‘Down With Multiculturalism,Book-burning and Fatwas’

Since the 7/7 London bombings, much has been said about the end and at times, the ‘death’ of multiculturalism in both the public and political spaces. Considering whether much of this discourse is little more than a thinly veiled discourse about the presence, role and responsibilities of Muslims in today's Britain, the paper takes the findings of the 1997 Runnymede Report into Islamophobia and uses this as a premise from which to explore those arguments and ideas that have ensued. Taking its title from an article written by Norman Lamont in The Daily Telegraph, the paper questions the sometimes tenuous relationship between ‘multiculturalism’ and notions of ‘Britishness’ as well as their effect and resonance contemporarily on perceptions and attitudes shown towards Muslims.     

‘NEET’ believers? An analysis of ‘belief’ on an urban housing estate

This article explores the impact that the experience of deep-seated social exclusion amongst unemployed white young men on a large urban housing estate in Birmingham, UK has on the ways in which they talk about identity, meaning and ‘belief’. Arising from detailed ethnographic fieldwork, the article forwards an analysis of current debates about youth social exclusion and the deployment of the acronym ‘NEET’ with reference to these young men and others like them across the UK. Drawing upon conversations between the author and young men during fieldwork, the article seeks to bridge the gap between social-science-based examinations of youth social exclusion and theological analyses of youth spiritualities to critically interrogate current debates about the nature of ‘belief’ and ‘belonging’. In particular, the article raises a key critical question: is the word ‘belief’ ‘fit for purpose’ when considering the experience of socially excluded young men on urban housing estates?     

Necessity of origins and multi-origin art

The Necessity of Origins is the thesis that, necessarily, if a material object wholly originates from some particular material, then it could not have wholly originated from any significantly non-overlapping material. Several philosophers have argued for this thesis using as a premise a principle that we call ‘Single Origin Necessity’. However, we argue that Single Origin Necessity is false. So any arguments for The Necessity of Origins that rely on Single Origin Necessity are unsound. We also argue that the Necessity of Origins itself is false. Our arguments rely on a thesis in the ontology of art that we find plausible: Multi-Work Materialism. It is the thesis that works of art that have multiple concrete manifestations are co-located with those manifestations.     

Navigating conflict and power at work: the effects of power and interdependence asymmetries on conflict in organizations

Many of the most difficult conflicts people face at work are up and down; with bosses, supervisors, and important clients, or with direct reports, staff, or other employees who differ from them in terms of their power and interests. However, much of the research on power differences and conflict tends to be piecemeal, decontextualized, and focused on negative consequences. This paper presents 2 studies that investigated a new situated model of conflict and power at work. They build on classic areas of research on social conflict, power, and interdependence; and integrate them into a coherent framework for organizational conflict research. The study methods and findings are presented, and their implications for research on work conflict are discussed.     

Acoustic correlates of emotional dimensions in laughter: Arousal,dominance, and valence

Although laughter plays an essential part in emotional vocal communication, little is known about the acoustical correlates that encode different emotional dimensions. In this study we examined the acoustical structure of laughter sounds differing along four emotional dimensions: arousal, dominance, sender's valence, and receiver-directed valence. Correlation of 43 acoustic parameters with individual emotional dimensions revealed that each emotional dimension was associated with a number of vocal cues. Common patterns of cues were found with emotional expression in speech, supporting the hypothesis of a common underlying mechanism for the vocal expression of emotions.     

Emotionally meaningful targets enhance orienting triggered by a fearful gazing face

Studies investigating the effect of emotional expression on spatial orienting to a gazed-at location have produced mixed results. The present study investigated the role of affective context in the integration of emotion processing and gaze-triggered orienting. In three experiments, a face gazed non-predictively to the left or right, and then its expression became fearful or happy. Participants identified (Experiments 1 and 2) or detected (Experiment 3) a peripheral target presented 225 or 525 ms after the gaze cue onset. In Experiments 1 and 3 the targets were either threatening (a snarling dog) or non-threatening (a smiling baby); in Experiment 2 the targets were neutral. With emotionally valenced targets, the gaze-cuing effect was larger when the face was fearful compared to happy—but only with the longer cue–target interval. With neutral targets, there was no interaction between gaze and expression. Our results indicate that a meaningful context optimises attentional integration of gaze and expression information.     

Negative priming reduces affective ratings

The mere exposure effect is the commonly observed increase in pleasantness ratings of stimuli that have been given prior exposure. According to the fluency attribution account of the mere exposure effect, repeated presentations of a stimulus lead to increased ease of processing, which in turn is attributed to pleasantness. If so, processing fluency manipulated by means other than repetition should influence liking. In the present experiment, processing fluency was manipulated using a negative priming procedure, and its influence on affective judgement was examined. Previously ignored stimuli were responded to slower (negative priming) and were rated as less pleasant than controls. It was concluded that decreased processing fluency decreases liking of previously ignored stimuli.     

False belief understanding goes to school: On the social-emotional consequences of coming early or late to a first theory of mind

Abstract

This research report describes a search for possible relations between children's developing theories of mind and aspects of their social-emotional maturity conducted by comparing the performance of 3-year-olds on measures of false belief understanding with teacher ratings of certain of their social-emotional skills and behaviours. The intuitions guiding this exploratory effort were, not only that a working grasp of the possibility of false belief would prove broadly predictive of social-emotional maturity, but also that such associations would be missing in the specific case of those preschool behaviours largely governed by a simple mastery of social conventions. As a step toward evaluating these possibilities a group of 40 preschoolers were given a battery of six measures of false belief understanding. The preschool teachers of these same children then completed a 40-item questionnaire covering a wide variety of markers of social-emotional maturity. Half of these items (termed “Intentional”) featured behaviours and skills thought to require some measure of insight into the mental lives of others, whereas the remainder (termed “Conventional”) were meant to sample a less heady domain of abilities open to those with no more than a simple grasp of social conventions, or the exercise of self-control. Consistent with the view that individual differences in children's early false belief understanding would express themselves primarily in those areas least governed by heavily routinised social conventions, our own summary measure of false belief understanding correlated positively only with those behavioural items classified as “Intentional”.     

Children's narratives and well-being

Research with adults indicates that writing causal-explanatory and emotionally disclosing narratives of stressful experiences is related to psychological well-being. Limited research with children has shown mixed results, but developmental theory suggests that simple extrapolation from adult findings might be problematic. In this study, 9- to 13-year-old children engaged in three days of writing under emotional and non-emotional instructions, and completed measures of depression, anxiety, strengths and difficulties, and somatic symptoms both at baseline and 2 months following intervention. Narratives were coded using a developmentally appropriate, exhaustive coding system. Children in the emotional writing group wrote more about negative evaluations, problems, emotions, explanations and coping than children in the non-emotional writing group. However, those children who wrote more about negative evaluations, problems and explanations subsequently showed higher levels of anxiety, depression and difficulties. Due to limited narrative and emotional regulation skills, expressive writing may not benefit, and may even be detrimental for, some children.