Cognition and the development of fear

It is significant that most sources of childhood and later fears identified by various investigators can be broadly categorized in terms of a general tendency to fear the very strange, especially when it is closely associated with the familiar, and that a key factor influencing whether or not an object or situation will arouse fear is the amount of control which is felt in its relation. The prospect of pain, for instance, which according to G. Stanley Hall' "puts to life the question of its very survival or extinction, complete or partial", was reported by C.W. Valentine to have produced surprisingly little fear in the children he tested as long as if was roused in circumstances under the child's own control, in an expected form, and in a familiar situation. It is, of course, the type of control supplied by our knowledge and expectations about our surroundings (Sartre's "hodological map" or the mental construction of reality created in the course of an individual's numerous experiences with his milieu which is at the base of Piaget's assimilation- accommodation model of the cognitive system) which is challenged or removed when we are faced with the very strange or the uncanny. For the human infant, as with many animals, strangeness elicits alarm: sudden noise, loss of support, jerky movements, quick changes of luminescence, and objects that rapidly expand or advance will cause an infant to show signs of distress. But what constitutes "strangeness" and the methods of coping with it will also change with the child's developing awareness and understanding of its environment.peer-reviewe

Video violence : cognitive and cultural implications

There is nothing unprecedented about the peak of popularity which is currently being enjoyed by horrific stories and films depicting violent situations. Given the fact that there is a tradition of this type of fiction, however, there are a number of significant changes in just what is today taken to constitute the horrific and shocking, as well as in the manners in which this subject is handled. In this essay I propose to place the phenomenon of contemporary horrific fiction within the context of a wider cultural debate. This will involve the alignment of some of this fiction's underlying assumptions and concerns with some of the theories, beliefs and anxieties which have dominated our century's attempts to understand itself, and with some of the images which contemporary society has found fit to express its conception of itself and of its habitat. The arguments developed here, therefore, build on the understanding that our perceptions of the environment both determine and are expressed in the myths of our times.peer-reviewe

Growing up between cultures : linguistic and cultural identity among Maltese youth and their ethnic counterparts in Australia

The paper explores how young people’s cultural identities are being increasingly redefined in complex linguistic and performative relation to transcultural experiences. It first considers the situation of young people of Maltese origin whose parents settled in Australia after the Second World War, and critiques the suggestion that these youths ’ educational performance and access to professional level employment may have been negatively affected by their alleged loss of ‘mother tongue’, ethnic identity and cultural heritage. The paper challenges this perception by outlining the complex ways in which young people growing up in Malta itself (the ‘home’ or ‘mother’ country) perceive, construct and perform their linguistic and cultural identities. It argues that young Maltese people’s performative and linguistic constructions of their cultural identities provide a striking example of ‘glocal’ hybridity, and that, irrespective of whether they choose to claim Maltese or English or a combination of the two as the primary marker of their cultural identity, this hybridity is experienced as a positive performance and expression of selfhood.peer-reviewe

'Not suitable for children' : young Maltese children's perceptions of adulthood and adult-rated TV programmes

This paper joins the educational debate on the role of the media in the lives and socialisation of young people by considering how young children' s experiences of watching television form an integral part of their emerging sense of identity. The focus is on how children talk about and perceive 'adult-rated' material on television, and how this relates to their understanding of how 'adulthood' is distinguished from 'childhood. ' It contends that younger children' s understanding of the 'adult' is often pieced together from disjointed and commodified fragments, and that this fragmentation also informs children's performative attempts to distance themselves from the 'childish' in order to build their own 'adult' subjectivities. The evidence is drawn mainly from a series of thirty focus-group interviews with 164 children aged between five and ten, and coming from different socio-economic backgrounds in the Mediterranean island state of Malta. The interviews were conducted in 1998 and 1999, and formed part of a larger project which also included a comparable number of interviews with older children (aged 11 to 14) as well as with parents and teachers.peer-reviewe

Compulsive consumption and commercial media : changing attitudes to spending and saving among Maltese youth

This paper explores changing patterns in young Maltese people’s attitudes to spending and saving, and how they see their lives and opportunities as being different from those of their parents’ generation. The paper suggests that many of these perceptions have been inflected by the increasingly global and commercialised orientations of the media environments inhabited by today’s youth. It is because these influences are so often unexamined or miscinstructed that more systematic and widespread programmes of critical media education are called for.peer-reviewe

Cultural forces in journalism: The impact of cultural values on Maori journalists' professional views

Social system-level analyses of journalism have tended to focus on political and economic influences, at the expense of other factors, such as the role that culture and cultural values play in shaping journalists' professional views and practices. This paper identifies cultural values as a particularly fruitful area for providing a more nuanced analysis of journalism culture. It examines this issue in the context of in-depth interviews with 20 M?ori journalists from Aotearoa New Zealand. The study finds that Indigenous journalism in that country is strongly influenced by M?ori cultural values, such as showing respect to others, following cultural protocols, and making use of culturally-specific language. Cultural limitations are also identified in the form of the social structures of M?ori society, and journalists' strategies in working around these are discussed. The paper highlights the implications a renewed focus on cultural values can have for the study of journalism culture more broadly