Reporting daily and critical events: journalists’ perceptions of coping and savouring strategies,and of organizational support

Although journalists are increasingly being viewed by scientific research as an at-risk occupational group, there is still little knowledge on their strategies for dealing with occupational stressors, in both daily work settings and in critical scenarios, and on the support provided by the media organizations. Taking the occupational stress model as a framework, 25 Portuguese journalists, experienced in reporting critical events, were interviewed on their perceptions of the coping and savouring strategies they use, as well as of their organizations’ support in daily work and critical events. Differences among these variables, according to deployment frequency to critical events were statistically analysed. The data content analysis showed that emotion-focused coping strategies were the most frequently mentioned for both settings, whereas savouring strategies were only referred to for critical events. Perceptions of coping strategies were four times more frequent than those of savouring, and the need for organizational support was especially stressed. Significant differences were identified in all variables according to the number of deployments to critical events. These findings may contribute to a reflection on the role of media organizations in promoting journalists’ occupational health in both settings. The article closes by suggesting directions for future studies.     

Behavioral variability as avoidance behavior

This study aimed to investigate whether variable patterns of responses can be acquired and maintained by negative reinforcement under an avoidance contingency. Six male Wistar rats were exposed to sessions in which behavioral variability was reinforced according to a Lag contingency: Sequences of three responses on two levers had to differ from one, two or three previous sequences for shocks to be avoided (Lag 1, Lag 2 and Lag 3, respectively). Performance under the Lag conditions was compared with performance on a Yoke condition in which the animals received the same reinforcement frequency and distribution as in the Lag condition but behavioral variability was not required. The results showed that most of the subjects varied their sequences under the Lag contingencies, avoiding shocks with relatively high probability (≥ 0.7). Under the Yoke procedure, responding continued to occur with high probability, but the behavioral variability decreased. These results suggest that behavioral variability can be negatively reinforced.     

Definability and Invariance

In his thesis Para uma Teoria Geral dos Homomorfismos (1944), the Portuguese mathematician José Sebastião e Silva constructed an abstract or generalized Galois theory, that is intimately linked to F. Klein’s Erlangen Program and that foreshadows some notions and results of today’s model theory; an analogous theory was independently worked out by M. Krasner in 1938. In this paper, we present a version of the theory making use of tools which were not at Silva’s disposal. At the same time, we tried to keep in mind, so much as possible, the gist of his standpoint.     

Validation of a Portuguese Version of the Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale

The paper describes the development of the Portuguese version of the Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale and the examination of its psychometric properties. A sample of 367 Portuguese students completed the Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS; Huebner in Sch Psychol Int 12:231–240, 1991a), Children’s Hope Scale (CHS; Synder in J Pediatr Psychol 22:399–421, 1997), Global Self-Worth Sub-scale (Harter, S. (1985). Manual for the self-perception profile for children. Denver: University of Denver) and Mental Health Inventory-5 (MHI-5; Berwick et al. in Medical Care 29:169–176, 1991). The first step includes translation, back-translation, inspection for lexical equivalence and content validity, and cognitive debriefing. Then we considered reliability, factor structure, and criterion-related validity. The validation process of the Portuguese SLSS version shows psychometric properties similar to the English language SLSS, suggesting that it measures the same construct in the same way. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Temporal and causal order effects in thinking about what might have been

When people think counterfactually about what might have been different for a sequence of events, they are influenced by the order in which the events occurred. They tend to mentally undo the most recent event in a temporal sequence of two events. But they tend to mentally undo the first event in a causal sequence of four events. We report the results of two experiments that show that the temporal and causal order effects are not dependent on the number of events in the sequence. Our first experiment, with 300 participants, shows that the temporal order effect occurs for sequences with four events as well as for sequences with two events. Our second experiment, with 372 participants, shows that the causal order effect occurs for sequences with two events as well as for sequences with four events. We discuss the results in terms of the mental representations that people construct of temporal and causal sequences.     

Living Beyond the Other

This article attempts to bring philosophy to clinical psychological practice by applying philosophical concepts to autobiographical experience. Through reflective engagement with personal narratives, the author tells three personal stories to illustrate ways in which the concept of Dasein in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas’s development of an ethical responsibility to the Other, in tandem with thanatology, helped the author come to terms with existential dilemmas evoked by the deaths of others.