Month: July 2024

Howells perceives Ambrosio as “powerless to escape from his guilt-ridden obsession” and “caught up in a web of guilt-ridden erotic fantasy.”Peter Brooks claims that Lewis builds a fictional world driven by “forces which are both beyond man’s control and yet inhabiting within man, as they inhabit within nature.”These scholars and others appear to be showing their own dominance over Lewis by exposing his manipulations, but they are accepting the idea that he allows no autonomy for his characters, similar to how we saw that scholars bridled under and submitted to the novel’s tendency toward objectification. By suspiciously reinforcing the existence of absolute control in the novel, scholars overlook the text’s evidence of culpability and possibility. The scholars quoted above insist that Ambrosio is powerless within the narrative despite the fact that he ruins or destroys many lives. Stephen Ahern takes issue with this kind of reading, arguing that “the narrative leaves plenty of room for individual agency.”He explains that “the monk’s actions cannot be excused as the product of passions beyond his control” because it is Ambrosio’s “willful blindness” that dooms him and his moments of uncertainty or regret that had the potential to save him.Lewis dramatizes Ambrosio’s paralyzing choices and missed opportunities throughout the novel. And yet it is true that Ambrosio also feels compelled. Ahern explains this apparent contradiction with the argument that Lewis is exposing the cruel delusion implicit in the rhetoric of sentimental love. However,hydroponic nft the rhetoric of desire is only one manifestation of a more pervasive verbal phenomenon in The Monk.

In this section, I will consider how the novel uses a rhetoric of necessity with which characters attempt to order each other’s present and future, and sometimes even past. These characters constantly recontextualize the situation they inhabit, attempting to reorient each other toward a perception of the possibilities and impossibilities that serve them in the moment. After close-reading how they do this, I will suggest that it can provide a model for recontextualizing our own situation as literary critics writing about sensational novels under the current scholarly constraints. As Napier and several characters in the text point out, the refusal of mercy is the primary sin in the novel.Yet Lewis does not portray his repeated scenes of desperation only as ones in which a powerless person begs for compassion from a hard-hearted and powerful one. In each of these scenes, though one character clearly has more power in the situation and the less powerful character can only ask for mercy, the way that character often does so is by striving for control of the more powerful character’s movements, thoughts, and feelings and by claiming the power to narrate events. Kilgour refers to Lucifer, the most influential character, as the “infernal author Satan,” but many characters appear to be struggling for authorial control.By looking closely at four of the scenes in which one character has the choice to act either maliciously or forbearingly, I will show that in these crucial moments of decision, both characters repeatedly use grammatical features like verbtense or mood to deploy power. In these exchanges, each one verbally conveys that there is no possibility for choice, even as their competing necessities and inevitabilities demonstrate that there is.

The first of these scenes of contestation occurs early in the novel, when Ambrosio finds Agnes’s letter from Raymond planning her escape from the convent and, refusing her pleas for mercy, turns the pregnant nun over to the domina to be punished. This summary implies that Ambrosio holds all the power in the situation, but the scene allows for more complexity. Napier and Ahern have identified Ambrosio’s pitilessness and subsequent regret in this scene as formative for his character, and many other scholars have likely overlooked it because of Agnes’s theatrical and sentimental emotional displays , but closer attention to the verbal exchange between Agnes and Ambrosio reveals the two to be engaged in a struggle for control of the perception of their situation. In this and other scenes, modal auxiliaries suggest whether a future course of action is possible, likely, necessary, inevitable, or recommended. We might expect an ethical negotiation like this one to feature several instances of could, may, might, should, and would, but here and elsewhere Lewis largely refrains from using these modal verbs and prefers must, shall, and will, making characters speak as if the future is already written while they argue over what that future will be. Another important aspect of this and other such scenes is Lewis’s reliance on the imperative mood. Imperatives can be interpreted as pleas, requests, and suggestions, but they always take the form of a command, which, along with the extent to which Agnes seizes control of narrating the future in this scene, makes her appear to have a great deal of autonomy even as, practically, she has none. Early in their exchange, Agnes sounds as if she possesses more power than Ambrosio. Ambrosio uses the modal auxiliary must to present his own choice as being out of his hands. Against Agnes’s objections, he announces, “I must read this letter” and “This letter must to the prioress.” He defers to authority to decide his behavior, as if his future actions have already been dictated by the rules of the Church. He uses few imperatives, and only physical ones like “stay” and “hold.”

Agnes also uses physical imperatives , but she additionally demands his attention and tells him to “think” and most frequently to feel, demanding that he take pity on her.Though Agnes is imploring, she is also commanding him to feel and act in a certain way and asserting her own idea of the future: “Father, compassionate my youth! Look with indulgence on a woman’s weakness, and deign to conceal my frailty! The remainder of my life shall be employed in expiating this single fault, and your lenity will bring back a soul to heaven!”Her use of the modal verbs shall and will rather than the more pleading could suggests that the situation has already been resolved in her favor and the fate she describes is a certainty rather than being reliant on Ambrosio’s unlikely mercy. As Agnes claims narrative control, Ambrosio resists. He uses rhetorical questions to demonstrate his imperviousness to her demands for compassion, responding in a manner intended to shut down dialogue and distort her version of the future to reflect his own perspective: “What! shall St Clare’s convent become the retreat of prostitutes? Shall I suffer the church of Christ to cherish in its bosom debauchery and shame?”Whereas Agnes used shall in the sense of will to denote necessity in her version of the future, Ambrosio uses shall in the sense of ought to reframe her necessary future as her ridiculous misconception of what is appropriate. Agnes responds by redoubling her imperatives for Ambrosio to heed her and take pity on her and her unborn child and then assures him, “If you discover my imprudence to the domina, both of us are lost,” using the form of a factual conditional statement to represent the deadly consequence of his intended action for her and her baby as a fact so incontrovertible and emergent it deserves the present tense.He again deflects with a scornful rhetorical question and counters with his own narrative of the future: “Shall I conceal your crime—I whom you have deceived by your false confession?—No, daughter, no. I will render you a more essential service. I will rescue you from perdition, in spite of yourself. Penance and mortification shall expiate your offence,hydroponic channel and severity force you back to the path of holiness.”His emphasized first-person pronoun repossesses his agency from Agnes, and he reasserts his control of his future and hers, characterizing himself as a holy hero in a narrative of her salvation. As Agnes is about to be carried away, she has lost the ability to affect her fate, but retains the ability to affect Ambrosio’s sense of what has happened. She reclaims their narrative, recasting the present and future as the fatal past: “You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue; but would not; you are the destroyer of my soul; you are my murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn infant’s!”She rejects his formulations in which he either has no choice or acts heroically, retelling their story as one in which he is clearly at fault, substituting could and would for his must and will.

She then predicts a future in which he will be punished by God for his cruelty and delivers her final command to him, that when that time comes, he “think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon.”Her words wound Ambrosio, as he suffers “[a] secret pang at his heart,” and Matilda soon gives him reason to shout in torment, “Agnes! Agnes! . . . I already feel thy curse!”The second scene I’ll consider is the one where Matilda reveals herself as a woman and convinces Ambrosio not to report her, and it is the only one in the novel in which a supplicant obtains mercy. Süner and other scholars have focused on the sensational moment when Matilda exposes her breast and Ambrosio becomes paralyzed by lustful indecision, but before this moment there are many others in which their power struggle is more verbal than physical. Max Fincher argues that Matilda’s rhetorical effectiveness in this scene is the first example in the novel of the recurring figure of the woman who verbally dominates men.When examining her rhetoric, though, we can see that it is very similar to Agnes’s from the previous scene and to Ambrosio’s own—the main difference is that she gives no ground in their verbal competition for control over the narrative. Matilda uses imperatives at least eighteen times in the scene, covering a full range of orders, including the physical , attentional , intellectual , and emotional .Meanwhile, Ambrosio, shaken, gives no commands for some pages, deferring to authority that he claims forecloses his ability to veer from the course of action that is dictated by the Church. He tells her, “I feel that duty obliges my treating you with harshness; I must reject your prayer . . . the laws of our order forbid your stay . . . my vows will oblige me to declare your story to the community. You must from hence.”He maintains that the Church has already decided his future actions, but he also shows discomfort with his cruel choice by tempering his certainty somewhat and disclaiming his responsibility further by making duty, vows, and religious laws the subjects of his statements. Matilda verbally outmatches Ambrosio at every turn. As Ambrosio softens his resolve, he also softens the rebuking rhetorical questions he used to resist Agnes’s vision of the future, now sounding equally searching and disapproving: “can you really hope for my permission to remain among us? Even if I were to grant your request, what good could you derive from it?”His use of the subjunctive mood still suggests that it would be impossible for him to allow her to stay, but he seems both curious and concerned, lacking the contempt he demonstrated in his questions to Agnes. Matilda, in contrast, transitions easily from a rhetorical question freighted with criticism to an accusatory dismissal of his stated intentions to a vivid evocation of her preferred future and a declaration of virtuous love: “Can you be less generous than I thought you? I will not suspect it. You will not drive a wretch to despair; I shall still be permitted to see you . . . and, when we expire, our bodies shall rest in the same grave.”When Ambrosio attempts to harden his resolve, she threatens to kill herself, and her physical threat is made more credible by the present tense: “the moment that you leave me, I plunge this steel into my heart”; “Tell me that you will conceal my story; that I shall remain your friend and your companion, or this poniard drinks my blood.”88 In her attempts to gain control of the situation, Matilda reaches extremes that Agnes and Ambrosio do not, but her verbal techniques are only an amplification of theirs, not a display of aberrant feminine power. The third of these scenes, in which Ambrosio rapes Antonia, has drawn scholarly attention for the horrific way Lewis portrays the rape, but the scene is also significant in showing Antonia’s comparative rhetorical weakness and, notably, Lewis’s suppression of most of her speech.

In Wolfenbach’s case, these responses tend to be ironic or disdainful. Even when scholars and publishers recover a novel, they often suggest it is important but not good, or that it is important only because others have dismissed it. The Castle of Wolfenbach went out of print after its 1968 publication as part of The Northanger Set of Jane Austen’s Horrid Novels, but after Rictor Norton included an excerpt of it in his 2000 book Gothic Readings, fringe publishers began to show renewed interest in Parsons’s novel. Norton introduces the excerpt with some details of Parsons’s tragic life, a description of her novels as derivate of Radcliffe’s, and a quotation from one of the novel’s early reviews that complains about its unmet expectations.Even this lukewarmreintroduction of Wolfenbach could have caught the attention of publishers and scholars who work with culturally devalued fiction. In 2003 Wildside Press, which produces mostly science fiction and is thus experienced in dealing with literature of precarious cultural value, published an edition without an introduction that is now out of print. In 2006, Valancourt Books, whose mission is to recover neglected fiction, released an inexpensive paperback with a scholarly introduction by Hoeveler, followed by a reprint in 2007 and ebook in 2009, as part of an effort to republish all of the Horrid Novels with scholarly introductions. Today, electronic versions are readily accessible, including one with a lengthy scholarly introduction by The Northanger Library Project, whose purpose is also the recuperation of dismissed fiction. These publications, like recent scholarly work on the other Horrid Novels,blueberry packaging attempt to reassess these works with the assumption that previous recovery workers were still too hasty to judge.

Yet, by continuing to assert Wolfenbach’s importance only as a novel mentioned by Jane Austen or as a novel that has been neglected, publishers and scholars spread awareness of the novel while disseminating what is likely only an ambivalent interest in it. Similarly, Wolfenbach’s scholarly recuperation as a “female gothic” novel makes interest in the novel conditional on the way it is perceived to be working in the Radcliffean mode and the extent to which it alters Radcliffe’s prototype in its depiction of female oppression. Scholars reading Wolfenbach through a female gothic lens have pointed out that Parsons, unlike Radcliffe, makes violence against women gruesomely apparent in the text, but they do so by marking this difference as a single variation in an otherwise typical imitation. Angela Wright prefaces her claim about this explicit violence with “Where Parsons deviates from the Radcliffean model, however,” and Sue Chaplin argues that Parsons’s plots are “very much in the Radcliffean mould, but what distinguishes Parsons from her predecessor” is the graphic nature of the descriptions.Karen Morton instead argues that Parsons’s gothic novels resist Radcliffe’s model, in part by portraying more realistic characters and situations, but even this argument necessitates constant comparison to Radcliffe, making interest in Parsons contingent on her relationship to a more well-regarded novelist.This contingent interest, with its attendant valuation of particularity, can help reveal the distance between the investments of a novel like The Castle of Wolfenbach and the investments of critics today. The cultural trend of recovering, reassessing, and revaluing popular older novels by women has not generally led scholars to argue that Wolfenbach is effectively written or complex. It is still extremely rare for them to approach Wolfenbach as anything but one of the Horrid Novels, for which it receives passing mention. As E. J. Clery writes, novels like Wolfenbach seem “already read” because they are formulaic.

The fact that Wolfenbach and other early gothic novels were plentiful, formulaic, and sensational has served historically as justification for describing them as indistinguishable media for feeling, rarely worthy of close, particular attention. By and large, scholars seem to pass the novel over as one among many of its kind, with nothing interesting to offer. Hoeveler represents many scholars’ attitude toward Wolfenbach well in statement that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “I would not claim it is a great novel. Instead, I see it as a historical document that speaks to us about the fears, beliefs, and prejudices of its era. As such it is an interesting text to study in relation to other gothic, sentimental, and melodramatic works of the 1790s.”Hoeveler’s tentative assertion that the novel is interesting perfectly illustrates Sianne Ngai’s argument that the word interesting offers a compromise in the conflict over whether a critic’s role should be to judge works aesthetically or dispense with aesthetic judgments entirely. Ngai writes that interesting “keeps the possibility alive that a critic might actually continue the task of influencing public judgment, if only in the modest way of suggesting that some texts are more worth paying attention to than others and then supplying reasons why.”In this way, as Ngai explains, there is “a deeply pedagogical dimension to the interesting,” as venturing this assessment often requires the critic to inform her audience and engage in a discussion with the intention of not only convincing but also illuminating.In contrast to aesthetic judgments that purport to be instantaneous, final, and universal , Ngai argues that interesting entails consideration and reconsideration, as it assumes an always-shifting point of personal knowledge. A work of art can be bad but still worthy of lengthy attention, Ngai explains, because it offers information the audience does not yet have. However, the affective dimensions of interesting complicate its usefulness as a way to reassess works like Wolfenbach.

Ngai describes interest as both affective and conceptual, a mostly detached engagement, and one that can easily tip into boredom or frustration. Gothic novels like Wolfenbach have been framed as intense emotional experiences, with an “already read” derivative quality. A reader expecting an intense emotional experience will likely find cold comfort in mere interest, and a reader predisposed to see only formula will be unlikely to search very hard for novelty. Scholars have a lot of incentive to find a book like Wolfenbach interesting, so they may be frustrated by the effort it takes, finding that a strenuous attempt to be interested yields only the rather unsatisfying option of being interested for the sake of the novel’s role in history alone, or that it requires a laborious reframing of the terms on which we judge the novel. I sidestep both of these endeavors in this chapter by attempting to occupy Wolfenbach’s world and our own critical climate at the same time, in order to illuminate the novel’s cultural investments and set them against our own. The differences among Wolfenbach’s values and our own seem too numerous to catalogue, but we have already seen the most important ones emerge in recent negative assessments of Parsons’s prescriptive morality, universality, and conventionality, which highlight our own beliefs in relativism, specificity, and individuality. According to Ngai, people are interested when they do not know something, while for Parsons, interest may involve not knowing, but it is also often determined by whether something fits into known categories. Ngai’s interest is individual and particular, always changing based on a given person’s knowledge at the time, and ambivalent in its emotional engagement, while Parsons’s is normative and unquestionably emotionally involved. These differences make it appear as though Parsons’s school of affliction is the only rigidly prescriptive one, but we have seen that what appear to be independent assessmentsof a novel like Wolfenbach actually look more like emotional rules that are passed down over time when considered together. Even a scholar like Ngai, who seems to be an independent auditor of the kinds of critics who establish emotional rules, inhabits an affective school in which she participates in the lessons. As she elaborates on the semiotics of interesting,blueberry packaging box what is for the most part a descriptive argument becomes sometimes indistinguishable from a prescriptive one. After using the definitions of authorities to break interesting into its components, like time and novelty, she then turns to examples and presents them as situations in which the particular combination of components means that there is only one appropriate response or range of responses. For example, when describing Ed Ruscha’s books of photographs of ordinary subjects , she writes, “Given the banality of the subject matter and the calculated distances at which the examples of each type were photographed , these generic-looking compilations were clearly engineered to keep affect on a low burner, generating at most tiny flickers of interest.”By linking the response to the objective components of interesting/boring that she has already established and to the artist’s intention and even the construction of the art, she excludes any possibility for meaningful variation in response, as if any such variations would be incorrect. Within a critical culture shaped by implicit affective rules like these, a reader who broadcasts her sympathetic response to a novel like Wolfenbach risks being judged as unsophisticated or self-righteous. I hope I escape both of these judgments by arguing that a sympathetic response to Wolfenbach, like my own, is not entirely different from the aforementioned critical responses. While scholars privilege educated and difficult reading experiences, in the case of eighteenth-century formulaic gothic fiction that abounds with tales of distress, it takes as much effort, cultivation of a specific taste, and resistance to the dominant critical attitude to become absorbed in the novel in a way similar to what lay readers in the 1790s might have when they made Wolfenbach and other circulating-library fiction popular.

When I read Wolfenbach for the first time, I read it with a taste for melodrama and sentiment honed by years of reading early eighteenth-century British amatory fiction, midcentury novels of sensibility, and early gothic novels, as well as American emotional literature, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Twilight. This reading practice and preference allowed me to immerse myself in the story and experience sometimes wrenching agony at the characters’ woes, especially when those woes were ones I could not bear to imagine experiencing. I also read Wolfenbach for the first time on an e-reader, like many of amateur critics note that they did, and even this new medium could have hugely affected the way I approached the novel, as scholars are beginning to consider.Even so, as a reader aware of the critical conversation about novels like Wolfenbach, I was continually conscious of how I ought to judge its formulaic qualities, and it took considerable effort to remain engaged in the story. In this way, some experiences of absorption in bad writing can be as difficult as some experiences of scholarly distance, just as some dismissive critical judgments of it can be as easy as some uncritical acceptance. The way in which our critical judgments of emotion conform to cultural standards is difficult to see because, like good students, we have internalized these standards. Parsons’s school of affliction is only visible to us in the aspects that differ from our own beliefs and conventions. Likewise, our school of critical emotion is most visible in these differences. We have our own rules that dictate the proper way to express suffering in fiction, but they are most apparent when they are broken by “horrid” fiction like Wolfenbach. We have learned a very limited number of ways we are supposed to respond emotionally to bad fiction as critics, but these limitations only feel constricting when we see the force of the critical tradition that upholds them. Our emotional conventions change greatly over time, but in any given cultural moment they have the doctrinal solidity of a schoolhouse, and only when we recognize that other people in other times and places occupied different schools can we have the option of stepping outside our own. The novel’s salacious sensationalism made it infamous after its publication in 1796, especially once the public knew that the author was Matthew Lewis, a young member of Parliament. But as we can see, the deviant brutality and pleasure that Coleridge denounces in 1797 becomes, for King in 2002, the explosive material of a swaggering rebel, something only the most uptight readers would shun. Even as early as 1957, Devendra Varma would reflect on the scandalized early reception of the novel, “To us it seems ineffably puerile that anyone could be disturbed by these mild erotics. But, immediately, the prigs and prudes rose up.”Today, The Monk’s transgressive subjects and stylistic power make it laudable, in contrast to Eliza Parsons’s “horrid” Castle of Wolfenbach from my previous chapter.

As Lang points out, her method “involves reading these responses as texts in themselves,” which is necessarily biased by her own perspective.Like Lang, I make no claims to objectivity, but I attempt to be a thoughtful reader of others’ responses. Lang, in the article mentioned above, calls attention to a scholarly tendency toward “obfuscation”: “Conventions of referring to one’s own idiosyncratic interpretation as that of “the reader”—a convenient fiction—are normative within literary criticism, and their effects in obscuring the way interpretative differences flow from differences in the subject position, geographical location and educational training of readers are rarely remarked on.”This convention includes not only “the reader” but also “we” and any subjective judgment stated as objective fact. Felski writes that though many scholars look askance at the idea of objectivity, “these same critics adopt a stance of what we can call ‘procedural objectivity’ that screens out any flicker of emotion, tamps down idiosyncratic impulses, and steers away from the first-person voice.”This practice becomes especially noticeable when scholars use it to represent their own emotions about a text. For instance, in her introduction to The Castle of Otranto, E. J. Clery asserts that the long-suffering Hippolita’s circumstances are “never so affecting” as the ones of comparable characters from other works.Similarly, Napier writes that “we are virtually prevented from developing anything more than a programmed response to stock Gothic situations.”

Though it is a scholarly norm to generalize from one’s own reaction and expertise,nursery grow bag these kinds of statements imply that readers who feel differently are feeling incorrectly. Lynne Pearce, in Feminism and the Politics of Reading, provides an alternative to this scholarly way of writing about feeling by including alongside her scholarly analysis the responses of readers in feminist reading communities and extracts from her own diary-like accounts of first experiencing, remembering, and reexperiencing the texts she analyzes. She uses these more overtly affective responses to illustrate what she calls “implicated” reading—a relationship with the text that is as dynamic and complex as a relationship between lovers, including not only “ravissement” but also feelings like disappointment. She sets this kind of textual engagement against the professional hermeneutical reading that can be comfortably performed by feminist scholars. Her opposition of implicated reading and hermeneutical reading demonstrates the “massive discomfort of those of us who, as feminist readers, regularly ‘commute’ between these two discourses/models of reading.”In one of her “meta-commentaries” on her reading experience, she draws attention to the way her feminist interpretive practice “constitutes an obstacle to a more personalized and emotionally engaged one” even as she recognizes her theoretical objection to the idea that politics and emotions are separate spheres.What she concludes is that the close engagement of implicated reading cannot be performed simultaneously with the distanced practices of contextualizing and interpreting.

My own reading practice, which informs the structure and method of my dissertation, often toggles between these two modes or even employs them simultaneously. My initial readings of the novels I discuss in these chapters were deeply implicated—I felt anxious for the characters, I cried over the portrayals of grief—but most of the time my critical faculties remained engaged as well, as an internal voice that noted distracting repetition or sexism or narrative techniques, like watching a film with a director’s commentary running. It is possible that my reading experience is unusual, the unconventional product of my lifelong empathetic enjoyment of sentimental and sensational fiction; my training and practice as a fiction writer and a copy editor; and my education in eighteenth-century literature, feminism, and emotion studies. Though I have been inculcated with the mood of scholarly suspicion that Felski describes, it is also mixed with many other moods when I read, reread, and write about texts. My initial orientation toward the criticism I analyze in my dissertation was thus adversarial: I was angry that amateur critics write violently about a character I had identified with; I was frustrated that scholars assert the impossibility of feeling what I did in fact feel. But in the process of attempting to understand these critical responses, I was able to acknowledge them as being equally valid as my own, the products of different orientations, practices, knowledges, and perceptions. It is these differences, and what they can tell us about engagements with literature, that energize my dissertation. In my first chapter, I investigate what is “bad” about The Castle of Wolfenbach , by Eliza Parsons.

Tepidly received by its contemporary critics, this sentimental gothic novel was nonetheless popular, in part because it was one of the works published by Minerva Press, which catered to the taste for formulaic gothic fiction in the 1790s. Minerva was the target of critical anxiety about popular novels and their readers, which is likely why Jane Austen included several by this publisher in her list of “horrid” novels that a young woman passes along as a recommendation in Northanger Abbey. Because of Wolfenbach’s association with Minerva and the Northanger Horrid Novels, scholars have tended to approach the novel as one among many of an emotional type, uninteresting in itself. Employing eighteenth-century ideas about feeling, Parsons portrays and enacts a kind of emotional instruction that teaches characters and readers to respond appropriately to types of suffering without needing to know the particulars of the distressing circumstances. The methods Parsons uses to teach a way of “feeling with the formula”—didactic moralizing, conventional characters and situations, and sparse detail— become, for amateur critics today, evidence of the novel’s poor literary quality. These amateurs, in turn, model ways of feeling against the formula, reducing Wolfenbach to its conventions in order to channel contempt into amusement, for example by counting the number of times characters burst into tears and categorizing the novel as one that is “so bad it’s good.” In contrast, Sianne Ngai’s description of scholarly interest appears to offer a way of suspending critical dismissal, but in practice it also closes down responses by limiting acceptable ways to feel. By comparing the way Parsons and different forms of criticism school emotional response, I attempt to make the institutional qualities of our affective judgments of “bad” fiction more apparent, which can allow us to resist our own emotional training. My second chapter, on Matthew Lewis’s 1796 novel, The Monk, uses Daniel Gross’s “uncomfortable situations” and Rita Felski’s suspicious critical mood to further consider the emotional constraints of criticism.In contrast to Wolfenbach, The Monk has met a better reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than it did when it scandalized early critics. But it has also been the subject of two very different marketing strategies during this time—one to abstract it from its sensationalism and the other to rebrand its sensationalism for modern fans of genre fiction. This tension in its publication history mirrors a tension in its scholarly reception, in which many scholars avoid discussing the novel’s emotional features or dismiss them as falsely sentimental. Meanwhile, scholars who address its graphic violence and rape and its aestheticized lust in detail follow conventions of feminist analysis or close reading that end up sounding awkwardly similar to amateur responses that praise the novel’s misogyny or prurience. Seeking a method for writing about the novel’s feeling that avoids these critical traps, I turn to its illustrations, which allow a different approach to the novel’s affective power dynamics and lead me to analyze the rhetorical struggles in its scenes of distress. In this chapter, analyzing the novel’s paratexts enables me to reconsider its critical history and access a set of responses that the dominant scholarly discourse has minimized,plastic growing bag freeing up further possibilities for scholarly analysis that resist current academic strictures.

The problem of analyzing sentimentality in The Monk remains difficult in our current academic context, but in my third chapter, I propose a way of exploring the particular features of Ann Radcliffe’s sentimental interactions in The Mysteries of Udolphoand tracing responses to them through the word sweet. Transitioning from my consideration of formal and stylistic emotion of the first two chapters, I narrow my focus in this chapter to a single word to begin an exploration of how the smallest textual features can affect readers. I use the term “emotional taste” to describe how beliefs become embedded in diction through cultural associations and how these value-inflected keywords can contribute to different strong responses among particular groups of readers. To illustrate this idea, I closely analyze how the word sweet, which Radcliffe uses 131 times in Udolpho, creates an intratextual association with feminine emotional receptivity and influence. This association, combined with certain literary and historical associations with sweetness, could help explain why, for instance, some female amateur reviewers today respond to Radcliffe’s sweetest character with violent frustration. It could also shed light on the better modern reputation of Radcliffe’s Italian, which cloaks feminine receptive sweetness with emotional impermeability. I close the dissertation with an investigation that includes speculation about how critical feeling could hinge on even the smallest typographical feature of a text. In my final chapter, I discuss how The Castle of Otranto , by Horace Walpole, has puzzled readers for centuries, provoking ambivalent assessments about its literary quality that depend in large part on whether Walpole meant the novel to be comic or tragic. In reflecting on these mixed responses, I show how critics appear to seek a correct affective response by speculating about Walpole’s intentions and how Walpole’s inclusion in Susan Sontag’s definition of camp seems to confirm beliefs that the novel is meant for the amusement of an in-crowd. However, Walpole’s own framing of the novel is more ambiguous, as is his tone in the novel itself. Compounding this indeterminacy is the fact that different editions of the novel format and punctuate dialogue differently—minor changes that could have a huge effect on how readers interact with the text, as I demonstrate through amateur critics’ discussion of dialogue format and scholars’ quotations of speech with exclamation points. Though minuscule, exclamation points in particular carry divergent affective associations through their literary history, and the way editors preserve or amend them in certain scenes can change the tone of the scene significantly. Since neither Walpole’s statements about the novel nor the text itself provide a clear emotional directive that resolves the affective uncertainties of critics, I consider whether it is possible to approach the novel in a way that discards the idea of a correct emotional response in favor of careful attention, curiosity, and receptivity. The ultimate goal of my dissertation is not to assert my own new and better interpretations of texts or to argue that professional or nonprofessional critics should feel differently about these novels. I would like instead to demonstrate the way all critical emotion is limited by critics’ situations and to consider what those limited emotional judgments do, especially when they have the power to shape the discourse on a novel, as those of prominent critics can. Despite my own limitations, I hope to offer a broad enough range of approaches to suggest that there are many more possible directions to move in than the ones literary scholars most often choose. Even as I find myself leaning on many of the traditional academic techniques for writing with and about emotion, I am feeling around for a better way. As these selections suggest, the reception of Eliza Parsons’s gothic novel The Castle of Wolfenbachhas been remarkably static, changing very little over more than two hundred years. These tepid responses temper expressions of enjoyment with judgments of quality, and rather than dismissing the novel outright, the professional critics concede that it possesses the bare minimum of “interest” necessary to recommend it. The word interesting has different implications in these different critical contexts, which I will discusslater, but the professional assessments of the novel’s importance and ability to involve readers, as well as the blogger’s statement that it is enjoyable but forgettable, all mark the novel as only somewhat worthwhile material for reading or studying. The similarity of these critics’ assessments over time might suggest that the novel is of objectively middling quality, since critics with extremely different training judge it similarly across time. However, I will argue that the relative constancy of critical judgment has less to do with quality and more to do with the way Wolfenbach comes to readers already classified as a certain kind of derivative, emotional novel and the manner in which this classification has been passed down for generations. This is not to say that the novel is actually good but misunderstood—in fact, I agree that the novel is formulaic and melodramatic.

Our analyses show that false positive and ‘of-target’ GWAS signals that arise because of erroneous physical addresses can typically be identified and rectified by fitting DNA markers associated with causal loci as fixed effects, which is effectively equivalent to fitting a multilocus genetic model in a QTL mapping or candidate gene analysis study using mixed linear models . A preponderance of the erroneous physical addresses are typically going to be found on homoeologous chromosomes, as was the case in our study, and hence could be misconstrued as signals associated with the effects of homoeologous loci.The sheer numerical abundance of sources of resistance to Fusarium wilt race 1 in strawberry did not shed light on the diversity of R-genes that they might carry, if any,or genetic mechanisms underlying resistance . Was resistance to race 1 conferred by dominant R-genes? How many unique Fusarium wilt R-genes exist in wild and domesticated populations of strawberry? To explore these questions, we developed and undertook genetic analyses of S1 populations developed by self-pollinating highly resistant F. × ananassa heirloom cultivars and individuals and full-sib populations developed by crossing highly resistant ecotypes of F. chiloensis subsp. chiloensis , F. virginiana subsp. virginiana , and F. virginiana subsp. grayana with a highly susceptible F. × ananassa individual .

The phenotypes of of spring in each of the segregating populations spanned the entire range from highly resistant to highly susceptible with bimodal distributions . When individuals within each population were classified as resistant or susceptible using 2.0 as the cut of on the disease symptom rating scale,plastic planters the observed phenotypic ratios perfectly ft the expected phenotypic ratios for the segregation of dominant resistance genes . The Guardian and Wiltguard S1 and 12C089P002 × PI602575 and PI552277 × 12C089P002 full-sib populations each appeared to segregate for a single dominant resistance gene, whereas the Earliglow and 17C327P010 S1 populations appeared to segregate for two dominant genes with duplicate epistasis, where a single dominant allele at either locus was sufficient to confer resistance . The statistical inferences were not affected by shifting the cut of downward to 1.5 or upward to 2.5; hence, we concluded that dominant R-genes segregated in these populations .Genome-wide searches for SNPs associated with loci segregating for resistance to Fusarium wilt uncovered a single tightly linked cluster of statistically significant SNP markers in each population . The SNPs most strongly associated with differences in resistance phenotypes were tightly linked to partially to completely dominant R-genes that segregated in these populations and mapped to three non-homoeologous chromosomes . The putative R-genes are hereafter designated FW2 , FW3 , FW4 , and FW5 . FW2 and FW5 genetically mapped proximal to FW1 on chromosome 2B . The effects and positions of the these loci were identified by GWAS or genetic mapping alone .

The SNP markers most strongly associated with each of these loci were different and spanned a 1.6 Mb haploblock . To explore the structure of this haploblock in greater depth, we imputed and phased the haplotypes for 71 50K Axiom array-genotyped SNPs among 653 individuals in the California population . These included the parents and more distant relatives and common ancestors of the S1 and full-sib progeny that were both genotyped and phenotyped . Although FW1, FW2, and FW5 could be alleles, haplotypes for 71 SNPs within the haploblock predicted to harbor these loci were insufficient to rule out paralogs, and confidence intervals for the estimated positions of these loci spanned the gene-rich haploblock . The SNP haplotypes for Fronteras and Portola were identical except for three consecutive SNPs in a short haploblock slightly downstream of the location predicted to harbor FW1 . The haplotype associated with the dominant FW1 allele for that haploblock was ascertained from the genotypes of Fronteras and Portola . The haplotypes observed for the other resistant parents difered from each other and Fronteras and Portola; hence, from SNP haplotypes and approximate physical positions, we could not unequivocally show that the putative R-genes associated with these phenotypically mapped loci were allelic. Finally, the KASP assays we developed for informative SNPs associated with these loci were not cross predictive . The paralog hypothesis seems plausible for the underlying R-genes; however, our data were in sufficient to rule out the single locus, multiple allele hypothesis. Although additional studies are needed to resolve this question, the classes of R-genes hypothesized to underlie these loci are commonly found in tandemly duplicated clusters in plants .

The genotypic means, effects, and PVE estimates for SNP markers tightly linked with FW2 and FW5 were nearly identical to estimates for SNP markers associated with FW1 in the Fronteras and Portola S1 populations . FW2 was nearly completely dominant . The additive and dominance effects of the FW2 locus were 1.5- to 1.9- fold greater than those reported for the FW1 locus, partly because unfavorable allele homozygotes were more strongly susceptible in the Guardian S1 population than in the Fronteras and Portola S1 populations. The estimated marginal means for favorable allele homozygotes ranged from 1.07 to 1.25 in the three populations . The EMM for resistant homozygotes was ̄yAA = 1.1, whereas the EMM for susceptible homozygotes was ̄yaa = 4.5. We could not estimate the degree of dominance for FW5 because the AA homozygote was not observed in the fullsib population; however, the EMM for the heterozygote was 1.06, which implies that the FW5 allele might be completely dominant. Although the statistical evidence for the segregation of a single dominant R-gene on chromosome 1A was strong in the Wiltguard S1 population, the effects of SNPs associated with FW3 were weaker than those associated with FW1, FW2, and FW5 on chromosome 2B . The most significant FW3-associated SNP was AX-123363542 , which only explained 23% of the phenotypic variation for resistance to race 1. Despite this, the EMM for FW3 homozygotes was only slightly greater than the EMMs for FW1 and FW2 homozygotes . Although the PVE estimate was greater for FW4 than FW3 , the EMMs for SNP marker heterozygotes were virtually identical: 1.76 for FW3 and 1.69 for FW4; hence, FW4 appears to be as strong as FW3 .With the genomic locations of FW1, FW2, and FW5 narrowed to a short haploblock on chromosome 2B , we searched annotations in the ‘Royal Royce’ reference genome to identify genes encoding proteins known to play an important role in race-specific disease resistance via pathogen recognition and activation of defense responses, e.g., pathogen-associated molecular pattern -triggered immunity or effector triggered immunity . Eight of 1,208 annotated genes found in the 0.0-5.0 Mb haploblock on chromosome 2B encode proteins with known R-gene domains and functions . These included one coiled-coil domain NLR encoding gene and two tightly linked Tollinterleukin 1 receptor domain type NLR encoding genes . Hence, the most promising candidate genes for FW1 encode NLR proteins. The approximate 95% Bayes confdence interval for the genomic location of FW4 on chromosome 6B was fairly wide and consequently harbored 197 annotated genes in the ‘Royal Royce’ reference genome . Nine of these 197 annotated genes are predicted to encode R-proteins that mediate gene-for-gene resistance in plants . These included multiple NBS-LRR R-proteins . Finally,plastic nursery plant pot the approximate 95% Bayes confdence interval for the genomic location of FW3 on chromosome 1A was slightly wider than that observed for the other mapped loci because the effect of the locus was weaker. There were 535 annotated genes within that interval, of which seven were predicted to encode NLR or other R-proteins . This was the locus with the weakest support for the segregation of a race-specific R-gene; however, as noted earlier, homozygous resistant of spring in the Wiltguard S1 population were highly resistant . Hence, even if FW3 does not encode a race-specific R-protein, this locus merits further study, in part because the favorable allele can be deployed and pyramided to increase the durability of resistance to Fusarium wilt.To accelerate the introduction and selection of Fusarium wilt resistance genes in breeding programs, we developed a collection of high-throughput Kompetitive Allele Specifc PCR markers for SNPs in linkage disequilibrium with FW1–FW5 . Collectively, 25 KASP markers were designed for the five loci using PolyOligo 1.0 .

The genotypic clusters for 17 of these were codominant , co-segregated with the predicted resistance loci, and were robust and reliable when tested on diverse germplasm accessions . For each target locus, at least one KASP-SNP marker had a prediction accuracy in the 98-100% range when tested in the original populations where they were discovered . To further gauge their accuracy when applied in diverse germplasm, they were genotyped on 78 California and 66 non-California individuals, mostly cultivars . Because the causal genes and mutations underlying FW1–FW5 are not known, the SNPs we targeted are highly population-specific . They are strongly predictive when applied in populations where specific genes are known to be segregating and moderately predictive when assayed among random samples of individuals because of recombination between the SNP markers and unknown causal mutations.The deployment of Fusarium wilt resistant cultivars has become critical in California since the early 2000s when outbreaks of the disease were first reported . This disease has rapidly spread and become one of the most common biotic causes of plant death and yield losses in California, the source of 88-91% of the strawberries produced in the US . The scope of the problem was initially unclear, as were the solutions, because the resistance phenotypes of commercially important cultivars, genetic mechanisms underlying resistance, and distribution and race structure of the pathogen were either unknown or uncertain when the disease unexpectedly surfaced in California . A breeding solution instantly emerged with the discovery of FW1 , and was further strengthened with the discovery of additional homologous and non-homoeologous resistance genes in the present study . Genetic and physical mapping of these race-specific R-genes has enabled the rapid development and deployment of Fusarium wilt resistant cultivars through marker-assisted selection. The transfer of R-genes from race 1 resistant donors to susceptible recipients via MAS has been rapid because the resistant alleles are dominant, found in both heirloom and modern cultivars, and identifiable without phenotyping using SNP markers tightly linked to the causal loci . Once FW1 was discovered, we knew that we had a robust solution to the race 1 resistance problem; however, we had virtually no knowledge of the diversity of Fusarium wilt R-genes in populations of the wild octoploid progenitors and heirloom cultivars of cultivated strawberry that might be needed to cope with pathogen race evolution . We did not purposefully set out to identify redundant R-genes but rather to scour global diversity for ancestrally diverse R-genes, both to facilitate R-gene pyramiding and inform future searches for sources of resistance to as yet unknown races of the pathogen, in addition to assessing the frequency, diversity, and distribution of R-genes in the wild and domesticated reservoirs of genetic diversity . Our results paint a promising picture for the identification of genes for resistance to race 2 and other as yet unknown races of the pathogen. As our phenotypic screening studies showed, the frequency of resistance to race 2 was comparable to that observed for race 1 . Similar to our findings for race 1, the sources we identified for resistance to race 2 were symptomless, which suggests that gene-for-gene resistance might underlie their phenotypes. The genetic basis of resistance to race 2 and other races of the pathogen, however, has not yet been elucidated. There is empirical evidence that resistance to Australian isolates of the pathogen might be quantitative . Henry et al. showed that the non-chlorotic symptom syndrome caused by Australian Fof isolates differs from the chlorotic symptom syndrome caused by California and Japanese Fof isolates . Hence, the genetic basis of resistance to the wilt- and yellowsfragariae diseases could be markedly different. We identified several strong sources of resistance to Australian and other non-California isolates of the pathogen that should accelerate the discovery of novel race-specific R-genes, elucidation of genetic mechanisms, and development of resistant cultivars . Growing resistant cultivars is indisputably a highly effective and cost-free method for preventing losses to Fusarium wilt race 1 in strawberry . We estimate that approximately two-thirds of the cultivars grown in California since the earliest outbreaks in 2005 were highly susceptible, whereas the other one-third were highly resistant .

These physical activities have been used in the exercise literature as measures of physical fitness and are both safe and simple to learn in an in-lab setting . For all activities, duration of time spent in each activity and number of attempts were assessed. For study 2, participants were asked to complete a shortened Trier Social Stress Test , during which participants delivered a 3-minute speech presenting their qualifications for a dream job to a panel of two evaluators while physiological stress responses were assessed .Across both studies, we used the same measures obtained at the same intervals to assess subjective well being. We replaced missing values with the mean of available items if ≤half of the items were missing, otherwise we treated the scale as missing . State optimism, considered a manipulation check for the optimism intervention, was measured at baseline, mid-study, and post-intervention with seven items from the validated State Optimism Measure . Participants were asked how they felt ‘right now’ on a scale of 0 to 10 regarding expectations for their present and the future. A total score was created by averaging scores across all seven items. In Study 1, α’s ranged from 0.91–0.92 and, in Study 2, from 0.89–0.90. Confidence about the future was assessed by asking participants to rate, on a ten-point scale ranging from 0 to 10 ,black flower buckets how they believe the challenges in their lives right now will turn out. It was measured at baseline and post intervention using the validated Life Orientation Test Revised .

Responses were modified to a seven-point continuum, ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree,’ based on prior work suggesting the 7-point scale is more suited for electronically distributed questionnaires . The total optimism score is the sum of the three positively worded items and the three negatively worded items reverse-scored, with higher scores reflecting higher optimism. In Study 1, α’s ranged from 0.79–0.80 and, in Study 2, from 0.74–0.85. Anxiety, depression, and aggression were assessed at baseline, mid-study, and post-intervention with items from the State-Trait Personality Inventory . Using a seven-point scale, respondents rated the degree to which they agreed with each statement. The final anxiety, depression, and aggression scores were calculated by averaging across items, with higher scores reflecting higher levels of each construct.Positive affect and negative affect were assessed at baseline, mid-study, and post-intervention by the Positive and Negative Schedule , which included ten items capturing positive affect and ten items capturing negative affect . Response options ranged from 1 to 7 . After completing the in-lab writing tasks and interview, participants were asked to complete a stepping task and a sit-to-stand task. For the stepping task, participants were asked to step up and down on a 14-inch high step platform at a rate of 22 steps per minute , until they were too fatigued to continue . Participants were asked to make as many attempts as they wanted for up to a total of 15 minutes. The research assistant recorded the duration of time participants spent stepping across all attempts, as well as the total number of attempts made. The final stepping task score was calculated by the duration divided by the number of attempts.Participants were asked to perform a sit-to-stand exercise.

This involved sitting in the middle of the chair and crossing their arms with each hand on the opposite shoulder and then completing sit-to-stand cycles at a rate of 22 cycles per minute. Participants were first asked to attempt this task for up to 60 seconds. If they decided to continue, the duration requested for each subsequent attempt increased by 30 seconds whereby the second attempt lasted up to 90 seconds and the third attempt lasted up to 120 seconds. As with the stepping task, the research assistant recorded the number of attempts and total duration completed. The sit-stand task score was created by dividing total duration by number of attempts.Physiological measures included measures derived from electrocardiography and impedance cardiography using ECG and NICO modules integrated into an MP150 Data Acquisition System with signals sampled at 1000 Hz. Spot sensors placed in a modified Lead II configuration measured ECG, and four mylar bands that completely encircled the neck and torso measured ICG. From these measures, we derived high-frequency heart rate variability and pre-ejection period . PEP is a time based measure of the contractile force measured from the time the ventricle contracts to the opening of the aortic valve. Shorter time indicates greater increases in sympathetic nervous system activity. RSA provides a relatively pure measure of parasympathetic nervous system responses, whereas PEP provides a relatively pure measure of sympathetic nervous system responses. We also collected blood pressure responses using a Colin Prodigy blood pressure monitor at 7 targeted times during the 2-hour visit. Our BP timing included end of the resting baseline, post-writing, post-interview of writing, beginning of speech preparation, beginning of speech delivery, beginning of math task, and end of math task.For both studies, we trained coders to evaluate the in-lab writing tasks to assess the optimism and affect conveyed in the essays. Coders were trained by first coding approximately 10% of the essays, and the Inter-rater reliability was assessed and found to be satisfactory.

Coders then met with other coders to clarify conceptual categories and calibrate their evaluations. Subsequently, each essay was then coded by at least two different judges. We averaged coders ratings at the item level and took the mean of the items to obtain final scores for optimism, positive affect, negative affect, and explanatory style. Optimism was judged by evaluating goal-oriented thinking and perceived resources . Judges provided ratings ranged from 1 to 7 . Study 1: alpha for the intervention group: α = 0.86 and control group: α = 0.82; Study 2: intervention group: α = 0.90 and control group: α = 0.74. Affect was evaluated by judges by completing a PANAS 20-item scale, which we modified to include feelings of optimism, gratitude, resentment, and pessimism in addition to the standard items. All items were rated on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 to 5 . Items that describe positive feelings were averaged to obtain a score for positive affect, and items that described negative feelings were averaged to obtain a score for negative affect. , α = 0.85 ; negative affect α = 0.71 , α = 0.77 ; Study 2: positive affect α = 0.95 , α = 0.93 ; negative affect α = 0.81 , α = 0.70.For both studies, we first evaluated the effectiveness of the randomization procedure by comparing the distribution of the demographic characteristics across the intervention and control groups, using chi-square tests or t-tests as appropriate. We then examined the pooled data from the two studies and conducted multilevel mixed-effect models to evaluate the combined effect of the manipulation on changes in optimism and the common self-report measures. We treated time as a fixed effect and study sites as a random effect. Next, we examined the effect of the intervention on self-reported outcomes and study specific outcomes. In Study 1, we conducted an ANOVA with condition as the between-subjects factor and self reported outcomes and in-lab exercise outcomes as separate dependent variables. For in-lab exercise outcomes,french flower bucket we conducted sensitivity analyses to additionally adjust for baseline self-report physical activity which was assessed by asking participants the number of days they had engaged in moderate physical activities, such as bicycling at a regular pace or doubles tennis. In Study 2, we used an ANOVA to evaluate reactivity values across the four physiologic responses: RSA, PEP, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure . Reactivity was derived by subtracting the last minute of baseline from each minute of the stress task for each physiological response. In order to understand whether the intervention effects were due primarily to increases in positive affect rather than optimism per se, we conducted sensitivity analyses on all physical activity and stress reactivity outcomes to also control for increases in positive affect. For essay coding, we conducted moderated regression analyses to predict psychological, physical activity, and physiological outcomes with condition, essay-coded optimism, and their interaction. The goal of these analyses was to determine if there was an association among more optimistic terms in the essay and better health-related responses in the lab. All analyses were performed using SAS 9.4 and figures were created using R. This study examined effects of induced optimism on in lab physical activity and stress reactivity through two experimental studies with community-dwelling individuals. Across both studies, the intervention led to greater increases in short-term optimism and positive affect in the intervention group compared with the control group. In general, coder-rated optimism and positive affect were associated with better performance on the in-lab physical activity tasks and healthier forms of stress reactivity.

However, we found little to no evidence that the intervention led to reliable changes in self-reported anxiety, depression, and aggression nor did we observe differences in in-lab physical activity and stress reactivity. Our findings that the writing tasks led to greater improvement in self-reports of optimism and positive affect in the intervention versus the control group are consistent with previous studies conducted in other populations. For example, in a study of 82 students, individuals who did versus did not receive a positive psychological intervention consisting of writing tasks exhibited greater improvement in optimism and positive affect . In another study of 54 Dutch-speaking participants, most of whom were students, a best possible selves writing intervention led to larger increases in optimism compared with writing about a daily activity task . Our research extends these findings to two larger samples of diverse, community-dwelling populations and provides further evidence that this type of intervention can be effective in boosting short-term optimism and positive affect.These findings notwithstanding, we did not find evidence that experimentally induced optimism influenced in-lab physical activity. In contrast, observational studies have repeatedly demonstrated that higher self-reported optimism levels are associated with greater engagement in physical activity or buffer against the harmful effects of stress on health . However, it is notable that our intervention was able to change participants’ exercise beliefs and improve perceived benefits of exercise. Perhaps the small increases in optimism that we obtained from the intervention were insufficient to change subsequent health-related behavior. This may be especially true for health behaviors like physical activity, which are largely habitual. Once established, health behavior is deeply embedded in individuals’ daily routines, and thus changes in behavior may require longer interventions with more substantial changes in optimism. We observed some differences in stress reactivity by condition with induced optimism associated with less vagal withdrawal and lower sympathetic nervous system activation – that is, both less PNS withdrawal and less SNS activation during the stress task. Together these findings suggest participants in the experimental condition had less arousal than participants in the control condition. We might speculate that the optimism condition increased a sense of calm resulting in less arousal during the stress task. However, it is important to note that the intervention did not result in differences in resting physiology nor in blood pressure reactivity, which are more closely associated with better physical health. Despite the null effects of our optimism intervention on in-lab physical activity, we found effects of coder-rated optimism and affect from essays on outcomes in both studies. Overall, greater coded optimism was associated with greater persistence in both physical activity tasks and less vagal withdrawal during the stress tasks. These findings raise several interesting possibilities for understanding our findings and the relationship of optimism with our outcomes of interest. One possibility is that optimism as reflected in writing rather than based on direct self-report more accurately captures participants’ true levels of their positive expectations. A second possibility is that optimism as reflected in writing provides a type of dose-level response such that individuals with more optimistic orientation in their writing benefitted most from the intervention. Our study has several limitations. Although we excluded individuals who were highly physically active from Study 1, we did not establish a pre-intervention exercise assessment. Doing so might have increased our precision in determining if the intervention increased exercise in the lab.

The Yael variety ael shows moderate levels of anthocyanins, hydroxycinnamates, and proanthocyanidins, as well as a high mean degree of polymerization, but with lower levels of the other measured factors. These compounds can contribute bitter and astringent characteristics to grapes and wines, impacting overall flavor and mouthfeel properties. Wild varieties are an incredibly valuable genetic resource for grape breeding, particularly for enhancing metabolites such as resveratrol, as well as for disease resistance. Considering the aroma profiling, most indigenous Israeli varieties showed low levels of terpenoids and esters. Such volatile aroma profiles are often relatively neutral in sensory properties, making wines made from these varieties useful for blending purposes. However, some interesting differences in the volatile profiles were observed that may provide valuable germplasms for breeding unique aroma and flavor traits. For example, a unique high terpene variety, Dumiat, was observed, which may provide an aromatic quality similar to Muscat and Riesling varieties. In addition, the Madvar variety has a unique profile among this set of varieties that is high in benzenoid/phenylpropanoid compounds such as cresol, eugenol, methyl salicylate, benzyl alcohol, and 2-phenylethanol. Depending on their concentrations, these compounds can contribute spicy, smoky, and honey-like aromas. Further sensory analyses will be necessary to fully relate the chemical composition of these accessions with specific aroma and flavor attributes. However,procona buckets this initial analysis demonstrates the potential for these field-grown indigenous varieties to serve as sources for breeding new varieties with unique flavor profiles.

Such varieties not only provide resources for breeding against a wide range of biotic and abiotic stresses, but also have oenological potential with health benefits. This high throughput analysis of berries from many different varieties, grown under the same geographic and agronomic conditions, can only be achieved by working in the germplasm collections. This comprehensive analysis can help determine possible uses of these varieties, especially when considering newly found ones that have never been studied and categorized.Viruses are obligate intracellular pathogens that require living host cells to replicate and spread in the infected plant. During compatible interactions, viruses overcome the plant immune system and hijack host cellular processes to establish active infections . Viruses disrupt the plant cell cycle, inhibit cell death pathways, restrict macromolecular trafficking, alter cell signaling, protein turnover, and transcriptional regulation, and suppress defense mechanisms. The interference with these processes in the host leads to a wide range of plant developmental and physiological deffects . Cultivated grapevines are highly susceptible to a variety of viruses and viroids, which cause significant crop losses and shorten the productive life of vineyards. More than 65 different viral species classified in at least 15 families have been reported to infect grapevines, which represents the highest number of viruses so far detected in a single cultivated plant species . Although these viruses are generally transmitted by plant-feeding insects or soil borne nematodes, they can also be spread through infected propagation material . Grapevine red blotch is a viral disease discovered in northern California in 2008 that has become a major economic problem for the wine industry in the USA . This disease is caused by the Grapevine red blotch-associated virus , a circular ssDNA virus with resemblance to geminiviruses, which infects wine grape cultivars with significant detrimental effects on productivity . The incidence and severity of the red blotch symptoms vary depending on the grape cultivar, environmental conditions, and cultural practices .

In red-skinned varieties, GRBaV infections result in the appearance of red patches on the leaf blades, veins, and petioles; in white-skinned varieties, they manifest as irregular chlorotic regions on the leaf blades. GRBaV also affects berry physiology, causing uneven ripening, higher titratable acidity, and lower sugar and anthocyanin content, among others . Consequently, must and wine produced from infected berries present altered flavor and aroma. To date, there is limited information on how GRBaV infections affect grape metabolism. Comprehensive analyses to study specific cellular processes that GRBaV exploits to promote infections in berries are still needed, in particular those that relate to changes in berry chemical composition during fruit development. Grape berry development exhibits a double sigmoid growth pattern with three distinct phases: early fruit development, lag phase, and berry ripening. Most metabolic pathways that promote desired quality traits in grape berries are induced during ripening. The onset of ripening is accompanied by significant changes in berry physiology and metabolism, including softening, sugar accumulation, decrease in organic acids, and synthesis of anthocyanins and other secondary metabolites that define the sensory properties of the fruit . Berry ripening is controlled by multiple regulatory pathways, and occurs in an organized and developmentally timed manner. Interactions between transcriptional regulators and plant hormones regulate the initiation and progression of ripening processes . Like other non-climacteric fruit, grape berries do not display a strong induction of ethylene production and respiration rate at véraison, and the activation of ripening events does not depend primarily on ethylene signaling. Even though the hormonal control of grape berry development is not completely understood, it is established that abscisic acid , brassinosteroids, and ethylene are positive regulators of ripening processes, while auxin delays the initiation of ripening .

In the context of virus–grape berry interactions, dissecting the mechanisms that regulate ripening and plant defenses may provide new opportunities to develop vineyard management strategies to control viral diseases and ameliorate the negative effects on berry quality. In this study, we integrated genome-wide transcriptional profiling, targeted chemical and biochemical analyses, and demonstrated that grapevine red blotch disrupts ripening and metabolism of red-skinned berries. We sampled berries at different ripening stages from vines infected with GRBaV and healthy vines in two vineyards. We identified grape metabolic pathways that were altered in ripening berries because of the viral infection. We determined that GRBaV-induced pathways that are normally associated with early fruit development in berries at late stages of ripening, and suppressed secondary metabolic pathways that occur during normal berry ripening and/ or in response to stress. Using targeted metabolite profiling and enzyme activity analyses, we confirmed the impact of GRBaV on phenylpropanoid metabolism. We identified specific ripening-related processes that were disturbed in GRBaV-infected berries. Remarkably, these processes included alterations in ripening regulatory networks mediated by transcriptional factors, post-transcriptional control, and plant hormones, which lead to berry developmental deffects caused by red blotch.To determine the impact of grapevine red blotch on berry physiology, we studied naturally occurring GRBaV infections in distinct wine grape-growing regions in northern California . We sampled red-skinned grape berries from two different vineyards, one in Oakville and one in Healdsburg . We used multiple vineyard sites to focus on observations consistently made across environments and, thus, to exclude factors associated with specific environmental or cultural conditions. Prior to sampling, vines were screened for the presence of GRBaV and other common grapevine viruses. The appearance of red blotch symptoms on leaves of GRBaV-positive vines and not on those of healthy controls confirmed the initial viral testing. We sampled grape berries from vines that tested positive for GRBaV and negative for other common grapevine viruses. At the same time, we also collected berries from vines that tested negative for all viruses and included them in the study as healthy controls. In order to determine the impact of the disease on berry development and metabolism,procona florida container we collected GRBaV-positive and control berries at comparable developmental stages: pre-véraison , véraison , post-véraison , and harvest . This sampling strategy also aimed to limit confounding effects due to differences in the progression of ripening between berry clusters of GRBaV-positive and healthy vines. In some cases, we observed that GRBaV-positive vines presented grape clusters with evident uneven ripening . Comparisons between berries from GRBaV-positive vines and healthy controls indicated that, at equivalent stages of development, berries affected by red blotch had reduced soluble solids and total anthocyanins in agreement with previous reports on red-skinned wine grapes . Sampled berries were used for genome-wide transcriptional profiling of viral and grape genes. RNAseq was performed using 3–4 biological replicates of each ripening stage, infection status, and vineyard. We first confirmed the presence of the virus in the berries of GRBaV-positive vines by qPCR amplification of viral DNA . Viral activity in the berries was also assessed by quantifying plant-derived mRNA transcripts of GRBaV genes in the RNAseq data. Plant expression of five out of the six predicted genes in the GRBaV genome was detected in all berry samples obtained from GRBaV-positive vines but not in berries collected from the control vines . The most expressed GRBaV genes in the berries corresponded to V1, which encodes a coat protein, and V3 with unknown function. Expression levels of the GRBaV genes appeared to change as berries ripened. However, we could not determine to what extent the progression of ripening or other environmental factors influenced the plant’s transcription of viral genes because their pattern of variation between ripening stages differed in the two vineyards . Expression of 25 994 grape genes was detected by RNAseq across all berry samples. Principal component analysis was carried out with the normalized read counts of all detected genes. The two major PCs, which together accounted for 42.97% of the total variability, clearly separated the samples based on ripening stage, regardless of the vineyard of origin or their infection status . These results indicated that the intervineyard variation was smaller than the ripening effect, and the overall progression of ripening was similar between berries from GRBaV-positive and control vines.

Therefore, we hypothesized that GRBaV infections in berries have altered the expression of particular grape genes and/or molecular pathways, which could subsequently have led to developmental and metabolic deffects.While the PCA described above indicated that overall transcriptome dynamics associated with berry ripening were not perturbed by the infection, the lower levels of soluble solids and anthocyanins in GRBaV-positive berries, particularly later in development, suggested that red blotch may affect specific primary and secondary metabolic processes. We therefore focused the RNAseq analyses to identify grape molecular pathways that were differentially regulated as a result of GRBaV infections. We identified grape genes with significant differential expression due to red blotch by comparing GRBaV-positive and GRBaV-negative berries at each ripening stage and independently for each vineyard. We then looked at the intersection of differentially expressed genes between the two vineyards to identify common responses to red blotch. A total of 932 grape DE genes were found to be consistently down- or up-regulated in infected berries in both vineyards at a given ripening stage, and were classified as GRBaV-responsive genes . On average these GRBaV-responsive genes showed 0.49 ± 0.22-fold changes compared with the healthy controls. Comparing berries at similar ripening stages may have contributed to exclude more dramatic changes in gene expression associated with more pronounced ripening delay due to GRBaV. Key metabolic processes that were suppressed or induced as a consequence of red blotch in ripening berries were identified by enrichment analyses of the functional categories defined by Grimplet et al. in the set of GRBaV-responsive genes . Amino acid biosynthetic pathways were repressed in GRBaV-positive berries, while amino acid catabolic pathways were induced. Changes in carbohydrate metabolism were also observed; in particular, genes involved in glycolysis/gluconeogenesis and starch metabolism had reduced expression in GRBaV-infected berries. The suppression of these pathways may partially explain the lower soluble solids in the GRBaV-positive berries. Genes involved in nucleic acid metabolism, including RNA processing and surveillance, showed higher expression in GRBaV-infected berries. These pathways coincided at véraison with the induction of genes involved in stress responses to virus . RNA metabolic pathways are commonly altered in plants during viral infections and have been related to resistance or susceptibility depending on the particular plant–virus interaction . Red blotch also impacted the transcription of several abiotic stress response pathways. In particular, berries after véraison showed lower expression of genes encoding hypoxia responsive proteins and heat stress transcription factors, among others . A prominent feature of the GRBaV-positive berries was the transcriptional suppression of secondary metabolic pathways, in particular the biosynthesis of phenylpropanoids, stilbenoids, and lignin . Because the lower anthocyanin content observed in the GRBaV-positive berries may have resulted from reduced metabolic flux in the core phenylpropanoid pathway and alterations in flavonoid and anthocyanin biosynthesis, we pursued a deeper evaluation of these pathways using an integrated approach of transcriptional and metabolite profiling coupled to enzymatic analyses.

The rachis, skins and seeds were dried in oven and weighed. The pulp was separated from the juice + pulp with vacuum filtration using a pre-weighed Q2 filter paper . The largest portion of grape juice soluble solids are sugars. Sugars were measured at 25% using a Refractometer PAL-1 . Below ground biomass was measured by pneumatically excavating the root system with compressed air applied at 0.7 Mpa for three of the 12 sampling blocks, exposing two vines each in 8 m3 pits. The soil was prewetted prior to excavation to facilitate removal and minimize root damage. A root restricting duripan, common in this soil, provided an effective rooting depth of about 40 cm at this site with only 5–10 fine and small roots able to penetrate below this depth in each plot. Roots were washed, cut into smaller segments and separated into four size classes , oven-dried at 60 °C for 48 h and weighed. Larger roots were left in the oven for 4 days. Stumps were considered part of the root system for this analysis.In vineyard ecosystems, annual C is represented by fruit, leaves and canes, and is either removed from the system and/or incorporated into the soil C pools, which was not considered further. Structures whose tissues remain in the plant were considered perennial C. Woody biomass volumes were measured and used for perennial C estimates. Cordon and trunk diameters were measured using a digital caliper at four locations per piece and averaged,plastic plant pot and lengths were measured with a calibrated tape.

Sixty vines were used for the analysis; twelve vines were omitted due to missing values in one or more vine fractions. All statistical estimates were conducted in R.The present study provides results for an assessment of vineyard biomass that is comparable with data from previous studies, as well as estimates of below ground biomass that are more precise than previous reports. While most studies on C sequestration in vineyards have focused on soil C, some have quantified above ground biomass and C stocks. For example, a study of grapevines in California found net primary productivity values between 5.5 and 11 Mg C ha−1—figures that are comparable to our mean estimate of 12.4 Mg C ha−1 . For pruned biomass, our estimate of 1.1 Mg C ha−1 were comparable to two assessments that estimated 2.5 Mg of pruned biomass ha−1 for both almonds and vineyards. Researchers reported that mature orchard crops in California allocated, on average, one third of their NPP to harvestable biomass, and mature vines allocated 35–50% of that year’s production to grape clusters. Our estimate of 50% of annual biomass C allocated to harvested clusters represent the fraction of the structures grown during the season . Furthermore, if woody annual increments were considered this proportion would be even lower. Likewise the observed 1.7 Mg ha−1 in fruit represents ~14% of total biomass , which is within 10% of other studies in the region at similar vine densities. More importantly, this study reports the fraction of C that could be recovered from wine making and returned to the soil for potential long term storage. However, this study is restricted to the agronomic and environmental conditions of the site, and the methodology would require validation and potential adjustment in other locations and conditions.

Few studies have conducted a thorough evaluation of below ground vine biomass in vineyards, although Elder field did estimate that fine roots contributed 20–30% of total NPP and that C was responsible for 45% of that dry matter. More recently, Brunori et al. studied the capability of grapevines to efficiently store C throughout the growing season and found that root systems contributed to between 9 and 26% of the total vine C fixation in a model Vitis vinifera sativa L. cv Merlot/berlandieri rupestris vineyard. The results of our study provide a utilitarian analysis of C storage in mature wine grape vines, including above and below ground fractions and annual vs. perennial allocations. Such information constitutes the basic unit of measurement from which one can then estimate the contribution of wine grapes to C budgets at multiple scales— fruit, plant or vineyard level—and by region, sector, or in mixed crop analyses. Our study builds on earlier research that focused on the basic physiology, development and allocation of biomass in vines. Previous research has also examined vineyard-level carbon at the landscape level with coarser estimates of the absolute C storage capacity of vines of different ages, as well as the relative contribution of vines and woody biomass in natural vegetation in mixed vine yard-wild land landscapes. The combination of findings from those studies, together with the more precise and complete carbon-by-vine structure assessment provided here, mean that managers now have access to methods and analytical tools that allow precise and detailed C estimates from the individual vine to whole-farm scales. As carbon accounting in vineyard landscapes becomes more sophisticated, widespread and economically relevant, such vineyard-level analyses will become increasingly important for informing management decisions. The greater vine-level measuring precision that this study affords should also translate into improved scaled-up C assessments . In California alone, for example, there are more than 230,000 ha are planted in vines. Given that for many, if not most of those hectares, the exact number of individual vines is known, it is easy to see how improvements in vine-level measuring accuracy can have benefits from the individual farmer to the entire sector.

Previous efforts to develop rough allometric woody biomass equations for vines notwithstanding, there is still a need to improve our precision in estimating of how biomass changes with different parameters. Because the present analysis was conducted for 15 year old Cabernet vines, there is now a need for calibrating how vine C varies with age, varietal and training system. There is also uncertainty around the influence of grafting onto rootstock on C accumulation in vines. As mentioned in the methods, the vines in this study were not grafted—an artifact of the root-limiting duripan approximately 50 cm below the soil surface. The site’s location on the flat, valley bottom of a river floodplain also means that its topography, while typical of other vineyard sites perse, created conditions that limit soil depth, drainage and decomposition. As such, the physical conditions examined here may differ significantly from more hilly regions in California, such as Sonoma and Mendocino counties. Similarly, the lack of a surrounding natural vegetation buffer at this site compared to other vineyards may mean that the ecological conditions of the soil communities may or may not have been broadly typical of those found in other vineyard sites. Thus, to the extent that future studies can document the degree to which such parameters influence C accumulation in vines or across sites, they will improve the accuracy and utility of C estimation methods and enable viticulturists to be among the first sectors in agriculture for which accurate C accounting is an industry wide possibility. The current study was also designed to complement a growing body of research focusing on soil-vine interactions. Woody carbon reserves and sugar accumulation play a supportive role in grape quality, the main determinant of crop value in wine grapes. The extent to which biomass production, especially in below ground reservoirs, relates to soil carbon is of immediate interest for those focused on nutrient cycling, plant health and fruit production,plastic planter pot as well as for those concerned with C storage. The soil-vine interface may also be the area where management techniques can have the highest impact on C stocks and harvest potential. We expect the below ground estimates of root biomass and C provided here will be helpful in this regard and for developing a more thorough understanding of below ground C stores at the landscape level. For example, Williams et al. estimated this component to be the largest reservoir of C in the vineyard landscape they examined, but they did not include root biomass in their calculations. Others have assumed root systems to be ~30% of vine biomass based on the reported biomass values for roots, trunk, and cordons. With the contribution of this study, the magnitude of the below ground reservoir can now be updated.High bush blueberries , native to the northeastern United States, are important commercial fruit and are the most planted blueberry species in the world . In the United States, blueberries traditionally have been grown in cooler northern regions; however, the development of new southern cultivars with low chilling-hour requirements has made possible the expansion of blueberry production to the southern United States and California .Blueberry production in California was estimated in 2007 at around 4,500 acres and is rapidly increasing.

Common southern cultivars grown include ‘Misty’ and ‘O’Neal’, but other improved southern high bush cultivars are now being grown from Fresno southward, such as ‘Emerald’, ‘Jewel’ and ‘Star’ . Southern high bush “low-chill” cultivars are notable for their productivity, fruit quality and adaptation , and require only 150 to 600 chillhours, making them promising cultivars for the San Joaquin Valley’s mild winters . Since 1998, we have conducted long-term productivity and performance evaluations of these cultivars at the University of California’s Kearney Agricultural Center in Parlier . North American production of high bush blueberry has been increasing since 1975, due to expansion of harvested area and yields through improvements in cultivars and production systems. In 2005, North America represented 69% of the world’s acreage of high bush blueberries, with 74,589 acres producing 306.4 million pounds . Acreage and production increased 11% and 32%, respectively, from 2003 to 2005. The U.S. West, South and Midwest experienced the highest increases in acreage. In 2005, 63% of the world’s production of high bush blueberries went to the fresh market. North America accounts for a large part of global high bush blueberry production, representing 67% of the fresh and 94% of the processed markets . Blueberry consumption is increasing, which is encouraging increased production. As a result, fresh blueberries are becoming a profitable specialty crop, especially in early production areas such as the San Joaquin Valley . In general, a consumer’s first purchase is dictated by fruit appearance and firmness . However, subsequent purchases are dependent on the consumer’s satisfaction with flavor and quality, which are related to fruit soluble solids , titratable acidity , the ratio of soluble solids to titratable acidity, flesh firmness and antioxidant activity . Vaccinium species differ in chemical composition, such as sugars and organic acids. The sugars of the larger high bush blueberry cultivars that are grown in California are fructose, glucose and traces of sucrose. Lowbush blueberries — which are wild, smaller and grow mostly in Maine — lack sucrose. The composition of organic acids is a distinguishing characteristic among species. In high bush cultivars, the predominant organic acid is usually citric , while the percentages of succinic, malic and quinic acids are 11%, 2% and 5%, respectively. However, in “rabbiteye” blueberries the predominant organic acids are succinic and malic, with percentages of 50% and 34%, respectively, while citric acid accounts for only about 10% . These different proportions of organic acids affect sensory quality; the combination of citric and malic acids gives a sour taste, while succinic acid gives a bitter taste . In addition to flavor, consumers also value the nutritional quality of fresh fruits and their content of energy, vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber and many bioactive compounds that are beneficial for human health . Fruits, nuts and vegetables are of great importance for human nutrition, supplying vitamins, minerals and dietary fiber. For example, they provide 91% of vitamin C, 48% of vitamin A, 27% of vitamin B6, 17% of thiamine and 15% of niacin consumed in the United States . Thedaily consumption of fruits, nuts and vegetables has also been related to reductions in heart disease, some forms of cancer, stroke and other chronic diseases. Blueberries, like other berries, provide an abundant supply of bioactive compounds with antioxidant activity, such as flavanoids and phenolic acids . For example, a study performed in rats showed that when they were fed diets supplemented with 2% blueberry extracts, age-related losses of behavior and signal transduction were delayed or even reversed, and radiation-induced losses of spatial learning and memory were reduced .

As this research field has progressed, it has become apparent that extraction of soil and plant waters for isotope analysis is beset with a number of methodological issues . Soil waters held under different tensions may have different isotopic characteristics: for example, freely moving water sampled by suction lysimeters often shows a much less marked evaporative fractionation signal than bulk soil waters dominated by less mobile storage extracted by cryogenic or equilibration methods . Such differences between extraction techniques may be exacerbated by soil characteristics, such as texture and organic content, which may in turn affect the degree to which water held under different tensions can mix . Similarly, sampling xylem and its resulting isotopic composition has been shown to be affected by methodology. It is usually assumed that methods such as cryogenic extraction isolate water held in xylem, when in fact water stored in other cells may be mobilized to “contaminate” the results . Interpretation of plant-soil water relationships can also be complicated by processes in plants and soils that alter isotopic compositions independently. For example, the spatio-temporal isotopic composition of soil water can change dramatically in relation to precipitation inputs, evaporative losses, internal redistribution and phase changes between liquid and gaseous phases . Moreover,10 plastic plant pots there is increasing evidence that plant physiological mechanisms may affect water cycling and the composition of xylem water . These include effects of mychorrizal interactions in plant roots that may result in exchange and fractionation of water entering the xylem stream .

Research also indicates that as flow in xylem slows, diffusion and fractionation can occur , which may involve exchange with phloem cells . Finally, there is increasing evidence that water storage and release from non-xylem cells may sustain transpiration during dry periods or early in the day , also affecting xylem composition. Thus, there is a need to understand the different timescales involved in uptake processes in the rooting zone, residence times and mixing of water in different vegetation covers . There is also evidence of differences between how such factors affect water movement in angiosperms and gymnosperms, as well as species-specific differences . Clearly, these methodological issues will take some time to address; in the interim there is a need for cautious interpretation of emerging data from critical zone studies in order to improve our understanding.A striking feature of isotopic studies of soil-vegetation systems is a bias to lower and temperate latitudes, with northern latitudes and cold environments being under-represented . Yet, northern environments present particular challenges and opportunities to further advance the growing body of knowledge about plant-soil water interactions. For example, the coupled seasonality of precipitation magnitude and vegetative water demand can be complicated by the seasonality of the precipitation phase. Cold season precipitation that accumulates as snow can replenish soil water in the spring and be available to plants months after deposition . Despite the lack of studies, these areas are experiencing some of the most rapid changes in climate and, as a result, vegetation . The effects of climatic warming on patterns of snow pack accumulation and melt can have particularly marked consequences for soil water replenishment and plant water availability, particularly at the start of the growing season .

Despite the importance of northern environments, remoteness and harshness of environmental conditions result in logistical problems that constrain lengthy field studies and data collection . This study seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about plant-soil water interactions by expanding the geographical representation of sites in cold northern environments. We report the findings of a coordinated project on xylem water isotopic data collection in the dominant soil – vegetation systems of five long-term experimental sites. Isotopic characteristics of soil water have previously been reported for all five sites; this used a comparative approach with, as far as possible, common sampling methods across the sites for a 12 month period . Here, we present xylem water isotopic composition data collected using common methods over the same time period encompassing the complete growing season, and then relate findings to soil water isotopic compositions. The study was conducted at five long-term experimental catchments across the boreal or mountainous regions of the northern latitudes . The catchments were part of the VeWa project funded by the European Research Council investigating vegetation effects on water mixing and partitioning in high-latitude ecosystems . Previous inter-comparison work on this project has examined such issues as changing seasonality of vegetation-hydrology interactions , soil water storage and mixing , water ages and modelling the interactions between water storage, fluxes and ages .At Bruntland Burn, study sites were dominated either by Scots pine or Ericacae species . Dominant vegetation at the Dorset sites was either coniferous trees , Eastern white cedar , Eastern white pine at sites He, Ce, Pw, respectively or deciduous red oaks . At Dry Creek, tree-dominated high elevation locations included Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine .

Mid-elevation sites had a mixture of similar trees plus shrubs including Sagebrush . Low elevation sites had no trees, but a variety of additional shrubs including Bitter brush , Chokecherry , Yellow willow and Water birch . At Krycklan, Norway spruce and Blueberry were present at site S04 about 4 m away from a stream, while Scots pine and Blueberry were the dominant species at the upslope site S22 about 22 m from the stream. The Wolf Creek sites, RP in the riparian zone and PL located on a relatively dry plateau, were vegetated by birch and willow shrubs . Prevailing soil textures at the sites varied from loam to silty sands . Soil characteristics are described in detail by Sprenger et al. . Briefly, these are podzolic soils at Bruntland Burn, Dorset and Krycklan, loamy sand at Dry Creek, and Wolf Creek had considerable amounts of organic matter in the upper soil layers. At Dry Creek, shrub and tree roots extend through the soil column, which ranges from ~10 cm to ~120 cm thick. Ponderosa pine roots may extend into fractured bedrock. The rooting depths are limited to the upper 15 cm for the heather sites at Bruntland Burn and to 50 cm depth for trees at Krycklan and Dorset. Rooting depths at Wolf Creek and Bruntland Burn are largely within the top 30 cm with smaller fractions to 50 cm. At each site, plants and surrounding soils were sampled concurrently for isotope analysis following a common sampling protocol . Depending on the nature of the soil cover,plastic pots large the maximum depth of sampling varied from -20 cm at BB to -70 cm at Dry Creek . Sampling took place at 5 cm intervals for Bruntlad Burn, Dorset, and Krycklan with two to five replicates for each depth. At Dry Creek, sampling was done at -10, -25, -45, and -70 cm with two to four replicates. Sampling depths at Wolf Creek varied between -2 and -40 cm with one to three replicates. Daily soil moisture data based on continuous soil moisture measurements at 10 or 15 cm soil depth were available for each soil water sampling location at Bruntland Burn, Dry CReek, Krycklan, and Wolf Creek. Only weekly manual soil moisture measurements were available for Dorset, and daily soil moisture data were derived from soil physical modelling . The volumetric soil moisture data were used to assess the hydrologic state on the sampling days. Plant samples from trees with a diameter > 30 cm were taken horizontally with increment borers at breast height . Retrieved plant xylem cores were directly placed in vials without bark and phloem. Shrub vegetation was sampled by clipping branches. These were immediately placed in vials after the bark was chipped off or left on . All vials were directly sealed with parafilm and immediately frozen until extraction was conducted at Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, USA. There were five replicates for each species and day at the sites in Bruntland Burn, Krycklan, Dorset. At Wolf Creek, the number of replicates varied between two and five and there were always four replicates for each sampling campaign at the Dry Creek sites. In total, 1160 xylem water samples were collected; 831 for angiosperms and 329 for gymnosperms . Dates of sample events varied at each site, but included the end of the growing season/senescence, pre-leaf out the following year, post leaf out, peak growing season and senescence . Precipitation was sampled daily or on an event basis at Bruntland Burn and Krycklan. Daily to fortnightly precipitation sampling was conducted at Dorset, Dry Creek, and Wolf Creek. Melt water was sampled from lysimeters at Krycklan, Dorset, Dry Creek and Wolf Creek during several snow melt events, while snowfall seldom occurred over the study year at Bruntland Burn . Various measures were taken to prevent evaporation of collected precipitation, including paraffin oil and water locks prior to transfer to the laboratory. The long-term groundwater signal was assessed at all sites, apart from Dorset, using several sampling campaigns of springs and wells tapping the saturated zone over the last few years .

There were no nearby wells from which to sample the regional groundwater at Dorset, which is found well below the surface in the granitic gneiss and amphibolite bedrock.Source water apportionment of plant xylem: To quantify the potential source of vegetation water from different soil depths and over a range of time periods, a modification of the ellipsoid method was utilized for the gymnosperms and angiosperms at soil depths in 10 cm increments up to 40 cm. All soil samples deeper than 40 cm were lumped together. The 40 cm cut off was chosen due to fewer sites sampling below 40 cm and a large decrease in the temporal resolution of sampling which could otherwise skew results. Due to soil water fractionation resulting in deviation from the local meteoric water line, the data are not well represented in an ellipsoid shape such as that employed in Amin et al. . Therefore a minimum polygon area was used to encompass the data points. Plant water and soil water data from the five sites are plotted in Figure 2. For both soils and xylem, the sites occupied partially overlapping regions showing a general gradient from highly isotopically depleted at Wolf Creek, the coldest of our sites in Canada, to the more isotopically enriched waters at Bruntland Burn at the temperate/boreal transition in Scotland. For each site there was a substantial range of variability in soil and xylem water isotope composition over the course of the sampling year. Most soil and xylem samples plotted below the GMWL, although xylem waters were generally more 2 H-depleted at each site, which was also evident from the lc-excess data . Samples from Dry Creek and, in particular, Wolf Creek showed the greatest divergence from the GMWL. These two sites slightly obscured an otherwise clear relationship between plotting position along the GMWL and the mean annual temperature gradient through Krycklan, Dorset and Bruntland Burn. Despite this, the isotopic ratios of δ2 H and δ18O in soils and xylem water correlate positively with air temperature, annual precipitation and aridity index, and negatively with elevation and to a lesser extent latitude . At all sites, substantial isotopic differences were apparent between xylem and soil water isotopes, and between angiosperms and gymnosperms . Soil waters at each site generally tracked precipitation and snowmelt inputs being more 2 H- and 18O-depleted in winter/spring and more enriched in summer; evidence of evaporative fractionation was also most evident in the more 2 H- and 18O-enriched summer soil water samples. The soil water data are shown relative to the sampling dates for each site in Figures S2 to S6 in the Supplementary material; also see Sprenger et al. for more detail. Soil water δ2 H data were significantly different from precipitation at Dry Creek, Dorset and Wolf Creek, while soil water δ18O differed from precipitation at Bruntland Burn and Dorset . Bruntland Burn, Krycklan and Dorset showed the greatest visual deviation of xylem δ2 H samples from soil water, while the most southern site, Dry Creek, and the most northern site, Wolf Creek, showed smaller differences between the xylem and soil water isotopes for δ2 H . However, at all sites the δ2 H characteristics of both angiosperms and gymnosperms were significantly different from soil water . Angiosperm xylem water δ18O at all sites, apart from Krycklan, was significantly different from soil water δ18O; whereas significant differences for gymnosperms were apparent only for Dorset and Bruntland Burn.

Data were analyzed using linear mixed models and generalized linear mixed models with the GLIMMIX procedure of SAS . The normal or log‐normal distribution and identity link function were used for continuous response data, the Poisson distribution and log link function for count data, and the binary distribution and logit link function for binary data. Inverse link functions were used to transform predicted means back to the original units of measure for presentation. P-values for multiple mean comparisons were adjusted with the Holm‐Tukey method. Potential relationships between vegetative and rooting attributes were analyzed using linear regression . The cultivars with high rooting percentage were Desertnyi, Eversweet, Golden Globe, Haku Botan, Ki Zakuro, Loffani, Nochi Shibori, Parfianka, Phoenicia, and Wonderful. Ambrosia and Green Globe had lower rooting percentages compared to other cultivars in both experiments. These data are consistent with other studies on rooting of pomegranate cuttings. Karimi et al. reported significant differences among cultivars for several growth attributes. Highest rooting percentages previously reported were 90% by Singh et al. , 86.7% by Polat and Caliskan , and 96.8% by Owais . Hussain et al. reported a mean percentage of 75.6% for hardwood cuttings propagated under different environmental conditions. Overall, research results indicated that pomegranate is readily propagated by hardwood cuttings,blueberry container size but there are exceptions, with certain genotypes more difficult to root than others.

Green Globe rooted poorly in both experiments, with rooting approximately 25% that of most other cultivars evaluated. According to Kennedy , Mae is a cultivar in the USDA NCGR collection that also roots poorly using hardwood cuttings, but no published data confirm this report. Dry root mass data are generally in agreement with Owais , who reported a maximum dry root mass of 0.223 g for hardwood cuttings. In our experiments, a gel formulation of IBA was used to stimulate rooting. Gel formulations are used less commonly in commercial propagation than liquid or powder formulations, but acceptable rooting was obtained using 3 g×L -1 IBA for all cultivars except Green Globe. In contrast, Owais utilized very high concentrations of IBA, up to 12 g×L -1 , and found that cuttings treated with 6 or 9 g×L -1 IBA had the highest rooting percentages compared to control cuttings or cuttings treated with 3 or 12 g×L -1 IBA. Karimi et al. reported that rooting percentages of pomegranate were lower for cuttings treated with 1 g×L -1 IBA when compared to non-treated cuttings. Some of these concentrations of IBA are higher than what is typically used for pomegranate in commercial practice. Our subsequent experiments with higher concentrations of IBA did not increase rooting percentages of ‘Ambrosia’ and ‘Green Globe,’ with ‘Ambrosia’ and ‘Green Globe’ having rooting percentages of 38.5% and 0%, respectively, for dormant hardwood cuttings treated with 9 g×L -1 IBA. If difficult-to-root cultivars are chosen for nursery propagation, further research on propagation methods will be needed.The factors causing one pomegranate cultivar to be more successful at rooting than another have not been confirmed.

Some research suggests that endogenous auxins explain cultivar differences in propagation. Auxins can regulate gene expression in plant tissues and endogenous auxin concentrations are under genetic control . According to Levin , ‘Wonderful’ and ‘Desertnyi’ are related, with ‘Wonderful’ being one of the parents used to hybridize ‘Desertnyi,’ with the parentage being x ‘Wonderful.’ Cuttings of both ‘Wonderful’ and ‘Desertnyi’ rooted at 96.9%. Whether rooting success is a heritable trait in pomegranate is unknown. There were significant differences in vegetative growth attributes between Wonderful and other cultivars in both experiments. Owais recommended hardwood cuttings of pomegranate be made 15 to 20 cm long and 6 to 7 mm in diameter. Our 10- cm cuttings rooted better than the 20-cm hardwood cuttings used by Owais , suggesting that dividing the longer cuttings in half not only produced twice as many cuttings, but also perhaps better rooting. In both of our experiments, stem diameter had no effect on any attribute measured and many cuttings were less than 6 mm in diameter. This indicated that more cuttings of smaller diameter may be used, but with the same propagation success. Wonderful, the industry standard, and nine other fruiting and ornamental cultivars of pomegranate rooted very well using hardwood cuttings treated with a gel formulation of 3 gL -1 IBA. Also, differences in certain vegetative growth attributes, such as plant height and branching, could be detected early in the production of some cultivars. This is the first known study to evaluate rooting and vegetative growth of dormant hardwood cuttings of Wonderful and other important cultivars from the USDA NCGR pomegranate germplasm collection. Further research is needed to discover methods to enhance the propagation success of the cultivars with poor rooting.

Global food security is threatened by climate change, which includes increasing temperatures and other unpredictable changes in weather patterns potentially damaging to agricultural systems . For example, long-term drought in California has caused significant economic losses to farmers . Drought in California has driven farmers to engage in crop abandonment, stress irrigation, the replacement of water-intensive crops to alternative crops , and most recently, using secondary water resources often available from urban or suburban wastewater systems. To lessen the impacts of climate change, it has been proposed that crop diversification may reduce food system vulnerability . Challenges posed by drought and water scarcity issues have led physiologists and breeders to focus on water-use efficiency in agriculture . Improving production efficiency and drought tolerance through cultivar selection has been proposed in citrus Prunus species , dates , and coffee , among others. Because tree crops have some degree of variability of physiological traits among genotypes in the same species, it is useful to study diversity within crop species to determine if there are cultivars that use water more efficiently or are as productive in cropping system conditions of high abiotic stress. Pomegranate is touted as a drought tolerant crop, especially once established , and it is being evaluated in California as an alternative tree crop species to replace or supplement more water-intensive species, such as avocado, citrus and almond , all three of which face pest and disease threats of their own. Historically, pomegranate has been grown in California for hundreds of years, even before statehood, starting with the Spanish missionaries who came over from Spain in the 1700s and planted mongrel seed from Spain in their gardens. Pomegranate was a minor crop in California until the 21st Century, when planting area increased by tenfold within twenty years and its value reached over $200 million annually. The body of knowledge regarding differences in pomegranate physiology, establishment, and site/climate effects among cultivars conserved in germplasm is limited. This limitation is a barrier to commercial growers and nurseries adopting new or forgotten cultivars that have traits with the potential to decrease water use and increase consumer demand for the fruit. Breeders also benefit from having germplasm phenotyped so that efforts to utilize molecular tools to map quantitative trait loci within breeding populations can be pursued for crop improvement. The pomegranate variety collection located at the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Davis, CA, conserves about 200 genotypes of pomegranate in Winters, CA,growing raspberries in containers many of which have consumer-friendly phenotypic traits not seen in ‘Wonderful,’ the industry standard . Experiments have demonstrated differences in morphology and vegetative growth traits during the propagation phase of the present study . Studies have shown that there can be differences among cultivars for many agriculturally-relevant physiological traits of pomegranate in other collections, including transpiration rate, stomatal conductance, water-use efficiency, photosynthetic rate and chlorophyll content . The objectives of this research were: 1) to evaluate eleven unique pomegranate cultivars for field performance in semi-arid and coastal Mediterranean climates to determine plant establishment rates and site effects on reproductive biology; and 2) to evaluate four pomegranate cultivars for field performance in coastal versus inland agroecosystems to determine if there are differences among genotypes for physiological traits that would be conducive to commercial crop production in drought conditions.

The sites were located at the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of California, Riverside, CA and on private land in Somis, CA . Riverside, CA is a semi-arid climate with hot, dry summers and cool winters and Somis, CA is a coastal Mediterranean climate with warm, dry summers and wet, cool winters. At Riverside, the mean annual precipitation of the area is 262 mm and mean high temperatures are 28⁰ and 36⁰ C for June and August, respectively. Mean temperature lows are 13⁰ and 18⁰ C for June and August, respectively and 5⁰, 6⁰, and 7⁰ C for December, January and February, respectively. The soil is a sandy loam with good drainage and was previously an established lemon grove. At Somis, mean annual precipitation of the area is 468 mm and mean high temperatures are 26⁰ and 28⁰ C for June and August, respectively. Mean temperature lows are 13⁰ and 14⁰ C for June and August, respectively and 5⁰, 5⁰, and 6⁰ C for December, January and February, respectively. The soil at Somis is a heavy sandy clay that was previously an established avocado grove. All trees were growing under natural light, outside in field conditions with drip irrigation three times per week to replace water lost to soil evapotranspiration as determined by California Irrigation Management Information System weather stations in Riverside and Ventura counties. Trees were grown under conventional commercial management practices and fertilized in spring with urea and potassium sulfate, totaling 31.75 kg N, and 34 kg K per year, respectively, over approximately 0.81 ha. All experimental trees were followed during their first four years of development and were located on the inside of the grove, with at least one border tree acting as a buffer to reduce the edge effect.Two pomegranate cultivar trials were utilized for this study. The cultivars utilized in the study were Ambrosia, Desertnyi, Eversweet, Golden Globe, Green Globe, Haku Botan, Loffani, Parfianka, Phoenicia, a proprietary cultivar and Wonderful . Cultivars were either cultivars bred for coastal sites and those that are typically grown in inland sites. Coastal cultivars included Ambrosia, Eversweet, Golden Globe, Green Globe, and Loffani. Inland cultivars included Desertnyi, Haku Botan, Parfianka, Phoenicia, and Wonderful. For the proprietary cultivar included, it is unknown whether it is a coastal or inland cultivar. All plants were sourced from the National Clonal Germplasm Repository, Davis, CA, and propagated via dormant hardwood cutting at the same time in winter of 2012 and. All trees included were mature and most cultivars were bearing commercial loads of fruit by the fourth year. For physiology trait evaluations, the healthiest tree in each of three blocks were selected among 15 trees per cultivar in the trial, which was planted in a randomized complete block design. Wonderful is the industry standard in many countries and was chosen as a control in the cultivar field trial. Wonderful is a widely-grown commercial cultivar that originated in Florida, it accounts for approximately 90-95% of production in the USA. It is a highly vigorous, thorny tree that has high yield with red fruit that have red arils with moderate seed hardness and a sweet-tart flavor. The growth habit is willowy, with a tendency to sucker at the base of the tree. There exists limited quantitative field establishment or physiology data for Wonderful and all other cultivars in this study. Trunk diameter was measured in cm with a digital caliper in spring of each year, with the measurement taken approximately 15 cm above the soil level. Tree canopy diameter was measured in-row and between rows to determine how quickly trees were growing into each other and into the rows. Tree height and in- and between row spacing measurements were taken with a folding rule. Tree canopy area was calculated with an equation reported by Serfontein et al. , where “S” is canopy area, “a” is tree height, “b” is skirt radius and “e” is eccentricity of an ellipse.During fruit development , an infrared gas analyzer was used to measure maximum rates of net CO2 assimilation , stomatal conductance , and transpiration during the morning hours. Morning light availability ranged from 1500-1600 µmol m-2 ·s-1 photosynthetic photon flux density . Photosynthesis measurements for three days were pooled for the four cultivars, which occurred on 29 July 2016, 4 August 2016, and 7 September 2016 for Riverside and 25 July 2016, 31 July 2016, and 31 August 2016 for Somis.

Recommendations or prescriptions must be simple, understandable and easy to implement in daily life by most patients. In the Appendix, we provide a leaflet as a guide for education and counselling in the field of hyperkalaemia for patients and professionals. In our experience the use of educational tools such as brochures with food images and inserts with “traffic light” colors can be useful during counselling to summarize some essential aspects of nutritional therapy and to help patients remember instructions. Several foods within the various food groups have been color-coded. The color green identifies foods that can be safely consumed even in hyperkalaemia, orange means foods that can be consumed with caution in hyperkalaemia, while in red are foods that should be avoided in hyperkalaemic patients if possible. This results in 3 columns, which allow users to build 3 kinds of diets characterized by mild, moderate or severe potassium restriction , recommended in the case of mild, moderate or severe chronic hyperkalaemia, respectively . In addition, we also provide several pragmatic suggestions meant to facilitate the application of potassium restricted diets in daily life . Obviously this tool, such as any other visual and practical tool, can only help in achieving excellent results if it is used within nutritional education programs appropriately applied by skilled and well trained health professionals who adapt the nutritional intervention to the individual patient. As we described above, the leaflets report a selection of foods from various food groups. It is possible that some foods are missing but boxes can be filled with other foods as needed,plastic potting pots to adapt the tool to patients’ habits, culture, traditions and needs. It is a great honor to receive the 2014 Cooley-Mead Award.

I feel especially honored when I review the names of those who have received this award in past years. Three are former Harvard teachers and colleagues of mine——Fred Bales, Alex Inkeles, and George Homans; many are old friends whose work I have long admired——Larry Bobo, Bernie Cohen, Gary Fine, Hal Kelley, Jane Piliavin, and Sheldon Stryker. The first Cooley-Mead Award was given to Muzafer Sherif in 1979. Had the award’s inception been two decades earlier, I am confident that Samuel Stouffer , a mentor and role model for me, would have also been a recipient. He was elected president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research in 1952 and the American Sociological Association in 1953. And he is certainly one of the truly great and influential social psychologists in sociology’s history. His generation followed that of Charles Horton Cooley , George Herbert Mead , W. I. Thomas , and other founders of American sociology in the early development of social psychology. Together with Paul Lazarsfeld and Rensis Likert, Stouffer developed the probability survey into a refined research instrument for all the social sciences. He was also the vital leader of three of the major social science projects of the mid-twentieth- century: Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, for which Stouffer kept the study going when Myrdal returned to Sweden when his nation was threatened by Germany’s Wehrmacht; The American Soldier series ,which Stouffer organized and directed on Army morale throughout World War II; and the survey study of McCarthyism published at the height of that dark period in American political history. This third book, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties , although six decades old, remains a model of how to analyze large-scale survey data and how to write about it simply and succinctly. Stouffer’s political courage was involved in this last work that undercut Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claim that the nation was highly concerned about Communists in government. In 1952, The FBI.’s J. Edgar Hoover received notice from a secret Harvard informant who claimed that, of all people, “Professor Talcott Parsons was probably the leader of an inner group” of Communist sympathizers at Harvard!

The informant alleged that the new Department of Social Relations had turned into a dangerous left-wing center as a result of “Parsons’ manipulations and machinations.” Based on this dubious “evidence,” Hoover authorized the Boston FBI. to initiate a security investigation of Parsons. Because he knew such suspected “Communists” as Parsons, Stouffer was then denied access to classified documents. Infuriated, Parsons in turn immediately prepared an affidavit in defense of Stouffer. “This allegation is so preposterous,” Parsons wrote, “that I cannot understand how any reasonable person could come to the conclusion that I was a member of the Communist Party or ever had been.” To Stouffer, he wrote, “I will fight for you against this evil with everything there is in me: I am in it with you to the death.” Stouffer soon responded. The Republican Methodist from small-town Iowa not only wrote Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties soon after this episode, but he also successfully faced off a McCarthyist inquisition held in Boston. He arranged for his former doctoral students who were Roman Catholic nuns and priests, replete in their habits and collars, to sit ostentatiously behind him at the hearing. That proved too much for the nominally Catholic McCarthy; he abruptly ended the session. Stouffer’s many key contributions are not remembered today as fully as they deserve. So I devote this paper to recalling his life and achievements and to one of his most lasting social psychological conceptual contributions—relative deprivation. Stouffer was born and grew up in the small town of Sac City in western Iowa. In 1900, the year of his birth, Sac City boasted only 2,079 people, and today it has virtually the same population. His father was the publisher of the local newspaper, and he initially planned to join him in journalism. He majored in English at the tiny Methodist college, Morningside, just sixty miles to the west in Sioux City. Upon graduation, he set off for Harvard University where he earned his masters degree in English before returning to his father’s newspaper. His path to sociology began with a chance meeting that he once described to me in detail. One summer in the 1920s, he took his family to the Wisconsin lake country for a vacation. Restless and sociable as always, Stouffer quickly made acquaintance with other vacationers staying at nearby cabins. One of these neighbors was Edward Ross, the famous University of Wisconsin sociologist who at the time was one of the most cited writers in the discipline . Ross responded by giving him a copy of his then-popular social psychology textbook . Stouffer read it voraciously, became fascinated with social science, and wanted to know how one became a sociologist. Ross encouraged him to apply to a PhDprogram in the subject. With characteristic decisiveness, Stouffer soon applied to the University of Chicago’s sociology department. He was accepted, but to pay for his training he had to work long hours at the Chicago Tribune as a reporter.

Years later, he would attribute his writing style more to the Tribune than to the formal style of academia. “I’ll never be thought of as a great sociologist,” he liked to joke, “I’m not a theorist and everyone can understand every damn word I write!” Stouffer studied at Chicago with two leading American pioneers in quantitative techniques for social science——William Ogburn in sociology and Lewis Thurstone in psychology. After receiving his PhD in 1930, he went to the University of London to learn more about the rapidly developing field of statistics. There he spent a postdoctoral year with R. A. Fisher and Karl Pearson——world leaders in statistics. Ogburn and Fisher in particular greatly influenced him,raspberry container growing and he often mentioned them in lectures and seminar discussions. His rigorous body of work consistently reflects the training he received from these teachers. His important statistical contributions include the Htechnique for making Guttman cumulative scales practical , and Stouffer’s Z, a straightforward method for combining probabilities . Stouffer’s remarkable energy and single-minded devotion to his research are legendary. I could tell dozens of stories of his exploits, but I will restrict myself to a few revealing anecdotes. In 1948, national political surveys were put in bad repute by predicting that Harry Truman would lose the presidential election to Thomas Dewey. Fred Mosteller, the statistician, loved to tell the story of this survey debacle. He wondered how Stoufferwould react, but he should have known. Early the next morning, he saw Stouffer plowing at top speed across Harvard Yard to Emerson Hall, fired up to begin a major study as to why the surveys had gone wrong. Stouffer was a heavy cigarette smoker. But, consistent with his intense style, he was extremely careless about his cigarette ashes. He regularly allowed the ashes to drop without noticing them. As might be expected, this habit had unfortunate consequences. At regular intervals, small paper fires would spring up from ashes falling on his desk while he worked preoccupied as ever. Usually, he took these incidents in stride. He would pop out from his office and calmly ask his frightened secretary to hand him the fire extinguisher. But once I witnessed a different reaction. He sprang from his office with uncharacteristic alarm as smoke poured out. What made the difference this time was that it was his annual tax returns that were going up in smoke! In the fall of 1957, I returned to Harvard as an assistant professor of social psychology in Harvard’s then-titled Social Relations Department. I audited Stouffer’s famous survey analysis graduate seminar. In September 1957, the racial desegregation crisis at Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School burst forth on the very same day the seminar held its first meeting. Stouffer rushed excitedly into the seminar room. He looked around the room at the students waiting for the seminar to begin. “Campbell,” he muttered, “and you, Pettigrew—you are the two Southerners around here. I want you to leave right away for Little Rock and study what is going on down there!” The late Ernest Campbell, later of Vanderbilt University, was a visiting scholar at Harvard for the 1957–1958 academic year. We had never met, but we were the only two native Southerners within Stouffer’snear reach. He wanted us to leave on a plane that night; but we persuaded him that our wives might need to know where we were going and what we were doing. However, we did leave on a plane two days later. Wild as it may sound, there was a point to this hurried approach to field research. Like the good newspaperman he started out to be, Stouffer wanted to strike while the iron was hot. He strongly believed in gathering field data while events were unfolding, not months later after sharpening and leveling of people’s memories had taken place. His initial guidance was to start by interviewing a group in Little Rock that was caught in cross-pressures. Such a group, he assured us, would lay bare the underlying dynamics of both sides of the conflict. Ernie and I decided that the white ministers of modern Protestant denominations represented the ideal target group. Most of these men were racially far more liberal and open to school integration than their congregations. However, a major problem arose from the fact that promotions in the ministerial profession are heavily influenced by how successfully one raises money and enlarges the flock. And these critical resources were under the control of their conservative congregations. As our later publications detailed , these cross-pressures did indeed lead to intense situations in which the ministers often had to choose between their beliefs and their careers. Stouffer did not want us to have all the fun. He soon joined us for a few days to see how we were doing. When we told him what we had learned thus far, he took a special interest in the fundamentalist Protestant ministers. These men were not at all in conflict. They preached against racial integration at every opportunity to the delight of their pro-segregationist congregations. They held racial segregation to be ordained by God. Their popular actions drew members away from some of the modern denominations, which further heightened the pressures on the liberal ministers. Given his special interest, we took Stouffer to a Sunday evening service at a small church led by one of Little Rock’s most fervent segregationist ministers. Stouffer soon made it obvious that he was far more comfortable in this setting than we were.