Pedro Costa

The topic of climate change raises awareness, especially among young people. A proposition based on “empathic journalism” for this sensitive issue could address the need for more alterity and empathy: less based on data from the climate crisis and more focused on empathy and the Other, in this case, those who suffer under its effects.Based on data from a study carried out in two countries (Brazil and Portugal), entitled “Youth Engagement with Sustainable Development Goals: The Choice of Moral Arguments in the News for Use in the Debate—Engage for SDG”, that addresses the engagement of young people in the environmental debate through Twitter, we realized that it is necessary to change the way journalism is produced, if the purpose is to attract such an audience to consume news about climate change. In addition, we noticed that the most interesting news to young people in these countries refer more to participation and climate action than to the destruction of biomes.Such results suggest a more empathetic way of communicating climate change, more focused on caring for the affected populations, reciprocity between nations that suffer from environmental events and climate justice, rising interest similar to that seen in the new eco-activism, promoted by young people around the planet.We might otherwise fall into the same journalistic patterns that contribute to eco-anxiety or climate anxiety. This proposal will present a reflection from the data collected by our investigation, which imagines the foundations for more empathetic journalism, that engages young people in the environmental debate through their care for Other. The theoretical framework will come from Social Psychology, like Goleman (Inteligência social: a nova ciência do relacionamento humano. Círculo de Leitores, 2006; Inteligência emocional. Temas e Debates, Lisboa, 2010), Sociology, like Gabriel Tarde (As Leis da Imitação. Rés Editora, Porto, 1978), and Communication Sciences, like Rocha (O Jornalismo Sensível: Leituras Plurais da Realidade Apresentada pelos Afetos. Appris Editora, Curitiba, 2022), reflecting on the challenges of rigorous journalism, but simultaneously with a greater emotional, social, empathic, and ecosystem intelligence.

Covid-19 brought back memories of past pandemics. In society, a pandemic imaginary was installed, framing an imaginary landscape, alongside a rationalized pandemic intellect to which the media contributed a lot. We live immersed in tele technologies, adding present to the past and past to the present. At a time when home confinement became the rule, this was even more highlighted. In this screen technological Era, social practices were even more subject to the five great sociotechnical effects that condition information and the way it articulates memory and the present: ubiquity, instantaneity, acceleration, mobilization and presentism. This article intends to demonstrate the presence of the imaginary of past pandemics in the present (Applying Einstein's Theory of General Relativity), the way in which we appropriate these memories to create solutions and the way in which we mix the present with the solutions that came from the past.

Background: Family sense of coherence can be defined as the cognitive map of a family that enables the family to deal with stress during their lifetime. FSOC is the degree to which a family perceives family life as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. To the best of our knowledge, few studies have used this scale, and very few have evaluated FSOC Scale psychometric properties.Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the original FSOC Scale in a sample of Portuguese caregivers of children aged between 10 and 15 years.Methods: A total of 329 caregivers completed a sociodemographic questionnaire and the FSOC Scale. Analyses were performed to evaluate the factor structure of the FSOC Scale with 26 items as well as composite reliability, internal consistency, convergent-related validity, and discriminant-related validity of the scale scores.Results: The findings supported a three-factor solution for a 13-item version that maintains the original FSOC Scale structure. The three FSOC dimensions presented a good fit to the data. Cronbach’s alpha, composite reliability, and convergent-related validity were considered very good for the FSOC Scale. No evidence of discriminant-related validity was found for the dimensions of FSOC.Conclusion: The findings support the use of the Portuguese FSOC Scale for research and clinical purposes with Portuguese caregivers. Future research is necessary to further develop a European Portuguese version of the FSOC Scale.Implications: This study provides a psychometric evaluation of FSOC Scale characteristics in a Portuguese sample. The results are helpful for clinicians and family therapists who work with families since it could help them to assess the resources of families and their ability to cope with adversity and enhance their strengths.

The purpose of the present systematic and critical review was to assess the findings and to identify the gaps in the literature concerning gay and bisexual fathers. A comprehensive search of relevant literature using electronic databases and reference lists for articles published until December 2016 was conducted. A total of 63 studies, spanning from 1979 to 2016, were collected. More than half of the studies were published after 2011 and the overwhelming majority were conducted in the United States. Nine themes were identified in the studies reviewed: (1) Pathways to fatherhood; (2) Motivations for fatherhood; (3) Parenting experiences and childrearing; (4) Family life and relationship quality; (5) Gender and father identities and gender-role orientation; (6) Disclosure of sexual identity; (7) Social climate; (8) Father’s psychosocial adjustment; and (9) Children’s psychosocial adjustment. It was found that research on gay fatherhood appears to be more heterogeneous than on lesbian motherhood, perhaps because of the variety of pathways to parenthood (via co-parenting, adoption, fostering, or surrogacy). Two-father families are becoming more visible in research on sexual minority parenting and gradually transforming the conceptualization of parenting in family research.

The aim of this research was to explore the elements that configure the quality of care among three Mexican same-sex planned families: two female-parented families (through donor insemination) and a male-parented one (through adoption). The first family consisted of two mothers and a 3-year-old daughter; the second one had two mothers and a 1.5-year-old set of boy twins and the third family consisted of two fathers and a 2-year-old girl. It was assumed that Ainsworth’s notions of quality of care organization are useful in order to understand caregiver-child attachment relationships, regardless of the parents’ sexual orientation. A collective case study was selected due to the fact that these families shared their “unconventionality” (i.e. parents were not heterosexual) and the fact that they were planned, but each one constituted a particular case with a unique configuration. Four trained independent observers used the q-sort methodology (Maternal Behavior Q-Sort and Attachment Q-Sort) to describe parents’ and children’s behavior, respectively. The findings showed that parents were highly sensitive and all children used them as a secure base. To provide an in-depth examination of which elements configure the quality of care, a semi-structured interview with each parent was carried out. Through a thematic analysis, an over-arching theme named Affections and Emotions was identified, together with six subthemes: 1) Creating an affective environment; 2) Being available; 3) Acknowledging and expressing emotions; 4) Perceiving, interpreting and responding adequately to the child’s real self; 5) Taking the child’s perspective into account; and 6) Agreeing on roles and dividing the tasks. In order to showcase the particular configuration of gay parenting, the male-headed family narrative is reported in detail, because gay parents have been perceived as violating traditional gender roles as well as the hegemonic model of masculinity. The findings were consistent with the notion of quality of care as proposed by Ainsworth and her collaborators. The implications of the methodological device and research regarding same-sex planned families are discussed so as to understand the organization of the caregiving environment.

This study examines the extent to which Community Development Banks can challenge traditional market-driven commodification by promoting community-oriented commoning. The existing literature associates the experience of commoning in market society with a decoupling from commodification and presents commoning as inherently communitarian. This article draws on data from the case of community banks in the south of Brazil to demonstrate how commons can emerge from economic forms encompassing diverse institutions and exist alongside market exchange rather than being anchored solely in community. The organizations examined in this study were actively co-created with the participation of the authors as part of a project driven by critical performativity in disadvantaged Brazilian neighborhoods. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi, we show how the two domains—market-driven commodities and community-oriented commons—coexist within different modes of economic integration. We conclude that while these organizations facilitate the construction of alternative futures by reinforcing social institutions that are not contingent on the market, the implications of this should be considered with caution. The study contributes to the existing literature on commons by highlighting the complexity of economic motivations within coexisting institutions and by providing a compelling empirical example of how to methodologically engage with the Polanyian framework from a substantivist perspective.

This article seeks to understand why femininity seems to be often present in artificial intelligence and tackle the questions that arise when this phenomenon is subject to closer inspection. It draws on a previous study on the relationship between gender and AI, complemented by an analysis of digital assistants such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri that reveals how these entities tend to be feminized through their anthropomorphization, the tasks that they perform and their behavioural traits. Furthering this discussion, this article addresses current trends of development of digital assistants and their stance towards gender, considering the functions or features that are being prioritized in AI evolution. It then focuses on the main questions raised by researchers and academics when examining the phenomenon and confronts these views with discussions around the feminization of AI in the context of online media coverage. This debate also highlights how common conceptions of AI and its portrayals of gender are influenced by bodies of fiction. Finally, the project Conversations with ELIZA seeks to comment on this phenomenon by ironically exposing and reinforcing common stereotypes and gender assumptions. In this manner, this study seeks to incite reflection on how artificial intelligence is reflecting our social and cultural views back to us.