Magical attachment: Children in magical relations with hospital clowns

The aim of the present study was to achieve a theoretical understanding of several different-age children's experiences of magic relations with hospital clowns in the context of medical care, and to do so using psychological theory and a child perspective. The method used was qualitative and focused on nine children. The results showed that age was important to consider in better understanding how the children experienced the relation with the hospital clowns, how they described the magical aspects of the encounter and how they viewed the importance of clown encounters to their own well-being. The present theoretical interpretation characterized the encounter with hospital clowns as a magical safe area, an intermediate area between fantasy and reality. The discussion presented a line of reasoning concerning a magical attachment between the child and the hospital clowns, stating that this attachment: a) comprised a temporary relation; b) gave anonymity; c) entailed reversed roles; and d) created an emotional experience of boundary-transcending opportunities

Negative emotions set in motion : the continued relevance of #GamerGate

This chapter aims at making sense of the #GamerGate (#GG) online harassment campaign that was particularly active in 2014–2015 but to this day continues to produce hateful speech against certain ideologies and minorities in gaming culture. The campaign was especially successful at building online visibility through harassment, and the affective resonances of the issues it raised have since translated into general online campaigning how-to’s, financial earnings, and even political action outside of the gaming sphere. Although the primary breeding ground for this movement was 4chan (and later, 8chan), it only reached public awareness and visibility – hence, effectiveness – through Twitter and, to a lesser extent, through YouTube. In order to understand the emotional charge and political relevance of this campaign, we rely on both quantitative and qualitative activity analyses of the Twitter users that use the hashtag #GamerGate between 2014 and 2019. In addition to analyzing who were the most active tweeters and what kind of resonance their tweets elicited, we looked into the emotional qualities of their communication. The communication strategies of #GG tweeters took advantage of the language and cultural references of the target demographic to drive a set of topics into public discourse and, further, to political activism. This discourse utilized a combination of affective modes, based mainly on resentment and schadenfreude, that we see echoing in many places on the internet. In the end, we argue that while #GG may have been only one instance of a campaign with harassment elements, the sentiments it cultivated and amplified as well as its operational logics have since been successfully employed in many similar online movements, including the current political campaigning associated with the so-called alt-right.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The views of children and their families on being in hospital

This study aimed to elicit the separate views of children, young people and carers after a period in hospital as an inpatient. Questionnaires were administered to 130 children and their families discharged after a period as hospital inpatients in January 2003. Anonymized data were returned from 50 families. Data analysis indicated that there were differences in the way that the three groups perceived the period of admission. Although parental sleeping and other social arrangements were subject to some critical review, the nursing care experienced by families was highly rated. Although arrangements for discharge were deemed satisfactory, 38% of carers had to wait for medicines to arrive on the ward before they could go home. Only six of the young people felt their ward catered for their age group and five indicated poor levels of privacy. None of the young people indicated that they had used the equipped teenagers’ room. Attempts to include the voice of the younger child in this study proved unsatisfactory as parents elected to act as proxies in completing the child-specific questionnaires. Child healthcare professionals attempting to involve all service users in determining optimum levels of care need to consider fully the methods of data collection and their applicability for differing age groups of children. Dependence on adult carers to reflect accurately the voice of the child is not fully satisfactory