ABSTRACT With 121 losses in 2024, the Chicago White Sox set an unwanted record for the most losses in a single Major League Baseball season. Team owner Jerry Reinsdorf wrote a letter apologizing to fans following the season, including additional attempts at image repair. The increasing availability of artificial intelligence (AI) raises unique questions concerning how apology messages ought to be generated and how effective such messages are with disgruntled fans. To determine if the real message from Reinsdorf was effective, we generated a similar apology using AI. Fans were randomly assigned to read the real message from Reinsdorf, one generated by AI, or a no message/control condition. Results of this experiment did not reveal significant differences across the three conditions – in fan perceptions of organizational reputation, intention to purchase season tickets, or intentions to subscribe to cable and streaming services carrying the games. Follow-up social media analysis indicated strong negative sentiment directed specifically at Reinsdorf, which abets the claim that a tainted communicator may not be effective regardless of how well the message is crafted, making the lack of significant differences an important finding. Discussion of the results, given the purpose of Reinsdorf’s letter, applies image restoration theory to explain the case, and we offer a new method for resolving social media sentiment analysis ambiguity.

ABSTRACT A crisis is recognized as a focusing event that brings attention to a particular situation and the actors involved. In young democracies where equitable access to media coverage for opposition politicians and parties is limited, crisis presents a unique rhetorical situation for affected opposition politicians when strategically handled. Using Crisis Exploitation based on Nord and Olsson’s tripartite model as a framework, this paper explores how a member of parliament in Ghana belonging to the opposition party frames the Akosombo and Kpong Hydro-electric dams spillage that affected his constituency using X rather than traditional mass media platforms. Existing literature on crisis communication in Africa focuses on actors who are directly involved or responsible for the crisis and how they can manage information and their reputation. We contend that in young democracies where political obligations are not clearly demarcated, opposition political actors can leverage a crisis to set national agendas, exert their managerial competence, and enhance their image in the public consciousness. Through textual analysis of posts from the MP, the study identifies the parliamentarian’s use of attributional, managerial, and morality frames in the context of social media logic while handling the Mepe flood incident as tools to directly engage state institutions and the incumbent party while promoting his party and himself. This study’s contribution challenges African traditional notions of crisis being a moment of solidarity devoid of partisanship and self-promotion as well as providing additional positionalities from which crisis communication can be explored in Africa.

ABSTRACT Keepers is a collaborative poetic video autoethnography, co-created by learners in a graduate course on “Communicating Race in the Classroom” at a public land-grant, predominantly white university located in the Northeastern United States. From our various positions as members of an academic institution who carry with us the diverse legacies of nationalities, immigration, race, and gender, among others, we wanted to voice a dialogic and evocative text that provokes reflections on the relationships between knowledges, identity, and belonging in education. Despite our differently raced bodies and social experiences, we grappled – individually and together – with questions of whether or not we have considered race as significant in our communication learning and why this might be. In this piece, we share our poem, the context and process of its creation, and reflections on the learning and tensive relations that emerge by being part of such a collaboration.

ABSTRACT Political communication on social media has reshaped the interaction between candidates and voters during electoral campaigns. This study examines the strategies employed on Instagram during the presidential elections in Mexico (2024), Brazil (2022), and Colombia (2022), applying Benoit’s functional theory of political discourse. Through the analysis of 3,287 posts, the functions of discourse (acclaims, attacks, and defenses) and the addressed themes (policy and character) are evaluated. The results of a negative binomial regression reveal that defenses increase comments by 58.6% and likes by 57.2%. Notably in the context of Instagram candidates’ direct responses to criticism (defenses) appear to foster greater audience engagement. Attacks generate more comments but reduce likes while acclaims negatively impact both metrics. Past actions enhance likes whereas future proposals diminish them. Videos prove highly effective increasing comments by 59.3% and likes by 55.5%. The originality of this study lies in its focus on three of Latin America’s major democracies, the empirical evaluation of political strategies on Instagram (a visually dominant and increasingly influential platform in politics), and a novel application of Benoit’s theory to measure discourse effectiveness in this specific digital context in Latin America. These findings suggest that Instagram’s interaction dynamics may privilege certain types of communication, such as direct confrontation or the validation of past actions, and underscore the power of multimedia content.

ABSTRACT The Culture-Centered Approach argues that dialogue with marginalized communities identifies structural challenges to health and development and helps to articulate community-defined solutions. In rural communities in the Global South, international and national organizations displace this authentic dialogue by providing top-down definitions of child wellbeing. To resist these imposed definitions, and to amplify voices from communities, this study reports on an art-based dialogue we conducted with children in a rural community in Ecuador. Specifically, in a mural-painting project, the children articulate a definition of a successful childhood that exceeds the government’s narrow scope to also include educational, transportation, familial, and environmental determinants of wellbeing. Through their art, the children identified structural conditions that limited successful childhood, and articulated a productive and creative agency to resolve those challenges. Arts-based methodologies may allow children fuller ability to participate in authentic dialogues with community members, researchers, and other agents of change in their communities.

ABSTRACT This study examined the relationship between family communication patterns (FCPs) in the family of origin, emotion suppression, and four common coping behaviors (drinking alcohol, masturbating, eating, and watching TV). Participants included 504 U.S. young adults (aged 18–30) raised in first-marriage families who responded to an online survey. Conformity orientation had positive, indirect effects on watching TV and eating to cope through emotion suppression. An examination of conformity orientation’s subdomains suggested that these relationships were driven by experiencing parental control. Experiencing parental control also had positive, direct effects on all four coping behaviors. A suppressor effect also emerged in which respecting parental authority had negative, direct effects on all four coping behaviors. These opposing patterns highlight the need for FCP researchers to carefully consider whether to model conformity orientation as a whole or to evaluate the potentially unique effects of its respective dimensions.

ABSTRACT With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), the educational landscape is evolving, increasingly integrating AI into classrooms. In response to this trend, the present study investigates how students perceive human-AI collaboration in AI-based education. Using an online experiment where undergraduate students in the U.S. watched to a lecture delivered by an AI instructor, data were collected to explore these dynamics. The findings reveal two primary insights. First, the impact of human-AI collaboration on students’ perceptions varies by their level of self-efficacy in learning. Students with high self-efficacy hold more favorable views toward an AI instructor and AI-based education, particularly when AI-based education is facilitated by human-AI collaboration. Second, the perceived credibility of the AI instructor plays a critical mediating role in fostering positive perceptions of AI-based education. These findings offer significant implications for both research and practical applications in AI in education.

The article is devoted to the study of paternalistic relations in medical discourse. The material was the scripts of 69 records of medical consultations received in medical institutions. The aim of the work is to identify the communicative specificity of paternalism in modern medical discourse. The definition of the paternalistic type of discourse as a way of communication of unequal status subjects is proposed, in which the senior communicant uses speech to influence the cognitive sphere of the opponent and control his/her behaviour by means of subordination and control with simultaneous demonstration of care. The factors of identification of paternalistic relations in medical discourse are revealed. Linguistic indicators of the paternalistic type of discourse, main strategies and auxiliary strategies, tactics specific to the paternalistic type of discourse are established. It is concluded that in a number of cases these tactics are used justifiably as a traditional way of showing care. Tactics of instruction, permission, control are preferable for some categories of patients, allowing them to focus on important information, to be convinced of the correctness of actions, to feel supported. The disadvantages of the tactics of prohibition, exhortation, and control are their high ability to cause conflict or psychological discomfort for patients, which significantly degrade the communication. To effectively use the linguistic facilities of paternalistic discourse, the doctor needs to take into account the age, social and psychological status of the patient

ABSTRACT The prediction that most people are honest most of the time and most lies are told by a few “prolific liars” has been recently affirmed pan-culturally. Predictors of frequent lying include factors associated with personality. Dark Triad (DT) studies have demonstrated positive associations between DT and deception. However, the skewed distribution of lies may have led to inaccurate conclusions, an issue recently raised. The present study, among (N = 622) Israeli subjects, tested the prediction of frequent lying by high DTs while considering the non-normal distribution of lie frequency. Results demonstrated heteroscedasticity of the lie frequency data. DT scores by the number of lies revealed that being low on DT predicts honesty. The tendency for high DTs is to tell more lies on average, but individually they are as likely to tell few lies as to tell many.

ABSTRACT This work explores the role of metacognition (Schwarz, 2011) and may be used to explain some of the effects predicted by Walther’s Hyperpersonal Model of computer-mediated communication (CMC; 1996). In an original experiment, participants (N = 290) were randomly selected to either favorably or unfavorably evaluate a target or not evaluate the target at all. Further, participants were assigned to a distractor task vs. no distractor task condition expected to affect judgments of composition fluency. Additionally, this work expected hyperpersonal effects to emerge when participants could focus more readily on an interpersonal task rather than having their attention divided between an interpersonal and distractor task. The results demonstrated a mediation between task difficulty and social attractiveness judgments through composition fluency. These and other experimental findings are discussed and explored.