Susan Goethel Campbell’s exhibition Field Guide explores the nature of art and the conceptual process through a multimedia installation that also reflects upon temporality, art history, ecology and science. Introduced with a time-lapse video of weather patterns captured by web cam over the course of an entire year, atmospheric effects assume the quality of translucent washes that blur distinctions between opacity and transparency, painting and technology. Aerial views of built environments set against expansive cityscapes present essential imagery for large-format digital woodblock prints realized in monochromatic tonals and saturated grids of yellow and blazing orange. Some combine undulating wood grain patterns with pinhole perforations to admit light; others consist of diaphanous walnut stains applied to hand-crafted paper, a self-referential allusion to art’s planarity and permeable membrane. The evanescence of these views is echoed in pristine impressions of filtered dust and shimmering milkweed assemblages contained in Plexiglas light boxes. Known as Asclepias, milkweed is an herbaceous flower named by Carl Linnaeus after Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, due to its efficacious medicinal powers. Like the weather, the milkweed’s reflective silver filaments respond to shifting currents of air paired with gently wafted treetops projected in the viewing room. Here pearls of light corresponding to the spheres and pinpricks of the prints on the walls float randomly over the fictitious frame of a cubical vitrine. Orbs appear and disappear amid nocturnal shadows as figments of the imagination, their languid dispersion eliciting not-ofthis-world sensations of suspension, ascent and transcendence. This joined to the mesmerizing stillness of a gallery pierced occasionally by the sound of supersonic aircraft, a reminder of the machine in the garden. Beyond, the history of landscape photography and the Romantic sublime are encoded in works titled “Old Stand” that render minuscule figures of stationary box photographers against the grandeur of ice-capped Rockies. In some of the works the human figure is effaced as a historical memory through exquisitely modulated rubbings whose unbounded spatiality contrasts with the reflexive interiority of the viewing room. Campbell’s incandescent vision of nature asserts the phenomenal power of art to elevate the human spirit in the presence of heart-stirring beauty. It dares to reaffirm the timeless union between the material and immaterial substance of the universe, between human life and the ephemera of the natural world. f i l m

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Roy A. Rappaport. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.536 pp.

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity

With the increasing sophistication and ubiquity of the Internet, behavioral research is on the cusp of a revolution that will do for population sampling what the computer did for stimulus control and measurement. It remains a common assumption, however, that data from self-selected Web samples must involve a trade-off between participant numbers and data quality. Concerns about data quality are heightened for performance-based cognitive and perceptual measures, particularly those that are timed or that involve complex stimuli. In experiments run with uncompensated, anonymous participants whose motivation for participation is unknown, reduced conscientiousness or lack of focus could produce results that would be difficult to interpret due to decreased overall performance, increased variability of performance, or increased measurement noise. Here, we addressed the question of data quality across a range of cognitive and perceptual tests. For three key performance metrics—mean performance, performance variance, and internal reliability—the results from self-selected Web samples did not differ systematically from those obtained from traditionally recruited and/or lab-tested samples. These findings demonstrate that collecting data from uncompensated, anonymous, unsupervised, self-selected participants need not reduce data quality, even for demanding cognitive and perceptual experiments.

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Is the Web as good as the lab? Comparable performance from Web and lab in cognitive/perceptual experiments

Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face recognition ability. Low correlations between face recognition scores and visual and verbal recognition scores indicate that both face recognition ability itself and its genetic basis are largely attributable to face-specific mechanisms. The present results therefore identify an unusual phenomenon: a highly specific cognitive ability that is highly heritable. Our results establish a clear genetic basis for face recognition, opening this intensively studied and socially advantageous cognitive trait to genetic investigation.

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Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable

Background Climate change is one of the great challenges of our time. The consequences of climate change on exposed biological subjects, as well as on vulnerable societies, are a concern for the entire scientific community. Rising temperatures, heat waves, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, fires, loss of forest, and glaciers, along with disappearance of rivers and desertification, can directly and indirectly cause human pathologies that are physical and mental. However, there is a clear lack in psychiatric studies on mental disorders linked to climate change. Methods Literature available on PubMed, EMBASE, and Cochrane library until end of June 2019 were reviewed. The total number of articles and association reports was 445. From these, 163 were selected. We looked for the association between classical psychiatric disorders such as anxiety schizophrenia, mood disorder and depression, suicide, aggressive behaviors, despair for the loss of usual landscape, and phenomena related to climate change and extreme weather. Review of literature was then divided into specific areas: the course of change in mental health, temperature, water, air pollution, drought, as well as the exposure of certain groups and critical psychological adaptations. Results Climate change has an impact on a large part of the population, in different geographical areas and with different types of threats to public health. However, the delay in studies on climate change and mental health consequences is an important aspect. Lack of literature is perhaps due to the complexity and novelty of this issue. It has been shown that climate change acts on mental health with different timing. The phenomenology of the effects of climate change differs greatly-some mental disorders are common and others more specific in relation to atypical climatic conditions. Moreover, climate change also affects different population groups who are directly exposed and more vulnerable in their geographical conditions, as well as a lack of access to resources, information, and protection. Perhaps it is also worth underlining that in some papers the connection between climatic events and mental disorders was described through the introduction of new terms, coined only recently: ecoanxiety, ecoguilt, ecopsychology, ecological grief, solastalgia, biospheric concern, etc. Conclusions The effects of climate change can be direct or indirect, short-term or long-term. Acute events can act through mechanisms similar to that of traumatic stress, leading to well-understood psychopathological patterns. In addition, the consequences of exposure to extreme or prolonged weather-related events can also be delayed, encompassing disorders such as posttraumatic stress, or even transmitted to later generations.

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The Impact of Climate Change on Mental Health: A Systematic Descriptive Review.

The Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) and Cambridge Face Perception Test (CFPT) have provided the first theoretically strong clinical tests for prosopagnosia based on novel rather than famous faces. Here, we assess the extent to which norms for these tasks must take into account ageing, sex, and testing country. Data were from Australians aged 18 to 88 years (N = 240 for CFMT; 128 for CFPT) and young adult Israelis (N = 49 for CFMT). Participants were unselected for face recognition ability; most were university educated. The diagnosis cut-off for prosopagnosia (2 SDs poorer than mean) was affected by age, participant-stimulus ethnic match (within Caucasians), and sex for middle-aged and older adults on the CFPT. We also report internal reliability, correlation between face memory and face perception, correlations with intelligence-related measures, correlation with self-report, distribution shape for the CFMT, and prevalence of developmental prosopagnosia.

Diagnosing prosopagnosia: Effects of ageing, sex, and participant–stimulus ethnic match on the Cambridge Face Memory Test and Cambridge Face Perception Test

https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2019-09/apo-nid260376.pdf

The health impacts of waste incineration: a systematic review.

Future climate change is predicted to diminish essential natural resource availability in many regions and perhaps globally. The resulting scarcity of water, food and livelihoods could lead to increasingly desperate populations that challenge governments, enhancing the risk of intra- and interstate conflict. Defence establishments and some political scientists view climate change as a potential threat to peace. While the medical literature increasingly recognises climate change as a fundamental health risk, the dimension of climate change-associated conflict has so far received little attention, despite its profound health implications. Many analysts link climate change with a heightened risk of conflict via causal pathways which involve diminishing or changing resource availability. Plausible consequences include: increased frequency of civil conflict in developing countries; terrorism, asymmetric warfare, state failure; and major regional conflicts. The medical understanding of these threats is inadequate, given the scale of health implications. The medical and public health communities have often been reluctant to interpret conflict as a health issue. However, at times, medical workers have proven powerful and effective peace advocates, most notably with regard to nuclear disarmament. The public is more motivated to mitigate climate change when it is framed as a health issue. Improved medical understanding of the association between climate change and conflict could strengthen mitigation efforts and increase cooperation to cope with the climate change that is now inevitable.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0141076815603234

Climate change, conflict and health.

Threats to health from climate change are increasingly recognized, yet little research into the effects upon health systems is published. However, additional demands on health systems are increasingly documented. Pathways include direct weather impacts, such as amplified heat stress, and altered ecological relationships, including alterations to the distribution and activity of pathogens and vectors. The greatest driver of demand on future health systems from climate change may be the alterations to socioeconomic systems; however, these “tertiary effects” have received less attention in the health literature. Increasing demands on health systems from climate change will impede health system capacity. Changing weather patterns and sea-level rise will reduce food production in many developing countries, thus fostering undernutrition and concomitant disease susceptibility. Associated poverty will impede people's ability to access and support health systems. Climate change will increase migration, potentially exposing migrants to endemic diseases for which they have limited resistance, transporting diseases and fostering conditions conducive to disease transmission. Specific predictions of timing and locations of migration remain elusive, hampering planning and misaligning needs and infrastructure. Food shortages, migration, falling economic activity, and failing government legitimacy following climate change are also “risk multipliers” for conflict. Injuries to combatants, undernutrition, and increased infectious disease will result. Modern conflict often sees health personnel and infrastructure deliberately targeted and disease surveillance and eradication programs obstructed. Climate change will substantially impede economic growth, reducing health system funding and limiting health system adaptation. Modern medical care may be snatched away from millions who recently obtained it.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2013EF000177

Climate change and health in Earth's future

This chapter explores the links between mental health and climate change and describes the mental health effects (e.g., anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder) of the primary, secondary and tertiary manifestations of climate change. The cognitive obstacles to dealing with climate change and the cognitive solutions for addressing climate change are discussed.

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Devin C. Bowles

Papers

Diagnosing prosopagnosia: Effects of ageing, sex, and participant–stimulus ethnic match on the Cambridge Face Memory Test and Cambridge Face Perception Test

The health impacts of waste incineration: a systematic review.

Climate change, conflict and health.

Climate change and health in Earth's future

Mental health, cognition and the challenge of climate change