Fuzzy-trace theory explains risky decision making in children, adolescents, and adults, incorporating social and cultural factors as well as differences in impulsivity. Here, we provide an overview of the theory, including support for counterintuitive predictions (e.g., when adolescents "rationally" weigh costs and benefits, risk taking increases, but it decreases when the core gist of a decisi...

Spoken words are highly variable. A single word may never be uttered the same way twice. As listeners, we regularly encounter speakers of different ages, genders, and accents, increasing the amount of variation we face. How listeners understand spoken words as quickly and adeptly as they do despite this variation remains an issue central to linguistic theory. We propose that learned acoustic pa...

The focus of this paper is on how popular representations of the countryside provide countryside users with a discursive framework to make sense of unfamiliar countryside-based risks, taking Lyme disease as an example. Sixty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted with 82 visitors in Richmond Park, New Forest, and Exmoor National Park in the UK. The data were analysed using thematic analy...

OBJECTIVE To describe the social representations of illness among people with chronic kidney disease undergoing haemodialysis. METHOD Descriptive, qualitative research, anchored on the social representations theory. This study was conducted in the municipality of Ponta Grossa, Paraná State, Brazil, with 23 adults with chronic kidney disease. Data were collection between February and November ...

This paper interrogates online representations of robot companions for children, including promotional material by manufacturers, media articles and technology blogs. The significance of the study lies in its contribution to understanding attitudes to robots. The prospect of childcare robots is particularly controversial ethically, and is associated with emotive arguments. The sampled material ...

OBJECTIVES to analyze and compare the incorporation of the ethical-doctrinal and organizational principles into the social representations of the Unified Health System (SUS) among health professionals. METHOD a study grounded in Social Representations Theory, undertaken with 125 subjects, in eight health institutions in Rio de Janeiro. The free word association technique was applied to the in...

The study aimed to identify the social representations of AIDS produced by female sex workers. This is a descriptive, exploratory study was conducted in five nightclubs in Teresina, with 30 female sex workers. Data were collected from October 2008 to January 2009, through the focus group technique, rendered in software Lexical Contextual Analysis of a Set of Segments Texts and analyzed by desce...

OBJECTIVE To understand the social representations of puerperal women regarding the contents of the educational practices carried out by nursing in the puerperium. METHOD Descriptive and qualitative study, carried out from June to September 2014, in Fortaleza, Ceará State, Brazil. Nineteen puerperal women were administered a semi-structured interview. The Theory of Social Representations was ...