Agency From a Radical Embodied Standpoint: An Ecological-Enactive Proposal

Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency.

Women's agency in Egypt: construction and validation of a multidimensional scale in rural Minya

Background

Measurement of women's agency in specific sociocultural conditions, particularly in Middle Eastern settings, has received limited attention, making its usefulness as an outcome or predictor of gender equality unclear.

Aims

This study aimed to construct and validate a multidimensional and context-specific scale of women's agency in rural Minya, Egypt.

Methods

Using data from 608 ever-married women in 2012, confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis were used to construct a scale measuring women's agency in rural Minya. The scale was validated through exploratory structural equation models.

Results

The 21-item model consisted of three factors (decision-making, freedom of movement and gender role attitudes), each corresponding to a previously-theorized domain of women's agency. The three factors were positively correlated, supporting women's agency as a multidimensional, context-specific construct. The strongest correlation was between decision-making and freedom of movement (0.410), and then between freedom of movement and gender attitudes (0.307); the weakest correlation was between decision-making and gender attitudes (0.211). Although we hypothesized that each domain would be positively associated with age, only decision-making was significantly and positively associated with women's age.

Conclusion

Similarities between the items used here and a study at the national level in Egypt suggest these indicators could be used in various Egyptian settings to monitor progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 on empowering women and girls, and to assess the effect of policies and programmes. Future research should build on the findings to identify the best observable indicators of women's agency in Egypt and elsewhere.

James Petiver's 'joynt-stock': middling agency in urban collecting networks

This article explores the complexities of James Petiver and Hans Sloane's relationship with one another and their shared contacts, examining the ways in which their networks overlapped but also, crucially, differed from one another. It shows that, though they had common interests and institutional memberships, Petiver ultimately occupied a different urban world from Sloane, a middling, trade-orientated stratum of society with its own forms of sociability and business, credit and advancement. It was this position that helped Petiver bridge a range of gaps in elite scholarly exchange, making himself indispensable through his effective mediation between different urban groups and access to spaces beyond Sloane's reach. It argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the imbrication of middling interests and agencies that operated across London's natural history communities, in order to prompt us to think more carefully about the strategies and interests of those who tried to navigate them.

Enhancing agency for health providers and pregnant women experiencing intimate partner violence in South Africa

Global policy frameworks call for strengthening the role of health systems to address intimate partner violence (IPV) and support women's agency, yet the evidence of health system responses remains slender in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In South Africa, 25-35% of pregnant women experience IPV, posing long-term health risks. We utilised agency as a theoretical construct, applying qualitative methods to investigate health professionals' experiences of a randomised controlled trial intervention to address IPV in pregnant women in five antenatal clinics (ANC) in Johannesburg (2011-2016). In-depth interviews (n = 16) were supplemented by participant observation, debriefing and field notes. Health providers viewed the intervention as enhancing health promotion agency and advancing help-seeking agency for IPV-exposed patients. Intervention nurses reported their own self-efficacy improved, and their relational and collective agency expanded. On-going supervision, mentorship and feedback were essential to establish the knowledge and skill-building necessary for providers to improve self-efficacy in intervention delivery. Integrating mental health services into primary ANC services is recommended. Findings offer insight into the untapped potential for LMIC health settings to become transformative, gender-responsive social systems, for patients and health professionals, in ways that advance women's agency, health, human rights and SDGs.

Seeing your own or someone else's hand moving in accordance with your action: The neural interaction of agency and hand identity

Forward models can predict sensory consequences of self-action, which is reflected by less neural processing for actively than passively generated sensory inputs (BOLD suppression effect). However, it remains open whether forward models take the identity of a moving body part into account when predicting the sensory consequences of an action. In the current study, fMRI was used to investigate the neural correlates of active and passive hand movements during which participants saw either an on-line display of their own hand or someone else's hand moving in accordance with their movement. Participants had to detect delays (0-417 ms) between their movement and the displays. Analyses revealed reduced activation in sensory areas and higher delay detection thresholds for active versus passive movements. Furthermore, there was increased activation in the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the middle temporal gyrus when someone else's hand was seen. Most importantly, in posterior parietal (angular gyrus and precuneus), frontal (middle, superior, and medial frontal gyrus), and temporal (middle temporal gyrus) regions, suppression for actively versus passively generated feedback was stronger when participants were viewing their own compared to someone else's hand. Our results suggest that forward models can take hand identity into account when predicting sensory action consequences.

How Do Object Shape, Semantic Cues, and Apparent Velocity Affect the Attribution of Intentionality to Figures With Different Types of Movements?

A series of experiments show that attribution of intentionality to figures depends on the interaction between the type of movement –Theory of Mind (ToM), Goal-Directed (GD), Random (R)– with the presence of human attributes, the way these figures are labeled, and their apparent velocity. In addition, the effect of these conditions or their interaction varies when the use of human nouns –present in the participant’s responses– is statistically controlled. In Experiment 1, one group of participants observed triangular figures (n = 46) and another observed humanized figures, called Stickman figures (n = 38). In ToM movements, participants attributed more intentionality to triangular figures than to Stickman figures. However, in R movements, the opposite trend was observed. In Experiment 2 (n = 42), triangular figures were presented as if they were people and compared to triangular figures presented in Experiment 1. Here, when the figures were labeled as people the attribution of intentionality only increased in R and GD movements, but not in ToM movements. Finally, in Experiment 3, Stickman figures (n = 45) move at a higher (unnatural) speed with higher frames per second (fps) than the Stickman figures of Experiment 1. This manipulation decreased the attribution of intentionality in R and GD movements but not in ToM movements. In general terms, it was found that the human attributes and labels promote the use of human nouns in participants’ responses, while a high apparent speed reduces their use. The use of human nouns was associated to intentionality scores significantly in R movements, but at a lesser extent in GD and ToM movements. We conclude that, although the type of movement is the most important cue in this sort of task, the tendency to attribute intentionality to figures is affected by the interaction between perceptual and semantic cues (figure shape, label, and apparent speed).

Structural Vulnerabilities, Personal Agency, and Caste: An Exploration of Child Sex Trafficking in Rural India

The commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) is considered normative and expected among some Indian castes. Focusing on the Bedia specifically, we sought to identify factors responsible for the intergenerational continuation of CSEC as well as opportunities for prevention. To this end, three questions were posed, including: (a) What structural factors perpetuate CSEC among the Bedia? (b) What are the mechanisms by which Bedia children enter the commercial sex industry (CSI)? and (c) To what extent do Bedia women have personal agency in exiting the CSI and in keeping their children from entering? Guided by structural vulnerability theory and a phenomenological approach, in-depth interviews were conducted with 31 Bedia women engaged in (or exited from) the CSI. Results indicate that girls as young as 12 are "selected" to enter the CSI; once involved, they carry the burden of familial financial sustainability and exit only comes when they are no longer able to attract paying clients and younger female kin able to assume the primary breadwinner role. Ability to keep female children from entry is minimal. Implications for future research, practice, and policy are discussed.

The Rostrolateral Prefrontal Cortex Mediates a Preference for High-Agency Environments

The ability to exert flexible instrumental control over one's environment is a defining feature of adaptive decision-making. Here, we investigated neural substrates mediating a preference for environments with greater instrumental divergence, the distance between outcome probability distributions associated with alternative actions. A formal index of agency, instrumental divergence allows an organism to flexibly obtain the currently most desired outcome as preferences change. As such, it may have intrinsic utility, guiding decisions toward environments that maximize instrumental power. Consistent with this notion, we found that a measure of expected value that treats instrumental divergence as a reward surrogate provided a better account of male and female human participants' choice preferences than did a conventional model, sensitive only to monetary reward. Using model-based fMRI, we found that activity in the rostrolateral and ventromedial PFC, regions associated with abstract cognitive inferences and subjective value computations, respectively, scaled with the divergence-based account of expected value. Implications for a neural common currency of information theoretic and motivational variables are discussed.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Agency is a central concept in philosophy and psychology. While research thus far has focused on cognitive and perceptual measures of agency, recent work demonstrating a strong preference for high-agency environments indicates a salient motivational dimension. Here, using instrumental divergence, the distance between outcome distributions associated with alternative actions, as a formal index of agency, we found that brain regions associated with directed exploration and subjective value computations, respectively, were selectively modulated by a model that treated agency as a reward surrogate, over models that assigned utility only to monetary payoffs. In a subset of regions, such effects were predicted by the influence of instrumental divergence on economic choice preferences. Our results elucidate neural mechanisms mediating the utility of agency.

A Formal Model for Adaptive Free Choice in Complex Systems

In this article, I develop a formal model of free will for complex systems based on emergent properties and adaptive selection. The model is based on a process ontology in which a free choice is a singular process that takes a system from one macrostate to another. I quantify the model by introducing a formal measure of the ‘freedom’ of a singular choice. The ‘free will’ of a system, then, is emergent from the aggregate freedom of the choice processes carried out by the system. The focus in this model is on the actual choices themselves viewed in the context of processes. That is, the nature of the system making the choices is not considered. Nevertheless, my model does not necessarily conflict with models that are based on internal properties of the system. Rather it takes a behavioral approach by focusing on the externalities of the choice process.

Where Is the Action in Perception? An Exploratory Study With a Haptic Sensory Substitution Device

Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor invariants, according to which bodily movements play an instrumental role in perception. ECS has focused on the notion of sensorimotor contingencies, which goes beyond an instrumental role because skillfully regulated movements are claimed to play a constitutive role. We refer to these two hypotheses as instrumental agency and constitutive agency, respectively. Evidence comes from a variety of fields, including neural, behavioral, and phenomenological research, but so far with confounds that prevent an experimental distinction between these hypotheses. Here we advance the debate by proposing a novel double-participant setup that aims to isolate agency as the key variable that distinguishes bodily movement in active and passive conditions of perception. We pilot this setup with a psychological study of width discrimination using the Enactive Torch, a haptic sensory substitution device. There was no evidence favoring the stronger hypothesis of constitutive agency over instrumental agency. However, we caution that during debriefing several participants reported using cognitive strategies that did not rely on spatial perception. We conclude that this approach is a viable direction for future research, but that greater care is required to establish and confirm the desired modality of first-person experience.

Neural responses to intention and benefit appraisal are critical in distinguishing gratitude and joy

Gratitude and joy are critical for promoting well-being. However, the differences between the two emotions and corresponding neural correlates are not understood. Here we addressed these issues by eliciting the two emotions using the same stimuli in an fMRI task. In this help reception task, participants imagined them in a situation where they need financial aid. Critically, we manipulated the benefactor's intention to provide help and the value of the benefit. Behaviorally, gratitude was stronger than joy when the benefactor-intention was strong and the benefit-value was low compared to other conditions. In parallel, gratitude activated mentalizing-related (e.g. precuneus) and reward-related regions (e.g. putamen) more strongly than joy in corresponding conditions compared to others. Moreover, gratitude was more negatively (or less positively) encoded in the region associated with mentalizing (i.e. the left superior temporal gyrus) than joy. Multivariate pattern analysis further demonstrated that the modulation patterns of benefactor-intention and benefit-value in mentalizing-related (e.g. precuneus, temporo-parietal junction) and reward-related regions (e.g. putamen, perigenual anterior cingulate/ventromedial prefrontal cortex) could distinguish the two emotions. The findings suggest that benefactor-intention and benefit-value appraisal and their neural correlates are critical in distinguishing gratitude and joy. Direct implications for gratitude interventions were discussed.

Effect of External Force on Agency in Physical Human-Machine Interaction

In the advent of intelligent robotic tools for physically assisting humans, user experience, and intuitiveness in particular have become important features for control designs. However, existing works predominantly focus on performance-related measures for evaluating control systems as the subjective experience of a user by large cannot be directly observed. In this study, we therefore focus on agency-related interactions between control and embodiment in the context of physical human-machine interaction. By applying an intentional binding paradigm in a virtual, machine-assisted reaching task, we evaluate how the sense of agency of able-bodied humans is modulated by assistive force characteristics of a physically coupled device. In addition to measuring how assistive force profiles influence the sense of agency with intentional binding, we analyzed the sense of agency using a questionnaire. Remarkably, our participants reported to experience stronger agency when being appropriately assisted, although they contributed less to the control task. This is substantiated by the overall consistency of intentional binding results and the self-reported sense of agency. Our results confirm the fundamental feasibility of the sense of agency to objectively evaluate the quality of human-in-the-loop control for assistive technologies. While the underlying mechanisms causing the perceptual bias observed in the intentional binding paradigm are still to be understood, we believe that this study distinctly contributes to demonstrating how the sense of agency characterizes intuitiveness of assistance in physical human-machine interaction.

Negotiating the Maximum-Security Offender Identity: Experiences From Incarcerated Women

The representation of women classified as maximum-security offenders continues to be a challenge due to paucity of research regarding their experiences. Generally, their stories are masked under the experiences of the other categories of incarcerated women. Drawing from a larger study conducted with incarcerated women in a South African correctional centre in Johannesburg, in this article I provide a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews on the lived experiences of negotiating the maximum-security offender identity by 13 women. The results suggest that the maximum-security offender identity is associated with rejection, dehumanisation, denial of agency, restricted movement, and labelling. The article also highlights the significance of providing agency to incarcerated women in deconstructing stereotypes that represent them as angry and uneducated with no value to society. A more balanced repositioning of their stories emerges as they get an opportunity to construct their own experiences.

Between blame and care: women's 'needs talk' about obesity interventions in prenatal care

Pregnant women's weight is no longer a private life situation, but a public health issue. In western prenatal care policies, pregnant women with a high body mass index (BMI) are targeted as a high-risk group in need of extra prenatal care to prevent pregnancy complications and childhood obesity. Recent studies argue that such targeting leads to a number of unintended negative consequences for women such as stigmatisation and mother blame. While targeting based on BMI increases the surveillance of women's weight and behaviour in pregnancy, it might also provide extra care and services for women. This article draws on Nancy Fraser's concept of 'needs talk' to investigate how women interpret Danish prenatal care services provided to meet the 'obese' pregnant women's needs. The analysis shows that women engage ambivalently with claims about their needs and who they 'are' as these are formulated by health authorities. Some claims and assumptions about the 'obese' pregnant woman are accepted. Others are rejected or redefined. The article concludes by discussing maternal ambivalence about the obesity discourse in relation to the 'obese' pregnant woman as a category that positions women between being blamed and receiving extra prenatal care.

Representation of Auditory Task Components and of Their Relationships in Primate Auditory Cortex

The current study aimed to resolve some of the inconsistencies in the literature on which mental processes affect auditory cortical activity. To this end, we studied auditory cortical firing in four monkeys with different experience while they were involved in six conditions with different arrangements of the task components sound, motor action, and water reward. Firing rates changed most strongly when a sound-only condition was compared to a condition in which sound was paired with water. Additional smaller changes occurred in more complex conditions in which the monkeys received water for motor actions before or after sounds. Our findings suggest that auditory cortex is most strongly modulated by the subjects’ level of arousal, thus by a psychological concept related to motor activity triggered by reinforcers and to readiness for operant behavior. Our findings also suggest that auditory cortex is involved in associative and emotional functions, but not in agency and cognitive effort.

The Linguistic Effects of Context Specificity: Exploring Affect, Cognitive Processing, and Agency in Physicians' Think-Aloud Reflections

Background The literature suggests that affect, higher-level cognitive processes (e.g. decision-making), and agency (the capacity to produce an effect) are important for reasoning; however, we do not know how these factors respond to context. Using situated cognition theory as a framework, and linguistic tools as a method, we explored the effects of context specificity [a physician seeing two patients with identical presentations (symptoms and findings), but coming to two different diagnoses], hypothesizing more linguistic markers of cognitive load in the presence of contextual factors (e.g. incorrect diagnostic suggestion). Methods In this comparative and exploratory study, 64 physicians each completed one case with contextual factors and one without. Transcribed think-aloud reflections were coded by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software for markers of affect, cognitive processes, and first-person pronouns. A repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance was used to inferentially compare these LIWC categories between cases with and without contextual factors. This was followed by exploratory descriptive analysis of subcategories. Results As hypothesized, participants used more affective and cognitive process markers in cases with contextual factors and more I/me pronouns in cases without. These differences were statistically significant for cognitive processing words but not affective and pronominal words. Exploratory analysis revealed more negative emotions, cognitive processes of insight, and third-person pronouns in cases with contextual factors. Conclusions This study exposes linguistic differences arising from context specificity. These results demonstrate the value of a situated cognition view of patient encounters and reveal the utility of linguistic tools for examining clinical reasoning.

A Balancing Act: Agency and Constraints in University Students' Understanding of and Responses to Sexual Violence in the Night-Time Economy

This article extends our understanding of how university students make sense of, and respond to, sexual violence in the night-time economy (NTE). Based on semi-structured interviews with 26 students in a city in England, we examine students’ constructions of their experiences of sexual violence within the NTE, exploring their negotiations with, and resistance to, this violence. Building upon theories of postfeminism, we interrogate the possibilities for resistance within the gendered spaces of the NTE and propose a disaggregated conceptualization of agency to understand responses to sexual violence, thereby offering useful insights for challenging sexual violence in the NTE and in universities.

Palestinian Women in Terrorism: A Double-Edged Sword?

Drawing on a decade of research on terrorism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we show how subjective "rational choices" motivate some women to engage in terrorist activism. Focusing on the motives of young women who engage in terrorism is consistent with feminist theory's insistence on women's agency-even at the extremes. In addition to the well-established motivations for terrorism reported in the literature, interviews with young women involved in terrorism reveal mixed personal motives for their gender-defying choices, including thrill-seeking and some conscious rebellion. However, we contend that women's subjective rationale for participation in such violent behavior needs to be contextualized. A cost-benefit approach, we maintain, highlights the strategic considerations supporting the deployment of women as combatants by Palestinian terrorist organizations. We argue that the inclusion of women in terrorist activism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exposes a major fault line in attitudes to the role and proper place of women in what remains largely a patriarchal culture. This social ambivalence accounts for why, on all measures, women fare worse than their male counterparts. The implications of the findings for feminist research as well as policy are discussed.

Appropriating and asserting power on inflammatory arthritis teams: A social network perspective

Background

Therapeutic interventions for people with inflammatory arthritis (IA) increasingly involve multidisciplinary teams and strive to foster patient‐centred care and shared decision making. Participation in health‐care decisions requires patients to assert themselves and negotiate power in encounters with clinicians; however, clinical contexts often afford less authority for patients than clinicians. This disadvantage may inhibit patients' involvement in their own health care.

Objective

To identify communication attributes, IA patients use to influence and negotiate their treatment with members of their health‐care network.

Method

A qualitative social network approach was used to analyse data from a larger study that investigated IA patients' overall experiences of multidisciplinary care. Fourteen patients with IA attended individual semi‐structured interviews. Researchers used thematic analysis to identify patterns of assertiveness and influence in the data.

Results

Participants experienced loss of identity, control and agency in addition to the physical symptoms of IA. However, they had a sense of personal responsibility for managing their health care. Perceptions of health‐care team support enhanced patients' influence in treatment negotiations. Notably, there appeared to be an underlying tension between being empowered or disempowered.

Discussion and conclusions

The findings have significant implications for treatment decision communication approaches to IA care. A social network perspective may provide a pathway for clinicians to better understand the complexities of communication with their patients. This approach may reduce unequal power dynamics that occur within clinician/patient interactions and afford people with IA agency, control and affirmation of identity within their health‐care network.

Time for Action: Verbal Action Cues Influence Temporal Binding

Prior research has shown that our perception of time is compressed when we volitionally perform actions, a phenomenon referred to as temporal binding. In three studies, we investigated the degree to which contextual cues that signaled other agents and related to actions would influence binding, given that those cues may affect individual's feelings of independent action performance. Participants heard action verbalizations that did or did not match actions that participants had already begun performing. Participants' time estimates of the intervals between action initiations and action effects were higher on trials in which they heard verbalizations that matched their ongoing actions, and lower on trials in which the verbalizations and actions did not match. Such effects did not occur when participants passively observed actions and effects being caused by the computer. These results show that the compatibility of action cues with ongoing actions influences temporal binding effects, suggesting that they influence our feelings of having been an independent agent.

The Logic of Condom Use in Female Sex Workers in Bali, Indonesia

Studies on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention practices of female sex workers often examine the use of condom as a single behaviour: using or not using condom. This study explores typologies of the logic of condom use as part of exercising meaningful identities from female sex workers' perspectives. We employed in-depth interviews with a purposely selected 35 female sex workers in Bali, Indonesia. Information from the in-depth interviews was analysed using thematic framework analysis to develop typologies of female sex workers' experiences on the logic of condom use and its relation to the construction of identity. We identified two main logics for not using condom: the prioritising of financial stability and romantic relationships over condom use. The main logic for using condom was to protect their health in order to improve their future economic security. Embedded within these logics, women chose to practise agency and negotiate meaningful identities consistent with their ideals of being responsible mothers, successful migrant workers and loyal partners. Our study concluded that female sex workers had clear logics for both the use and non-use of condom with their clients, highlighting the rational nature of female sex workers decision making.

Paradoxes of late-modern autonomy imperatives: Reconciling individual claims and institutional demands in everyday practice

Governmentality studies and social theories agree that in contemporary societies the idea of autonomy is no longer simply an ideal or an individual aspiration but a social obligation. In an attempt to clarify the meaning of autonomy in this day and age, this paper asks how individuals perceive and negotiate the various dimensions of autonomy and how this affects the functioning of late-modern institutions. The empirical insights derived from a qualitative study provide a differentiated picture of how individuals pursue their claims to autonomy and comply with institutional demands for autonomy in everyday practice. By presenting seven types of late-modern "autonomy managers," the analysis evinces a usurpation of autonomous agency that renders individuals the institutional editors of the contemporary contradictions, deficits, and tensions that occur in their everyday interactions. This comes at the price of notionally free but exhausted actors running short of all kinds of resources.

A Complexity Perspective on Narrative Identity Reconstruction in Mental Health Recovery

The issue of complex nonlinear change processes is one of the least understood aspects of recovery and one of the most difficult to apply in recovery-oriented health care. The purpose of this article is to explore the recovery stories of 17 mental health peer support workers to understand their narrative identity reconstruction in recovery using a complexity perspective. Using the Life Story Model of Identity (LSMI), a narrative thematic analysis of interviews suggests that self-mastery as part of personal agency is an important component of participants' narrative identity reconstruction. Self-mastery is particularly evident in redemptive story turning points (positive outcome follows negative experience). A complexity perspective suggests that participants realized their adaptive capacity in relation to self-mastery as part of recovery and that its use at story turning points critically influenced their recovery journey. Further exploring self-mastery as adaptive growth in narrative identity reconstruction appears to be a fruitful research direction.

My Turn to Make a Difference: Efficacy Trends among Induction Physical Educators

Purpose: This study provides a longitudinal examination of the influences enhancing or constraining the development of efficacy in ten induction physical educators. Method: Over a span of three years, data from structured interviews and responses to the Physical Education Teaching Efficacy Scale were collected at seven time points. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, data were analyzed for qualitative themes and quantitative trends through the lens of various factors known to influence the career cycle. Results: In the personal environment, the presence of positive individual dispositions, the ability to balance competing demands, and high levels of perceived support emerged as constructive enhancers of efficacy. In the organizational environment, positive influences included the ability to meet the expectations of stakeholders and perceived confidence related to the tasks of teaching. Over time, significant differences existed for the survey categories measuring efficacy in content knowledge, accommodating skill level differences, teaching students with special needs, and instruction. Furthermore, significant differences also occurred related to gender, geographical location/setting, and school classification. Conclusion: Efficacy levels in beginning physical educators are highly dynamic and context-specific, but the presence of high levels of perceived support, both personally and organizationally, can positively enhance the efficacy of induction teachers related to balancing demands both inside and outside the classroom. Implications include the necessity for authentic and thorough preservice training and upon employment, access to adequate resources.

Saving a victim from himself: The rhetoric of the learner's presence and absence in the Milgram experiments

This paper contests what has remained a core assumption in social psychological and general understandings of the Milgram experiments. Analysing the learner/victim's rhetoric in experimental sessions across five conditions (N = 170), it demonstrates that what participants were exposed to was not the black-and-white scenario of being pushed towards continuation by the experimental authority and pulled towards discontinuation by the learner/victim. Instead, the traditionally posited explicit collision of 'forces' or 'identities' was at all points of the experiments undermined by an implicit collusion between them: rendering the learner/victim a divided and contradictory subject, and the experimental process a constantly shifting and paradoxical experiential-moral field. As a result, the paper concludes that evaluating the participants' conduct requires an understanding of the experiments where morality and non-destructive agency were not simple givens to be applied to a transparent case, but had to be re-created anew - in the face not just of their explicit denial by the experimenter but also of their implicit denial by the victim.