Australia Day or Invasion Day? Perspectives on the Continuing Impact of Colonialism Underlies Public Contestations Around Australia's National Day

The ways in which collective memories are constructed in the present is important in explaining how people choose to commemorate their nation's history. The present research focused on the context of Australia Day, a controversial national holiday that falls on January 26, which is a date that marks the beginning of colonization. We conducted field surveys of community members participating in an Invasion Day protest pushing for Indigenous rights (n = 219) and community members enjoying the public holiday in a public park (n = 174). We found that greater recognition of colonial history explained protesters' (vs. nonprotesters') greater support for changing the date of Australia Day. Further, protesters' lower levels of perceived continuity and higher levels of desired continuity of First Australian culture was linked to greater support for changing the date of Australia Day compared to the nonprotesters. These findings suggest that creating consensus over contested collective memories of a nation's history requires greater recognition of the ongoing impact of past atrocities.     

Ideological Contestation on Twitter Over Diversity: Constructions of Diversity as Clashing Projects

The problematic of diversity today circulates a discourse on human differences and similarities which is also taken up by actors with controversial political agendas, notably right-wing populist and neoconservative movements. Focusing on contestation over the meaning of “diversity” by lay actors in social media, we suggest here that different constructions of diversity may be seen as clashing projects largely shaping each other through their emphasis on differences or similarities among people. In a qualitative analysis on the tweets mentioning diversity in Greek over a year, constructions of diversity were mirror images of each other across two independent ideological tensions, with distinct social stakes. Individualist constructions of diversity praising individuals' differences clashed over the legitimation of power with majoritarianist constructions emphasizing social homogeneity, and universalist constructions of diversity advocating the fundamental similarities of individuals clashed over the legitimation of social identities with particularist constructions praising cultural differences. Those constructions converse with basic social psychological models of diversity, suggesting that the emphasis on difference or similarity across people may stem from a dynamic context of political confrontation. The findings also suggest that right-wing populist representations may be channeled by the content of contestation and the positions held by the other side.     

Redefining the Meaning of Negative History in Times of Sociopolitical Change: A Social Creativity Approach

This article explores the role negative history plays in political discourse on crisis management and how times of sociopolitical change in turn influence the strategies that can be employed to write a positive historical charter. Choosing Germany as a case study, we analyzed how political leaders negotiate Germany's narrative and political role during the European “refugee crisis” in speeches (n = 332) held between 2015 and 2018. Applying a combination of corpus-based and qualitative narrative analysis, we found that the context of a crisis is used to attach new meaning to Germany's role in World War II. By focusing on the lessons learned from history and pointing out the parallels between the current crisis and sociopolitical developments that took place 80 years ago, Germany is presented as the ideal advocate for a free and united Europe, a narrative that legitimizes its advancingly dominant role within the EU and beyond. The analysis demonstrates how times of change can facilitate social creativity strategies for nations whose past is dominated by negative history, with implications for the theory of identity management.     

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.     

Bridging ears and eyes when learning spoken words: On the effects of bilingual experience at 30 months

From the very first moments of their lives, infants selectively attend to the visible orofacial movements of their social partners and apply their exquisite speech perception skills to the service of lexical learning. Here we explore how early bilingual experience modulates children's ability to use visible speech as they form new lexical representations. Using a cross‐modal word‐learning task, bilingual children aged 30 months were tested on their ability to learn new lexical mappings in either the auditory or the visual modality. Lexical recognition was assessed either in the same modality as the one used at learning (‘same modality’ condition: auditory test after auditory learning, visual test after visual learning) or in the other modality (‘cross‐modality’ condition: visual test after auditory learning, auditory test after visual learning). The results revealed that like their monolingual peers, bilingual children successfully learn new words in either the auditory or the visual modality and show cross‐modal recognition of words following auditory learning. Interestingly, as opposed to monolinguals, they also demonstrate cross‐modal recognition of words upon visual learning. Collectively, these findings indicate a bilingual edge in visual word learning, expressed in the capacity to form a recoverable cross‐modal representation of visually learned words.     

Dynamiques représentationnelles et identitaires au cours de la socialisation professionnelle de jeunes recrues LGBT

This article examines the ways in which representational and identity transformations work during the socialization in the workplace of young LGBT hires, linked to discrimination perceived in their workplace environment as well as their impact on professional goals. Working within the theoretical framework of active socialization, the study is based on the IMIS method and proposes a detailed analysis of two cases recently entering the transportation workplace. The results show that, depending on how severe the perceived discrimination is in the workplace, previous experiences of homophobia encountered in other environments and already built self-image are reactivated in different ways, leading to a more or less important reconstruction of professional and identity representations, as well as the future goals of the individual. These elements are discussed from the point of view of interactions between environments and possible interventions by valuing diversity and accompanying the integration of young hires into organizations.     

Children's Representations of the World of Drugs

The changing profile of drug use has highlighted the need for age-appropriate education which requires insight into children's representations of drugs. Representations were elicited from 134 children aged between 5 and 11 years, drawn from two schools, by asking them to draw and write their responses to questions relating to a story about losing and finding a bag of drugs. Relevant responses were generated by 119 children aged between 8 and 11 years. A content analysis of these responses revealed differences with school and age. Older children were more likely to recognize that drugs can be good or bad depending on type, quantity taken and reason for use. The children had firm ideas about who takes drugs and their motivations and were knowledgeable about methods of use. They recognized that drugs can be dangerous, but had little understanding of how or why. The children's representations were characterized by fear and uncertainty and most wanted to know more. These findings are used to argue that there is a need for child-centred constructivist approaches to drug education which seek to demystify drugs and drug use and to orientate children to the realities of the world of drugs in the 1990s.     

Analyse narrative du récit de la maladie : intérêts méthodologiques et réflexion sur la prise en charge thérapeutique des patients en oncologie

The narrative approach is an emerging disciplinary field, which considers the narrative to be a therapeutic, a methodological and an object of study in its own right. The objective of our contribution is twofold: (a) to present the context of emergence of the narrative approach and the notion of narrative in the field of psychology, and (b) to question the theoretical-methodological relevance of this approach in order to explore the expression of social knowledge with regard to the lived experience of cancer. After presenting some methods of collection and analysis of the narrative, we will suggest an application of this approach by analyzing narrative interviews of people with cancer. We will build on the results obtained to develop a reflection on the applied perspectives of the narrative approach, particularly with regard to the psychological therapy of cancer patients.     

Statistical learning of multiple speech streams: A challenge for monolingual infants

Language acquisition depends on the ability to detect and track the distributional properties of speech. Successful acquisition also necessitates detecting changes in those properties, which can occur when the learner encounters different speakers, topics, dialects, or languages. When encountering multiple speech streams with different underlying statistics but overlapping features, how do infants keep track of the properties of each speech stream separately? In four experiments, we tested whether 8‐month‐old monolingual infants (N = 144) can track the underlying statistics of two artificial speech streams that share a portion of their syllables. We first presented each stream individually. We then presented the two speech streams in sequence, without contextual cues signaling the different speech streams, and subsequently added pitch and accent cues to help learners track each stream separately. The results reveal that monolingual infants experience difficulty tracking the statistical regularities in two speech streams presented sequentially, even when provided with contextual cues intended to facilitate separation of the speech streams. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding how infants learn and separate the input when confronted with multiple statistical structures.