Cultures explicitly and implicitly create and reinforce social norms and expectations, which impact upon how individuals make sense of and experience their place within that culture. Numerous studies find substantial differences across a range of behavioral and cognitive indices between what have been called “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD)” societies and non-WEIRD cultures. Indeed, lay conceptions and social norms around wellbeing tend to emphasize social outgoingness and high-arousal positive emotions, with introversion and negative emotion looked down upon or even pathologized. However, this extravert-centric conception of wellbeing does not fit many individuals who live within WEIRD societies, and studies find that this mismatch can have detrimental effects on their wellbeing. There is a need to better understand how wellbeing is created and experienced by the large number of people for whom wellbeing manifests in alternative ways. This study investigated one such manifestation—the personality trait of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS)—qualitatively investigating how sensitive individuals experience and cultivate wellbeing within a WEIRD society. Twelve adults participated in semi-structured interviews. Findings suggest that highly sensitive individuals perceive that wellbeing arises from harmony across multiple dimensions. Interviewees emphasized the value of low-intensity positive emotion, self-awareness, self-acceptance, positive social relationships balanced by times of solitude, connecting with nature, contemplative practices, emotional self-regulation, practicing self-compassion, having a sense of meaning, and hope/optimism. Barriers of wellbeing included physical health issues and challenges with saying no to others. This study provides a rich idiographic representation of SPS wellbeing, highlighting diverse pathways, which can lead to wellbeing for individuals for whom wellbeing manifests in ways that contradict the broader social narratives in which they reside.

In fiction, unlike his life, Poe was able to contain his women. He derived many features from the European Gothic tradition, and utilized motifs such as incarceration, premature burial, and the pathetic fallacy, or the use of external landscape to express or reflect psychological turmoil. Poe’s psychologically intense tales feature narrators whose mental fabric disintegrates before the reader’s eyes. This essay will concentrate upon three such tales: ‘Berenice’ (1835), ‘Ligeia’ (1838), and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). Each of these stories are narratives of obsession and monomania featuring female incarceration and objectification, and the threat of the feminine monstrous. Berenice, Ligiea and Madeline Usher each embody the feminine monstrous in varying ways, a masculine projection of womanhood unrestrained, unsuccessfully repressed by their male counterparts, and thus returning in an act of unheimliche consummation. Berenice symbolizes the vagina dentata whose threat must be removed through dental extraction; Ligeia is an incubus who perverts the Eucharist in order to achieve an act of monstrous metempsychosis; and Madeline acts as both monstrare and monere: as both the warning and the source of impending destruction. The perceived female abandonment and thus betrayal which had become a pattern of Poe’s life was through his fiction able to be halted and contained. The inextricable link between Eros and Thanatos undergirds these stories in which, in a mirror of Poe’s own life, each love object wastes away during the prime of her beauty. This essay discusses the context of male–female relations in Poe’s life and how they impact upon his fiction. Unlike reality, in his tales Poe was able to resurrect the objects of his obsessions, and thus the female figures comprising the monstrous loves of his male protagonists. However, this essay also questions the extent to which such resurrections and containment are successful within each narrative, and how far Poe’s delineations of the feminine monstrous and unheimlich sexuality can be read as interrogations of compromised masculinity.

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has been implemented in Spain for more than two decades, and the number of schools that have joined CLIL initiatives has progressively grown in an attempt to increase students’ proficiency in English; all of these developments are indicative of the importance of foreign language learning (FLL) in this country. The aim of this paper is to analyse the promotion of cognitive skills by teachers in the subjects of science and social science in primary education in the Spanish Region of Murcia. A mixed methodology combining techniques for collecting both quantitative and qualitative data was implemented. The results show a tendency to lapse into low-order thinking skills, which can hinder the development of demanding cognitive skills and creative learning processes in CLIL lessons. Some factors might affect these teaching practices, such as the type of teaching staff position or the experience that teachers have gained over time. The article concludes with some suggestions for further research.

Global climate change and the continued neoliberalization of food systems have exacerbated levels of food insecurity and hunger, producing an ever-expanding population of displaced persons who are also nutritionally vulnerable. Restrictive immigration policies in post-arrival and resettlement contexts compound with other cultural, social, political, and economic conditions to negatively affect the food security and health of displaced persons. This article engages a comparative ethnographic perspective for examining the migration-food security nexus. Drawing on ethnographic research with Mexican and Central American im/migrants in the Western United States, Haitian im/migrants in the Dominican Republic, and African im/migrant populations in Italy, this article analyzes local experiences of food insecurity in restrictive immigration policy contexts through an intersectional lens. Finally, this article examines the possibilities for engaged research oriented toward generating “healthy publics” and addressing food insecurity across disparate geographical and political settings and amid structural and social constraints.

This paper sets out the future potential and challenges for developing an interdisciplinary, mixed-method Citizen Social Science approach to researching urban emotions. It focuses on urban stress, which is increasingly noted as a global mental health challenge facing both urbanised and rapidly urbanising societies. The paper reviews the existing use of mobile psychophysiological or biosensing within urban environments—as means of ‘capturing’ the urban geographies of emotions. Methodological reflections are included on primary research using biosensing in a study of workplace and commuter stress for university employees in Birmingham (UK) and Salzburg (Austria) for illustrative purposes. In comparing perspectives on the conceptualisation and measurement of urban stress from psychology, neuroscience and urban planning, the difficulties of defining scientific constructs within Citizen Science are discussed to set out the groundwork for fostering interdisciplinary dialogue. The novel methods, geo-located sensor technologies and data-driven approaches to researching urban stress now available to researchers pose a number of ethical, political and conceptual challenges around defining and measuring emotions, stress, human behaviour and urban space. They also raise issues of rigour, participation and social scientific interpretation. Introducing methods informed by more critical Citizen Social Science perspectives can temper overly individualised forms of data collection to establish more effective ways of addressing urban stress and promoting wellbeing in urban communities.

Social media like Facebook are harshly criticized for the propagation of health misinformation. Yet, little research has provided in-depth analysis of real-world data to measure the extent to which Internet users engage with it. This article examines 6.5 million interactions generated by 500 posts on an emblematic case of online health misinformation: the Facebook page Santé + Mag, which generates five times more interactions than the combination of the five best-established French media outlets. Based on the literature on cultural evolution, we tested whether the presence of cognitive factors of attraction, that tap into evolved cognitive preferences, such as information related to sexuality, social relations, threat, disgust or negative emotions, could explain the success of Santé + Mag’s posts. Drawing from media studies findings, we hypothesized that their popularity could be driven by Internet users’ desire to interact with their friends and family by sharing phatic posts (i.e. statements with no practical information fulfilling a social function such as “hello” or “sister, I love you”). We found that phatic posts were the strongest predictor of interactions, followed by posts with a positive emotional valence. While 50% of the posts were related to social relations, only 28% consisted of health misinformation. Despite its cognitive appeal, health misinformation was a negative predictor of interactions. Sexual content negatively predicted interactions and other factors of attraction such as disgust, threat or negative emotions did not predict interactions. These results strengthen the idea that Facebook is first and foremost a social network used by people to foster their social relations, not to spread online misinformation. We encourage researchers working on misinformation to conduct finer-grained analysis of online content and to adopt interdisciplinary approach to study the phatic dimension of communication, together with positive content, to better understand the cultural evolution dynamics of social media.

The central hypothesis of this paper is that the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis can be applied to the study of AI and human/AI interaction. The paper connects three research fields: machine behavior approach, psychoanalysis and anthropology of science. In the “Machine behavior: research perspectives” section, I argue that the behavior of AI systems cannot be studied only in a logical-mathematical or engineering perspective. We need to study AI systems not merely as engineering artifacts, but as a class of social actors with particular behavioral patterns and ecology. Hence, AI behavior cannot be fully understood without human and social sciences. In the “Why an unconscious for AI? What this paper is about” section, I give some clarifications about the aims of the paper. In the “Unconscious and technology. Lacan and Latour” section, I introduce the central thesis. I propose a re-interpretation of Lacan’s psychoanalysis through Latour’s anthropology of sciences. The aim of this re-interpretation is to show that the concept of unconscious is not so far from technique and technology. In the “The difficulty of being an AI” section, I argue that AI is a new stage in the human identification process, namely, a new development of the unconscious identification. After the imaginary and symbolic registers, AI is the third register of identification. Therefore, AI extends the movement that is at work in the Lacanian interpretation of the mirror stage and Oedipus complex and which Latour’s reading helps us to clarify. From this point of view, I describe an AI system as a set of three contrasting forces: the human desire for identification, logic and machinery. In the “Miscomputation and information” section, I show how this interpretative model improves our understanding of AI.

Social living groups are organised in social hierarchies often exhibiting inequalities in beings. Investigating class segregation and the use of punishment applied downward in the rank acts as a key aspect to ascertain how dominant and subordinate partners cooperate to achieve mutual profit. In human subjects coming from countries with an uneven wealth distribution, this mutual profit may be reduced, especially for the lower socioeconomic classes. We implemented an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game experiment in one such country with starkly high inequality, China. We split relatively richer and poorer subjects into separate classes and gave only one the authority to punish the other. When rich subjects could unidirectionally punish poor subjects (as in a segregated society), rich subjects decreased their cooperation effort while punishing poor subjects. When rich and poor subjects, instead, could punish each other in random combinations (as in an integrated society) they decreased defections so they could punish more. In the segregated society model, the punishing classes earned twice as much as the non-punishers. Conversely, in the integrated society model, weak differences in earnings were found, leading to a decrease in inequality. These results were confirmed by an agent-based simulation mirroring the human experiments and repeated during a very large number of rounds. From our research, we conclude that, especially in developing economies, if the states enacted that the dominant and subordinate individuals relinquished their almost segregated state, this would lead to a redistribution of wealth and power.

‘The Evolution of Monsters in Children’s Literature’ will chart the developing form of the monster in literature for young people and discuss ways in which different guises can alter the fear experienced by the reader. Literary monsters must continuously adapt according to the developing maturity of the reader to ensure a consistent balance of fear and imagination. In order to approach the subject of fear and monsters in children’s literature, and potential reasons behind their presence, this article will explore a wealth of issues such as: the impact of different formats (visual or text only), specific attributes or qualities that can evoke fear from the reader, and the monster as both comical and fearful. Fear in society is typically heightened when faced with the unknown entities of the future. Therefore, this article will conclude by considering the form of future monsters in order to represent this shift in anxiety and potential forms that the monster is yet to adopt.

Monsters within British pantomime are ubiquitous creatures, from the ogre in the castle of Puss in Boots to the Giant at the top of the beanstalk, and as personified in the monstrous acts of Wicked Stepmothers, frightening Barons and diabolical henchmen. The popularity of pantomime means that it is often the first encounter that a child has with a monster in material form, sharing the same physical space: a theatre. Bruno Bettelheim (1991) argues that fairytales, from where many pantomimes are drawn, are our first negotiations with the monstrous. In pantomime, the audience are complicit in the act of finding, chasing and dealing with the monster, and the ethical positioning of this by writers and directors is paramount in guiding us to understand how we may deal with the ‘other’ in our own lives. This paper critically interrogates the threat posed by these monsters when invested with a materiality in performance. In the first instance, I explore the interplay between stage space and the representation of the monster and how this relates to my professional experience of directing over twenty-five professional pantomimes in the United Kingdom since 1999. Tracing this spatial dynamic between monster and audience to the medieval stage and the ludic dimension to the staging of the devils in the mystery play, the paper argues that there is a long-reaching historical antecedent to the staging of evil that informs and inspires spatial practices in modern-day pantomime. Key questions are: to what extent have pantomimes historically presented and rehearsed the threat posed by the monster in order to contain that threat?; What ethical considerations do producers, writers and directors now face in the contemporary pantomime? Finally, to what extent does the popular form of pantomime itself matter as a vehicle for enabling audiences both young and old to confront the monstrous Other?