Size doesn't matter: emotional content does not determine the size of objects in children's drawings

Abstract

In Experiment 1 we examined whether children spontaneously alter the size of objects in their drawings of emotionally-laden events. To do this, we evaluated children's drawings of their own personal, past experiences. Children were asked to draw a picture of an event that had made them happy and an event that had made them sad. We found no differences in the size of object that children drew in their positive and negative emotional events. In Experiment 2, we asked adults with and without clinical training to discriminate children's drawings of happy events from their drawings of sad events. There was no difference in the accuracy of raters as a function of clinical expertise. Moreover, performance for both groups was at chance when we removed drawings with specific emotional indicators from the set (e.g. smiles or tears). We conclude that the emotional interpretation of drawings on the basis of the size of objects in that drawing is fraught with difficulty. We question the projective use of drawings in forensic and clinical practice.     

Non-ethnic Mobilisation in Deeply Divided Societies,the Case of the Sarajevo Protests

How do groups mobilise around non-ethnic issues in deeply divided societies and cities? This article seeks to answer this question by offering a close reading of one particular exemplary episode in the recent history of post-conflict Bosnia &; Herzegovina: the 2008 Sarajevo protests. Sarajevans took to the streets to demand more security in the wake of the murder of a young boy on a tram. The article analyses the framings used by the mobilising social movements in depth, exploring in detail the connections with the local cultural environment, as well as the demobilising authorities' counter-frames.     

The Language of the Nation: The Rise of Arabic among Jews and Christians (1900–1950)

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which in the period following the First World War, non-Muslim communities participated in the establishment of Modern Standard Arabic as the foremost symbol of the new states that replaced the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. A comparison of the sociolinguistic trajectories of Syriac Christians in North Iraq, Jews in Baghdad and Catholic Christians in Palestine suggests that Arabic’s function of undergirding the ‘Arab states’ thrived on earlier interpretations of Arabic as the language of interregional and interdenominational contacts and as the language of cultural, societal and political modernization rather than on exclusivist nationalist, ethnic or linguistic identifications. Put differently, the increased use of Arabic by those who also had other languages at their disposal resulted from the combination of pragmatism with commitment to societal modernization and inclusive nationalism. The linguistic trajectories of these three groups are analysed against the background of a rereading of George Antonius’ The Arab Awakening (1938) as a contemporary source for the rise of Arab nationalism among non-Muslim minorities.     

Regulation of genetic and other health information in a comparative perspective

In the present article, the authors provide a general overview of the academic and legal debate on the regulation of access to and use of genetic information by non-medical actors. Their aim is to give some insight in the academic views on the need to introduce specific genetics legislation and on the balance that might be struck between the various interests concerned. Furthermore, by analyzing relevant legislation and policy measures in the US and in Europe, they identify the issues that are deemed relevant in considering and, eventually, introducing regulative measures with respect to genetic information.     

Nationalist Politics at the Crossroads: The Basque Nationalist Party and the Challenge of Sovereignty (1998–2014)

In the past two decades the Basque Nationalist Party's political strategy has exemplified its historical oscillation between, on the one hand, a more radical claim to Basque sovereignty supported mostly by nationalist forces and, on the other, a comparatively more moderate Realpolitik aimed at achieving higher degrees of regional autonomy and cross-party consensus as a means of more gradual Basque nation-building. In contrast to the mainstream interpretation forwarded by the media and other political parties, the main difference between the relatively more radical or moderate strategies of the PNV is not a higher or lower ideological profile of the claim for Basque sovereignty but a different strategic decision concerning the problem of how to bring together the struggle for sovereignty and the reality of Basque pluralism.