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The influence of consonance–dissonance contrasts on perceived pleasantness of concluding tonic chords in short chord sequences
Full text linkDoes dissonance enhance the pleasantness of the following consonance due to the ensuing contrast? The contrast between the affective characteristics of successive stimuli is considered an important factor for the perceived pleasantness of the final stimulus, known as the contrast effect. We tested the contrast effect of dissonance and consonance by employing short chord sequences ending with a manipulated penultimate chord, resolving to the final tonic as stimuli. The dissonance level of the penultimate chord was manipulated by varying both its acoustic roughness and cultural familiarity, and 49 participants rated the pleasantness of the final chord. We hypothesized that the final chord would be more pleasant when the penultimate chord was more dissonant. However, the results showed the opposite: greater dissonance in the penultimate chord led to lower pleasantness ratings for the following final chord. It could be that greater dissonance in the penultimate chord makes it less tonally related to the final chord and that its dissonance may have violated listeners’ tonal expectations. Rather than demonstrating the contrast effect, this result demonstrates dissonance’s strong association with unpleasantness and its influence on the pleasantness of the following consonance
Morphology and Syntax in Competition: The Place of Inflectional Periphrasis
No full textInflectional periphrasis is the realization of inflectional properties by a lexical word-form and an ancillary function word. In categorial periphrasis the inflectional property is entirely defined by the periphrase; in intersective periphrasis the periphrase occupies a cell in an otherwise synthetically realized paradigm. We set out the conceptual prerequisites: the notions of ‘inflectional property’, ‘(inflected) word-form’, ‘lexeme’, and ‘paradigm’ and then discuss the criteria that have been proposed for determining whether a given construction is periphrastic, focusing on the feature intersection property and on non-compositionality. We illustrate a variety of the phenomena and issues surrounding periphrasis with a detailed discussion of the very rich periphrastic verb morphology of Bulgarian, which illustrates, inter alia, the interaction with clitic systems and zero realization with periphrastic paradigms. We conclude with a survey of the kinds of grammaticalization paths that lead up to periphrasis and the subsequent developments shown by periphrases, focusing on clitic affix alternations (morphologization) and morphosyntactic categorial mixing as evidence of partial grammaticalization, illustrated by comparison of the form of the have-perfect in the closely related languages Bulgarian and Macedonian
“I would want to see young people working in here, that’s what I want to see…” How peer support opportunities in youth justice services can support a Child First, trauma-informed, and reparative model of practice for Youth Justice.
No full textThis chapter explores how peer support opportunities can contribute to a combined Child First, trauma-informed and restorative approach for youth justice. While other scholars have identified clashes between these approaches, particularly between Child First and restorative justice, a focus on engagement with peers has been under-explored as a more child-centred model for reparation-focused work. We draw on qualitative data gathered with young people and parents/caregivers in a London youth justice service (YJS) to evaluate the effectiveness of its model of practice. Within this, peer support emerged as a key theme. Our participants expressed the desire to see young people working and volunteering in the YJS and felt this would help make it a safe and non-threatening space. Those who had completed their time with the YJS saw themselves as relatable roles models with the insight and skills to support others and, in some cases, expressed a strong desire to develop long-term careers in supporting young people. Our research challenges the notion that young people who have been involved in crime struggle to empathise, providing rich examples of their empathic understanding for peers. Peer support opportunities could offer a form of reparative practice that is Child First and trauma-informed. This would benefit both the young people being supported and those offering support, building a co-produced approach that is directly informed by the expressed needs and desires of the young people
Spontaneous visual imagery during extended music listening is associated with reliable alpha suppression
Full text linkMusic is widely recognised as being able to evoke images in the mind's eye. However, the neural basis of visual imagery experiences during music listening remains poorly understood. Here, we combined probe-caught experience sampling methodology with 32-channel electroencephalography (EEG) recordings in order to investigate the neuro-oscillatory correlates of music-evoked visual imagery and examine how spontaneously generated imagery compares to more deliberately generated forms. Thirty participants listened with closed eyes to four blocks of music, differing in their familiarity and relaxation potential and spanning a range of genres. In response to probes sent throughout listening, participants indicated whether or not they had been experiencing visual imagery and, if they had, whether the experienced visual imagery had been spontaneous or deliberate. Cluster permutation analyses on the time-frequency decomposed EEG data revealed alpha power suppression during visual imagery that was more reliable during spontaneous than deliberate imagery. Further, while theta and delta bands did not discriminate the presence or absence of the visual imagery experience or its intentionality subtypes, we observed that gamma power suppression in fronto-central areas was present during visual imagery experiences. Our results extend prior findings of a role of posterior alpha suppression in visual imagery to show its reliability in music-evoked spontaneous imagery specifically. We consider plausible interpretations of the presence and absence of other oscillatory signatures in relation to the listening conditions used in the current study
From victimhood to victimcould: Hypothetical injury and the 'criminalization' of Donald Trump
Full text linkThis article theorizes how far-right cultural politics leverage hypothetical injuries and imaginary futures, often through media, to justify agendas of social violence – a technique I term victimcould. Victimcould is both a representational achievement (alive within the cultural repertoires of the far-right) and a justificatory logic (supporting the cultural legitimacy of far-right political agendas). Working with the concept of vulnerability politics and building on extant critiques of regressive and ‘tactical’ weaponizations of victimhood, I position victimcould as an analytical intervention that clarifies how far-right claims to victimization strategically exploit both the prospective temporality of vulnerability as openness to injury (rather than injury itself) and the definitional openness of the unarrived, always-as-yet-undetermined future. I do this by way of an illustrative example: the so-called ‘criminalization’ of Donald Trump. Analyzing a series of AI-generated images of Trump’s could-be arrest that went viral online six months before his actual arrest occurred, I argue that Trump and his allies have engaged victimcould to appropriate the cultural legacies of movements like #BlackLivesMatter while strategically inverting the actual material politics of the US criminal legal system, repositioning wealthy white men (and Trump as their proxy) as its primary victims. I conclude by arguing for how and why the concept of victimcould can help equip us for the resistance of regressive cultural agendas, and for the recalibrating of public vulnerability politics for progressive ends
Forensic age progression for missing person investigations: A pilot evaluation of recognition accuracy.
Full text linkForensic age progression is widely used to support long-term missing person investigations by estimating an individual’s potential current appearance. Empirical validation of this technique remains limited, and systematic evaluations of its accuracy are scarce. This pilot study examines the recognizability of age-progressed facial images derived from childhood and adolescent photographs of two adult participants (Subject A and Subject B) attending a scientific congress, aiming to provide preliminary insight into the conditions under which age progression may succeed or fail.
A forensic anthropologist—blinded to the participants’ current appearance—produced age progressions to age 25 following established morphological assessment principles. The resulting images were anonymously displayed during the meeting, where 105 attendees with no specific training in age progression attempted to identify the portrayed individuals among those present.
Recognition performance differed between the two subjects, with 79.1% correct identifications for Subject A and 54.3% for Subject B. Qualitative comparison between the age-progressed and current photographs showed both accurate feature predictions and discrepancies influenced by lighting conditions, facial orientation, and individual morphological variation.
This preliminary investigation highlights the potential value of forensic age progression while emphasizing its challenges. The findings underscore the need for larger, systematically controlled validation studies to improve the reliability and forensic applicability of age progression in missing person cases
An unsupervised feature selection approach for finding diverse emotional-semantic representations in sonic branding music
Full text linkDiscovering the emotional–semantic dimensions underlying music description is central to music psychology and widely applied in sonic branding practice. Academic work typically relies on dimension reduction approaches such as principal components analysis (PCA), which (i) require subjective reinterpretation of latent components, (ii) often yield uneven component importances when a fixed number of dimensions is imposed, and (iii) offer limited guidance for selecting practically manageable subsets of descriptors. Addressing this gap, we evaluate whether an existing feature-selection algorithm — Diversity-Induced Self-Representation (D-ISR; Liu et al. [2017]) — can serve as an objective and scalable alternative for identifying concise yet representative sets of emotional–semantic attributes. Using a large real-world dataset (NParticipants = 55,593; NResponses = 5,820,188; NAudioTracks = 251), we compare D-ISR and PCA within a unified experimental framework. D-ISR selects 14 core attributes from an industry-scale pool of 212 attributes and reconstructs the original 212-dimensional space with good accuracy. Direct comparison with PCA demonstrates how D-ISR provides a more balanced trade-off between interpretability, reconstruction fidelity, and the need for a practically small set of descriptors. Our findings (i) document and analyse a large-scale emotional–semantic music dataset rarely accessible in the public domain, (ii) demonstrate a principled framework for comparing feature-selection and component-extraction methods for music-descriptor research, and (iii) illustrate how large attribute sets can be reduced to flexible, task-appropriate representations of the emotional–semantic music space. This contributes a clear methodological foundation for both scientific studies of musical meaning and applied work such as sonic branding
Queering the diagnostic trajectory of borderline personality disorder
No full textThis is an article based on the findings of an Australian research council funded project, The Social Dimensions of BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) led by Renata Kokanović.
There is increasing evidence that LGBTQIA+ people are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) at higher rates than cisgender and heterosexual populations. Despite this, limited qualitative research has critically examined the social, cultural, institutional, and diagnostic processes that shape these disparities. BPD is a highly stigmatised and contested psychiatric diagnosis, with a long history of debate across disciplines, including psychiatry. Critically unpacking these diagnostic trajectories is essential for understanding how gender and sexual diversity, and LGBTQIA+ people more broadly, are responded to within mental health and social care systems. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 13 LGBTQIA+ individuals who had received a BPD diagnosis, this study is informed by the sociology of diagnosis and queer theory. This framework enables a critical interrogation of how gender and sexual diversity intersect with dominant psychiatric discourses that continue to pathologise non-normative identities, emotional expression and relational practices. Findings are organised around three interrelated themes. First, participants described how limited understanding, validation, and access to LGBTQIA+ -affirming care contributed to experiences of distress that were subsequently interpreted through a diagnostic lens. Second, participants highlighted how BPD diagnostic criteria risk pathologising identity exploration and self-expression that diverge from cisnormative and heteronormative expectations. Third, clinical judgements were frequently shaped by superficial assumptions about appearance, gender expression and sexuality, compounded by limited queer-specific training among practitioners. Collectively, our findings suggest everyday clinical interactions, diagnostic practices and healthcare cultures contribute to the disproportionate application of BPD diagnoses among LGBTQIA+ people. The study underscores the need for further critical research, practitioner education and the resourcing of LGBTQIA+ -affirming mental health services