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This study explores lay perceptions of mental health among Afghan forced migrants in Finland. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 participants. Reflexive thematic analysis was used as the method of analysis. The analysis produced two main themes: external symptoms (changes in physical appearance and behavior) and internal symptoms (burdensome feelings and sensations). Participants rarely used explicit mental health terminology, preferring nuanced culture-specific, individual expressions, and indirect communication about stress and trauma. This study contributes to the understanding of Afghan forced migrants' lay perceptions of mental health and calls for culturally-safe approaches in social work and mental health services for forced migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to examine cultural differences in perceiving leaders' visual non-verbal behavior. It examines and compares how business students at universities in Finland and the Philippines perceive business leaders based on visual cues, drawing on social psychological theories of social categorization, person perception, and the cultural dimensions of leadership and organization. A total of 32 university students of business studies participated in the study. They were presented with eight images of people with different visual expressions and reflected in writing on what kinds of leaders these people would be. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The findings show that both Finnish and Filipino students had similar perceptions of what kinds of leaders the people in the images might be. However, in terms of leadership preferences, the Finnish students appeared to place more emphasis on the person's level of communicativeness and friendliness, whereas levels of competence and commitment were emphasized more strongly by Filipino students. The theoretical approach and design of the study may be applied in research on leaders' visual nonverbal expressiveness in multicultural organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Membership categorization analysis focuses on studying how people categorize each other in interaction. Even though the role of observation has been acknowledged within this methodological approach, it has mainly been used to analyze oral and written communication. This study focuses on examining how membership categorization analysis can be applied to person perception. It elucidates the procedure with two examples where students in a vocational upper secondary college in Finland perceived portrait paintings and reflected in writing what kind of teachers the people depicted in them would be. Drawing on the theorization of person perception and membership categorization analysis, the study suggests a model for applying membership categorization analysis in person perception and discusses its relevance to social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how Otherness is constructed visually in newspaper photographs of the refugee crisis. This visual rhetoric analysis examines the form, content, and function of images and explores the rhetorical strategies deployed in visualizations of the refugee crisis in a mainstream Finnish national newspaper from 2015 to 2016. The data consisted of 1,473 images. The study identified six rhetorical strategies used for dehumanizing refugees: massifying, separating, passivating, demonizing, individualizing, and recontextualizing the Other. The rhetorical strategies in turn constructed four discourses related to refugees, namely those of threat and victimhood aimed at dehumanizing as well as personhood and distance aimed at humanizing the Other. The paper contributes to the current knowledge on dehumanization and humanization of refugees in public discourse by unpacking the subtle visual mechanisms through which these processes occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how students categorize teachers based on visual cues. The research drew on theories of social representations, social perception, and social categorization to study how students perceive and interpret teachers' nonverbal communication. At a Finnish vocational college for culture studies, 17 paintings depicting a variety of people were shown to 65 students, who reflected on them as pictures of teachers. The data were analyzed applying membership categorization analysis. Five categories of teachers emerged from the data. The results show that students make inferences about teachers' approachability and competence based on their visual cues, which might have implications for classroom management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]