Reminiscing and the Passage of Years: Investigating the Role of Affective Autobiographical Memories in Passage of Time Judgments

Previous research has shown that judgments of the experienced velocity of recent years passing by vary depending on the number of autobiographical memories being activated in the moment of judging. While a body of evidence shows affect to have an impact on both prospective and retrospective judgments on the experience of time for short periods, the effect of valence of memories on the experience of the passage of long intervals has not been examined yet. Thus, we asked 282 people to retrieve five either emotionally positive or negative memories from the last 5years before judging the subjectively experienced passage of time of these years. However, positive and negative events differ in some ways beyond valence, e.g., the ascribed impact on the participants’ subsequent lives as well as the stability of ascribed affective intensity: The latter decreased over time for negative but not for positive memories while ascribed impact was markedly higher for positive memories. Results indicate no significant differences between the two conditions, even after controlling for the aforementioned differences. However, exploratory analyses show that participants rate time to have passed faster, the longer the activated memories dated back on average, a result that seems in line with contextual-change hypothesis.

Maintenance and Reformation of News Repertoires: A Latent Transition Analysis

Today’s media environment provides people ample opportunities for constructing news habits fitting their preferences, but our knowledge about the dynamics of such news habits is limited. Using a four-wave panel survey from Sweden and taking a news repertoires approach, the study identifies four groups of news users labeled Public service-oriented traditionalists, Minimalists, Engaged pluralists, and Quality-oriented explorers, which are each related to news interest, trust in mainstream news media, and socio-demographic factors in distinct ways. The news repertoires are highly stable, even during profound contextual change, showing that people most often maintain their news habits and only seldom reform them.

Synthetic futurism: exploring the possibilities of limitless architectural change and growth

Buildings do not have to burst out of the ground with a predetermined identity. They have an inherent need to grow, change and reinvent themselves to reflect the changes among the people and context. In the ever-changing condition of the context, the design of a building must be conscious of and attuned to the growing needs of society. It cannot assume it is destined for a singular purpose, as instead it is defined by a continuity of growth and reinvention. With the onset of contextual changes, the fleeting moment of a design’s conception becomes less significant. In turn, what rises in import is the integration of contingency to allow a design to metabolize the effects of the contextual change and synthesize new solutions within a flexible, absorptive system. Each added component through its relationship with subcomponents and previously existing elements can serve to create diversity, continuity and flexible internal hierarchies between continuous servant and served space. The summation of the Group Form that results from the melding of many parts can allow the buildings identity to shift as the individual parts reform and change to form new cohesive identities. By manufacturing the base and set of core components, a radically diverse system can grow beyond the limits of the originating elements, adding malleability to the many comprising identities.

Synthetic futurism: exploring the possibilities of limitless architectural change and growth

Buildings do not have to burst out of the ground with a predetermined identity. They have an inherent need to grow, change and reinvent themselves to reflect the changes among the people and context. In the ever-changing condition of the context, the design of a building must be conscious of and attuned to the growing needs of society. It cannot assume it is destined for a singular purpose, as instead it is defined by a continuity of growth and reinvention. With the onset of contextual changes, the fleeting moment of a design’s conception becomes less significant. In turn, what rises in import is the integration of contingency to allow a design to metabolize the effects of the contextual change and synthesize new solutions within a flexible, absorptive system. Each added component through its relationship with subcomponents and previously existing elements can serve to create diversity, continuity and flexible internal hierarchies between continuous servant and served space. The summation of the Group Form that results from the melding of many parts can allow the buildings identity to shift as the individual parts reform and change to form new cohesive identities. By manufacturing the base and set of core components, a radically diverse system can grow beyond the limits of the originating elements, adding malleability to the many comprising identities.

Unpopularity and cultural power in the age of Netflix: New questions for cultural studies’ approaches to television texts

Although Internet-distributed television bears much in common with the television long studied and theorized using cultural studies-based approaches to analysis, several of its features profoundly deviate from earlier television norms and require reassessment and adaptation of theoretical frames. This article focuses on the issue of textual popularity in relation to these services and identifies key challenges to using the same frames of cultural power that have been used for studying television in the past. The underlying problem of audience fragmentation does not originate with streaming services, but this profound contextual change, in concert with industrial aspects that further distinguish internet-distributed television from television’s past norms, must be addressed. The article concludes by identifying several ways the cultural power of streaming services can be investigated despite the challenges that emerging norms of Internet-distributed video provide.

Foreign language education policy in Ireland: A discourse-historical analysis

This paper investigates the effects of contextual change on the body of education policy discourse in Ireland, and specifically on discourse pertaining to foreign language education. Discourse-Historical Analysis of key documents reveals a range of micro-, meso- and macro-environmental factors which have had a detrimental effect on foreign language policy discourse over the last twenty years. The objective of this study is to expose complex discursive strategies and tools which serve to convey the relationship between the micro-, meso- and macro-environmental factors and to investigate the effect of contextual change on the body of foreign language education policies. This will be achieved in two ways; firstly, by deconstructing the relevant documents in order to reveal how concepts, problems, causes, imperatives and inevitabilities are discursively framed; and secondly, by examining intertextual connections between texts which make up the discursive sample. It is anticipated that researchers and policymakers alike regardless of the capacity in which they deal with the body of foreign language education policy will find these findings of interest.

The methodology of missiology in the context of Turtle Island

This article explores the impact of contextual change and reality in Turtle Island on missiological methodology. It is a contextually focused argument to try and tease out some specific dimensions of methodology. At the heart of the argument lies the conviction that posture in the study of missiology is a critical part of its methodology. This focus on posture also addresses the potential tension between practitioners of mission and university- and seminary-based professors of mission. First, it will briefly outline some traditional assumptions of missiological methodology. Then it will argue that methodology on Turtle Island should be rooted in a christomorphic engagement with Scripture and context. Out of this engagement arises a creatively constructive process, guided by the Spirit. Through this process missiological methodology needs to take on the character of a humble pilgrim through the different disciplines and “worlds” of its context while focused on the salvific thriving of all creation. Ultimately, because mission arises out of a joyful doxological response to God’s grace for the world, missiological methodology is to be practiced as a discipline of creative poiesis.

Future obligations

This article reflects on a double interpretation of English constructions containing the combined expression will have to. As I will show, illocutions involving sentences of the type ‘NP will have to VP’ can be interpreted as either (i) predicting future enforcing circumstances that trigger a future obligation or (ii) reporting such circumstances as currently in force at speech time. Once I sketch the different semantic elements at play in a Kratzerian framework, I cast doubt on some current views on the so-called modal–tense interaction. As I will show, one way to fully account for the availability of both readings is by assuming a semantic temporal underspecification as to when the triggering circumstances in the conversational background are initially in force. This raises important theoretical caveats for semantic analyses in the field, particularly for those that equate the semantics of the future with prediction. As the article shows, such a widespread assumption can be contended by a dynamic account of obligational ascriptions, according to which their different illocutionary forces can be derived from the contextual change potential of its primitive (and admittedly underspecified) future semantics. Ultimately, the paper voices support for the view that future semantics must not be equated with prediction.