Tortoise or hare? Supporting the chronotope preference of employees with fluctuating chronic illness symptoms

Objective: Our aim is to understand how to facilitate the job retention of employees with chronic illness. We focus on multiple sclerosis (MS) as a criterion chronic illness.

Design: An opportunity sample of 20 individuals of working age (13 female; 7 male) were recruited who had been in paid employment for over 28 months with a concurrent diagnosis of MS. Participants took part in one of three focus groups with a topic guide comprising keywords: work, coping, performance, support, future, expectations, sharing and symptoms. Data were analysed using dialogical analysis.

Main outcome measures: As a qualitative study, no outcome measure was used. However, the specific focus of interest was to search for differential patterns of ‘timespace’ – chronotope – that people with chronic illness utilise to manage their condition in the workplace.

Results: Participants oriented to two distinct chronotope types: unsustainable epic (characterised by condensed time) and temporary idyll (characterized by condensed space). Perceived managerial discretion was identified as possibly influencing participants’ chronotope preference.

Conclusion: Identifying chronotope preference has practical implications for health psychologists and related professionals who provide and advise on support to facilitate people with chronic illness to thrive in the workplace.     

‘Pissed Off and Confused’/‘Grateful and (Re)Moved’: Affect,Privilege and National Commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article explores affect, colonial privilege, and the cultural politics of national commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Based on focus-group interviews around two major national days, we examine means through which feelings and emotions are deployed in ways that enable the reproduction of social advantage. Situating affect within patterns of relationship, four interrelated affective-discursive practices are explored. In relation to Waitangi Day, agents tend to work under the rubric of anger and confusion. For Anzac Day, being grateful and moved shapes the interaction, although participants often indicate preferences towards “having a day off.” Given the colonial context in which these practices circulate, analysis observes the associated freedom and ease by which affective-discursive privilege is (re)produced. Often incongruent and rarely challenged, privilege allows associated actors to do what they want, when they want, however they want. This affective climate authorizes the ongoing reproduction of, and justification for, membership to a higher-status ethnic group of which unearned opportunities and entitlements remain its everyday, expected currency.     

How Do Artificial Neural Networks Classify Musical Triads? A Case Study in Eluding Bonini's Paradox

How might artificial neural networks (ANNs) inform cognitive science? Often cognitive scientists use ANNs but do not examine their internal structures. In this paper, we use ANNs to explore how cognition might represent musical properties. We train ANNs to classify musical chords, and we interpret network structure to determine what representations ANNs discover and use. We find connection weights between input units and hidden units can be described using Fourier phase spaces, a representation studied in musical set theory. We find the total signal coming through these weighted connection weights is a measure of the similarity between two Fourier structures: the structure of the hidden unit's weights and the structure of the stimulus. This is surprising because neither of these Fourier structures is computed by the hidden unit. We then show how output units use such similarity measures to classify chords. However, we also find different types of units—units that use different activation functions—use this similarity measure very differently. This result, combined with other findings, indicates that while our networks are related to the Fourier analysis of musical sets, they do not perform Fourier analyses of the kind usually described in musical set theory. Our results show Fourier representations of music are not limited to musical set theory. Our results also suggest how cognitive psychologists might explore Fourier representations in musical cognition. Critically, such theoretical and empirical implications require researchers to understand how network structure converts stimuli into responses.