Collective memories,emotions, and spatial tactics in social movements: The case of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong

Recent studies have increasingly acknowledged the dynamic relationship between emotions and space in social movements. They, however, have seldom tied emotions and space to time when discussing activists’ emotions and their tactical choices. This paper studies the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and explores how collective memory and generational experiences—two intertwined notions of time—shaped how activists felt and how they designed and deployed a spatial tactic. The Umbrella Movement was characterized by miscellaneous emotions and intense disputes among activists regarding how to best use spatial occupation to fight for democratization before and during the struggle. Using a qualitative dataset that contains textual and interview data, I argue that while emotions and the political-cultural characteristics of contentious space were two factors in informing tactical choices, collective memory and generational experiences were key to understanding the rise of the movement and its characteristics. Experiencing different political events in their years of early adulthood, young and veteran activists felt differently in the context of 2013–2014, which led them to embrace disjunctive views on the pace, sequence, and bodily action for the same tactic of spatial occupation and dissimilar emotional management strategies. This created ongoing internal clashes before and during the movement.     

A comparison of 8- and 11-year-old girls' and boys' participation in specific types of rough-and-tumble play and aggressive fighting: Implications for functional hypotheses

Study 1 compared the extent to which 8- and 11-year-old girls and boys (N = 86) participated in specific types of rough-and-tumble play. It used an observational methodology. The data were used to test two prominent hypotheses about the evolutionary function of this general category of play behaviour that have been applied to children, especially boys, of this age. One is that rough-and-tumble play provides practice for the development of real fighting skills and the other that it serves as a safe way to establish/display social dominance. Both hypotheses predict that boys will engage in more rough-and-tumble play than girls, especially those types that are used in fighting/dominance contests. Boys were found to engage in significantly more chase initiation activities, more bouts of brief rough-and-tumble play, more bouts of restraining and more bouts of boxing/hitting than girls. These data provide some support for the two hypotheses, although significant sex differences were not found for all types of rough-and-tumble play observed. No significant age differences were obtained, suggesting that the two hypotheses may be applicable throughout the 8- to 11-year-old period and not just at the end of it as previous research had suggested. Study 2 presented observational data concerning the motor patterns used in aggressive fighting. In all but one case, there were no significant differences in the extent to which 8/9- and 10/11-year-old girls and boys employed wrestling, hitting and restraining, supporting the view that the practice fighting hypothesis is relevant throughout the 8-11-year-old period. It was argued that age and sex differences provide a useful means of scrutinising functional hypotheses, and that splitting behavioural categories that contain disparate action patterns facilitates more refined tests of those hypotheses. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Timing the “magical number seven”: Presentation rate and regularity affect verbal working memory performance

The informative value of time and temporal structure often remains neglected in cognitive assessments. However, next to information about stimulus identity we can exploit temporal ordering principles, such as regularity, periodicity, or grouping to generate predictions about the timing of future events. Such predictions may improve cognitive performance by optimising adaptation to dynamic stimuli. Here, we investigated the influence of temporal structure on verbal working memory by assessing immediate recall performance for aurally presented digit sequences (forward digit span) as a function of standard (1000 ms stimulus-onset-asynchronies, SOAs), short (700 ms), long (1300 ms) and mixed (700–1300 ms) stimulus timing during the presentation phase. Participant's digit spans were lower for short and mixed SOA presentation relative to standard SOAs. This confirms an impact of temporal structure on the classic “magical number seven,” suggesting that working memory performance can in part be regulated through the systematic application of temporal ordering principles.     

Displacement trauma: complex states of personal,collective and intergenerational fragmentation and their intergenerational transmission

Originally presented at the Journal’s one day conference entitled ‘Displacement: Contemporary Traumatic Experience’ held in London in November 2019, this paper expands on the author’s theory of the implicit psychological organizing gestalt, an associated pattern of psychic functions which operate in an integrated way to simultaneously structure and organize our experience of self-cohesion and self-continuity. The gestalt, which implicitly links the formation of psychic skin, body image, cultural skin and both personal and cultural identity with place, functions as an emergent non-conscious permanent presence or background ‘constant’. It develops over time and emerges out of embodied emotional experiencing with the total environment – both human and non-human. The author argues that it is the rupture of this gestalt and the disorganizing consequences of its loss which underlies the experience of displacement trauma. If disruptions in the formation of the gestalt and/or its later rupture remain unrecognized and unrepresented then the absence creates a void which can be intergenerationally transmitted. Case material is presented which describes this and which highlights the ways in which the gestalt can contribute to our understanding of collective displacement anxiety, cultural trauma and cultural complexes.     

Longitudinal Development of Memory for Temporal Order in Early to Middle Childhood

Abstract

Existing studies examining the development of temporal order memory show that although young children perform above chance on some tasks assessing temporal order memory, there are significant age-related differences across childhood. Yet, the trajectory of children’s ability to retrieve temporal order remains unclear as existing conclusions are drawn from cross-sectional studies. The present study utilized an accelerated longitudinal design in order to characterize the developmental trajectory of temporal order memory in a sample of 200 healthy 4- to 8-year-old children. Specifically, two tasks commonly used in the literature were tested longitudinally: a primacy judgment task and an ordering task. Results revealed that, even after controlling for differences in IQ, linearly increasing trajectories characterized age-related change in performance for both tasks; however, change appeared greater for the temporal ordering task. Further, performance on the two tasks was positively related, suggesting shared underlying mechanisms. These findings provide a more thorough understanding of temporal order memory in early to middle childhood by characterizing the developmental trajectories of two commonly used tasks and have important implications for our understanding of children’s developing memory more broadly.