Comparing professional identities, attitudes, and views in public communication: A study of Chilean journalists and public relations practitioners

Public relations (PR) practitioners’ and journalists’ professional views and attitudes toward each other have been a subject of academic inquiry during the past decades; however, much of this research has focused on Europe and North America. In other regions of the world, for example in Latin America, historical developments and social understandings have led to slightly different conceptualizations of PR and journalism. Using Chile as a case study, this paper reports the results of an examination of Chilean journalists’ and PR practitioners’ professional conceptions. While both groups tend to have somewhat similar views of media relations and see themselves as part of the same profession, there are also important differences which are most likely based on professional socialization processes rather than educational backgrounds or sociodemographic and work related variables. Implications for contextually grounded approaches to the study of PR and journalism are highlighted.     

Residualization: justification,properties and application

Although it is usual to find collinearity in econometric models, it is commonly disregarded. An extended solution is to eliminate the variable causing the problem but, in some cases, this decision can affect the goal of the research. Alternatively, residualization not only allows mitigation of collinearity, but it also provides an alternative interpretation of the coefficients isolating the effect of the residualized variable. This paper fully develops the residualization procedure and justifies its application not only for dealing with multicollinearity but also for separating the individual effects of the regressor variables. This contribution is illustrated by two econometric models with financial and ecological data, although it can also be extended to many different fields.     

El Silencio: a rural community of learners and media creators

A one-to-one learning environment, where each participating student and the teacher use a laptop computer, provides an invaluable opportunity for rethinking learning and studying the ways in which children can program computers and learn to think about their own thinking styles and become epistemologists. This article presents a study done in a rural school in Costa Rica in which students used computers to create media. Three important components of the work are described: (1) student-owned technology that can accompany students as they interact at home and in the broader community, (2) activities that are designed with sufficient scope to encourage the appropriation of powerful ideas, and (3) teacher engagement in activity design with simultaneous support from a knowledge network of local and international colleagues and mentors.     

Environment, transnational labor migration, and gender: case studies from southern Yucatán, Mexico and Vermont, USA

Gender shapes the migration–environment association in both origin and destination communities. Using quantitative and qualitative data, we juxtapose these gender dimensions for a labor migrant-sending location of Mexico’s southern Yucatán with those for a labor migrant-receiving location in Vermont (USA). We illustrate how in the southern Yucatán, circular transnational migration alters pasture, maize and chili production in a peasant field–forest system. Gender norms condition the land-use decisions of migratory households to keep women out of agricultural fields, but in turn may be modified in unexpected ways. With men’s migration, more women assume aspects of land management, including in decision-making and supervision of hired farm labor. In comparison, in Vermont a largely male migrant labor force helps maintain an idealized, pastoral landscape with gender deeply embedded in how that labor is constructed and managed.     

Tuning and Practicing the Therapeutic Instrument: The Therapist's Life Experience

This article views the therapeutic use of self broadly as if through a wide-angle lens focusing on the therapist within his or her surroundings. These contextual features can be seen as projections of the therapist's self and therefore useable in treatment. Through an interest in alternative brain functions due to her own struggles with a neurological illness, the author arrived at the idea of utilizing her personal interests which naturally come into the milieu as therapeutic vehicles. Personal interests that are compatible with the patient's character offer alternative modes for experiencing, expressing and regulating affect states. These interests in the expressive arts together with the person of the therapist constitute a medium for rotating attention around unfamiliar parts of the mental landscape. Disavowed or dissociated affects can be unearthed, made conscious, put into language, and treated. This idea in practice nests neatly within recent thinking in psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and the philosophy of science. When language alone is not enough to move the therapeutic process forward, other working knowledge in the therapist's life can be brought to bear as a powerful evocative force for therapeutic change.     

The Other‐Race Effect in a Longitudinal Sample of 3‐, 6‐ and 9‐Month‐Old Infants: Evidence of a Training Effect

We investigated the development of the other‐race effect “ORE” in a longitudinal sample of 3‐, 6‐, and 9‐month‐old Caucasian infants. Previous research using cross‐sectional samples has shown an unstable ORE at 3 months, an increase at 6 months and full development at 9 months. In Experiment 1, we tested whether 9‐month‐olds showed the ORE with Caucasian and African faces. As expected, the 9‐month‐olds discriminated faces within their own ethnicity (Caucasian) but not within the unfamiliar ethnicity (African). In months. In Experiment 2, we longitudinally tested infants at 3, 6, and 9 months by presenting either the Caucasian or the African faces used in Experiment 1. In contrast to previous cross‐sectional studies and Experiment 1, we found that infants discriminated between all stimuli. Hence, we did not find the ORE in this longitudinal study even at 9 months. We assume that the infants in our longitudinal study showed no ORE because of previous repetitive exposure to African faces at 3 and 6 months. We argue that only a few presentations of faces from other ethnic categories sufficiently slow the development of the ORE.     

Functional Parallelism of Detailed and Rough Speech Processing at the End of Infancy

Although realization of the same speech sound is far from being consistent across different contexts, speech recognition has to rely on phonetic detail in order to detect words. So far, it appeared that young infants cannot avoid noticing subtle speech sound variation whenever it occurs. Only later on, they are able to tolerate speech sound variation in some word recognition tasks. Here, we test whether this ability is associated with the time infants start storing their first word forms. We recorded event‐related potentials (ERPs) in a priming paradigm. German words (targets) followed syllables (primes) with a different amount of phoneme overlap. We tested infants at three, six, and nine months after birth. ERPs reflected sensitivity to prime‐target variation in a single phoneme in three‐month‐olds, tolerance to this in six‐month‐olds, and both processing aspects in nine‐month‐olds. Our findings reveal individual developmental priorities for different aspects of speech processing, with very detailed speech processing dominating at around 3 months, rough processing dominating at around half a year after birth, and an architecture of parallel rough and detailed processing at around 9 months. Functional parallelism at the end of infancy might explain the heterogeneous pattern of results regarding the degree of acoustic detail that toddlers appear to consider at different ages and across different paradigms.