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Abstract: Building on the social psychology literature on collective memory, we tested if national nostalgia fosters collective angst through greater perceived societal anomie among French participants. Consistent with our predictions, a correlational study ( N = 535) and an experimental study ( N = 370) showed that nostalgia for France's past predicted greater angst regarding its future through increased perceptions that present French society is more anomic than before. These findings suggest that (1) our representations of the national past shapes how we perceive present and future society and (2) national nostalgia, besides acting as a coping mechanism against existential threats as suggested in previous work, might also feed these threats by fostering perceptions of an anomic present and a frightening future.

The present research aimed to extend the existing literature on political extremes' symmetries and asymmetries, by examining the relationship between political extremism and perceived societal anomie (i.e., perceptions that the leadership is disregulated and that the social fabric is disintegrated) across three studies conducted within French samples. The first two studies revealed that perceived leadership disregulation increased as participants position themselves toward either political extreme and was associated with greater support for proposals regarding protectionism and economic redistribution; indicating a symmetry between political extremes. However, perceived social fabric disintegration was not associated with political extremism but was stronger for far-right individuals; thus suggesting an asymmetry between the extremes. The last study, conducted before the 2017 French Presidential elections, showed that, when imagining a future society in which the candidate they supported is elected as President, political extremes, compared to moderates, similarly reported reduced levels of leadership disregulation, but not social fabric disintegration. The present findings therefore suggest both similarities and differences between political extremes' perception of anomie within current and future French society and extend previous work showing that political extremes share negative views of society.

The Yellow Vests (YV) movement stands out because of its length and its unusual violent outbursts. This paper aims to better understand the emotional path underlying YVs' intention to engage in more or less radical collective action. To this end, we opposed two models: one based on Becker and Tausch's (2015) model of engagement in collective action – whereby only contempt is supposed to predict radical collective action – and one based on Matsumoto, Frank and Hwang's (2017) ANCODI hypothesis – according to which anger, contempt and disgust as a whole are supposed to predict radical collective action. We assumed that support for the YVs' demands would be associated with negative emotions (i.e., anger, contempt and disgust) towards the government which in turn would foster behavioral intentions in favor of YV. The results (Study 1, N = 677; Study 2, N = 738) confirmed this hypothesis and also showed that the model in which negative emotions (i.e., anger and contempt) are treated separately (i.e., Becker and Tausch's model) presented a better fit with the data. Taken together, these results suggest that negative emotions towards the French president and his government have a key role in understanding the Yellow Vests mobilization.

AbstractThis article deals with the methodologies commonly used in the framework of the structural approach to social representations. It concerns free and hierarchical evocations, the characterization questionnaire, the similarity analysis, the basic cognitive schemes model, the attribute‐challenge technique and the test of context independence. More than a simple review of these methodologies, it offers a critical approach concerning the problems encountered and related to: thresholds or "cutoff points" used to diagnose the structure (core vs. periphery) and the accuracy of the structural diagnosis, grouping methods employed to reduce the corpus of verbal associations, the dilemma between reliability and feasibility, especially in field research, the adequacy and number of modalities of response in the framework of the structural diagnosis. Following this evaluation, this article suggests potential solutions to overcome these methodological limitations. Moreover, as methodological issues are closely related to theoretical questions, the link between social representation theory and identity approaches is discussed.

The present article aims to show that collective memories could serve as a criterion in social categorization. We predicted that a target person who shares common collective memories will be perceived as similar (to the self), relatively more favorably and categorized as an ingroup member. We conducted four studies using memories of historical events or childhood objects. These studies consistently showed that a target who shares common memories is more likely to be perceived as an ingroup member than someone who does not. This effect is mediated by perceived similarity to the self. Finally, individuals who share common memories are perceived more favorably than when they do not. However, according to the type of collective memories (historical events vs. childhood memories) sharing memories impacts either perceived competence or perceived warmth. The current sets of studies support the idea that collective memory influences social categorization processes, exemplifying its group identity-defining function.