sun,” Moss, who lives in fear of the next holocaust, awaits a visit from the long-lost daughter he has tracked down. In “Rider on the Storm,” Gary, a rock drummer and born-again Christian, who “almost played” on the Turtles’ 60s-hit “Happy Together,” strives to find escape from his personal guilt. And in “The Woman in the Sea of Stars,” June, a former Hollywood studio secretary whose husband once cheated on her with Marilyn Monroe, makes the best of a disconnected life until she emerges reborn through ashes strewn in the illuminated swimming pool of the Starlite Terrace.

Book by Peter Gottschalk.

Peter Gottschalk, professor of religion, is the author of Religion, Science, and Empire Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India, published by Oxford University Press in November 2012. In this 448-page book, Gottschalk offers a compelling study of how, through the British implementation of scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities.

England’s ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion, led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and zoological taxonomies.

Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village of Chainpur, Gottschalk shows that the Britons’ presumed categories did not necessarily reflect the Indians’ concepts of their own identities, though many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today’s propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by imperial Britain.

Religion, Science, and Empire will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in the colonial and postcolonial history of religion in India.

Jeff McDonald is a columnist/blogger for en elite football coaching magazine.

Assistant football coach Jeff McDonald will be a regular columnist/blogger for the online edition of American Football Monthly, the top college football coaches’ magazine in the country, during 2013. His first article titled, “The Importance of Off-Season Self Scouting to Keep Your Defensive System Evolving,” is currently live. In addition, McDonald has an article in the February edition of the print magazine involving the use of the iPad as a coaching tool. The article can be seen in part here, but is only available fully to magazine subscribers.

This past summer, McDonald began working with AFM with a series of instructional videos dealing with lineback play. McDonald recently completed his fourth season as a defensive assistant coach for Wesleyan and serves as linebacker coach, special-teams coach and recruiting coordinator for the Cardinals. He also is integral in the football team’s community service initiative. Before joining the Wesleyan staff in 2009, McDonald was a defensive assistant at Towson University in 2008 and served for six years as an assistant at Yale (2002-07). He began his college coaching career at Quincy University in 1998.