This paper analyses the discourse of statements of the leaders of two Greek political parties
commemorating the restoration of Greek democracy on 24th July 1974; the ruling party New
Democracy and the opposition, Coalition of the Radical Left. We focus on how these leaders
act as entrepreneurs of their identities by constructing their in-groups in broad or narrow terms
and their outgroups in vague or specific terms. These constructions were ventured during a
period of relative political stability (2008) and instability (2012), and we focus on how in-group
prototypes and group boundaries are narrated across Greece?s past, present and future in
ambiguous or concrete terms. The study aligns the social identity approach to political
leadership with studies on political discourse and ?the rhetoric of we?. We view commemorative statements as historical charters and respond to calls for discourse analysis to
take greater account of historical context. The findings suggest concrete hypotheses about how
leaders with different amounts of political support might define, as identity entrepreneurs, who
?we? are, and who ?we? are not in democratic contexts marked by stability or crisis.
The present study explores how the leaders of two political
parties, the party in power New Democracy (ND) and one of
the parties in opposition SYRIZA, depict ingroups and outgroups
using a past, present or future account, when representing
their group identities. It focuses on commemorative
statements made by political leaders on the anniversaries of
the restoration of the Greek democracy in 1974. Statements
from five different years are analysed: 2004 (the year when
Greece hosted the Olympic Games and values of democracy
were associated with the Olympic ideals), 2006, 2008, 2012,
and 2014 (two of the years of economic crisis). Analysis concerns
the rhetorical framing of the restoration of democracy by
leaders, focusing on the use of past, present or future account
in group representations. Findings identified three key issues
around which political leaders shape their temporal account:
temporal slippage from past categories to the current political
parties versus horizontal comradeship between them, reflections
on ingroup history versus expected future outcomes,
denial of spatiotemporal co-existence of competing groups
versus ongoing co-existence between ingroups and outgroups
across time in the political landscape. Findings are discussed
under the light of social identity theory and the consideration
of different temporal accounts as identity maintenance
strategies.
In the current issue of JISS, we discuss different forms of human thought related to
nostalgia, replying to Luri Conceicao?s commentary (2017; see this present issue of JISS).
With regard to the distinction between normal and pathological nostalgia, we argue for a
socio-psychological approach to the construction of thought as it has been evolved over
the last sixty years. We base our dialogue on the theories of social representations, social
memory/ oblivion and cognitive polyphasia. Our goal is to bring into the discussion an
alternative view of the same phenomena particularly concerning traditional distinctions
that reproduce dominant modes of thought and action.
Our aim here is to delineate the connection between selective remembering and selective forgetting as it applies to lay historians listening to selective recountings of history. How does what a speaker remembers about a nation?s past shape what is forgotten about the nation?s past for the listener? To address this question, we will discuss psychological research demonstrating the mnemonic consequences of this selectivity with an emphasis on retrieval-induced forgetting within social settings. In particular, we highlight how selectively remembering nationally relevant, historical events may induce forgetting of related historical information for the listener, and this forgetting may not only have important implications for individual and national identities but said identities may influence both what is remembered and forgotten. We end with some concluding thoughts and areas of future research.
The purpose of this study was to examine the content of autobiographical nostalgic memories, the
reasons for their recollection and the elicited emotions. Furthermore, this study aimed to show how
specific groups generate different representations of nostalgic memories. A total of 244 men and
women (young, adults and older people) participated in the study by answering open-ended and
closed-ended questions about autobiographical nostalgia. Findings showed that nostalgic
experiences related to significant ?others?, life periods, leisure, places, and the loss of loved
persons. The reasons of nostalgia were associated with good memories and pleasant times, with the
desire for revival of the past, carefreeness, but also with the need to cope with loss, death and
missed situations. Nostalgia also appeared to be related to both positive and negative emotions.
Variations were found across generations. Older people seemed to be more prone to nostalgia and
communicated their nostalgic experiences more often than younger individuals. Older people
anchored their nostalgia in significant ?others? who have passed away, while younger people turned
to important personal life periods and leisure activities. Gender differences were detected within
older generations. Adult and older aged females were more prone to nostalgia. They were sensitive
in absence and in death of family members (parents, grandparents, spouses) experiencing bitter
sweet emotions.
In psychology, there is renewed interest in the constructive role of the future as guide for current thought and action (Seligman et al., 2013; Sools, Tromp & Mooren, 2015; Sools & Mooren, 2012). Although future imagination has been central to earlier research on possible selves for example (Markus & Nurius, 1986; Cinnirella, 1998), the importance of a more radical and wide-ranging shift to a future-making science to address key challenges of our time has been proposed in disciplines ranging from psychology (Gergen, 2015), anthropology (Appadurai, 2013), sociology (Levitas, 2013) and philosophy (Unger, 2015). In political psychology, the importance of the future is implicit in central concepts such as ideology (Chau, Chiu & Peng, 2003), expectation (Bombay, Matheson &Anisman, 2013) motivation (van Zomeren, 2016), anxiety when anticipating future threats (Wohl & Branscombe, 2009), and in-group projection processes (Sacchi et al., 2013). More explicit recognition of the constructive role of the future in political psychology can be found in research on political horizons (Dunmire, 2005), restorative justice (Greenwood, 2015), and the role of confidence in risk attitude (Kanner, 2004).
Background
Although the ability to recognize emotions through bodily and facial muscular movements is vital to everyday life, numerous studies have found that older adults are less adept at identifying emotions, compared to younger ones. The message gleaned from research has been rather a message for greater decline for specific negative emotions than positive ones. At the same time, it refers to methodological issues raised with regard to different modalities in which emotion decoding is measured. The main aim of the present study was to identify the pattern of age differences in the ability to decode basic emotions from naturalistic visual emotional displays.
Method
The sample comprised a total of 208 adults from Greece, aged from 18 to 86 years. Participants were examined using the Emotion Evaluation Test (EET) which is the first part of a broader audiovisual tool called ?The Awareness of Social Inference Test?. The EET was designed to examine a person?s ability to identify six emotions and discriminate these from neutral expressions, when they are portrayed dynamically by professional actors.
Results
The findings indicated that decoding of basic emotions is taking place along the broad affective dimension of ?uncertainty?, and a basic step in emotion decoding is to recognize whether information presented is emotional or not. Age was found to negatively affect the ability to decode the basic negatively-valenced emotions and pleasant surprise as well. Happiness decoding is the only ability that was found well-preserved with advancing age.
Conclusion
The main conclusion drawn from the study is that the pattern in which emotion decoding from visual cues is affected by normal aging is formulated according to the rate of uncertainty that either is related to decoding difficulties or is inherent to a specific emotion.
Difficulties in recognizing emotional signals might have serious implications for social interactions.
Neurodegenerative diseases that affect neural networks involved in emotional displays processing might thus be connected with a disproportionate impairment in social life. This study aimed at examining the ability to decode basic emotions from dynamic visual displays in mild to
moderate dementia. Thirty old adults diagnosed as demented, and 30 gender-matched healthy controls were administered a measure of emotion evaluation. The groups did not differ significantly in age and educational level. The emotion evaluation test was designed to examine a person?s ability to visually identify basic emotions and discriminate these from neutral expressions,
when they were expressed as dynamic, subtle, day-to-day expressions. Results showed that demented participants had a great difficulty in recognizing the positively valenced emotions of happiness and pleasant surprise, while sadness, anger, and anxiety were the easiest emotions to recognize. Healthy controls were almost excellent on happiness recognition, while discrimination of non-emotional displays was the most difficult condition often mislabeled as anxiety or pleasant
surprise. Results were mainly discussed in terms of socio-emotional selectivity theory positing that only older adults capable of exerting cognitive controlled favor emotional over non-emotional and positive over negative information.
