Rhetorical Analysis of Academic Journal Plus My Face

I tried so so hard to find an actual copy of any of the scientific journals that I wrote about previously. I went to the science and engineering library at UofA and the only copy they had of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology throughout the entire UofA campus was online. So yes I did take a selfie of myself in the very full lobby of the library on the database with an online copy of the journal. Don't judge.

My picture.

Please ignore my face. I did this in front of hundreds of people and I didn't want to sit there taking 50,000 pictures of myself.

• There are about a million authors in the volume 69 issue 2 of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Actually, more like 47, but it's pretty much the same thing. For the sake of my sanity I will not be typing out all of those names, but you can find them here if you really want them. A couple names from the first two articles was Karl K. Szpunar, Gabriel A. Radvansky, Catherine Barsics, Martial Van der Linden, and Arnaud
  D'Argembeau. Like any other scientific journal, the authors are respected and treated as professionals in the field who know what they are writing about. Especially since being published in a well-respected journal is a pretty big deal, so no background on the authors is needed to prove credibility and is often not given.

• The intended audience for this particular journal issue is mostly geared towards other professionals in the field. The journal is set up almost like a conversation between not only the articles, but the authors of previous works as well. One example is the extensive list of references at the end of every article (of at least 30 references). That shows how much conversation is happening in one article alone. However, a secondary audience could be anyone who's interested in what a particular article or study is focusing on.

• The context surrounding this particular journal issue revolves around the sudden interest in psychology in pop culture. From learning different daily tips from a psych article in a magazine, to figuring out what your crush's behavior tells you about how they feel (trust me, I've read all the magazine articles about that), pop culture is eating up what psychologists have to say. This affects content since psychologists have the public's support to keep moving forward in figuring out how thinking and memories can affect our personality. All of the articles in this issue had to do with our way of thinking and how it affects us in a situation.

• The overall message of the journal issue was to increase the public's awareness about the psychology of memories and thoughts. I reached this conclusion since all the articles in issue 2 all had titles that corresponded to remembering or how a certain event can affect a person's thinking (or vice versa).

• The purpose that the journal issue is trying to achieve is to contribute to the psychological conversation regarding a person's thoughts and how they can affect them. Also, the journal is trying to reach out to the public and making the public more aware of psychological advances and findings by making the studies conducted geared more towards pop culture.