The Phenomenon of Cognitive Polyphasia in Social Representations on the Mentally

The present study is focused on the phenomenon of cognitive polyphasia in the context of representations of mentally ill people by different groups of society. The authors put at the forefront the problem of finding the conditions for the actualization of cognitive polyphasia. The study was aimed at identifying manifestations of cognitive polyphasia in the structure of social representations (SRs) of the mentally ill in the groups of Orthodox respondents and non-believers. The sample consisted of Orthodox Christians: N = 114 (49 males and 65 females) and non-believers: N = 113 (76 males and 37 females) in the age ranges 18-23, 40-45 and 60-65 years, permanently residing in Moscow. The survey of the respondents at the main stage of the research was carried out using: (1) the authors questionnaire developed on the basis of the results of the search stage and including 29 statements; (2) a scale of self-assessed degree of religiosity; (3) a modified D. Feldes Psychological Distance Scale; (4) a modified sentence completion method; (5) the Bubbles technique and (6) a question pool for obtaining socio-demographic information. The results showed that the emotional component of SRs of the mentally ill changed their modality depending on the survey methods used. When the respondents evaluated the statements of the questionnaire, the core of SRs in both groups contained elements that were extremely sympathetic towards the mentally ill, and the statements revealing negative emotions (the possibility of contracting a mental illness or the need to isolate these people from society) were on the periphery of their representations. At the same time, the data of the projective methods showed that the negative representation background (as compared to the positive one) in relation to mentally ill people significantly predominated among both believers and non-believers. The negative representation of the mentally ill is most pronounced in the group of non-believers and reaches the highest rates in the group of 60-65-year-old respondents. We regard such ambivalence as a manifestation of cognitive polyphasia and, in particular, its variety, i.e., selective prevalence.

Representation of the Self and Other in Joe Biden's Democratic National Convention Speech

This paper discusses the analysis of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation in Joe Biden’s speech in Democratic National Convention on 20 August 2020. This research utilizes van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), in which the main analysis is related to social power abuse and inequality in the social and political context. The main purpose of this research is to find out how language contributes to build both positive and negative representation in the speech. However, the research will only focus on the micro-level approach which consists of macrostructure, microstructure, and superstructure analyses. This research employs a qualitative descriptive method since it involves data interpretation in describing the representation. The result of the analysis shows that Biden as the Self has a positive representation; on the other hand, Trump as the Other has a negative representation. Both negative and positive representation are formed through various tools. Through this analysis, it is hoped that people can be more critical in absorbing the information given by political figures.

How Ibn Saud Became a Romanticized Legend in the U.S., British and French Press (1920–1953)

Despite the vast research on Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, there has been little attention given to the impact of his representation by the British, French and U.S. press in the first half of the twentieth century. The man who built the kingdom in line with his Islamic sect’s doctrine has been portrayed as a puritan reformer and a modernist, in sharp contrast with the negative representation of other Arabs who happened to be fighting against French and British domination of the region at the time. This research is important for our understanding of how media representation was both a catalyst that contributed to building a reputation and a destiny for Ibn Saud and Saudi Arabia, and also a tool in the hands of the great powers of the time. This study is based on a critical examination of news articles and features published by French, British and American journalists from 1920 until Ibn Saud’s death in 1953.

The origins of the negative historical representations of burghers in Hungary

Hungarian historiography needs to review its negative representation of towns and burghers typical of the first half of nineteenth-century Hungary, as Vera Bácskai, a major figure of Hungarian urban history suggested in a paradigmatic paper. Starting from her statements, this article examines the historical narratives of secondary school textbooks and wider historical syntheses of Hungarian history published in the age of Austria-Hungary (1867–1918). The author shows that the burghers’ negative image was rooted in the political fights prior to the 1848 Revolution and the emergence of modern nationalism.

Tackling Negative Representation: The Use of Storytelling As a Critical Pedagogical Tool for Positive Representation of Roma

This article focuses on the negative representation of Roma in Greece in the early twenty-first century. It investigates how negative feedback takes the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy that suppresses the self-esteem of young Roma and maintains a distance between Romani identity and education despite several positive yet little known examples of Romani scientists and scholars. The article questions how negative Romani images canbe reversed in order to enhance Roma’s educational success. The importance of innovative educational activities based on Romani literature, critical multiculturalism, and the parameter of Romani bilingualism is highlighted. Particularly, the article focuses on the power and the echo that stories can have (storytelling),where protagonists have a Romani connection or identity and are portrayed as positive models, both within classrooms with Romani students and within a society where the idea of Romani literature is a fantasy.

Non-status workers and the official discourse in Canada : a case of convenience

This paper makes a critical assessment of the study conducted by the CIMM (Standing Committee on Immigration and Citizenship) on undocumented and temporary foreign workers. It examines records of three moments of the process: (i) minutes of meetings during the assessment phase; (ii) the CIMM Report; (iii) and the Government Response. The argument sustained throughout the paper is that government's negative representation of non-status workers is conveniently constructed to avoid policy changes and consequently sustains the irregular movement of migrants.

Non-status workers and the official discourse in Canada : a case of convenience

This paper makes a critical assessment of the study conducted by the CIMM (Standing Committee on Immigration and Citizenship) on undocumented and temporary foreign workers. It examines records of three moments of the process: (i) minutes of meetings during the assessment phase; (ii) the CIMM Report; (iii) and the Government Response. The argument sustained throughout the paper is that government's negative representation of non-status workers is conveniently constructed to avoid policy changes and consequently sustains the irregular movement of migrants.

‘Nigeria is fighting Covid-419’: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of political protest in Nigerian coronavirus-related internet memes

This paper examines political protest in 40 purposively sampled internet memes circulated among Nigerian WhatsApp users during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to exploring the thematic preoccupation, ideology, and the representation of participants and processes in the memes. The data, which were subjected to qualitative analysis, are examined from a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach. The analysis reveals that the memes are used to protest corruption, perceived government deceit, insecurity, hunger, and inadequate health facilities and other social amenities. These are done in order to project and resist an anti-welfarist ideology and emphasise the negative representation of the government.

Discriminative non-negative representation based classifier for image recognition

During the past decade, representation based classification method has received considerable attention in the community of pattern recognition. The recently proposed non-negative representation based classifier achieved superb recognition results in diverse pattern classification tasks. Unfortunately, discriminative information of training data is not fully exploited in non-negative representation based classifier, which undermines its classification performance in practical applications. To address this problem, we introduce a decorrelation regularizer into the formulation of non-negative representation based classifier and propose a discriminative non-negative representation based classifier for pattern classification. The decorrelation regularizer is able to reduce the correlation of representation results of different classes, thus promoting the competition among them. Experimental results on benchmark datasets validate the efficacy of the proposed discriminative non-negative representation based classifier, and it can outperform some state-of-the-art deep learning based methods. The source code of our proposed discriminative non-negative representation based classifier is accessible at https://github.com/yinhefeng/DNRC .