Humanizing the self: Moderators of the attribution of lesser humanness to others

Three studies investigated moderators of the tendency to attribute greater humanness to the self than to others, an interpersonal counterpart of outgroup infra-humanization. Study 1 demonstrated that this self-humanizing effect is reduced when the other is the focus of comparison. Study 2 showed that the effect is reduced when the other is individuated. Study 3 indicated that empathy does not moderate self-humanizing: Self-humanizing failed to correlate negatively with dispositional empathy or perspective-taking. Study 3 also indicated that abstract construal moderates the self-humanizing effect using a temporal comparison. Participants rated their future self, but not their past self, as less human than their present self. Studies 1 and 3 also showed that selfhumanizing is greater for undesirable traits: People may view their failings as “only human.” All findings were distinct from those attributable to self-enhancement. Self-humanizing may reflect a combination of egocentrism, focalism, abstract representation of others, and motivated processes.

Student voice in Irish post-primary schools: a drama of voices

This research is an exploration of the expression of student voice in Irish post-primary schools and how its affordance could impact on students’ and teachers’ experiences in the classroom, and at whole-school level through a student council. Student voice refers to the inclusion of students in decisions that shape their experiences in classrooms and schools, and is fundamental to a rights-based perspective that facilitates students to have a voice and a say in their education. Student voice is essential to the development of democratic principles, active citizenship, and learning and pedagogy. This qualitative research, based in three post-primary case-study schools, concerns teachers in eighteen classrooms engaging in dialogic consultation with their students over one school year. Teachers considered the students’ commentary and then adjusted their practice. The operation of student councils was also examined through the voices of council members, liaison teachers and school principals. Theorised within socio-cultural (social constructivist), social constructionist and poststructural frames, the complexity of student voice emerges from its conceptualisation and enactment. Affording students a voice in their classroom presented positive findings in the context of relationships, pedagogical change and students’ engagement, participation and achievement. The power and authority of the teacher and discordant student voices, particularly relating to examinations, presented challenges affecting teachers’ practice and students’ expectations. The functional redundancy of the student council as a construct for student voice at whole-school level, and its partial redundancy as a construct to reflect prefigurative democracy and active citizenship also emerge from the research. Current policy initiatives in Irish education situate student voice in pedagogy and as dialogic consultation at classroom and whole-school level. This work endorses the necessity for and benefit of such a positioning with the author further arguing that it should not become the instrumental student voice of data source, accountability and performativity.

Career motivation in nursing students and the perceived influence of significant others

This paper is a report of a study investigating the motivation of nursing students, their reasons for entering nursing and the perceived influence of others in their decision-making.

(un)childhood: performing the voices and times of childhood through relational video-making

This practice-based PhD is comprised of two interrelated elements: (i) ‘(un)childhood’, a 53’ video-essay shown on two screens; and (ii) a 58286 word written thesis. The project, which is contextualised within the tradition of artists working with their own children on time-based art projects, explores a new approach to timebased artistic work about childhood. While Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), Ernie Gher (1943-), Erik Bullot (1963-) and Mary Kelly (1941-) all documented, photographed and filmed their children over a period of years to produce art projects (experimental films and a time-based installation), these projects were implicitly underpinned by a construction of childhood in which children, shown as they grow, represent the abstract primitive subject. The current project challenges the convention of representing children entirely from the adult’s point of view, as aesthetic objects without a voice, as well as through the artist’s chronological approach to time. Instead, this project focuses on the relational joining of the child’s and adult’s points of view. The artist worked on a video project with her own son over a four-and-a-half year period (between the ages of 5 and 10) through which she developed her ‘relational video-making’ methodology. The video-essay (un)childhood performs the relational voices of childhood as resulting from the verbal interactions of both children and adults. The non-chronological nature of(un)childhood offers an alternative to the linear-temporal approach to the representation of childhood. Through montage and a number of literal allusions to time in its dialogue, (un)childhood performs the relational times of childhood by combining children’s lives in the present with the temporal dimensions that have traditionally constructed childhood: past, future and timeless.

Lived experience of gay men caring for others with HIV/AIDS : living, loving and dying in the era of HIV/AIDS

This thesis explored gay male carers’ experience of caring for their partner, brother or friend who had HIV/AIDS. Through using phenomenological methodology (van Manen, 1990), the day-to-day caring experiences were uncovered. The data gathered were then analysed through a nursing ‘lens’, with the concept of stigma as an anchoring point. The dual stigmas of homophobia and AIDS phobia impacted on the daily lives of these men as they cared for their loved one. The research identified six themes. These were: 1) the relationship; 2) coping with HIV and AIDS; 3) the corporal impact of HIV/AIDS; 4) experiences of carers including the absence of others; 5) living daily with the virus: Demands of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA); and 6) saying goodbye, but wanting to keep the memory alive. The caring these men undertook, for which they were frequently unprepared, was intensive and complex, but because of their commitment and love they battled on. Because of a sense of shame associated with AIDS phobia on the part of the PLWHA, the carer often had to undertake this care in isolation, without support from family, friends or home health care agencies. The carers struggled with not only the demands of day-to-day care, but also with non-acceptance from family, both of the nature of the relationship with their partner and of their homosexuality. Family members were forced, often with great difficulty, to acknowledge the close commitment the men had to each other. Recognition that one had a terminal disease, HIV/AIDS was also required. The fear of potential transmission was high among carers, friends and family members. Notably, there was an absence of blame on the part of the carer towards his partner for contracting HIV/AIDS. The physical decline and marking of the body further stigmatised the PLWHA, which added to carers’ burdens. They endeavoured to minimise the physical decline in their partner, so he could continue to pass as healthy, and attempted to make the day-to-day living as normal as possible. The methods of combating weight loss and opportunistic infections meant frequent medical appointments, complex intensive medical procedures and help with personal care, which was undertaken at home largely without support from health care staff. Carers frequently struggled also with their partner’s denial of being ill. One strategy all carers used was to escape with their partners from their everyday life in Melbourne and attempt metaphorically to leave the HIV/AIDS behind; this was a time when they could rekindle their life together as it was before HIV/AIDS came into their lives. Some carers chose to holiday without their partner, to give themselves a break from the day-to-day caring, while others planned and took holidays with their partner. The decline of the health in the PLWHA meant that family members had to recognise and accept both the nature of the relationship and the presence of the disease. This recognition and acceptance often came only when the partner was very ill, even at the point of dying. Carers and their partners discussed the potential use of euthanasia, as a means of ending the final phase of life with some dignity. One carer and his partner used euthanasia, despite its illegal status. The main concern for all carers was providing comfort and a reduction in the pain associated with HIV/AIDS for the partner. The widespread grief associated with HIV/AIDS was evident amongst these carers. All had known other gay men who had died, some carers own partner had died, or was about to die. There was an overwhelming sense of grief, which at times was repressed as a means of coping day-to-day. All carers felt it was important and necessary to remember those lost to HIV/AIDS through the various public memorials, as they did not want their partner to be just another faceless person lost to this disease. This phenomenological study of carers’ experience highlights the need for health care workers to be aware of the differing strategies that gay men use to cope with HIV/AIDS. While it may seem that the carers are coping with care of their partner, the outer façade is not always an accurate portrayal of the true situation. Health care workers should enquire as to the assistance these carers need from health care services in order to continue to care for their loved one. Such assistance can be the simple recognition of the partner and acceptance of them as part of the PLWHA’s network; this inclusion and acceptance is half the battle.

Women clinical nurses' constructions of collegiality : an ethnomethodological study

This research is about a shared journey of being together. It involved thirteen women nurses (including myself) in a process approach to working with data collected through audio transcriptions of conversations during group get-togethers, field notes and journalling over twelve months. The project was conducted in a large acute care metropolitan hospital where the ward staff interests lie in a practice history of the medical specialty of gynaecology and women's health. Prior to commencement ethical approval was gained from both the University and hospital ethics committees. Accessing the group was complicated by the political climate of the hospital, possibly exaggerated further by the health politics across the state of Victoria, at a time of major upheaval characterised by regionalism, rationalisation and debt servicing. In order to ascertain women clinical nurses' constructions of collegiality I adopted an ethnomethodological approach informed by a critical feminist lens to enable the participants to engage in a process of openly ideological inquiry, in critiquing and transforming practice. I felt the choice of methodology had to be consistent with my own ideological position to enable me to be myself (as much as I could) during the project. I wanted to work with women to illuminate the ways in which dominant ideologies had come to be apprehended, inscribed, embodied and/or resisted in the everyday intersubjective realities of participants. The research itself became a site of resistance as the group became aware of how and in what ways their lives had become distorted, while at the same time it collaboratively transformed their individual and collective practice understandings, enabling them to see the self and other anew. Set against the background of dominant discourses on collegiality, women's understandings of collegiality have remained a submerged discourse. Revealed in this work are complex inter-relationships that might be described by some as collegial!, but for others relations amongst these women depict alternative meanings in a rich picture of the fabric of ward life. The participants understand these relations through a connectedness that has empathy as its starting point. In keeping with my commitment to engage with these women I endeavoured to remain faithful to the dialogical approach to this inquiry. Moreover I have brought the voices of the women to the foreground, peeling away the rhizomatic interconnections in and between understandings. What this has meant in terms of the thesis is that the work has become artificially distanced for the purposes of academic requirements. Nevertheless it speaks to the understandings the participants have of their relationships; of the various locations of the visible and invisible voices; of the many landscapes and images, genealogies, subjectivities and multiple selves that inform the selves with(in) others and being-in-relation. Throughout the journey meanings are revealed, revisited and reconstructed. Many nuances comprise the subtexts illuminating the depths of various moral locations underpinning the ways these women engage with one another in practice. The process of the research weaves through multiple positions, conveying the centrality of shared goals, multiple identities, resistances and differences which contribute to a holding environment, a location in which women value one another in their being-in-relation and in which they stand separately yet together.

Doing research with teachers, parents and students : the ethics and politics of collaborative research

Truly collaborative research partnerships between universities and schools are seldom commonplace (Potter, 2001). Many schools – particularly those in disadvantaged communities – have long histories of being involved in research yet few see themselves with real investment in, ownership of and/or benefiting from the experience. In this chapter we discuss research conceived with more mutually beneficial researcher-researched relations, cognisant of the ‘importance of respecting and ultimately giving more than we take to the communities we research’ (Schultz, 2001, p. 1). The research involved teachers’, parents’ and students’ engagement with schooling in a secondary school in regional Australia. Rather than conducting the research on others, we attempted to craft our project with them. Michelle Fine (1994) argues that a decision to work with those we once might have written about or for, necessarily changes our work, making it both more ethical and more explicitly connected to struggles for social justice. This chapter draws on the voices of the teachers, parents and students we worked with and alongside during the research to explore the ethics and politics of such an approach.

Tertiary educators' voices in Australia and South Africa: experiencing and engaging in African music and culture

Music tertiary educators can foster positive experiences that promote diversity, enhance intercultural and cross-cultural understanding through our teaching. Through findings of interview data of tertiary music educators’ understandings of multicultural music practice at two South African universities and at an Australia university, I used interpretative phenomenological analysis to analyse the data. Two major themes emerged: why is it important to teach multicultural music like that of Africa, and what are some of the effective ways of preparing students to best teach it? The data provides insights into an appreciation of and respect for music and cultural diversity. In multicultural societies educators cannot deliver courses based solely on one’s own identity and cultural perspective. I argue that music education may be seen as an agent of social change where music teaching and learning can occur through exploring, experiencing, expressing and engaging in the music of our own culture and that of others.

Electroglottographic analysis of actresses and nonactresses' voices in different levels of intensity

Background: Previous studies with long-term average spectrum (LTAS) showed the importance of the glottal source for understanding the projected voices of actresses. In this study, electroglottographic (EGG) analysis was used to investigate the contribution of the glottal source to the projected voice, comparing actresses and nonactresses' voices, in different levels of intensity. Method: Thirty actresses and 30 nonactresses sustained vowels in habitual, moderate, and loud intensity levels. The EGG variables were contact quotient (CQ), closing quotient (QCQ), and opening quotient (QOQ). Other variables were sound pressure level (SPL) and fundamental frequency (F0). A KayPENTAX EGG was used. Variables were inputted in a general linear model. Results/Discussion: Actresses showed significantly higher values for SPL, in all levels, and both groups increased SPL significantly while changing from habitual to moderate and further to loud. There were no significant differences between groups for EGG quotients. There were significant differences between the levels only for F0 and CQ for both groups. Conclusion: SPL was significantly higher among actresses in all intensity levels, but in the EGG analysis, no differences were found. This apparently weak contribution of the glottal source in the supposedly projected voices of actresses, contrary to previous LTAS studies, might be because of a higher subglottal pressure or perhaps greater vocal tract contribution in SPL. Results from the present study suggest that trained subjects did not produce a significant higher SPL than untrained individuals by increasing the cost in terms of higher vocal fold collision and hence more impact stress. Future researches should explore the difference between trained and nontrained voices by aerodynamic measurements to evaluate the relationship between physiologic findings and the acoustic and EGG data. Moreover, further studies should consider both types of vocal tasks, sustained vowel and running speech, for both EGG and LTAS analysis. © 2013 The Voice Foundation.

Contrary Voices: Heine, Holderlin, and Goethe in the music of Hanns Eisler

Contrary Voices examines composer Hanns Eisler’s settings of nineteenth-century poetry under changing political pressures from 1925 to 1962. The poets’ ideologically fraught reception histories, both under Nazism and in East Germany, led Eisler to intervene in this reception and voice dissent by radically fragmenting the texts. His musical settings both absorb and disturb the charisma of nineteenth-century sound materials, through formal parody, dissonance, and interruption. Eisler’s montage-like work foregrounds the difficult position of a modernist artist speaking both to and against political demands placed on art. Often the very charisma the composer seeks to expose for its power to sway the body politic exerts a force of its own. At the same time, his text-settings resist ideological rigidity in their polyphonic play. A dialogic approach to musical adaptation shows that, as Eisler seeks to resignify Heine’s problematic status in the Weimar Republic, Hölderlin’s appropriation under Nazism, and Goethe’s status as a nationalist symbol in the nascent German Democratic Republic, his music invests these poetic voices with surprising fragility and multivalence. It also destabilizes received gender tropes, in the masculine vulnerability of Eisler’s Heine choruses from 1925 and in the androgynous voices of his 1940s Hölderlin exile songs and later Goethe settings. Cross-reading the texts after hearing such musical treatment illuminates faultlines and complexities less obvious in text-only analysis. Ultimately Eisler’s music translates canonical material into a form as paradoxically faithful as it is violently fragmented.

The Effect of Supportive Social Interaction Priming on Children's Prosocial Comforing Responses to Distressed Others

The ability to sensitively care for others’ wellbeing develops early in ontogeny and is an important developmental milestone for healthy social, emotional, and moral development. One facet of care for others, prosocial comforting, has been linked with important social outcomes such as peer acceptance and friendship quality, underscoring the importance of determining factors involved in the ability to comfort. Although social support has been linked with a number of important social outcomes, no study has directly examined whether felt social support can foster children’s positive behavior toward others. The purpose of the current investigation was to use an experimental priming paradigm to demonstrate that felt social support a) enhances children’s ability to respond prosocially to the distress of others and b) decreases children’s expressions of personal distress when faced with the distress of another person. Participants were 94 4-year-old children (M = 53.56 months, SD = 3.38 months; 52 girls). Children were randomly assigned to either view pictures of mothers and children in close, personal interactions (supportive social interaction condition), happy women and children in separate pictures, presented side-by-side (happy control condition), or pictures of colorful overlapping shapes (neutral control condition). Each set of 20 pictures was presented in the context of a categorization computer game that participants played 4 times throughout the course of the study. Immediately following the first three computer games, children were given the opportunity to comfort someone who was distressed; twice it was the adult experimenter working with the child, and once it was an unseen infant crying over a monitor that participants had been trained to use. Comforting behaviors and distress/arousal were coded in 10-second time segments and yielded a global comforting score and a distress proportion score for each task. Results indicated that priming condition had no effect on either prosocial comforting behavior or expressions of personal distress. I discuss these null findings in light of the available literatures on priming mental representations in children and on prosocial comforting, and suggest some future directions for continued investigation in both fields.

Why fundamentalism?

Why Fundamentalism? was an exhibition proposal and critical writing project developed from concept phase through to detailed proposal. It included an edited video document that lay out its core ideas and presented the diverse voices of each collaborator. A number of key themes were engaged around the hot-button (and much misunderstood) concept of Fundamentalism. The proposal included an exhibition layout, developed test imagery, ideas and animations, proposed forms for future works and a process whereby design briefs would lead to subsequent commissions. Two major grant applications were submitted to the Australia Council and Arts Queensland, with the support of State Library of Queensland, the University of Adelaide and numerous others. The project remains at the developed proposal stage awaiting suitable funding----- Critically the show became an active vehicle for drawing and exploring a line of distinction between ideas of ‘what is fundamental’ and ‘fundamentalism’ as it rested in the popular imagination, as well as in political and philosophical debates. It teased out and engaged with a number of key questions that included The Problem of Ungroundedness, A Politics of Finitude, The Post-modern/Pluralist Problem, Silent Fundamentalisms (Voices of Reason and Neo-con Religions), Fundamentalism as a Media Construct, The Pre and Post Cold-war Other, The Pressing Need for Foundations in the West and Islam as Foundationalism (rather than fundamentalism).

IT professionals' experience of ethics and its implications for IT education

This study investigates variation in IT professionals' experience of ethics with a view to enhancing their formation and support. This is explored through an examination of the experience of IT, IT professional ethics and IT professional ethics education. The study's principal contribution is the empirical study and description of IT professionals' experience of ethics. The empirical phase is preceded by a review of conceptions of IT and followed by an application of the findings to IT education. The study's empirical findings are based on 30 semi-structured interviews with IT professionals who represent a wide demographic, experience and IT sub-discipline range. Their experience of ethics is depicted as five citizenships: Citizenship of my world, Citizenship of the corporate world, Citizenship of a shared world, Citizenship of the client's world and Citizenship of the wider world. These signify an expanding awareness, which progressively accords rights to others and defines responsibility in terms of others. The empirical findings inform a Model of Ethical IT. This maps an IT professional space increasingly oriented towards others. Such a model provides a conceptual tool, available to prompt discussion and reflection, and which may be employed in pursuing formation aimed at experiential change. Its usefulness for the education of IT professionals with respect to ethics is explored. The research approach employed in this study is phenomenography. This method seeks to elicit and represent variation of experience. It understands experience as a relationship between a subject (IT professionals) and an object (ethics), and describes this relationship in terms of its foci and boundaries. The study's findings culminate in three observations, that change is indicated in the formation and support of IT professionals in: 1. IT professionals' experience of their discipline, moving towards a focus on information users; 2. IT professionals' experience of professional ethics, moving towards the adoption of other-centred attitudes; and 3. IT professionals' experience of professional development, moving towards an emphasis on a change in lived experience. Based on these results, employers, educators and professional bodies may want to evaluate how they approach professional formation and support, if they aim to promote a comprehensive awareness of ethics in IT professionals.

Differences between journalistic and academic accounts of child sexual abuse in Australia

The paper uses qualitative textual analysis to compare journalistic and academic accounts of child sexual abuse. There are seven main differences. Academic accounts suggest higher levels of neglect, emotional abuse, and physical abuse than sexual abuse in Australia, by contrast, journalistic accounts highlight sexual abuse. Academic accounts suggest that child sexual abuse in Australia is decreasing; journalistic accounts suggest that it is increasing. Academic accounts suggest that the majority of cases of child sexual abuse are perpetrated by family members; journalistic accounts focus on abuse by institutional figures (teachers, priests) or by strangers. Academic accounts have shown that innocent sexual play is a normal part of childhood development; journalistic accounts suggest that any sexual play is either a sign of abuse, or in itself constitutes sexual abuse. Academic accounts suggest that one of the best ways to prevent sexual abuse is for children to receive sex education; journalistic accounts suggest that children finding out about sex leads to sexual abuse. Academic accounts can gather data from the victims; journalistic accounts are excluded from doing so. Academic researchers talk to abusers in order to understand how child sexual abuse can be prevented; journalistic accounts exclude the voices of child sexual abusers.

How do other people influence your driving speed? Exploring the 'who' and the 'how' of social influences on speeding from a qualitative perspective

Using only legal sanctions to manage the speed at which people drive ignores the potential benefits of harnessing social factors such as the influence of others. Social influences on driver speeds were explored in this qualitative examination of 67 Australian drivers. Focus group interviews with 8 driver types (young, mid-age and older males and females, and self-identified Excessive and Rare speeders) were guided by Akers’ social learning theory (Akers, 1998). Findings revealed two types of influential others: people known to the driver (passengers and parents), and unknown other drivers. Passengers were generally described as having a slowing influence on drivers: responsibility for the safety of people in the car and consideration for passenger comfort were key themes. In contrast, all but the Rare speeders reported increasing their speed when driving alone. Parental role modelling was also described. In relation to other drivers, key themes included speeding to keep up with traffic flow and perceived pressure to drive faster. This ‘pressure’ from others to ‘speed up’ was expressed in all groups and reported strategies for managing this varied. Encouragingly, examples of actual or anticipated social rewards for speeding were less common than examples of social punishments. Three main themes relating to social punishments were embarrassment, breaching the trust of others, and presenting an image of a responsible driver. Impression management and self-presentation are discussed in light of these findings. Overall, our findings indicate scope to exploit the use of social sanctions for speeding and social praise for speed limit compliance to enhance speed management strategies.