The Kigali Amendment introduced a new family of chemical compounds, which do not contribute to stratospheric ozone depletion but present a high global warming potential, under the watch of the Montreal Protocol in 2016. Earlier this year, a press note from the World Meteorological Organization entitled “Ozone layer recovery is on track, helping avoid global warming by 0.5°C” caught our attention because of the wrong conclusions that can be potentially drawn by laypersons due to an apparent linkage of ozone depletion and global warming problems. Public communication of the Montreal Protocol since the Kigali Amendment should be more careful than ever to avoid lessening the social perception of the threat of climate change, particularly considering that society already has a distorted representation of these problems, assuming causal relations between ozone depletion and climate change, that could lead to unfounded optimism towards the climate crisis.

Biodiversity loss is a complex issue and a risk that education cannot overlook. Teachers play a crucial role in how biodiversity, and in particular local biodiversity, is understood. To provide insight into how to improve communication on the subject, we investigate teachers’ perspectives and social representations regarding biodiversity, their fluency in terms of Internet use, their familiarity with biodiversity web portals and perceived pedagogical usefulness of technology. A sample of 243 K–12 schoolteachers of multiple scientific domains from eight Azorean islands answered an online survey, including three free-word association tests using inductive terms such as ‘Internet’, ‘biodiversity’ and ‘familiar biodiversity portals’. Overall, the schoolteachers failed to incorporate the multidimensionality of the biodiversity concept (including natural science teachers) or to show technological fluency, and they tended not to use biodiversity web portals as tools to engage students in teaching activities. Our results indicate that teachers’ perspectives about biodiversity need to be broadened and improved and that it is worth exploring whether information and communication technology represents a window of opportunity to do so. As an example, biodiversity web portals, which are widely recognized as trustworthy information repositories, may be used to engage teachers in this endeavour.

This article discusses how three Finnish regional newspapers represented older people's digital competences and internet use in their daily coverage. The study explored media representations from the perspective of social representations and sought to answer the following questions: In what kind of internet user roles do the articles portray older people? How and with what kind of images do the articles portray older people's digital competences in various internet user roles? How are older people positioned at a societal level in the articles? The analysis revealed that older people were portrayed as incompetent outcasts of a digitalised society. However, there was a clear difference according to whether older people were portrayed as recipients of public services or as consumers of private services. As targets of public services, older people were predominantly portrayed as happy targets, who welcomed the services provided for them. This result can be interpreted as part of the promotion of government digitalisation policies.

This paper examines how contextual (conversational) aspects and socially shared meanings might affect the participants' performance on a standardised memory test using the theoretical framework of social representations. A total of 97 members of centres for older adults located in Rome, Italy participated in a screening using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test. Prior to testing, a group of volunteers had organised a performance focused on events from the distant past, stimulating intergenerational reminiscence. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the first case, prior to administering the test, a psychotherapist talked to each participant about the performance, focusing on ageing and stressing the neutral aspects of its social representations, such as change and time. In the second case, performance was used to concentrate on positive aspects of the social representations of ageing, namely wisdom and experience. In line with the hypothesis, focusing on positive aspects of social representations of ageing (wisdom and experience) versus their neutral aspects (change and time) has resulted in improved performance on a standardised memory test. Practitioners (psychotherapists – experts in psycho-diagnostics) who administered the tests have been involved in the co-construction of the meaning of ageing, discussing a real-life situation: the common experience of intergenerational activity that involved the participants' memories of their urban environment.

The study describes the representations of 453 Portuguese students about the present financial and economic crisis, examining the impact of the family financial situation on these representations, and the relationship between these representations and different factors likely to influence them. An initial word association task produced 2339 responses, from which 86.75% were classified into six classes by a downward hierarchical classification. Four classes (58.26% of the corpus) confirmed that the austerity measures implemented in Portugal affected the respondents with different degrees of severity: respondents described the consequences of the crisis in terms of misery, difficulties, or change, depending on their family’s income. More generally, the discourses (41.73% of the corpus) pointed out the factors that were viewed as responsible for the crisis as well as the geopolitical situation of Portugal. The answers given to opinion scales revealed a consistent pattern of results: respondents with a lower family income experienced less positive emotions toward the crisis (η2 = .03, p = .007), more negative emotions, stronger feelings of vulnerability and relative deprivation that resulted from comparison with others (all η2 ≥ .05, p < .001). However, the unequal consequences of the crisis were reflected neither in differences in the respondents’ expectations about their future situation, which they foresaw without great changes, nor in their lack of willingness to participate in protest actions against the austerity measures.

This research examined the role of humour in power-differentiated wage bargaining conversations. We collected transcripts of wage bargaining between the local labour union and management negotiators of a multinational beverage company operating in the Philippines. Through conversation analysis, we determined how both parties utilised humor to challenge or maintain power relations even as both labour and management worked towards a wage bargaining agreement. Findings show that humour was used to maintain intergroup harmony, subvert authority and control the negotiation. Our findings may be useful for labour organisations and multinational corporations that operate in Southeast Asian countries with historically tumultuous labour relations such as the Philippines. Studies have shown how humour can play a significant role in various social interactions, such as business meetings (Rogerson-Revell, 2007), conversations between friends (Hay, 2000) and co-workers (Holmes, 2000), problem solving (Dunbar, Banas, Rodriguez, Liu, & Abra, 2012), conflict negotiations (Maemura & Horita, 2012) and price haggling (O’Quin & Aronoff, 1981). We note, however, that humour analysis rarely considers asymmetric features of social interactions occurring within the context of negotiation.

Distance to the object is a new approach that highlights the complex nature of the link between groups and social representations. It is composed of three elements: knowledge, involvement, and level of practices associated with the social object. This study aims to replicate a previous study that has demonstrated the validity of distance to the object in order to explore social representations of cannabis. We carried out a research on the social representations of cocaine. Respondents (n = 200) completed a questionnaire including opinions related to cocaine and constitutive elements of the distance to cocaine. The regression analysis on the representational dimensions revealed a significant effect of the distance variable on two dimensions (social facilitator, addiction and social dangerousness). The groups that were “distant” from the object showed stronger adherence to the normative component than to the functional component of SR, in opposition to those who were “close” to the object. The concept of distance to the object is thus heuristic as it offers an integrative grid of reading that permits to understand and highlight the link individuals maintain with a social representation.

Within the social representations’ field of research, the “mute zone” hypothesis considers that some objects are characterized by counternormative content that people usually do not express in standard conditions of production. Within the framework of this approach, this study aims to explore the variations in the expression about the Gypsy community following the manipulation of different contexts and the issues associated with a pluri-methodological approach of data analysis. Indeed, two methodologies have been combined. The participants were asked to express themselves in public or in private. In addition, the identity of the experimenter was also manipulated as she presented herself as a Gypsy or not. Then, through a set of analyses based on a methodological triangulation approach, we were able to observe a recurrent modulation of the participants’ answers. These analyses highlighted a greater incidence of the expression of counternormative elements when the context of expression was private and especially when the experimenter did not present herself as a Gypsy (p < .01, ηp ² = .06). These results will be discussed in terms of the contribution of the methodologies employed and their comparison within the framework of the study of counternormative content.

The goal of this work was to analyze the social representations that women of three different age groups had about aging, rejuvenating, and methods of rejuvenation. The research was performed in São Paulo between 2004 and 2005. The participants of this research were three groups of women of different ages: 19 to 24 years, 25 to 35 years, and over 60 years. The data were collected by the focus group technique. Data was analyzed using the lexical analysis software ALCESTE 4.5. The main results show a social representation of aging centered on losses and gains. The subjects appraised the possibility of using rejuvenating methods only when it was extremely necessary, because of the health risks that most of them involve. The three groups agreed about natural methods of rejuvenating instead of resorting to invasive methods.

In the present article, we examine the extent to which legal norms related tofamily matters are in line with the diverse social representations of currentconjugal life, more particularly as concerns the economic interdependence of thecouple during or subsequent to their union. Two Quebec legal measures compelattention: the division of the family patrimony and the obligation of supportpayable to the former partner. The present analysis is based on an empiricalstudy involving couples living together in Quebec. Whereas current legaldiscourse concerning unmarried cohabitation appears focused on spousal support,our survey has brought out two elements that could challenge the current legalapproach. When it comes to social representations, we find that the awarding ofsupport to the partner is highly controversial. The majority of our respondentsalso believe that the family patrimony should be shared equally, whether or notthe couple is married, and more especially when there are children, the propertyof the household being deemed to be the fruit of a joint and family-orientedeffort.

The present study, aligned with the structural approach on social representations (SR), aimed at comparing dichotomous (central vs. peripheral) and continuous models of structural status of SR elements. The sample was formed by 114 undergraduate students who completed context independence tasks and resistance to change evaluations related to 30 elements from 3 SR objects. Non-nested regression models having resistance to change as the criterion variable and dichotomous and continuous operationalizations of symbolic value as predictors were compared. Statistical results complemented by follow-up t-tests challenge the dichotomous model and support a continuous quadratic one. The curve is interpreted as being related to different evaluations when elements are attributed to a majority or a minority and point out to the need to employ within subjects designs in future research assessing more properties with composite measures.

Using a social representations lens, we examined subjective meanings of land entitlements in Central Mindanao among Muslims and Christians. In Study 1, we collected survey data from 231 students from the University of Southern Mindanao in Central Mindanao, asking them: ‘If you were to tell the story of land ownership in Cotabato, what three topics would you want to include in your story?’ Results of our hierarchical evocation analysis show that Christians are concerned with direct conflicts or actual intergroup confrontations while Muslims emphasise land issues. Study 2 implemented Focauldian Discursive Analysis to evaluate two separate focused group discussions by Muslim and Christian village leaders on the question: ‘Who really owns the land in Cotabato, specifically here in Midsayap?’ Findings indicate that Christians hold on to a legal story while Muslims use the ancestral domain narrative to cohere subjective claims to the contested territory. We discuss our results in the light of the role of legalese in an asymmetric territorial conflict and more specifically, the Framework Agreement signed last October 2012 by both the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

This study's interest relies on adolescents' social representations of unprotected sex, more precisely on the relationship between the attitude towards the preservative and the reason attribution for its non use. 1386 secondary school students took part in the study, in the Brazilian cities of Florianópolis, Itajaí and Balneário Camboriú. In order to verify reasons attributed by the students, we focused on the sample that had sexual experiences without using the condom during last year. Data was analyzed with software ALCESTE, which showed three different classes of explanations for the non use of the preservative: the moment of the intercourse (unpredictable and incontrollable), trust in the partner and the option of the contraceptive pill, instead of the preservatives, in avoiding pregnancy. The students' attitudes towards the preservative are less favourable among those who maintain sexual intercourse with known people. The results revealed two representations of AIDS: one of trust in the partner and another of the experience with sex and the preservative – the first one gives sense to the adolescents' experiences with known sexual partners and the second, with less known sexual partners.