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We aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of public views and ways of talking about antibiotics. Four focus groups were held with members of the public. In addition, 39 households were recruited and interviews, diaries of medicine taking, diaries of any contact with medication were used to explore understanding and use of medication. Discussions related to antibiotics were identified and analyzed. Participants in this study were worried about adverse effects of antibiotics, particularly for recurrent infections. Some were concerned that antibiotics upset the body’s “balance”, and many used strategies to try to prevent and treat infections without antibiotics. They rarely used military metaphors about infection (e.g., describing bacteria as invading armies) but instead spoke of clearing infections. They had little understanding of the concept of antibiotic resistance but they thought that over-using antibiotics was unwise because it would reduce their future effectiveness. Previous studies tend to focus on problems such as lack of knowledge, or belief in the curative powers of antibiotics for viral illness, and neglect the concerns that people have about antibiotics, and the fact that many people try to avoid them. We suggest that these concerns about antibiotics form a resource for educating patients, for health promotion and social marketing strategies.

Media representations of food are ubiquitous in contemporary society, and healthy eating features predominantly in such texts. This study explores the discursive construction of food and healthy eating in texts appearing in popular women's magazines, and examines the variety of positions and subjectivities offered to women readers of these texts. We find that such texts present quite complex constructions of nutritional health, based on scientific and biomedical discourses of nutrition interwoven with discourses of morality, feminine beauty and mothering. We conclude that these texts offer a conflictual space for women to traverse in efforts to position themselves as good mothers and moral and healthy eaters.

Previous research has demonstrated that talk about immigration can function to produce, reproduce and stabilize racism (Capdevila & Callaghan, 2008). In New Zealand (NZ), changes in immigration policy have seen a rapid increase in diverse groups of migrants with varied cultural backgrounds entering the country in the past two decades. Given its unique colonial history and 'settler nationality in a bicultural nation' (Bell, 2009), we explored how young NZ adults talk about and produce meanings and understandings of immigration, immigrants and cultural diversity. Appealing to notions of NZ as 'one society', as English speaking, and as English looking participants constructed NZ, NZ national identity and the NZ economy in particular ways. This constituted a nationalist rhetoric that was taken up in common-sense ways by participants to legitimize racist talk whilst simultaneously acting to locate participants themselves as reasonable and moral individuals. It is concluded that nationalist discourses function to reinforce patterns of social dominance and perpetuate the notion of New Zealanders as largely white, European-looking and English-speaking. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Key words: immigration; immigrants; New Zealand; discrimination; racism INTRODUCTIONAs international migration continues to increase around the world, countries hotly debate immigration and issues such as immigrant adjustment to host societies and challenges faced by societies in dealing with new migrants (Carr, 2010; UNDP, 2009). Psychological models of migration, based on theories developed in anthropology and sociology, have examined social and cultural changes experienced by migrants (e.g. Bretall & Hollifield, , reasons for migration and how it is temporally sustained, and consequences for the host society, (e.g. Heisler, 2000;Berry, 2001). Assimilation models have been used to capture the process of immigrant groups adopting cultural patterns of the host society whilst abandoning their native ethnic identity, whereas acculturation models have explored the interplay between the host majority and immigrant groups (e.g. Montreuil & Bourhis, 2001) and addressed issues around ethnic contact and prejudice to acculturation stress (Deaux, 2000). However, psychologists' measures in this field have focussed on individual attitudes towards factors such as intercultural contact, cultural maintenance and cultural and ethnic identity, neglecting broader social and cultural factors and downplaying the role of the majority host population (Bowskill, Lyons & Coyle, 2007). In contrast, a discursive, social constructionist approach to acculturation moves away from static and decontextualized accounts, enabling an exploration of wider socio-political forces and the role of 'the majority' to examine how 'lay theories' of cultural diversity are (re)produced (Bowskill et al., 2007). Previous discursive research on immigration has analysed print media and explored how acculturation rhetoric functioned to implicitly reinforce and reproduce assi...

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Food is related to health, both directly and symbolically, in complex ways. Also, social practices around food are highly gendered, and, in the context of family life, fall largely to mothers. This study examines mothers' talk about nutritional health, and food, health and dietary practices in the context of everyday life, using a discursive analysis of the talk from focus group discussions. Findings show that discourses surrounding nutritional health offer women a variety of conflictual subjectivities. If they do not engage in 'correct' dietary practices, women are positioned as immoral, both as individuals and as mothers. Further, their ability to determine which foods are 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' is undermined through a distrust of 'facts' and scientific evidence, and they are rendered susceptible to exploitation through claims made for food as health promoting. Together, these areas of conflict perpetuate subjectivities of anxiety around dietary practices.The women seek to re-position themselves and overcome these contradictions by offering a variety of legitimations for their dietary practices. In doing so, they resist nutritional health messages and reveal how such messages can have unintended effects.

The current research extends prior research linking negative emotions and emotion regulation tendencies to memory by investigating whether (a) naturally occurring negative emotions during routine weekly life are associated with more negatively biased memories of prior emotional experiences-a bias called projection; (b) tendencies to regulate emotions via expressive suppression are associated with greater projection bias in memory of negative emotions; and (c) greater projection bias in memory is associated with poorer future well-being. Participants (N = 308) completed a questionnaire assessing their general tendencies to engage in expressive suppression. Then, every week for 7 weeks, participants reported on (a) the negative emotions they experienced across the current week (e.g., "This week, I felt 'sad'"), (b) their memories of the negative emotions they experienced the prior week (e.g., "Last week, I felt 'sad'"), and (c) their well-being. First, participants demonstrated significant projection bias in memory: Greater negative emotions in a given week were associated with remembering emotions in the prior week more negatively than those prior emotions were originally reported. Second, projection bias in memory of negative emotions was greater for individuals who reported greater tendencies to regulate emotions via expressive suppression. Third, greater projection bias in memory of negative emotions was associated with reductions in well-being across weeks. These 3 novel findings indicate that (a) current negative emotions bias memory of past emotions, (b) this memory bias is magnified for people who habitually use expressive suppression to regulate emotions, and (c) this memory bias may undermine well-being over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

An extensive body of literature exists on the phenomena of poverty, charitable giving and the effectiveness of aid appeals. To date psychological research has predominantly focused on individualistic models to explain people's understandings of poverty and their charitable giving practices. Based upon a social constructionist epistemology, this study investigates how understandings of aid appeals, poverty and charitable giving are discursively produced and constructed in relation to one another through an analysis of New Zealand young adults' talk about these issues. Data were collected from three focus group discussions among pre-existing friendship groups comprising three male and nine female students aged between 18 and 25. A brief video clip of aid appeals was used to stimulate discussion on poverty and charitable giving. Analysis of these discussions revealed three discursive themes relating to the aid appeals: local versus international need, emotional arousal and insufficient information. Drawing upon these themes the participants constructed poverty as relative or extreme, and largely explained by educational deficits. They constructed charitable giving as solicited through aid appeals, as compromised through immunity to such appeals, and as diminished through positionings of self-help and self-responsibility. These discursive constructions were drawn on by participants to legitimate their own non-donor position. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Key words: aid appeals; charitable giving; poverty; discursive constructions; positioning; media; social context INTRODUCTION Poverty continues to be a widespread global phenomena despite international efforts to combat it. Latest figures published by the World Bank reveal that 1.1 billion people, one fifth of the world's population, live on less than $1 a day (World Bank, 2007). Since the early 1980s psychologists have been involved, alongside economists, political scientists, social policists and sociologists in the study of poverty and charitable giving. Psychological research has largely focused on individuals' and groups' attributions for the causation of poverty (e.g. respectively, Feagin, 1972;Furnham, 1982;and Campbell, Carr, & MacLachlan, 2001). Harper (1996; however, argues that an over-reliance on attribution theory has limited psychology's contribution to the field.Figures show that whilst most of the funds for the alleviation of poverty are provided by governments, charitable giving by individuals provides an important contribution to the effort to reduce global poverty. Sargent (1999), after synthesizing findings on charitable giving, proposed a model of charitable giving by individuals as a function of several different factors: inputs (e.g. nature of appeals, images); extrinsic determinants (e.g. demographic characteristics such as age, social class, gender); intrinsic determinants (e.g. the need for self-esteem, guilt, pity, empathy, social justice); perceptual reactions (e.g. strength of stimulus, fit with self), and processing det...