The present study explores the structural stability of peace and war concepts, adopting a social representation approach. A word association task to the stimuli conflict, peace, and war was submitted to 206 Italian university students in 2004 and 2005. The data were explored through correspondence factor analyses and the analysis of frequency and rank of association. The results show that the social representation of war focuses chiefly on images of death and blood. Peace, on the contrary, is represented in terms of ideals, interpersonal relations, and metaphors. In 2005, new elements functional in peacebuilding, such as respect and cooperation, enter the representation, but the representation of peace is still not as stable and strong as war. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study investigates how European journalists evaluate the changes that have occurred in their profession since the Internet has been integrated in newsrooms. How do journalists perceive the features and innovations associated with the Internet? What are the principal changes in the profession? Do practitioners believe that the quality of journalism has been raised or lowered? To answer to these research questions, we carried out a survey across 11 European countries–Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden–of 239 journalists, working for 40 of the most‐read print/online news outlets in these countries. The survey shows that the opportunity to use the Internet to reinforce the social functions of journalism has not been fully recognised.

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a b S t r a c tThe present paper illustrates the potentialities offered by the Social Representations approach to the exploration of peace and war concepts. Free associations tasks to the stimuli War and Peace were given to 112 students in order to assess contents and structures. Differences related to gender, age and school grade were investigated. Attention was devoted to the role of peace education activities. Results indicate a dramatic representation of war, based on death and destruction. The representation of peace is based on intimate and positive emotional experiences. It appears weaker and polyphasic, with cues of change. Respondents involved in peace education show greater complexity of contents and more features related to positive approaches to peace, thus underlining the relevance of these activities.

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The article suggests the use of social representations theory to provide a positive approach to peace research and a theoretical framework for understanding peace movements. Studying peace, war and conflict in this perspective enables exploration of these concepts as objects socially constructed, elaborated and shared by different groups. Four groups of activists are compared with people not belonging to any association, in order to investigate the existence of particular social representations of peace, war and conflict. As in previous cross-cultural research, an independent social representation of peace emerges only among activists. The social representation of war is also different in the two groups: nonactivists see it as frightening, whereas activists see ways of tackling it. The greatest difference between the two groups is in the social representation of conflict. Conflict is assimilated to war for non-activists, whereas activists represent it as more manageable and normal. The results support the idea of understanding peace activism as a particular form of coping -community coping -based on the group as a whole, rather than on individual capacity to manage problems. At a theoretical level, the article discusses the importance of linking social representations to practice and group identification. At a practical level, it suggests that support for pacifism will be only transient and superficial until these underlying differences in representations can be changed.* We wish to thank the editor and three anonymous referees from JPR for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. We also wish to thank the individuals and the associations who cooperated in the study. A replication dataset can be found at

Purpose On the verge of what has been hailed as the next technological revolution, the purpose of this paper is to examine scientific and popular definitions of the social robot, reflecting on how expert and lay spheres of knowledge interact. Drawing on social representations theory, this paper aims to elucidate how social robots are named and classified, and to examine the dynamics contributing to their definition. Design/methodology/approach Scientific and popular definitions of the social robot were investigated by conducting: a systematic review of relevant articles published from 2009 to 2015 in the International Journal of Social Robotics; an analysis of the definitions retrievable from the scientific literature using Google Scholar; and an assessment of the interest in the public sphere, and of the popular definitions retrievable online (by inputting “social robot” in Google Trends, and in Google). Findings Scientific definitions of the social robot adopt two strategies, one drawing on and merging previous definitions, the other proposing new, visionary, forward-looking definitions. Popular online definitions of social robots attribute new emotional, linguistic and social capabilities to their physical body. Research limitations/implications The findings need to be confirmed by further research, given the limited size of the data sets considered, and the distortions in the data due to filters and the opacity of the online tools employed. Originality/value Both scientific and non-scientific definitions see social robots as being capable of interacting with and working for humans, but attribute them a different degree of (functional or full) autonomy. In future, any controversy over the connotation of social robots is likely to concern their sociality and autonomy rather than their functionality.