EDITORIAL

LUISA FERNANDA RAMÍREZ *

* Editor

This publication of the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología is a monographic number in Social Psychology that includes research reports on individual, group, contextual, and cultural variables analyzing the interaction among social representations, belief systems, social identity processes, causal attributions, and copying strategies, among other things, with social behavior.

The first articles “Social representations on aging: Structural differences concerning age group and cultural context”, and “Considering the roles of Culture and Social Status: The Protestant Work Ethic and Egalitarianism”, emphasize shared knowledge construction and transmission. From a crosscultural perspective, these studies evaluate the effect of cultural differences on social representations and lay beliefs about socially relevant groups in Italy and Brazil in the first case, and in United States and Colombia in the second.

From a related view, the text on the “Psychometric properties and factorial structure of Spanish Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM)” tests several models to establish not only the psychometric properties of the scale, but its usefulness and relevance, given its important contributions to the study of social identity.

This edition includes a review article on “Perceptions of the poor and the poverty”; a topic of unquestionable social and scientific relevance that, fortunately, has been increasingly included in the agendas of researchers in psychology. This article contributes to strengthen this research area that claims for so much attention from our part.

The second part of this monographic number includes two case studies concerned with political conflict. “Legitimizing and de-legitimizing beliefs disseminated by the Spanish press about political assassination” and “Why do girls join Guerrilla and Paramilitary Groups in Colombia?”;. These are two examples of research work performed on the rather young field of political psychology whose formal appearance dates back to the 1960s, that provide judgment elements from a scientific point of view of violent political conflict.

Finally, last articles focus on the study of the interaction between individual and collective aspects in more specific contexts such as work and school. The article on “Multiple identifications and citizenship at work: mediation of social support” is concerned with understanding the relations between identification with the organization, group-identification and career-identification and citizenship. The article on “Assessment of forgiving: Generational and sex differences” taps on the identification of different ways of understanding and exercising forgiveness given age and gender, and studying their effect on forgiveness attitudes.

The texts on “Relationships between School Peer Acceptance and Socioemotional Maladjustment, Daily Stress, and Coping” and “Effects of collaborative learning on the use of coping strategies” focus on learning the abilities to deal with potentially conflicting situations. First one deals with the relation between school peer acceptance and several measures of socioemotional maladjustment, stress and copying from a developmental perspective, looking at age and gender differences. The second explores the use of collaborative learning techniques and copying with conflicting situations that derive from interpersonal peer-relations in the context of the school.

With these articles, we hope, will carry us back to the tradition of editing monographic numbers that would allow us to bring our readers closer to specific subjects in psychology, while promoting a dialogue among scientific researchers from the area.