The OSROR model of communication effects has repeatedly suggested political discussion (R1), knowledge and efficacy (O2) as significant mediators through which news media use facilitates political participation. The present study contends that the application of the well-established OSROR framework to research linking social media use and citizen engagement may not wholly address social media's implications for a desired democratic citizenry in an age of growing partisan divide and political mis/disinformation. In an attempt to offer a more comprehensive understanding on the potential influence of social media on democracy, this dissertation aims to reimagine the communication mediation model of social media effect on participation by incorporating recent insights on (1) social media's potential to promote exposure to political disagreements and (2) the negative effect of social media use on political learning. Using a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults, this study finds that perceiving disagreements on social media positively moderates the path from social media use to the frequency of political talk (S-R1), and suggests that the positive effect of political discussion on internal efficacy (R1-O2) may depend on the level of perceived knowledge, underlining the little role that factual political knowledge plays in the pathways from social media use to civic participation. Implications of these findings and future research directions are discussed.

When we disagree about fundamental issues, especially issues such as politics or religion, it can be incredibly difficult to maintain close interpersonal relationships. These differences have ended friendships and caused rifts in families. We need a tool to help us build more resilient relationships despite real and present differences. In Brave Talk, communications expert Melody Stanford Martin offers just such a tool: impasse. By learning to treat every conflict as if it's an impasse and temporarily suspend our desire to resolve differences, we make space for deeper understanding and stronger ties. Brave Talk offers hands-on skill-building in critical thinking, power sharing, and rhetoric. Combining real-life storytelling, engaging illustrations, and rigorous academic sources, this book blends humor, creativity, and interactive learning to help everyday people develop better skills for navigating conflict in order to build stronger relationships and healthier communities.

Make workplace conflict resolution a game that EVERYBODY wins! Recent studies show that typical managers devote more than a quarter of their time to resolving coworker disputes. The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games offers a wealth of activities and exercises for groups of any size that let you manage your business (instead of managing personalities). Part of the acclaimed, bestselling Big Books series, this guide offers step-by-step directions and customizable tools that empower you to heal rifts arising from ineffective communication, cultural/personality clashes, and other specific problem areas—before they affect your organization's bottom line. Let The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games help you to: Build trust Foster morale Improve processes Overcome diversity issues And more Dozens of physical and verbal activities help create a safe environment for teams to explore several common forms of conflict—and their resolution. Inexpensive, easy-to-implement, and proved effective at Fortune 500 corporations and mom-and-pop businesses alike, the exercises in The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games delivers everything you need to make your workplace more efficient, effective, and engaged.

Self-concept and coping behaviour are important aspects of development in adolescence. Despite their developmental significance, however, the two areas have rarely been considered in relation to each other. This book is the first in which the two areas are brought together; it suggests that this interaction can open the way to new possibilities for further research and to new implications for applied work with adolescents. Two separate chapters review research carried out in each of the areas. These are followed by a series of more empirically focussed chapters in which issues such as changes in relationship patterns, difficult school situations, leaving school, use of leisure, anxiety and suicidal behaviour are examined in the context of self-concept and coping. The final chapter seeks to identify some of the central themes emerging from this work and discusses possible research and applied implications.

We describe how wilderness visitors perceive changes in wilderness use, impacts, and management. We examine how visitors have responded to change, both behaviorally and cognitively. The study was based on a sample of visitors to 19 Forest Service wildernesses in Oregon and Washington. Many respondents said the types of wilderness trips they take have changed since their earlier wilderness trips. Most perceived adverse change. Use has increased (particularly day use), resulting in crowding and a widespread sense that these places seem less like wilderness than they did in the past. Most of these visitors learned to cope with these adverse changes by either adjusting the way they think about these places or by adjusting their behavior. Cognitive coping, particularly rationalization, is very common. Most visitors do not consider changing conditions to be very problematic, probably because their coping mechanisms are successful. This explains lack of support for management actions that restrict access. Very few visitors cannot cope with crowded conditions. Displacement of visitors away from crowded places does not seem prevalent enough for concern about increased crowding and biophysical impact in places in wilderness that are currently lightly used or the validity of on-site visitor surveys.

Dyadic coping is a concept that has reached increased attention in psychological science within the last 20 years. Dyadic coping conceptualizes the way couples cope with stress together in sharing appraisals of demands, planning together how to deal with the stressors and engage in supportive or joint dyadic coping. Among the different theories of dyadic coping, the Systemic Transactional Model (STM; Bodenmann, 1995, 1997, 2005) has been applied to many studies on couples’ coping with stress. While a recent meta-analysis shows that dyadiccoping is a robust and consistent predictor of relationship satisfaction and couple’s functioning in community samples, some studies also reveal the significance of dyadic coping in dealing with psychological disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety) or severe illness (e.g., cancer, diabetes, COPD, etc.). Researchers all over the world build their research on this or other concepts of dyadic coping and many typically use the Dyadic Coping Inventory (DCI) for assessing dyadic coping. So far, research on dyadic coping has been systematically presented in two books, one written by Revenson, Kayser, & Bodenmann in 2005, focussing on emerging perspectives on couples’ coping, the other by Falconier, Randall, & Bodenmann more recently in 2016, addressing intercultural aspects of dyadic coping in African, American, Asian and European couples. This eBook gives an insight into recent dyadic coping research in different areas and countries.

In this article, we demonstrate that physiological reactions to a conflict affect the way individuals manage their conflicts and, in effect, how the conflict affects decision making. Instead of a uniform positive or negative conflict-performance relationship, we show that a task-related team conflict can be functional when it is perceived, and physiologically experienced, as a challenge, but dysfunctional when it is perceived, and physiologically experienced, as a threat. The results were contingent on the level of power of a team member. Specifically, results show that high power individuals make inferior decisions when their cardiovascular reactions to a conflict indicated that they were threatened, while the reverse relationship was found for low power individuals. Together the findings illustrate the important, but often neglected, role human physiology plays in conflict management.