The psychology of modern memorials: the affective intertwining of personal and collective memories / La psicología de los monumentos modernos: la implicación afectiva de los recuerdos personales y colectivos

Abstract

This paper explores collective memory and grief as they are experienced and expressed at modern memorial sites. What makes them collective is the way they are interpreted and felt as a ‘we’, in first-person plural. From a cultural psychological perspective, we conceptualize memorials as cultural and historical artefacts that mediate these processes and in so doing give meaning to the past based on present and future challenges. Along these lines, we analyse visitors’ situated and evolving experiences of two memorial sites: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Ground Zero National September 11 Memorial in New York. Results focus on individuals’ particular modes of experiencing and appropriating modern memorial sites, which in contrast to classic ones are purposely built to generate a wide range of different meaning-making processes and ways of interacting with them.     

The international student sojourn,identity conflict and threats to well-being

ABSTRACT

This article reports findings from a qualitative (interview) study of the identity conflict experienced by five international students at a university in the south of England for whom real and perceived challenges to national self-image were shown to be unsettling. The article suggests that our cultures of origin are centrally important to our private and personal sense of self and it argues that counsellor educators and counsellors need to understand their students' and clients' emotional and behavioural problems in the context of their cultural identities. In this research, there was a strong emotional response to threats to collective identity, which appeared to be influenced by both the degree of students' cultural identification and their country's global standing. The following themes were generated from a thematic analysis and capture the essence of student responses to perceived derogation of their national identity: re-identifying with the culture of origin; allying with the West; resisting the discourse of western supremacy; and acquiescence with stigma. Of importance to all participants' perceptions of derogation was their location in the western world.     

THE JUSTICE IN MERCY

It is natural to wonder how mercy is related to justice. I focus in this essay on a more limited question: how should we relate mercy and retributive justice? My suggestion is that attending to our situation as moral agents can help us solve this conundrum. I offer a pessimistic reading of our situation. Because of original sin and related forms of bad moral luck, we have limited control over our attitudes and actions. This has a surprisingly hopeful upshot, since our unfortunate condition makes it appropriate to respond to one another mercifully. I suggest that this response can take two forms. Without collapsing justice into mercy, it is right to make our approach to justice and punishment more merciful and to recognize the fittingness of “erring” on the side of mercy when we are uncertain how to apportion blame.     

No Blame No Gain? From a No Blame Culture to a Responsibility Culture in Medicine

Healthcare systems need to consider not only how to prevent error, but how to respond to errors when they occur. In the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, one strand of this latter response is the ‘No Blame Culture’, which draws attention from individuals and towards systems in the process of understanding an error. Defences of the No Blame Culture typically fail to distinguish between blaming someone and holding them responsible. This article argues for a ‘responsibility culture’, where healthcare professionals are held responsible in cases of foreseeable and avoidable errors. We demonstrate how healthcare professionals can justifiably be held responsible for their errors even though they work in challenging circumstances. We then review the idea of ‘responsibility without blame’, applying this to cases of error in healthcare. Sensitive to the undesirable effects of blaming healthcare professionals and to the moral significance of holding individuals accountable, we argue that a responsibility culture has significant advantages over a No Blame Culture due to its capacity to enhance patient safety and support medical professionals in learning from their mistakes, while also recognising and validating the legitimate sense of responsibility that many medical professionals feel following avoidable error, and motivating medical professionals to report errors.     

Travail d’articulation et organisation de travail : Etude dans un collectif de l’enseignement public

Articulation work is an activity that makes other’s work easier or allows a whole work collective to reach its objectives. It is necessary for a coordinated functioning in organizations, but is often unrecognized and seldom considered as a full activity. In this study, we tried to find if work organization could affect the occurrence of articulation work. We analyzed articulation work made between pairs of persons and its relations with the proximity of their offices, the amount of working time in common, the proximity of their posts, the degree of interdependance linked to their duties. Among these organizational factors, we noticed that only the interdependance level could explain the differences in articulation work depending on the pairs of individuals considered.     

Seeking a Common Framework for Research on Narcissism: An Attempt to Integrate the Different Faces of Narcissism Within the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits

The current paper presents a proposal for integrating different narcissism constructs (grandiose, vulnerable, communal, and collective) within the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits (CPM), an integrative model of personality structure that could also be used to accommodate the narcissism spectrum model. The study was conducted on a community sample (N = 781 adults). The theoretically predicted locations of the different narcissism constructs within the CPM space were empirically verified using the structural summary method. We found that grandiose, vulnerable, and communal narcissism can be meaningfully located within the CPM, while the status of collective narcissism remains unclear. Thus, the CPM can serve as a personality matrix explaining the differences and similarities between the various faces of narcissism. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology