Socio-psychological barriers for peace making and ideas to overcome them / Barreras sociopsicológicas para la paz e ideas para superarlas

Intensive and violent intergroup conflicts that rage in different parts of the world are real. These conflicts center over disagreements focusing on contradictory goals and interests in different domains and must be addressed in conflict resolution. It is well known that the disagreements could potentially be resolved if not the powerful socio-psychological barriers which fuel and maintain the conflicts. These barriers inhibit and impede progress towards peaceful settlement of the conflict. They stand as major obstacles to begin the negotiation, to continue the negotiation, to achieve an agreement and later to engage in a process of reconciliation. These barriers are found among both leaders and society members that are involved in vicious, violent and protracted intergroup conflicts. They pertain to the integrated operation of cognitive, emotional and motivational processes, combined with a pre-existing repertoire of rigid supporting beliefs, world views and emotions that result in selective, biased and distorted information processing. This processing obstructs and inhibits the penetration of new information that can potentially contribute to facilitating progress in the peace-making process. The paper elaborates on the nature of the socio-psychological barriers and proposes preliminary ideas of how to overcome them. These ideas focus on the unfreezing process which eventually may lead to cessation of adherence to the repertoire that supports the continuation of the conflict, its evaluation and arousal of the readiness to entertain of alternative beliefs that support peace making.     

Feeling disability: theories of affect and critical disability studies

This paper explores connections between affect studies and critical disability studies. Our interest in affect is sparked by the beginnings of a new research project that seeks to illuminate the lives, hopes and desires of young people with ‘life-limiting’ or ‘life-threatening’ impairments. Cultural responses to these young people are shaped by dominant discourses associated with lives lived well and long. Before commencing our empirical work with young people we use this paper to think through how we might conceptualise affect and disability. We present three themes; ontological invalidation in neoliberal-able times; affect aliens and crip killjoys; disability and resistant assemblages.     

Communication and representation of risk in health crises: the influence of framing and group identity / Comunicación en crisis sanitarias y representación del riesgo. La influencia del framing y la identidad grupal

Based on the Social Representations Theory (SRT) applied to the social construction of risk and the role played by group identities, this study examines the construction of risk created by the mass media in health epidemics. An experimental design with split-ballot questionnaire and 319 participants was used in which message framing (human interest vs. attribution of responsibility) and proximity (high vs. low) were manipulated for a high invulnerability identity (youth) vs. a low invulnerability identity (elderly) population. Results showed that the human interest framing increased the perception of risk, especially when the proximity of the epidemic was high; this effect was explained by people’s emotional response. Furthermore, youth projected the risk towards ‘the other’ in order to protect their invulnerability identity. Finally, we stress the importance of the SRT on a theoretical and applied level for risk communication in health crises.     

A Fragmentary Archive: Migratory Feelings in Early Anglo-Saxon Women’s Letters

The letters by Anglo-Saxon women in the Boniface correspondence are connected by cultural practices and emotions centered on the conversion mission that functioned to maintain connections between the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. A striking recurring focus of these letters is on loss and isolation, which connects them to the Old English elegies. Many of the letters describe the writers’ traumatic experiences that result from the death or absence of kin. These are women who endured the trauma of being left behind when others migrated overseas or who, in traveling away from their homeland, found themselves isolated in an alien environment, displaced in time as well as space. This article offers an analysis of the letters, focusing on the queer temporalities they explore, the queer emotions they evoke, and the queer kinships that they forge. It argues that the women’s letters represent fragments of an early queer archive of migratory feelings.     

试评蒙古族史家拉西彭苏克——从《水晶念珠》看作者思想感情

拉西彭苏克是清代内蒙古昭乌达盟巴林右旗人,属答言汗第五子纳勒出·孛罗(Nal cˇu Bolod)次子苏巴孩·达尔罕(Subaqai Darqan)的后裔。关于拉西彭苏克,相关资料所提供的只是一些只言片语的零星记载,使后人很难直接、全面地了解他。然而一部《水晶念珠》使他的形象清晰丰满起来,人们可以通过他在书中传达的信息捕捉到他思想感情的脉络。     

人性与自由情感——兼论奥斯卡影像美学

人类存在着两类不同性质的情感：自由情感和必然情感。所谓自由情感指的是刺激源和这种情感对象之间没有任何直接的利害关系条件下所产生的情感。美的本质就在于自由情感。奥斯卡艺术堪称电影艺术中的经典。奥斯卡奖近百年的评奖历史证明人性是社会大众和奥斯卡奖评委共同的最好的审美趣味激发源。其中爱情、亲情、友情是奥斯卡影像中最浓墨重彩的人性主题，是自由情感的主要源泉，也是奥斯卡影像美学的核心。     

限量促销诱发的前瞻性情绪及其作用机制

摘要:为探讨限量促销诱发的前瞻性情绪及其对购买意愿的作用机制,根据促销决策及目标导向型决策理论,在将前瞻性情绪分为“希望、焦虑、预期欣喜和预期后悔”的基础上,结合限量方式、产品类型及限制数量3个因素,借助5个心理学实验进行检验.研究发现:1)生产型限量与销售型限量方式对前瞻性情绪及购买意愿的影响有显著差异,且生产型限量的影响更大;2)限量方式对前瞻性情绪及购买意愿的影响会受到产品类型的调节.炫耀品更适合使用生产型限量促销,非炫耀品更适合使用销售型限量促销;3)在炫耀品情境下,限量方式对前瞻性情绪及购买意愿的影响会受到限制数量的调节;4)在炫耀品情境下,一元线性回归结果显示,希望、焦虑、预期欣喜、预期后悔对购买意愿的影响都显著,但多元线性回归显示,希望的影响最大,预期后悔与预期欣喜紧随其后,而焦虑则不显著.以上研究结论不仅对企业提升限量促销效果有益,而且有助于深入理解前瞻性情绪的作用.     

An argument for love in intercultural education for teacher education

This paper proposes rethinking intercultural education in teacher education, arguing that any discussion of student teachers’ intercultural education should be connected more explicitly to a theoretical conceptualisation of love. The first part of the paper focuses on identifying discursive boundaries in engaging with intercultural education in teacher education. It is argued that if we are to develop intercultural education, we need to consciously move away from some discourses in teacher education, namely instrumentalism, performance orientation, emotionlessness and seeing the relationship between teacher and learner as static. The second half of the paper develops a theoretical alternative by engaging with the concept of love as a basis for intercultural education in pursuing an alternative to the instrumentalist, performance-based, non-emotional fixed-relationship ethos of intercultural education in teacher education.     

It Won't Change a Thing: The Meanings of Marriage in the Netherlands

The vast body of literature that highlights the increasing fragility of marriage fails to explore the effect of this fragility on the meanings people attach to marriage. During the last twenty-five to thirty years the instrumental and normative reasons for marriage—legal protection, societal support and enforcement, the social rejection of alternatives to marriage—have largely disappeared in the Netherlands. This study focuses on how young adults, raised after the most dramatic changes in marital practices took place, talk about the meanings of marriage in the context of building intimate relationships. In-depth interviews with fifteen heterosexual young adults (aged twenty-one to thirty) who were in a committed relationship showed that they talked about marriage in four different ways. They (1) minimized the meaning of marriage, (2) talked about the idea of marriage to ascertain commitment, (3) defined marriage as the ideal relationship, and/or (4) saw marriage as a jinx. Contradictions between these modes of talk revealed feelings of ambivalence and anxiety associated with a desire for commitment. The emotionally charged meanings associated with marriage anchored marriage in interviewees' imaginations, enabling the institution to retain its hold even though social pressures to marry are limited and legal substitutes to marriage exist.