The Impact of Thought Speed and Variability on Psychological State and Threat Perception: Further Exploration of the Theory of Mental Motion

Thought speed and variability are purportedly common features of specific psychological states, such as mania and anxiety. The present study explored the independent and combinational influence of these variables upon condition-specific symptoms and affective state, as proposed by Pronin and Jacobs’ (Perspect Psychol Sci, 3:461–485, 2008) theory of mental motion. A general population sample was recruited online (N = 263). Participants completed a thought speed and variability manipulation task, inducing a combination of fast/slow and varied/repetitive thought. Change in mania and anxiety symptoms was assessed through direct self-reported symptom levels and indirect, processing bias assessment (threat interpretation). Results indicated that fast and varied thought independently increased self-reported mania symptoms. Affect was significantly less positive and more negative during slow thought. No change in anxiety symptoms or threat interpretation was found between manipulation conditions. No evidence for the proposed combinational influence of speed and variability was found. Implications and avenues for therapeutic intervention are discussed.

For the Good of the Game(?): The Legacy of the Football Trust, the Football Pools & the Dangerous Seduction of Political Promise

During the late twentieth century, the United Kingdom’s football infrastructure and spectatorship underwent transformation as successive stadia disasters heightened political and public scrutiny of the game and prompted industry change. Central to this process was the government’s formation of an independent charitable organization to oversee subsequent policy implementation and grant-aid provision to clubs for safety, crowd, and spectator requirements. This entity, which began in 1975 focusing on ground improvement, developed into the Football Trust. The Trust was funded directly by the football pools companies who ran popular low-stakes football betting enterprises. Working in association with the Pools Promoters Association (PPA), and demonstrating their social responsibility towards the game’s constituents, the pools resourced a wide array of Trust activities. Yet irrespective of government mandate, the PPA and Trust were continually confronted by political and economic obstacles that threatened the effectiveness of their arrangements. In this paper the history of the Football Trust is investigated, along with its partnership with the PPA, and its relationship with the government within the context of broader political shifts, stadia catastrophes, official inquiries, and commercial threats. It is contended that while the Trust/PPA partnership had a respectable legacy, their history afforded little protection against adverse contemporary conditions.

Prospects and Problems for Religious Education in England, 1967-1970: Curriculum Reform in Political Context

This article provides an historical case study of an abortive attempt to revise policy and legislation relating to Religious Education (RE) in English schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing upon published sources, including parliamentary debates, as well as previously unutilised national archival sources from the Department of Education and Science, it comments upon events which have hitherto been omitted from the historiography of RE, but which help to contextualise significant changes in RE theory and practice at that time. Moreover, it demonstrates that the current parlous state of RE in schools is in part the result of latent and longstanding issues and problems, rather than a consequence of present-day government policy alone. Therefore, in reviewing and developing RE policies and practices, all stakeholders are urged to look more closely at both changes and continuities in the subject’s past and the contexts in which they occurred.

Introduction: the impact of the 'War on Terror' on executive–legislative relations: a global perspective

In democratic polities, constitutional equilibria or balances of power between the executive and the legislature shift over time. Normative and empirical political theorists have long recognised that war, civil unrest, economic and political crises, terrorist attacks, and other events strengthen the power of the executive, disrupt and threaten constitutional politics, and damage democratic institutions: crises require swift action and executives are thought to be more capable than parliaments and legislatures of taking such actions. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 and the ensuing so-called 'war on terror' declared by President Bush clearly constituted a crisis, not only in the United States but also in other political systems, in part because of the US's hegemonic position in defining and shaping many other states' foreign and domestic policies. Dicey, Schmitt, and Rossiter suggest that critical events and political crises inevitably trigger the concentration of (emergency) powers in the hands of the executive. Aristotle and Machiavelli questioned the inevitability of this process. This article and the articles that follow in this Special Issue utilise empirical evidence, through the use of case studies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Australia, Israel, Italy and Indonesia, to address this debate. Specifically, the issue explores to what extent the external shock or crisis of 9/11 (and other terrorist attacks) and the ensuing 'war on terror' significantly changed the balance of executive-legislative relations from t (before the crisis) to t+1 (after the crisis) in these political systems, all of which were the targets of actual or foiled terrorist attacks. The most significant findings are that the shock of 9/11 and the 'war on terror' elicited varied responses by national executives and legislatures/parliaments and thus the balance of executive-legislative relations in different political systems; that, therefore, executive-legislative relations are positive rather than zero-sum; and that domestic political contexts conditioned these institutional responses.

Rethinking crises and the accretion of executive power: the “War on Terror” and conditionality evidence from seven political systems

External shocks to democratic systems are likely to threaten the stability of relations between the executive and the representative assembly. This article investigates the impact of the so-called “war on terror” on executive-assembly relations in comparative perspective. We analyze data from seven countries, which varied in terms of form of government, level of democracy, culture, social structure, and geographic location, to evaluate its effects. We find that whereas in some systems the “war on terror” altered the balance of power between the executive and the assembly, in other cases the extant balance of power was preserved. We postulate various conditions under which the constitutionally sanctioned balance of power is most likely to be preserved in times of crisis.

Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–9) and the return to the gold standard

The general election of 29 October 1924 saw Winston Churchill return to Parliament as Constitutionalist MP for Epping after two years in the political wilderness. It also saw Stanley Baldwin swept back to Number 10 on a Conservative landslide. Speculation about whether Baldwin would cement Churchill’s drift from the Liberal fold by offering him office surfaced during the election campaign. Churchill nevertheless thought ‘it very unlikely that I shall be invited to join the Government, as owing to the size of the majority it will probably be composed only of impeccable Conservatives’. [ 1 ] Because of his anti-socialist credentials, his ability to reassure wavering Liberals through his opposition to protectionism – dropped by Baldwin after its rejection in the 1923 general election – and concern he could prove a rallying point for backbench malcontents, there was however much to commend giving Churchill a post. To his surprise, Baldwin offered Churchill the long-coveted office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, briefly held by his father before his ill-conceived resignation in 1887. Having arranged a meeting with his Labour predecessor, Philip Snowden, about outstanding business the new Chancellor set to work. Marking his political transition, a few days later Churchill resigned from the National Liberal Club.

How can economic and political liberalisation improve financial development in African countries?

The objective of this paper is to study the interactions between Economic liberalisation, Political liberalisation and Financial development in African countries. More specifically, we seek to establish the impact of Economic, Political and institutional openness on financial deepening. The empirical approach will be two-step procedure, first using a difference in difference method to show the various aspect of financial liberalisation on economic and political freedom while the second step will be using panel data techniques from period 1990 to 2005. The estimation results can be summarised as the following, first, Economic and financial liberalisation did account significantly for the financial development performance. While political stability show a positive overall effect on financial development, the association with Political freedom is consistent only after controlling the endogeneity of Political freedom on financial development. This result indicates that the transformation of the political and economic environment has improved the performance of the financial sector.

Symposium: Editing Political Diaries

The witness seminar was held in December 1991 at the Institute of Historical Research in London. It examined some of the key issues surrounding the editing of political diaries, including what to edit, the motivation of the diarist and the value of diaries to historians. Peter Catterall of the ICBH was in the chair. The three principal speakers were Ruth Winstone, editor of Tony Benn's diaries, David Brooks, editor of the diary of Sir Edward Hamilton, and John Barnes, co‐editor with David Nicholson, of the diary of Leo Amery. Other contributors included Jad Adams (biographer of Tony Benn), Kathleen Burk (co‐author of a study of the 1976 IMF crisis), Philip Williamson (editor of the diary of William Bridgeman), M.R.D. Foot (an editor of the Gladstone diaries), and Stuart Ball (editor of the diary of Sir Cuthbert Headlam).

A dynamic role-playing platform for simulations in legal and political education

One big challenge in deploying games-based learning, is the high cost and specialised skills associated with customised development. In this paper we present a serious games platform that offers tools that allow educators without special programming or artistic skills to dynamically create three dimensional (3D) scenes and verbal and non-verbal interaction with fully embodied conversational agents (ECAs) that can be used to simulate numerous educational scenarios. We present evaluation results based on the use of the platform to create two educational scenarios for politics and law in higher education. We conclude with a discussion of directions for the further work.

Lines in class The ongoing attack on mass education in England

Andrew McGettigan’s analysis of the financial transformations of higher education (‘Who Let the Dogs Out? The Privatization of Higher Education’, RP 174)is important for comprehending the complexity of the changes universities are undergoing and their implications. As he argues, ‘it is mass higher education in England’ that is now under attack and adequately responding to this requires the development of new habits and new forms of thought. It is also necessary to contextualize this attack in relation to comparable changes occurring in other educational sectors in England, not least because it is through control of the points of intersection between primary, secondary, and tertiary education that the government’s political intent is being most effectively realized. An analysis of these changes reveals the broader nature of the attack on the idea and practice of mass education itself.

Data Visualisation Does Political Things

In this paper I advance the theory of critical communication design by exploring the politics of data, information and knowledge visualisation in three bodies of work. Data reflects power relations, special interests and ideologies that determine which data is collected, what data is used and how it is used. In a review of Max Roser’s Our World in Data, I develop the concepts of digital positivism, datawash and darkdata. Looking at the Climaps by Emaps project, I describe how knowledge visualisation can support integrated learning on complex problems and nurture relational perception. Finally, I present my own Mapping Climate Communication project and explain how I used discourse mapping to develop the concept of discursive confusion and illustrate contradictions in this politicised area. Critical approaches to information visualisation reject reductive methods in favour of more nuanced ways of presenting information that acknowledge complexity and the political dimension on issues of controversy.

Age-period-cohort effects in the incidence of hip fractures: political and economic events are coincident with changes in risk

Introduction: Healthcare improvements have allowed prevention but have also increased life expectancy, resulting in more people being at risk. Our aim was to analyse the separate effects of age, period and cohort on incidence rates by sex in Portugal, 2000–2008. Methods: From the National Hospital Discharge Register, we selected admissions (aged ≥49 years) with hip fractures (ICD9-CM, codes 820.x) caused by low/moderate trauma (falls from standing height or less), readmissions and bone cancer cases. We calculated person-years at risk using population data from Statistics Portugal. To identify period and cohort effects for all ages, we used an age–period–cohort model (1-year intervals) followed by generalised additive models with a negative binomial distribution of the observed incidence rates of hip fractures. Results: There were 77,083 hospital admissions (77.4 % women). Incidence rates increased exponentially with age for both sexes (age effect). Incidence rates fell after 2004 for women and were random for men (period effect). There was a general cohort effect similar in both sexes; risk of hip fracture altered from an increasing trend for those born before 1930 to a decreasing trend following that year. Risk alterations (not statistically significant) coincident with major political and economic change in the history of Portugal were observed around birth cohorts 1920 (stable–increasing), 1940 (decreasing–increasing) and 1950 (increasing–decreasing only among women). Conclusions: Hip fracture risk was higher for those born during major economically/politically unstable periods. Although bone quality reflects lifetime exposure, conditions at birth may determine future risk for hip fractures.