A New Culture of Learning: Digital Storytelling and Faith Formation

How has the “new culture of learning” begun to transform us, and in what ways might the faith formation practices of religious communities be impacted by the shift? Recent research funded by the MacArthur Foundation lays an empirical basis for recognizing shifts in learning brought about by widespread access to digital technologies. The implications of that research, in turn, pose widespread challenges to the work of faith formation in contemporary communities of faith. Communicative theologies may be best poised to engage these challenges through the practices of digital storytelling.     

The role of pupil size in communication. Is there room for learning?

The eyes are extremely important for communication. The muscles around the eyes express emotional states and the size of the pupil signals whether a person is aroused and alert or bored and fatigued. Pupil size is an overlooked social signal, yet is readily picked up by observers. Observers mirror their own pupil sizes in response, which can influence social impressions. In a landmark study by Hess [1975. The role of pupil size in communication. Scientific American, 233(5), 110–119] it was shown that individuals with large pupils are perceived more positively than individuals with small pupils. In that behavioral study, participants were asked to draw pupils in line drawings of faces with empty irises and they drew large pupils in the happy face, and small ones in the angry face. The current study tested 579 participants (aged 4–80 years old) and extended this work by showing that this association between large (small) pupils and a positive (negative) impression develops over age and is absent in children. Several explanations for how individuals through interactions with close others learn that large pupils mean care, interest and attention and small pupils the opposite, are discussed. To conclude, this study shows that pupil size and emotion perception are intertwined but that their relationship develops over age.     

The interrelatedness between infants’ communicative gestures and lexicon size: A longitudinal study

Research has shown a close relationship between gestures and language development. In this study, we investigate the cross-lagged relationships between different types of gestures and two lexicon dimensions: number of words produced and comprehended. Information about gestures and lexical development was collected from 48 typically developing infants when these were aged 0;9, 1;0 and 1;3. The European Portuguese version of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Gestures (PT CDI:WG) was used. The results indicated that the total number of actions and gestures and the number of early gestures produced at 0;9 and at 1;0 year predicted the number of words comprehended three months later. Actions and gestures’ predictive power of the number of words produced was limited to the 0;9–1;0 year interval. The opposite relationship was not found: word comprehension and production did not predict action and gestures three months later. These results highlight the importance of non-verbal communicative behavior in language development.     

It's Fascinating Research: The Cognition of Verbal Irony

ABSTRACT— Verbal irony is nonliteral language that makes salient a discrepancy between expectations and reality. For researchers who study verbal irony, a critical question is: How do we grasp the meaning of ironic language? The parallel-constraint-satisfaction approach holds promise as an answer to this question. By this account, multiple cues to ironic intent, such as tone of voice, incongruity, and knowledge of the speaker, are processed rapidly and in parallel and this information is coordinated with the utterance itself in order to construct a coherent interpretation that is the best fit for the activated information. Recently, research with individuals who struggle with irony comprehension (typically developing children, individuals with autism-spectrum disorder, individuals with brain injury) has provided new clues about the complex process by which ironic meaning is inferred.     

从前语言到语言转换阶段的语言运用能力发展——3岁前汉语儿童语用交流行为习得的研究

研究着重探讨汉语儿童从前语言到语言交往阶段语用交流行为发展,通过质和量两种方式搜集14-32月儿童与母亲互动交往语料,采用汉化的CHILDES模式转录并用CLAN系统进行分析。研究发现3岁前汉语儿童语用交流行为清晰度的快速增长,语用交往行为类型的明显扩展和语用交流行为核心类型的运作倾向,是该阶段具有标志性的语用发展阶段特征。研究同时发现汉语儿童语用交流行为与母亲的语用交流行为存在着较为密切的关系。     

The relevance of Habermas' communicative turn

This paper points out the way in which educational and communicative action (Habermas) are to be related. It is shown that earlier attempts to put Habermas ideas to use have led to a dead end because they do not realize clearly that the new basic notion introduced by Habermas, namely communicative action, is the expression of a communicative turn. It is argued that Habermas' concept expresses a radical new attempt to grasp the intersubjective character of social action. Next implications of this communicative turn for the concept of education as a social praxis are indicated. Education can be conceived of as a praxis responding to the vulnerability of a communicative self.     

Ethical and institutional frameworks for interactional justice in public organizations: a comparative analysis of selected Western and Chinese sources

This paper explores both differences and points of contact between selected contemporary theories of public ethics in the West and China. China is in a greater state of flux in this connection, with new, eclectic approaches to ethical justification for moral agency gaining prominence. There are thematic parallels between East and West in their distinct strains of institutionalism (in which neither individual moral agency nor the justice claims of individuals have much play). However, there are recent Chinese theoretical proposals – many incorporating Western sources – that address this quandary, namely the institutional overdetermination of moral agency. These proposals are joined to contributions from feminist and liberation ethics in a critical reconsideration of overridingness in formal ethics. Contemporary Chinese ethics connect moral claims to kin, community, and reciprocity networks, particularly as traditional philosophy is recovered in new theoretical syntheses. The grounding of Confucian ethics in kin and community offers an instructive contrast to formal Western ethical systems, as do radical strains of Western ethics that suggest that transcendence is found in the self's extension toward others in need. This paper considers these ethical themes in connection with hypothetical instances of interactional justice in organizations.     

Unconscious phantasy as a structural principle and organizer of mental life: The evolution of a concept from Freud to Klein and some of her successors

Starting with Freud's discovery of unconscious phantasy as a means of accessing his patients’ internal world, the author discusses the evolution of the concept in the work of Melanie Klein and some of her successors. Whereas Freud sees phantasy as a wish fulfilling imagination, dominated by primary process functioning and kept apart from reality testing, Klein understands phantasies as a structural function and organizer of mental life. From their very beginnings they involve object relations and gradually evolve from primitive body‐near experiences to images and symbolic representations. With her concept of projective identification in particular, Klein anticipates the communicative function of unconscious phantasies. They are at the basis of processes of symbolization, but may also be put into the service of complex defensive operations. The author traces the further evolution of the concept from the contributions of S. Isaacs, the theories of thinking proposed by W.R. Bion and R. Money‐Kyrle, Hanna Segal's ideas on symbolization and reparation all the way to the latest approaches by R. Britton, J. Steiner and others, including the understanding of transference and counter‐transference as a ‘total situation’. Points of contact with Freud are to be found particularly in connection with his concept of ‘primal phantasies’. In the author's view, the idea of the transmission and communicative potential of unconscious phantasies enabled these authors to overcome the solipsistic origins of drive theory in favour of a notion in which unconscious phantasies both set down the coordinates of the inner world and form and reflect the matrix of inter‐subjective relations.     

Maternal postpartum depressive symptoms predict delay in non-verbal communication in 14-month-old infants

We investigated the potential relationship between maternal depressive symptoms during the postpartum period and non-verbal communication skills of infants at 14 months of age in a birth cohort study of 951 infants and assessed what factors may influence this association. Maternal depressive symptoms were measured using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, and non-verbal communication skills were measured using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, which include Early Gestures and Later Gestures domains. Infants whose mothers had a high level of depressive symptoms (13+ points) during both the first month postpartum and at 10 weeks were approximately 0.5 standard deviations below normal in Early Gestures scores and 0.5–0.7 standard deviations below normal in Later Gestures scores. These associations were independent of potential explanations, such as maternal depression/anxiety prior to birth, breastfeeding practices, and recent depressive symptoms among mothers. These findings indicate that infants whose mothers have postpartum depressive symptoms may be at increased risk of experiencing delay in non-verbal development.