Female Politicians’ Gendered Communicative Structures

Recently there has been growing number of women running for national political positions. This study presents multimodal gender communicative-structures of female politicians. We analyzed 80 political interviews by all female politicians who ran for the 20th Knesset in Israel (n=40). The findings revealed novel integrated structures that combine masculine-verbal and feminine-nonverbal communicative-patterns. Unexpectedly, the adaptation of the mixed multimodal communicativestructure was strongly correlated with power, particularly in terms of seniority. In contemporary political communication, the inclusion of feminine-nonverbal communicative-patterns is a manifestation of political strength rather than of weakness. However, female politicians from cultural minorities express masculine-verbal and nonverbal communication-patterns, constituting the traditional communication-pattern of female politicians, which assumes that the key to female politicians’ success is adopting masculine communicative-structure.

„Wie ist das denn in deinem Heimatland?“ Kommunikative Muster invektiver Kulturvergleiche im Orientierungskurs

The German Orientation Course is considered as one of the most important measures of integration policy in Germany. It is a mandatory German language and cultural course dedicated to refugees and immigrants. It aims to provide knowledge about the German political system and certain ‘cultural’ German values. This article examines the Orientation Course as an intercultural encounter, as a place which is institutionally and politically framed and also as a hierarchically didactic arena where cultural mediation takes place. It illustrates also how invective communication happens through the establishment of certain communicative patterns which can degrade or disparage social groups. Based on participatory observation in the Orientation Course using the Genre Analysis, this article argues in which ways these communicative patterns can affect the social order and unite or shape groups.

Translation as a Reconstructing Factor of Public Relations

Translation is very important to create an effective cultural exchange since it substantiates the concept of intercultural communication. Given that the source text is the embodiment of the cultural aspects of a given society or nation, the author makes use of his/her mother tongue to communicate his/her ideas about how he/she perceives his community with his/her readers. Thus, the source text mirrors particular aspects of a given culture and portrays how people of a certain community live and interact. Seen from this perspective, translation is definitively considered as a reconstructing factor of public relations as it draws attention to how linguistic systems operate within social structures and the extent to which cultural patterns prescribe rigid rules on language. The interconnectedness of language and culture is at the heart of public relations, for it determines the nature of relations that circulate within a social structure. Translation, in this sense, deals with the different linguistic and cultural aspects that make up a given social structure in an attempt to come up with an informative conclusion about the communicative patterns that characterize certain nations or communities.

Transit Zones, Locales, and Locations: How Digital Annotations Affect Communication in Public Places

The article presents an analytical concept, the Constitution of Accessibility through Meaning of Public Places (CAMPP) model. The CAMPP model distinguishes different manifestations of public places according to how they facilitate and restrict communication between urbanites. It describes public places along two analytical dimensions: their degree of perceived accessibility and the elaboration of knowledge necessary to participate in place-related activities. Three patterns of communicative interaction result from these dimensions: civil inattention, small talk, and sociability. We employ the CAMPP model as an analytical tool to investigate how digital annotations affect communicative patterns and perceptions of accessibility of public places. Based on empirical observations and interviews with users of smartphone apps that provide digital annotations, such as Foursquare City Guide, we observe that digital annotations tend to reflect and reinforce existing patterns of communication and rarely evoke changes in the perceived accessibility of public places.

Encouraging Emotional Conversations in Children With Complex Communication Needs: An Observational Case Study

Children with complex communication needs (CCN) regularly have barriers to express and discuss emotions, and have fewer opportunities to participate in emotional conversations. The study explores and analyzes the changes after a training program focused on offering an interactive home learning environment that encouraged and modeled emotion-related conversations between a parent and a child with CCN within storybook-reading contexts. An observational design (nomothetic/follow-up/multidimensional) was used to explore and analyze the changes in the communicative interaction around emotions between mother-child. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies were used to provide the child access to emotion-related vocabulary. The training program resulted in the mother providing more opportunities to engage her child in emotional conversations, suggesting that when opportunities and resources to talk about emotions were promoted, the child showed more engagement in emotion-related conversations using his AAC system. The mother–child communicative patterns and behavioral relationships observed during the phases are also presented. This case study illustrates the importance of a primary communication partners’ role in facilitating emotional conversations, and the promising efficacy of a training program implemented in a storybook interactive learning environment to promote conversations about emotion-related events while encouraging children with CCN to learn, explore, express, and discuss emotions.

The Embodied-Enactive-Interactive Brain: Bridging Neuroscience and Creative Arts Therapies

The recognition and incorporation of evidence-based neuroscientific concepts into creative arts therapeutic knowledge and practice seem valuable and advantageous for the purpose of integration and professional development. Moreover, exhilarating insights from the field of neuroscience coincide with the nature, conceptualization, goals, and methods of Creative Arts Therapies (CATs), enabling comprehensive understandings of the clinical landscape, from a translational perspective. This paper contextualizes and discusses dynamic brain functions that have been suggested to lie at the heart of intra- and inter-personal processes. Touching upon fundamental aspects of the self and self-other interaction, the state-of-the-art neuroscientific-informed views will shed light on mechanisms of the embodied, predictive and relational brain. The conceptual analysis introduces and interweaves the following contemporary perspectives of brain function: firstly, the grounding of mental activity in the lived, bodily experience will be delineated; secondly, the enactive account of internal models, or generative predictive representations, shaped by experience, will be defined and extensively deliberated; and thirdly, the interpersonal simulation and synchronization mechanisms that support empathy and mentalization will be thoroughly considered. Throughout the paper, the cross-talks between the brain and the body, within the brain through functionally connected neural networks and in the context of agent-environment dynamics, will be addressed. These communicative patterns will be elaborated on to unfold psychophysiological linkage, as well as psychopathological shifts, concluding with the neuroplastic change associated with the formulation of CATs. The manuscript suggests an integrative view of the brain-body-mind in contexts relevant to the therapeutic potential of the expressive creative arts and the main avenues by which neuroscience may ground, enlighten and enrich the clinical psychotherapeutic practice.

Vaccine Discourse During the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Thematic Structure and Source Pattern Study of Tweets (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Understanding public discourse about a COVID-19 vaccine in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic may provide key insights concerning vaccine acceptance or hesitancy. However, few studies have investigated the communicative patterns in which Twitter users participate discursively in vaccine discussions. OBJECTIVE This study aims to investigate 1) the major themes that emerged from public conversation on Twitter concerning vaccines for COVID-19, 2) the topics that were emphasized in tweets with either positive or negative sentiment toward a COVID-19 vaccine, and 3) the type of online accounts in which tweets with either positive or negative sentiment were more likely to circulate. METHODS We randomly extracted a total of 349,979 COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets from the initial four-month period of pandemic planning and initial lockdowns (between March 1 and June 30, 2020). Out of 64,216 unique tweets, a total of 23,133 (36.03%) tweets were classified as positive and 14,051 (21.88%) as negative toward a COVID-19 vaccine using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) machine learning algorithm. We conducted Structural Topic Modeling (STM) and Network Analysis (NA) to reveal the distinct thematic structure and connection patterns that characterize positive and negative discourse toward a COVID-19 vaccine on Twitter. RESULTS Our STM analysis revealed the most prominent topic that emerged from the U.S. public discussion on Twitter of a COVID-19 vaccine was “other infectious diseases”, followed by “vaccine safety concerns”, and “conspiracy theory.” Comparing the thematic focus of positive and negative discourses, while the positive discourse demonstrated a broad range of themes such as “vaccine development”, “vaccine effectiveness”, and “safety test”, negative discourse was more narrowly focused on topics such as “conspiracy theory” and “safety concerns.” Beyond topical differences, positive discourse was more likely to interact with verified sources such as scientists/medical sources and the media/journalists, whereas negative discourse tended to interact with politicians, online influencers, and suspended accounts. CONCLUSIONS Positive and negative discourse was not only structured around distinct topics but also circulated within different networks. Our findings suggest that public health communicators need to address specific topics of public concern in varying information hubs to deliver more tailored messages based on audience segmentation, potentially increasing COVID-19 vaccine uptake.