244 research outputs found

    Animate Being: Extending a Practice of the Image to New Mediums via Speculative Game Design

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    This post-disciplinary practice as research thesis examines the potential of Carl Jung's therapeutic method of active imagination as a strategy for engaging with an increasingly complex and interconnected technological reality. Embracing a non-clinical, practice-driven approach, I harness James Hillman’s notion of the image and the imaginal to investigate the interdisciplinary capacity and ethical dimensions of an expansive mode of image-work. My approach to practice theoretically and practically intertwines analytical psychology, feminist worlding and design speculation. Building upon Susan Rowland’s work, I study image-work as an ecological alchemical craft that seeks to matter the immaterial. Through the cyclic iterative design of a video game, I mobilise and respond to image-work as a mode of myth-making that may facilitate dialogue between human and non-human intelligences. Departing from the essentialism of the hero's journey, I adopt Le Guin's Carrier Bag (1986/2019) as a feminist video game form and by utilising the framework of a video game (Bogost, 2007; Flannigan, 2013), the alchemical processes of image-work are transformed into novel interactive game mechanics. The game I design is both a vessel and a portal to an imaginal ecological realm, an open-world, procedurally generated ‘living world’ sandbox exploration game. This game integrates real-time, real-world data streams to invite the non-human to enter into play as player two, facilitating experimentation with possible new forms of cross-species dialogue, collaboration, and healing

    Fictional Practices of Spirituality I: Interactive Media

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    "Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations

    COVID-19 Booster Vaccine Acceptance in Ethnic Minority Individuals in the United Kingdom: a mixed-methods study using Protection Motivation Theory

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    Background: Uptake of the COVID-19 booster vaccine among ethnic minority individuals has been lower than in the general population. However, there is little research examining the psychosocial factors that contribute to COVID-19 booster vaccine hesitancy in this population.Aim: Our study aimed to determine which factors predicted COVID-19 vaccination intention in minority ethnic individuals in Middlesbrough, using Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) and COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, in addition to demographic variables.Method: We used a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative data were collected using an online survey. Qualitative data were collected using semi-structured interviews. 64 minority ethnic individuals (33 females, 31 males; mage = 31.06, SD = 8.36) completed the survey assessing PMT constructs, COVID-19conspiracy beliefs and demographic factors. 42.2% had received the booster vaccine, 57.6% had not. 16 survey respondents were interviewed online to gain further insight into factors affecting booster vaccineacceptance.Results: Multiple regression analysis showed that perceived susceptibility to COVID-19 was a significant predictor of booster vaccination intention, with higher perceived susceptibility being associated with higher intention to get the booster. Additionally, COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs significantly predictedintention to get the booster vaccine, with higher conspiracy beliefs being associated with lower intention to get the booster dose. Thematic analysis of the interview data showed that barriers to COVID-19 booster vaccination included time constraints and a perceived lack of practical support in the event ofexperiencing side effects. Furthermore, there was a lack of confidence in the vaccine, with individuals seeing it as lacking sufficient research. Participants also spoke of medical mistrust due to historical events involving medical experimentation on minority ethnic individuals.Conclusion: PMT and conspiracy beliefs predict COVID-19 booster vaccination in minority ethnic individuals. To help increase vaccine uptake, community leaders need to be involved in addressing people’s concerns, misassumptions, and lack of confidence in COVID-19 vaccination

    Analytics and Intuition in the Process of Selecting Talent

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    In management, decisions are expected to be based on rational analytics rather than intuition. But intuition, as a human evolutionary achievement, offers wisdom that, despite all the advances in rational analytics and AI, should be used constructively when recruiting and winning personnel. Integrating these inner experiential competencies with rational-analytical procedures leads to smart recruiting decisions

    An Analysis of a Public Health Media Campaign in Switzerland

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    This multidisciplinary, grounded theory study analyses public health media communication for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) prevention in Switzerland. Health communication researchers measure the effects of media campaigns on populations to improve prevention. However, such effects may evade measurement due to complex interactions between audiences, media channels and ecology, message content, and targeting strategies. Competing theories explain media effects on health behaviours but there is a dearth of research examining upstream planning and stakeholder perceptions of media campaigns. In effect, interactions between communities, health officials, practitioners, and communication/media stakeholders are politically sensitive, and inaccessible to researchers. Whereas national HIV and STI prevalence was relatively low, the Swiss government aimed to raise general public awareness about risks and prevention. LOVE LIFE 2019 was a multimedia public health campaign centred on a video series promoting male condom use as well as a Safer Sex Check questionnaire providing tailored recommendations. This case study utilises innovative triangulation of media analysis methods including content analysis; digital ecosystem analysis; Goffmann’s theatrical frame and gender display; grammar of visual design and social semiotics; intervention theoretical indicators; and social marketing and extended social marketing, to retroactively understand encoded values and underlying mechanics of the media strategy. Concurrently, international and national authorities and practitioners with diverse stakeholder viewpoints were interviewed regarding media campaign planning in general and LOVE LIFE 2019 specifically. As a complement to grounded theory, thematic analysis elucidated interview and media themes, leading to insights into stakeholder environments and media effects. Grounded theory methodology resulted in a substantive theory comprising four testable propositions to guide further research, identifying relationships between culture, ideology, and values, with implications for public health media communication. Based on the substantive theory, practical recommendations were formulated to address contextual issues: (a) a content strategy for HIV and STI prevention targeting the general public; (b) HIV and STI federal policies; (c) inclusive design processes for human-centered planning; and (d) ethical considerations for public health utilisation of digital media

    Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods: How to Protect the Global Civic Body from Disinformation and Misinformation

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    This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future

    Auto/fictioning (the) contemporary (in) human relations and psychotherapeutic processes

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    This writing inquiry presents an autofiction through which contemporary relationality and relationally-oriented psychotherapy are examined. Fictioning is used as a method that allows experience to be worked through in an imaginary, virtual or speculative zone, in which new thought is possible, affecting through its relation though not directly acting upon, material reality. Autofiction as a form of creative expression, enables articulation of an oscillating metamodern ‘structure of feeling’, which lends complexity to our understanding of contemporary intersubjectivity, becoming a valuable ontological and epistemological positioning for those concerned with relationality. The author recognises the interplay of creative form and relational action that generates new thought, understanding and expression, thus residing at the core of the transformation that psychotherapy reaches-longingly toward. The thesis is moving ever closer to an artful, collaborative, creative-relational psychotherapy, that is future-oriented, sustainable and makes room for the more than human

    Frontiers in psychodynamic neuroscience

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    he term psychodynamics was introduced in 1874 by Ernst von Brücke, the renowned German physiologist and Freud’s research supervisor at the University of Vienna. Together with Helmholtz and others, Brücke proposed that all living organisms are energy systems, regulated by the same thermodynamic laws. Since Freud was a student of Brücke and a deep admirer of Helmholtz, he adopted this view, thus laying the foundations for his metapsychology. The discovery of the Default Network and the birth of Neuropsychoanalysis, twenty years ago, facilitated a deep return to this classical conception of the brain as an energy system, and therefore a return to Freud's early ambition to establish psychology as natural science. Our current investigations of neural networks and applications of the Free Energy Principle are equally ‘psychodynamic’ in Brücke’s original sense of the term. Some branches of contemporary neuroscience still eschew subjective data and therefore exclude the brain’s most remarkable property – its selfhood – from the field, and many neuroscientists remain skeptical about psychoanalytic methods, theories, and concepts. Likewise, some psychoanalysts continue to reject any consideration of the structure and functions of the brain from their conceptualization of the mind in health and disease. Both cases seem to perpetuate a Cartesian attitude in which the mind is linked to the brain in some equivocal relationship and an attitude that detaches the brain from the body -- rather than considering it an integral part of the complex and dynamic living organism as a whole. Evidence from psychodynamic neuroscience suggests that Freudian constructs can now be realized neurobiologically. For example, Freud’s notion of primary and secondary processes is consistent with the hierarchical organization of self-organized cortical and subcortical systems, and his description of the ego is consistent with the functions of the Default Network and its reciprocal exchanges with subordinate brain systems. Moreover, thanks to new methods of measuring brain entropy, we can now operationalize the primary and secondary processes and therefore test predictions arising from these Freudian constructs. All of this makes it possible to deepen the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, in ways and to a degree that was unimaginable in Freud's time, and even compared to twenty years ago. Many psychoanalytical hypotheses are now well integrated with contemporary neuroscience. Other Freudian and post-Freudian hypotheses about the structure and function of the mind seem ripe for the detailed and sophisticated development that modern psychodynamic neuroscience can offer. This Research Topic aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the latest advances in psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Potential authors are invited to submit papers (original research, case reports, review articles, commentaries) that deploy, review, compare or develop the methods and theories of psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Potential authors include researchers, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists

    Vygotsky's theory as a tool of imaginationdevelopment in primary school

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    The cognitive process of imagination is a fundamental faculty developed in childhood. This research extracts a testable four-stage model of development from the conceptual writings of Lev Vygotsky. Literature is given that provides an overview of the field of imagination, within which a conceptual account of Vygotsky's theory of the imagination is seated. From this discussion, a Vygotskian four-stage model of the imagination is extracted. The study, conducted as a case study, employed a robust research design, incorporating qualitative analysis methods providing a nuanced understanding of the creative evolution among participants and shedding light on the intricate processes of artistic development during early education. Notably, the research introduces a novel approach to the analysis of projective drawing, showing a significant achievement within the thesis. To test the veracity of this four-stage account, three classes ofYear 5 10-year-old primary school students were given creative tasks to produce materials from which their imaginative expression could be ascertained. Year 5 studentswere chosen as it was expected they would demonstrate a range of imaginative productsacross all four stages, given they were at an ongoing developmental age. Two imaginative tasks were carried out: making an unreal animal drawing and a companion piece of a written fairy tale. Results demonstrated that the four-stage model of imagination proved to be an apt tool to categorise the stage of development shown in an imaginative product. Valuable insights were also gained that may inform the development of effective teaching methodologies to support the imaginative development of primary school children. Results suggested that exposure to diverse, imaginative activities and creative experiences significantly enhances the expression and, perhaps more importantly, the development of a child's imagination. The teacher and parents' roles in involving children in such experiences are highlighted. It is hoped these findings may contribute to the further development of Vygotsky's theory of the imagination and provide methodological recommendations for practical classroom applications.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Education, 202
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