FB1 Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaften
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This paper delves into Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) as powerful artefacts for challenging dominant narratives and promoting inclusive storytelling. The study is based on a literature review of the research discourse on IDNs, aiming to discern their potential to support and address counter-narratives. Triangulation and systematisation of the existing knowledge corpus, key themes, theoretical frameworks, and studies surrounding IDN and counternarrative were conducted, collecting primary definitions and identifying for each domain relevant clusters. Five original scientific works by as many scholars that constitute this special issue are explored and mapped against this backdrop and associated with IDN and counter-narrative clusters. This process highlights their alignment with the research discourse, leading to the identification of intersections between IDNs and counter-narratives from diverse perspectives. This exploration sheds light on how IDNs can serve as counter-hegemonic narratives, being spaces for alternative perspectives and identities that challenge dominant ideologies. Ultimately, the requisite preconditions for IDNs to function as counter-narratives are discussed.
Demonstratives (“this”/“that”) express a speaker-relative distance contrast and need to be substituted for each other systematically: depending on their relative position, what one speaker refers to by saying “this” another speaker has to refer to by saying “that.” This substitution aspect of demonstratives poses additional difficulties for learning demonstratives, because it requires recognizing that two speakers have to refer to the same thing with different words, and might be one reason for the reportedly protracted acquisition of demonstratives. In an online study conducted in German, it was investigated whether children in the estimated upper age range of demonstrative acquisition (5 to 7 years) understand demonstratives' substitution aspect with familiar (“dies”/“das”) and novel (“schmi”/“schmu”) demonstratives, and whether they understand novel words (“schmi”/“schmu”) when used non-demonstratively as labels (N = 73; between-subject). Children's accuracy was compared with adult performance (N = 74). The study shows that children between 5 and 7 years of age perform less accurately than adults in all conditions. While adults' performance was highly accurate in all conditions (between 75% and 92% correct), children performed below chance in both demonstrative conditions and above chance in the labeling condition. This suggests that children do not understand demonstratives in the presented setup. More detailed analyses of children's response patterns indicate that they instead treat words as mutually exclusive labels in any condition.
Affect control theory (ACT) is a sociological theory of meaning processing in social interactions. Meaning, according to ACT, derives from cultural institutions and situational affordances, having denotative (declarative) as well as connotative (affective) properties. Mathematical formalizations of ACT allow predictions of affective incongruency (in the terminology of ACT, deflection), which arises from conflicting institutional and situational meanings in a given interaction context. Although ACT is theoretically consistent, its propositions regarding cognitive and affective processing have rarely been tested. The present study fills this gap by investigating the neural processing of affective incongruency in linguistic descriptions of social interactions. Following a neurosociological paradigm, the study draws on neurocognitive evidence on the effects of words’ affective content on word processing as well as on a previous electroencephalography study that investigated processing of affective incongruency using event-related brain potentials. We hypothesized that affective incongruency is associated with activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain area known for conflict processing. To test this hypothesis, we replicated the electroencephalography study using functional magnetic resonance imaging: We visually presented sentences describing social interactions to 23 participants in a silent reading task while measuring differences in the hemodynamic response in two conditions of affective congruency. Results show expected increases in neural activity for affectively incongruent sentences in the left ACC, supporting the assumption that affective language content influences meaning-making at very early semantic processing stages. The results also add to the emerging neuroscientific evidence for ACT’s mathematical model of impression formation.
Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA)
(2022)
The current demographic change means that young psychotherapists and older patients will increasingly come into contact. Unique for this constellation is the intergenerational therapeutic relationship, which forms the basis of psychotherapy, but has not yet been the focus of empirical research. This qualitative study provides preliminary insights into how older patients (aged over 65) experience and perceive the therapeutic relationship with young psychotherapists (aged in their mid-20s to mid-30s). We conducted semi-structured interviews with twelve older patients (8 women, 4 men) and analysed their data using the grounded theory approach. We found a connection between the type of transference a participant demonstrated and their biographical as well as social experiences, desires, and fantasies. Overall, a tendency to seek harmony was observed among the participants, which was reflected in their behaviour towards young psychotherapists: (a) conflict avoidance, (b) (fantasised) therapy discontinuation, (c) adaption/subordination, and (d) solidarity, support, and protection. Our findings demonstrated that various intergenerational transference phenomena, including the roles in which young therapists are perceived, are associated with certain particularities and challenges, such as the topic of sexuality. It can be valuable for young psychotherapists to become aware of a potential role reversal that may result in older patients trying to support them.
Drawing on anthropological conceptions of pilgrimage, our ethnography of professional development at an Israeli Holocaust Memorial follows German teachers on journeys to Israel. Seeking transformative and transferable experiences to combat anti-Semitism in schools, teachers experienced the voyage as a secular pilgrimage rooted in Christian traditions of guilt, confession, and absolution. As teachers' emotional encounters in Israel simultaneously forged communitas and challenged official historical–pedagogical visions, their practices abroad elucidate prevalent Holocaust education discourses in contemporary Germany.
Emotion-specific vocabulary and its relation to emotion understanding in children and adolescents
(2024)
Among children and adolescents, emotion understanding relates to academic achievement and higher well-being. This study investigates the role of general and emotion-specific language skills in children’s and adolescents’ emotion understanding, building on previous research highlighting the significance of domain-specific language skills in conceptual development. We employ a novel inventory (CEVVT) to assess emotion-specific vocabulary. The study involved 10–11-year-old children (N = 29) and 16–17-year-old adolescents (N = 28), examining their emotion recognition and knowledge of emotion regulation strategies. Results highlight the ongoing development of emotion-specific vocabulary across these age groups. Emotion recognition correlated with general vocabulary in the younger group. In the older age group, emotion recognition was related to emotion-specific vocabulary size, but this effect only became apparent when controlling for the depth of emotion-specific vocabulary. Against expectation, there were no significant contributions of general or emotion-specific vocabulary to knowledge of emotion regulation strategies in either age group. These findings enhance our comprehension of the nuanced interplay between language and emotion across developmental stages.
Complements and Competitors
(2023)
The vast majority of research on the diffusion of innovations focuses on how one particular idea or technology spreads across a network of connected individuals, or a population more generally. Diffusive processes are typically considered either in isolation. We consider innovations themselves as nodes in a larger network, and look at how individual innovations can spread with or against one another in a larger community of potential adopters. Using a large publicly-available data set, custom-designed measurements, and network analysis methods, we present a temporal analysis of a set of technological innovations. Specifically, we examine how coding languages spread across users on GitHub, an online platform for collaborative coding. By looking at which languages co-appear in individual projects, we develop network based measurements of how frequently languages appear together in the same coding projects (functional cohesion), and how similar two languages are in terms of how often they co-appear with other languages in coding projects (functional equivalence). We also assess two types of diffusion, one form where users of one language become users of an additional language (complementary or 'piggybacking' diffusion), and another where users of one language abandon one language for another (competitive or 'cannibalistic' diffusion). Using MR-QAP Regression Techniques, we find strong evidence that functional cohesion positively predicts complementary diffusion. We also find some evidence that functional equivalence predicts competitive diffusion. More broadly, we find support for the idea that the networks of functional relationships between innovations is important for understanding diffusive processes.
Introduction: As a result of the large-scale arrivals of refugees and migrants, Germany is facing the challenge of providing inclusive education pathways not at least for a successful integration into the labor market. In our research project laeneAs (Ländliche Bildugnsumwelten junger Geflüchteter in der beruflichen Ausbildung/The Rural Educational Environments of Young Refugees in Vocational Training), we focus on educational barriers and good practices within the vocational education and training system (VET) for refugees in rural counties. In particular, racism and discrimination are significant barriers to refugee participation in society and education. Our contribution addresses the following research question: How is educational inclusion discussed and defined in and through real-world labs among stakeholders in four rural districts: social workers, educators, policymakers, administration, and young refugees?
Methods: We initiated real-world labs as a space for collaborative research, reflection, and development to promote inclusive pathways for young refugees in vocational education and training in four research sites. We used futures labs as a method to identify key challenges and develop action plans as an activating method with stakeholders and refugee trainees. Our data consisted of audio recordings of group discussions in the real-world future labs, which were analyzed using deductive content analysis.
Results: The analysis identified the following areas as important barriers to education and for practice transformation: (1) infrastructural and cultural barriers; (2) day-to-day problems in vocational schools and companies (3) restrictive immigration policies and regulations.
Discussion: Educational barriers are imbedded in a contradictory immigration regime with reciprocal effects so that refugee trainees have difficulties in completing their education and further their social inclusion. On the other side of this contradictory immigration regime, social work and social networks provide fundamental support in obtaining a vocational qualification.
In this paper, we want to present research on children’s perspectives in the context of participation. We emphasize that the survey of children's perspectives is a form of participation. We understand participation based on children’s rights. We refer to the Lundy model ([2007]. “‘Voice’ Is Not Enough: Conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.” British Educational Research Journal 33 (6): 927–942. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920701657033), which emphasizes that it is not enough to simply ask children to speak their minds. Rather, they also need the experience that their views have an influence. In the discourse on quality in ECEC, children's perspectives became only recently the focus of extended research. In evaluation instruments, at least in Germany, the inclusion of children’s perspectives is rare. In the study presented here, these two aspects are brought together using the example of the evaluation instrument QuaSi. We describe how children's perspectives are taken into account in the evaluation and feedback process in contrast to everyday life in ECEC centres. It becomes clear that the collection of children's perspectives and their feedback to the pedagogues in the centre does not automatically lead to their views influencing the quality of the centre.
Charlemagne’s Legacy
(2023)
We investigate between- and within-country consensus about affective meanings of social identities along the evaluation, potency, and activity dimensions from the affect control theory research tradition. Ratings for 387 (194 male and 193 female) identities were collected from two samples representative of the French (N = 700) and German (N = 700) populations for age, gender, and region. Guided by two preregistered hypotheses based on previous cross-cultural research, our analysis points to considerable cultural consensus between French and Germans who seem to share a common “Carolingian” affective culture; yet some culture-specific patterns concerning the evaluation dimension and evaluation-potency interactions were found to be statistically significant. We interpret these results in terms of known cross-cultural features such as power distance and conceptions of power.
Understanding how individual or group behaviour are influenced by the presence of others is something both social psychology and agent-based social simulation are concerned with. However, there is only limited overlap between these two research communities, which becomes clear when terms such as “variable”, “prediction”, or “model” come into play, and we build on their different meanings. This situation challenges us when working together, since it complicates the uptake of relevant work from each community and thus hampers the potential impact that we could have when joining forces.
Approximately four percent of the world’s population suffers from anxiety disorders. This makes anxiety disorders one of the most common mental illnesses and a significant global health concern. As social media is a primary source of health information and communication, this study aims at investigating how the hashtag #anxiety is used on Twitter and Instagram. The hashtag #anxiety was chosen because it is commonly used by the social media community to post or tweet about anxiety disorders, such as social anxiety, thus providing broad access to the data. We followed a quantitative approach and gathered open data from December 24th, 2019 to January 1st, 2020. Furthermore, we used a qualitative content analysis to detect topics and patterns within the data. Coding focused on identifying goals, motivations, and feelings concerning anxiety (disorders) and information sharing. Findings show that content and appearance of posts are strongly shaped by characteristics of the platforms. Additionally, the results unveil that both platforms serve as mediua for sharing information regarding mental health matters, such as personal experiences, challenges, and coping strategies, thereby cultivating a sense of community and support among users dealing with comparable issues. Twitter predominantly functions for real-time updates, in-situ interactions, and emergency communication, while Instagram's visual nature appears to offer a venue for creative expression through images and captions, illuminating the emotional and personal narratives of mental health journeys.
The current understanding of cognitive development rests on the premise that infants can individuate objects early on. However, the so-called object-first account faces severe difficulties explaining extant empirical findings in object individuation tasks while alternative, more parsimonious explanations are available. In this paper, we assume that children start as feature-thinkers without being able to individuate objects and show how this ability can be learned by thinkers who do not already implicitly possess the notion of an object. Based on Tugendhat's ideas on the relation between singular terms and object reference, we argue that spatial indexicals comprise the fundamental means of object individuation and describe how feature thinkers might acquire the complex substitutional system of spatial indexicals. In closing, two accounts of object cognition that do not rely on symbolic capacities, namely Pylyshyn's FINST indexes and Burge's perceptual objectivity, are critically discussed.
Spiking Versus Speculation? Perceived Prevalence, Probability, and Fear of Drink and Needle Spiking
(2023)
Contrasting widespread speculation in the media and public debate about spiking (administration of a substance to a person without their knowledge/consent), empirical evidence on the subject is lacking. This study aimed to investigate the assumed prevalence, perceived likelihood, and fear of drink-versus needle-spiking, and associated mental strain. Data from a cross-sectional online-survey (November 2022 – January 2023) of 1916 adults connected to Berlin’s nightlife-scene were analyzed. Almost a quarter reported having experienced drink-spiking, but only a small fraction sought medical or police attention; about 1% suspected needle-spiking. Presumptive victims of drink-spiking rated the likelihood and fear of spiking significantly higher and exhibited more symptoms of depression and anxiety. Considering toxicological and police findings, the reported prevalence and perceived likelihood of spiking seem to be highly overestimated. This, in conjunction with associated mental strain, highlights the importance of adequately addressing the issue of spiking through psychoeducation, prevention, and interprofessional investigation.
Theoretical and Empirical Modeling of Identity and Sentiments in Collaborative Groups (THEMIS.COG) was an interdisciplinary research collaboration of computer scientists and social scientists from the University of Waterloo (Canada), Potsdam University of Applied Sciences (Germany), and Dartmouth College (USA). This white paper summarizes the results of our research at the end of the grant term. Funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform’s Digging Into Data initiative, the project aimed at theoretical and empirical modeling of identity and sentiments in collaborative groups. Understanding the social forces behind self-organized collaboration is important because technological and social innovations are increasingly generated through informal, distributed processes of collaboration, rather than in formal organizational hierarchies or through market forces. Our work used a data-driven approach to explore the social psychological mechanisms that motivate such collaborations and determine their success or failure. We focused on the example of GitHub, the world’s current largest digital platform for open, collaborative software development. In contrast to most, purely inductive contemporary approaches leveraging computational techniques for social science, THEMIS.COG followed a deductive, theory-driven approach. We capitalized on affect control theory, a mathematically formalized theory of symbolic interaction originated by sociologist David R. Heise and further advanced in previous work by some of the THEMIS.COG collaborators, among others. Affect control theory states that people control their social behaviours by intuitively attempting to verify culturally shared feelings about identities, social roles, and behaviour settings. From this principle, implemented in computational simulation models, precise predictions about group dynamics can be derived. It was the goal of THEMIS.COG to adapt and apply this approach to study the GitHub collaboration ecosystem through a symbolic interactionist lens. The project contributed substantially to the novel endeavor of theory development in social science based on large amounts of naturally occurring digital data.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most commonly diagnosed anxiety disorders and a health concern that has a significant impact on the affected individuals’ quality of life. Although there is a need to develop methods and tools to support those affected by SAD, it is especially challenging to conduct participatory design with this psychologically vulnerable group of people. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a participatory format built on a toolkit, a cultural probe and an online prototyping workshop to gain insights into the challenges and needs experienced in the everyday lives of those affected by severe social anxiety. We provide the theoretical framework for designing a participatory format for this vulnerable group, introduce and discuss our methodological approach, and present the lessons learned from implementing and evaluating the format in two workshop sessions with a total of 15 participants.
We argue that objectivity is acquired by learning to refer to particular situations, that is, by developing episodicity. This contrasts with the widespread idea that genericity is crucial in developing humans’ ability to conceive of an objective world. According to the collective intentionality account, objectivity is acquired by contrasting one’s particular perspective in the “here and now” with a generic group perspective on how things are generally. However, this line of argument rests on confusing two independent notions of genericity: social and worldly genericity. Holding these two notions apart shows that there is no coherent developmental route from episodicity to objectivity via genericity. In effect, the collective intentionality account presupposes objectivity. Alternatively, episodicity may develop by enculturation into the common practice of spatial-indexical use. This ability establishes an initial, socially shared spatiotemporal reference system comprising the basis for objectivity.
The present study investigated whether 7-month-old infants attribute directionality to an object after having observed it engage in agentive behavior and whether they maintain this attribution even when the agent is presented statically. Infants were familiarized with an object displaying either agentive behavioral cues (self-propelled, context-sensitive movement) or non-agentive motion (the same movement pattern caused by external factors). In a subsequent spatial-cueing procedure, the agent was displayed statically at the center of the screen. Gaze latencies were assessed for targets appearing at a location congruent or incongruent with the position of the agent’s formerly leading end. Only infants that had observed the object move in an agentive manner showed shorter gaze latencies for congruent compared to incongruent targets, suggesting facilitation of attention toward a location congruent with the agent’s prior action direction. Results provide evidence that infants attribute directionality to novel agents based on behavioral agency cues, that this directional representation is maintained even when the agent is stationary, and that it guides infants’ covert attention.