"Teaching, my passion; publishing, my pain": unpacking academics' professional identity tensions through the lens of emotional resilience.

In the global competition of higher education, an increasing emphasis has been placed on university research excellence. Accordingly, academics have to engage in both research and teaching activities. The multiple and fragmented identities of academics can sometimes be contested, leading to identity tensions, and impeding their professional development. This raises the issue of how, and whether at all, academics integrate their professional identities in a culture of performativity. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study explored how a specific group of Chinese academics negotiate identity tensions as teachers and researchers through an emotional resilience lens. The narrative frames and interviews with 10 college English teachers yielded four types of identity negotiation in the continuum from identity conflicts to identity integration mediated by emotional resilience, including the disheartened performer, the miserable follower, the strenuous accommodator, and the fulfilled integrator. Emotional resilience as a mediator in professional identity tensions is discussed. Our findings offer a nuanced understanding of the complexity of academics developing an integrated professional identity. Policymakers should recognize the potential of emotional resilience in integrating academic professional identities and jointly support academics to cope with their identity tensions. However, if identity tensions are too complex for academics to solve, the policymakers should consider tensions as signals that the existing institutional policies may be counterproductive and need to be revised, rather than merely calling on academics' resilience.

How linguistic and cultural forces shape conceptions of time: English and Mandarin time in 3D.

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers' temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, including the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals' representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context).