Vogel

The notion that Deng Xiaoping had kept the PRC afloat both in Mao Zedong’s collapsing economy and away from the former Soviet Union’s suicidal “path to freedom” enjoys some popularity today. “To date, no socialist country had successfully—and without serious disruptions—made the shift from a planned economy to a sustained open, market-based economy,” writes Ezra F. Vogel. This essay reviews Vogel’s book, entitled Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. The essay has two tasks. The first is to look at how Vogel’s narrative identifies China’s recent “transformation” into a global economic power with Deng’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Specifically, it lays out how Vogel celebrates Deng’s role as “the general manager” of China’s post-1978 “opening” and in so doing defines the temporal relation between China’s modernity and global capitalist modernity. The second task of this essay is to place Vogel’s interpretation of China against the ideological hegemony of global capitalism. Vogel enjoys marked success in spinning a legend out of China’s experience of “transformation” because, importantly, he contributes to the discourse of global capitalism. In Vogel’s legend, Deng appears as the corrector of Mao, who set China on the road to recovery and “rise.” What is missing in this legend are the legacy of China’s revolutionary past and the darker sides of Deng’s career, most notably June 4. In evaluating Deng’s historical place, Vogel ensures that people “concerned about human life and the pursuit of liberty” “know” about Deng’s contribution to China’s “spectacular” economic growth.

O presente trabalho tem por objetivos identificar, nos dois volumes de Humano, demasiado humano, de Friedrich Nietzsche, vestígios de metáforas de pássaro e analisar qual o significado destas metáforas no contexto filosófico-conceitual do referido autor. A metodologia consiste em pesquisa bibliográfica sobre o tema. O problema está em analisar se os significados que Nietzsche utiliza para a figura do pássaro dizem respeito apenas ao espírito livre ou apenas à (criticada) metafísica. Fazendo literatura de um texto filosófico e buscando retirar conceitos de metáforas, a pesquisa atual justifica-se por buscar refletir um problema sem se prender a um campo de estudo específico, mas a mesma irá se deter sobretudo nas obras do filósofo aqui estudado e arriscará algumas interpretações de aforismos que suscitam a utilização por Nietzsche de metáforas da figura do pássaro, ou, em alemão, Vogel.

Anxiety disorders are the most common forms of mental illness of the adult population of the U.S.A. Use of animal models for anxiety has made an important contribution to clinical and pharmacological anxiety research as well as basic research of the mechanisms involved. We review the current operant conditioning models that are used in anxiety research as well as paradigms using unconditioned fear responses. We then outline how they could theoretically and in practice be adapted to the settings of a novel automated system, the IntelliCage. The IntelliCage is a computer-controlled environment for socially housed mice that automatically records a number of behavioral parameters for each mouse and in addition allows to individually condition and test mice. IntelliCage allows fast and efficient test procedures for evaluating fear responses with a minimum of handling stress and a maximum of standardization. To confirm suitability of the IntelliCage for the study of anxiety, we present re...

Dispositional anxiety is a well-established risk factor for the development of psychiatric disorders along the internalizing spectrum, including anxiety and depression. Importantly, many of the maladaptive behaviors characteristic of anxiety, such as anticipatory apprehension, occur when threat is absent. This raises the possibility that anxious individuals are less efficient at gating threat’s access to working memory, a limited capacity workspace where information is actively retained, manipulated, and used to flexibly guide goal-directed behavior when it is no longer present in the external environment. Using a well-validated neurophysiological index of working memory storage, we demonstrate that threat-related distracters were difficult to filter on average and that this difficulty was exaggerated among anxious individuals. These results indicate that dispositionally anxious individuals allocate excessive working memory storage to threat, even when it is irrelevant to the task at hand. More broadly, these results provide a novel framework for understanding the maladaptive thoughts and actions characteristic of internalizing disorders.

Anxiety disorders are the most common forms of mental illness of the adult population of the U.S.A. Use of animal models for anxiety has made an important contribution to clinical and pharmacological anxiety research as well as basic research of the mechanisms involved. We review the current operant conditioning models that are used in anxiety research as well as paradigms using unconditioned fear responses. We then outline how they could theoretically and in practice be adapted to the settings of a novel automated system, the IntelliCage. The IntelliCage is a computer-controlled environment for socially housed mice that automatically records a number of behavioral parameters for each mouse and in addition allows to individually condition and test mice. IntelliCage allows fast and efficient test procedures for evaluating fear responses with a minimum of handling stress and a maximum of standardization. To confirm suitability of the IntelliCage for the study of anxiety, we present re...