Contextual Frame Research Articles

“Mood features of world leaders' commitments to carbon neutrality in COP28 climate communication”

AbstractThe world faces a critical era for climate action, and research pinpoints the role of linguistic analysis in enhancing our understanding of climate discourses (Zanaty, 2023; Dormer, 2020). In light of this, examining mood features in world leaders’ commitments to carbon neutrality is timely and essential. Defined as the balance between emitted and absorbed carbon (European Parliament, 2023), carbon neutrality has become a focal point in climate agendas. World leaders frequently use public speeches to shape perceptions and drive engagement on the issue. This study analyzes 85 speeches delivered at COP28, sourced from the official United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) website. A sample of 70 speeches was selected using Yamane's formula (1967), and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (1985) was applied to examine 2,553 mood features in these speeches. Findings reveal a significant imbalance in mood feature usage, with 84.17% in the indicative mood to assess climate conditions, 9.67% in the imperative mood for directives, 2.50% in the conditional mood for future vision, 3.17% in the substantive mood for contextual framing, and 0.47% in the interrogative mood for audience engagement. This study underscores the importance of balanced mood features in climate discourses to reinforce global commitment toward emission reduction and to promote a more compelling, resonant narrative for climate action.

Framing matters: LGBTQIA+ organisations’ boundary spanning within and across collective action fields

Western-based LGBTQIA+ mobilisations have often been described as both internally fragmented and isolated from other social struggles. However, recent studies show that LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, intersex, asexual/aromantic and other) organisations have increasingly used social media to span organisational boundaries by networking with other groups and framing common concerns. This article addresses these concerns by examining the interplay between digital networking and collective framing in different socio-political contexts and over time. The investigation focuses on the collective action events promoted on Facebook by LGBTQIA+ organisations located in Milan and Madrid between 2011 and 2020. After mapping the socio-semantic networks resulting from the promotion of the collective action events, the article analyses the brokerage roles played by different frames. Our findings show that while social media facilitates the creation of both within- and cross-field cooperative networks, framing congruence is necessary for transforming occasional cross-field network choices into sustained efforts to span boundaries and form intersectional alliances.

Aspectual Pair Formation in Russian Verbs: A Cognitive Approach

Aspectual pair formation in Russian verbs represents a core grammatical feature that governs the temporal and contextual framing of actions. Traditional approaches to aspect focus on morphological mechanisms such as prefixation, suffixation, and suppletion, yet they often fail to address irregularities and semantic nuances. This study adopts a cognitive linguistic perspective, exploring how conceptual metaphors, image schemas, and mental mappings underpin aspectual distinctions. By analyzing patterns of pair formation, including both regular and irregular verbs, the research highlights the cognitive processes that align with bounded and unbounded conceptualizations of actions. The findings contribute to linguistic theory by integrating semantic and cognitive frameworks, while practical applications offer innovative strategies for teaching aspect to learners through mental imagery and contextualized learning. Challenges and unanswered questions, such as the treatment of suppletive forms and cross-linguistic comparisons, underscore the need for further interdisciplinary research to refine this approach.

Exploring construal level matching effects: focusing on descriptive norms and temporal framing in environmental cause-related communication contexts

PurposeTo enhance the effectiveness of environmental cause-related marketing (CRM) message design, this study identifies two key factors: descriptive social norms (provincial vs general) and temporal framing (near-future vs distant-future). Drawing upon construal level theory, it examined the synergy between the type of social norms and suitable temporal framing, matched at similar construal levels, to optimize CRM’s impact by positively influencing consumer purchase intentions and engagement in environmentally sustainable behaviors.Design/methodology/approachA full factorial 2 × 2 online experiment was conducted.FindingsThe findings showed that aligning message elements at a low level of construal significantly increases message persuasiveness, enhancing purchase intentions and pro-environmental behaviors. Conversely, matching elements at high levels of construal does not necessarily lead to synergistic effects. Notably, misaligned message elements – where one operates at a higher construal level and the other at a lower level – can generate cognitive resistance, potentially leading to adverse backlash effects. Messages that paired provincial norms with distant future framing were deemed least persuasive, resulting in diminished purchase intentions and pro-environmental behaviors.Originality/valueThis study refines approaches in environmental CRM by illustrating that descriptive social norms alone do not achieve desired impacts. It emphasizes aligning message elements at a low construal level to boost effectiveness and synergistic outcomes. The research also highlights a need to critically reassess matching effects at higher construal levels, thus enriching environmental CRM message strategies.

Sexual orientation as a contextual frame for attractiveness judgments.

Despite strong consensus about the basic features that make someone look objectively attractive, contextual variation may modulate subjective assessments. Here, we investigate how social group membership provides such a context, comparing attractiveness judgments between lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) versus straight perceivers, and examining how these attractiveness judgments relate to beliefs about the target person's sexual orientation. We indeed find that perceivers rate targets as more attractive when they believe the target's sexual majority/minority status matches their own (Study 1). This association differs according to context, however: Although straight and LGB perceivers evaluate the components of facial attractiveness similarly (Study 2), straight men use attractiveness as a cue to sexual orientation (i.e., deeming unattractive women lesbians; Study 3) whereas LGB perceivers use sexual orientation as a cue to attractiveness (e.g., gay men rate men they believe are gay as more attractive than men they believe are straight; Studies 4 and 5). Thus, LGB identity seems to create a context in which sexual minority perceivers learn to attend to information about sexual diversity that straight perceivers may ignore. These findings highlight how group membership provides a lens for social perception, specifically pointing to how the contextual mindset of partner selection may transmute otherwise objective judgments, such as facial attractiveness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Sharing the Burden of Care

Recent scholarship on the treatment of chronic diseases in neoliberalizing contexts frame patients as individuated selves enacting biopolitical imperatives toward self-care. However, in public psychiatric and oncology hospitals in contemporary southern Vietnam, it is instead the family unit, rather than the individual patient, that is “responsibilized” to enable access to medical care. Indeed, the norms and structures of Vietnam’s healthcare system presume the participation of informal familial caregiving. This paper argues that biopolitical governance in Vietnam is contingent on long-standing practices and ideals surrounding the family and moral sentiments.

The influence of the contextual framing on physio- and occupational therapists’ clinical reasoning in sensory rooms with patients admitted to psychiatry – a qualitative case study

Aim To investigate the influence of contextual framing on physio- and occupational therapists’ clinical reasoning in sensory rooms for patients admitted to psychiatric units. Material and method Physiotherapists and occupational therapists from acute and intensive care units with sensory rooms were invited to participate in the study. The therapists were interviewed following sessions with patients in sensory rooms, using a semi-structured interview guide. These therapists also participated in a focus group interview. All interviews were transcribed and analysed based on the thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke. Results Twenty individual interviews and one focus group interview were conducted with seven physio- and occupational therapists. Three themes with accompanying subthemes emerged: (i) The contextual influence: Therapists’ perceptions of the use of sensory rooms, The dominance of the medical paradigm). (ii) The therapeutic alliance: The therapists’ relational skills, The importance of a good therapeutic patient relation, and Physio- and occupational therapy in a psychiatric setting.: (iii) The therapeutic diagnosis, Therapeutic sensory room interventions, and Holistic approach in a limited timeframe. Conclusion The clinical reasoning of physio- and occupational therapists in sensory-modulating sessions for patients admitted to psychiatric units is influenced by a primarily medically dominated paradigm; legally, economically, and politically. Occupational therapists mainly focus on everyday skills and being in the present, whereas physiotherapists focused on activities with bodily anchoring and awareness.

Unequal Framing in Times of Hardship? How Newspapers from Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and Switzerland Portray Syrian and Ukrainian Refugees – Evidence from a Deductive and Inductive Automated Content Analysis

ABSTRACT The mostly welcoming attitudes toward refugees from Ukraine stand in stark contrast to restrictive policies and often negative attitudes toward refugees from Syria in Europe. By emphasizing certain aspects of reality whilst leaving out others, media framing plays an important role in the public image of both refugee groups. To better understand how the different refugee groups were framed in European media, we applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and a thorough manual analysis and validation process to identify frames from the topic modeling results. We identified eleven generic and issue-specific emphasis frames in a sample of 84,623 newspaper articles from Germany, Spain, the UK, and Switzerland from 2014–2022. The frames were grouped into four overarching frame categories: Fate, Threat, Value and Context Frames. Syrian refugees were mostly portrayed negatively through Threat Frames and Context Frames, whereas more positive humanitarian and victimization perspectives were pronounced in Fate Framing of Ukrainian refugees. The findings indicate more negative and delegitimizing framing patterns in news coverage about Syrian compared to Ukrainian refugees.

Strategic behavior of large language models and the role of game structure versus contextual framing

This paper investigates the strategic behavior of large language models (LLMs) across various game-theoretic settings, scrutinizing the interplay between game structure and contextual framing in decision-making. We focus our analysis on three advanced LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and LLaMa-2—and how they navigate both the intrinsic aspects of different games and the nuances of their surrounding contexts. Our results highlight discernible patterns in each model’s strategic approach. GPT-3.5 shows significant sensitivity to context but lags in its capacity for abstract strategic decision making. Conversely, both GPT-4 and LLaMa-2 demonstrate a more balanced sensitivity to game structures and contexts, albeit with crucial differences. Specifically, GPT-4 prioritizes the internal mechanics of the game over its contextual backdrop but does so with only a coarse differentiation among game types. In contrast, LLaMa-2 reflects a more granular understanding of individual game structures, while also giving due weight to contextual elements. This suggests that LLaMa-2 is better equipped to navigate the subtleties of different strategic scenarios while also incorporating context into its decision-making, whereas GPT-4 adopts a more generalized, structure-centric strategy.

Wealth/Poverty Opposition in English and Kazakh: A Comparative Study

This research employs linguistic concept modeling to scrutinize the semantic variations between notions of wealth and poverty in English and Kazakh, aiming to discern their contrasting characteristics. The corpora in English and Kazakh encompassing varied genres, styles, and thematic content were examined through word frequency and co-occurrence to elucidate divergent contextual frames for the terms in both languages, unveiling cultural nuances and cognitive associations. The results indicate that in English, wealth is majorly associated with financial prosperity, real estate ownership, and the availability of resources for a comfortable lifestyle. Conversely, in Kazakh-language writings, the concept of wealth extends to encompass elements like family connections and devotion to the homeland, reflecting cultural priorities and lifestyles. A comparable distinction is evident when examining the contextual usage of the term poverty. The findings underscore the significance of exploring linguistic concepts within distinct cultural and cognitive frameworks, opening avenues for further comparative linguistic research.

Role conflicts and management strategies in social workers working for refugees

The article presents a qualitative study of the relational dimension of the social work practice with asylum seekers and refugees. The aim of the research is to explore how a group of social workers working with asylum seekers and refugees represent their relationship with users and how they construct this relational work. In Italy, the social workers' practice is performed by workers with different educational backgrounds, as it is not a juridically recognised job with its theoretical and operative background. In this study, 20 social workers working with asylum seekers and refugees employed in the asylum accommodation centres of the Extraordinary Reception Centres system and the Protection System for Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Northern Italy participated in semi-structured interviews. From the results of the thematic analysis of the interviews, which applied a bottom-up coding strategy, it emerged that social workers describe their relationship with users as a means of intervention (goal-oriented relationship) but also as a source of information (needs-centred relationship), a negotiation process and a source of emotional strain (emotionally demanding relationship). Furthermore, the construction of relational work requires social workers to take into account normative obligations and organisational lines (contextual frame) to refer to their role but also, at the same time, to their biographical background and personal resources to develop strategies. Therefore, social workers working with asylum seekers and refugees need to find a mediation between a personal approach to the relationship and a professional one (person-role balance).

The (in)justice of EMI: a critical discourse analysis of two key stakeholders’ views on the Polytechnic University of Milan court case

Abstract While English-medium Instruction (EMI) continues to be appealing for various stakeholders, it also raises some epistemological and ethical concerns, which have in the past found expression in polarized debates. A well-known example is the 2012 Milan court case, in which the academic staff sued the Polytechnic University of Milan over its attempt to promote an EMI-only policy. Now almost ten years after the case, the motivations of the key proponents and opponents of the policy are yet to be explored in depth. In order to explain how different interpretations of EMI could result in such unreconcilable positions, in this paper we adopt a new analytical angle, focusing on two elite participants: the rector who promoted the policy and the lawyer (also a faculty member) who represented the lecturers in court. Via a critical discourse analysis of interviews to these participants, we aim to unveil how different stakeholders from the same context frame EMI in relation to ideas of justice/injustice. Results indicate that, despite comparable personal commitment to education and similar understandings of language/power interactions, the participants evaluate English against different frames of reference (i.e. a horizon of globalized education, versus the traditional national understanding of the goals of education). This leads to diametrically opposite evaluations of the growing presence of English in higher education.

Future in-orbit servicing operations in the space traffic management context

This paper provides a concise yet informative overview on future operations in near-Earth space including in-orbit servicing, assembly, manufacturing, and the use of space tugs, in the frame of the space traffic management context. After providing a general definition of these activities, the significant impact that they will have in the space domain from an economic perspective is highlighted. Past achievements in terms of orbital demonstrations are then recalled, leading to the identification of the most critical technological challenges which need to be addressed to improve reliability, frequency, and robustness of servicing operations. A summary of the most critical next steps and recommendations is finally provided.

Impact of Acute Alcohol Consumption on Sexuality: A Look at Psychological Mechanisms.

Alcohol's link with sexuality is long-standing and prominent. While research continues to document robust associations between drinking and sexual behavior, scientific attention now centers primarily on evaluating mechanisms and attendant theoretical frameworks to advance our understanding of how alcohol exerts a causal impact. We describe four domains with reliable evidence of alcohol effects: sexualized social perceptions, sexual arousal, sexual risk taking, and sexual assault. We consider three contextual frames: distal factors associated with encountering opportunities for alcohol-involved sex, proximal factors associated with alcohol's acute effects, and distal-proximal interactions. We then examine the empirical support for mechanisms embedded within four theoretical frameworks: alcohol disinhibition, alcohol expectancy, alcohol myopia, and emotion regulation. Support for disinhibition mechanisms is evident with sexual arousal only. Expectancy and myopia mechanisms enjoy support across domains and make up bases for integrative expectancy-myopia causal explanations. Emotion regulation mechanisms evidence preliminary support in risk taking and sexual assault. Implications and future directions are considered.

Act(ion)s of solidarity: possibilities of hope and change through art

ABSTRACT Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska was invited as a keynote speaker for the Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance conference, which took place at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, on 30 June and 1 July 2022. What follows is the text of Kulikovska’s keynote presentation, with introduction and contextual framing of Kulikovska’s work by conference organiser and chair, Alissa Clarke. During this artist keynote, Kulikovska explores her deep commitment to solidarity by reflecting on her complex geographical roots, family relations, experiences in Ukraine and as a twice-displaced artist, and examples of her multidisciplinary artworks, including: sculptures (Homo Bulla (2012); Soap Figure with Flowers (2019; a collaboration with Vinnichenko), solo activist performance/performance actions (Action (2014)/Act of Solidarity (2022); Body and Borders (2014–2017); War and Pea€e (2016); Raft CrimeA (2016); and feminist platforms (Flowers of Democracy [2015]). Through these reflections, Kulikovska traces: a longing for solidarity as a meaningful, sincere state of connectedness with others; striking acts of agentive and loving solidarity by family members; politically motivated false impressions of solidarity; acts of solidarity against russian violence and territorialism and patriarchal oppression; hopeful actions and offerings supporting queer solidarity and displaced peoples.

Single-Frame Supervision for Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding.

Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) aims at localizing the spatio-temporal tube of a specific object in an untrimmed video given a free-form natural language query. As the annotation of tubes is labor intensive, researchers are motivated to explore weakly supervised approaches in recent works, which usually results in significant performance degradation. To achieve a less expensive STVG method with acceptable accuracy, this work investigates the "single-frame supervision" paradigm that requires a single frame labeled with a bounding box within the temporal boundary of the fully supervised counterpart as the supervisory signal. Based on the characteristics of the STVG problem, we propose a Two-Stage Multiple Instance Learning (T-SMILE) method, which creates pseudo labels by expanding the annotated frame to its contextual frames, thereby establishing a fully-supervised problem to facilitate further model training. The innovations of the proposed method are three-folded, including 1) utilizing multiple instance learning to dynamically select instances in positive bags for the recognition of starting and ending timestamps, 2) learning highly discriminative query features by incorporating spatial prior constraints in cross-attention, and 3) designing a curriculum learning-based strategy that iterative assigns dynamic weights to spatial and temporal branches, thereby gradually adapting to the learning branch with larger difficulty. To facilitate future research on this task, we also contribute a large-scale benchmark containing 12,469 videos on complex scenes with single-frame annotation. The extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that T-SMILE significantly outperforms all weakly-supervised methods. Remarkably, it also performs better than some fully-supervised methods associated with much more annotation labor costs. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/qumengxue/T-SMILE.

Interação de Mercados: Agenciamento de Interdefinição de Mercado de Alimentos

ABSTRACT Objective: in order to collaborate with the ongoing research program on how markets intersect and overlap, this theoretical essay introduces the notion of market interdefinition agencing. Theoretical framework: the theoretical framework draws on previous constructivist market studies on the process of framing, overflowing, translation, and agencing in a market interaction context. Methods: to illustrate the market interdefinition agencing, this article uses a theoretical essay on slow and fast food markets. Results: this essay depicts how slow food can be seen as an overflow in opposition to fast food framing, agencing opposite sociotechnical elements for the construction of this new frame, and how slow food also contributes to a new fast food frame. Conclusion: first, this essay shows that both food markets entangle and disentangle sociotechnical elements that move away from or closer to each other, translating and agencing their sociotechnical arrangements. Second, market interdefinition agencing is delineated as a process of market interrelation that happens through the capacity of actors to shape markets, where a previous market is used as a reference to influence another market frame.

Supplemental Material for Sexual Orientation as a Contextual Frame for Attractiveness Judgments

Supplemental Material for Sexual Orientation as a Contextual Frame for Attractiveness Judgments

PISCI KAO SARADNICI DETINjSTVA U POLA STOLEĆA DUGOM PROMIŠLjANjU O KNjIŽEVNOSTI ZA DECU: KONTEKSTI I VRSTE PRILOGA

In the past half a century, dozens of female and male writers have published their papers in the journal Childhood, among them were texts belonging to the field of critical and theoretical reading of literature for children. Suggesting several open fields for further research of everything the phrase “writers as critics” entails, this paper gives and overview of contextual frames and types of contributions from this group of associates. Regardless whether they were intentionally written for this journal, whether they were included in the themes and thematic blocks, permanent or temporary sections, whether they are experiments, studies, essays, demonstrations, comments, reflections, interviews, translations – all texts from the abovementioned corpus are regarded as equally valuable, and even crucial in the creation of the structural diversity and dynamic of Childhood.

Contextual Frames of Reference in the Translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm to Kiswahili

This paper seeks to establish the cognitive contextual frames of references (CFRs) in the translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm from English to Kiswahili. The source text “Animal Farm” and the target text "Shamba la Wanyama" were used to gather the study's data. The paper offers insights on how CFRs can be employed in literary translation to domesticate the target text so that it is relevant to the target language audience. Specific word and phrase meanings were deduced from sentences of both the source text and the target text. The analyzed data revealed that the translator used organizational category shifts, textual category shifts, communicational category shifts, and socio-cultural category shifts. The most common CFRs in the Kiswahili translation of Animal Farm were found to be communicational category shifts. The target text is made relevant to the audience through such manipulations.