Children's incipient ability to distinguish mistakes from lies: An Italian investigation

We report a study in which Italian children aged 3 to 5 years were given situations requiring a distinction between lies and honest mistakes. As in previous research, the children displayed an incipient grasp of the lie-mistake distinction with regard to situations involving falsehoods about edibility of a substance that had been contaminated. However, children of all ages often regarded instances of both lies and mistakes as negative rather than restricting their judgements of naughtiness to the lying alone. The results are discussed in terms of the characteristics of Italian language and culture such as the connotations of words used to indicate mistakes'' and references to anger in labelling a variety of emotional events.

Conceptualising the virtual and the posthuman

This article aims to explore the relations between technology and the subject. With new media intensifying the provisionality of discursive structures and in turn embodied experiences, questions pertaining to virtuality have become vital, particularly since Western society's increasing reliance on technologies now permeates our everyday practices. While many theorists often resort to a reification of the subject when conceptualising the posthuman condition, this analysis will recover the notion of embodiment in order to avoid such technological determinism. Tracing this complexity in contemporary texts can be achieved through various means. Here, the focus will remain on how narrative frameworks can create new possibilities for understanding and interpreting shifting subjectivities in the digital age. To explore this, I shall provide an analysis of a contemporary film, Being John Malkovich, which has been chosen due to its unexpected success at the box office, indicating how finely attuned the film is to contemporary concerns.

The socio-religious beliefs and nature of the contemporary Vampire Subculture

The contemporary Vampire Subculture can be defined as a multi-faceted, socio-religious movement with its own distinct collective community and network of participants who share a similar belief system and customary lifestyle that reflect their concept of the vampire. The Vampire Subculture consists of individuals who profess to be 'real vampires', vampire communities of like-minded persons, 'blood-donors' who willingly allow vampires to partake of them, occult-based and mystical-orientated groups that appeal to their spirituality, the blood fetishists, and the live-action vampire role-players. In response, a Christian counter-movement of self-proclaimed 'vampire-slayers' has emerged that actively opposes the vampire subculture and its beliefs and practices. The socio-religious nature of the Vampire Subculture can be best described as a Segmented, Polycentric and Integrated Network of participants.

A Hermeneutic Case Reconstruction of a published first-person narrative

Hermeneutic Case Reconstruction (Rosenthal, 1993) is a systematic method of analysing biographical self-presentations from an interpretivist perspective. The method consists of five major analytic steps. The first is an analysis of the biographical data that can stand independently of the narrator’s perspective. ‘Objective’ data is extracted from the text or interview transcript and ordered chronologically. Secondly, a thematic field analysis is undertaken in which the data is divided into separate units according to the type of text used, whilst keeping the sequence of these texts units intact. In this step, hypotheses are developed regarding the potential significance of the style and sequence of the events presented. The product of this second step is a reconstruction of the life story. A reconstruction of the life history then follows as the third step. The purpose of this step is to generate hypotheses about the meanings that biographical experiences might have had for the narrator at the time they occurred, given the sociocultural context in which they occurred. In the fourth step, microanalysis of individual text segments is undertaken, in which all hypotheses generated in the earlier steps are tested against the text for support or refutation. The final step consists of a contrastive comparison of the life history and life story. The life story and life history are compared to determine, for example, which aspects of the narrator’s experience have been emphasised or minimised. Through this comparison, the selective process is highlighted. This is referred to as the case structure. This paper describes an application of this method to a published first-person narrative of a woman’s experiences of sustaining a brain injury in a motor vehicle accident.