Religion,Statelessness, and Belonging

Before 1948, and stretching back more than 1800 years, the Jewish people suffered all the problems of statelessness. The Zionist movement, 1897–1948, strove to end the condition of Jewish exile and statelessness. The great historical irony and tragedy is that the establishment of the State of Israel brought about the Nakba, the catastrophe, of the Palestinian people. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians see themselves as the victims of the conflict. They seem to be competitors in what I call a “suffering sweepstakes.” One of the problems with victimhood is that it prevents victims from assuming responsibility for their actions, including the victimization of others. In the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, both sides are victims and both sides are victimizers. The least helpful thing people can do – and regrettably many well‐meaning people do this – is to portray the situation in terms of a zero‐sum game, in which, if you’re pro‐Palestinian, you must be anti‐Israeli, and vice versa. We must be both pro‐Palestinian and pro‐Israeli, because we are pro‐people and, therefore, pro‐peace. The achievement of peace necessitates a two‐state solution based on some recognition of the two narratives. The best fulfilment of Zionism will come when there is a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.     

Positive weighing of the other's collective narrative among Jewish and Bedouin‐Palestinian teachers in Israel and its correlates

Teachers play a pivotal role in the educational discourse around collective narratives, and especially the other's narrative. The study assumed that members of groups entangled in a conflict approach the different modules of the other's narrative distinctively. Jewish and Palestinian teachers, Israeli citizens, answered questionnaires dealing with the narrative of the other, readiness for interethnic contact, negative between‐group emotions and preferences for resolutions of the Israeli–Palestinian (I–P) conflict. Positive weighing of the other's narrative among Jewish teachers correlated with high levels of readiness for interethnic contact and low levels of negative between‐group emotions, across the various modules of the Palestinian narrative. Preferences for a peaceful resolution of the I–P conflict and rejection of a violent one were noted in two of the modules. Among Palestinian teachers, positive weighing of the other's collective narrative was exclusively noted for the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust, and this stance negatively related to negative between‐group emotions and preference for a violent solution of the I–P conflict, and positively related to readiness for interethnic contact and preference of a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Practical implications of these findings for peace education are discussed.     

Palestinian Autobiographical Memory Regarding the 1948 Palestinian Exodus

Background : Collective memory of intractable conflict is an important sociopsychological phenomenon which influences the psychological and behavioral reactions of each party to the conflict. This memory is composed of two kinds of memories: autobiographical memory—the memory of the people who experienced the given events directly—and indirect‐collective memory—the memory of the people who learned about the given events second hand, via books, etc. Purpose : This study explores the characteristics of Palestinian autobiographical memory with respect to the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus and how it relates to other Palestinian memories of that exodus (official, historical/academic, and indirect‐collective). From these empirical findings, theoretical insights are concluded. Method : This is done by analyzing the content of four oral history projects of 1948 Palestinians refugees (in total, 131 interviewees from 38 localities). In addition, the content of these projects is compared to the accounts of documented Israeli history (using the research of Israeli historian Benny Morris). Studies of the other Palestinian memories are also used. Findings : The findings reveal that the Palestinian autobiographical memory is not a typical memory of conflict (e.g., with relatively low focus on the expulsion cause for the exodus). It is also compatible to a large degree with documented Israeli history. However, it is very different from other Palestinian memories of the exodus (official, historical/academic, and indirect‐collective), which focus almost exclusively on the expulsion cause. Other empirical findings and their explanations are discussed. The findings have mostly theoretical implications regarding various kinds of memories of conflicts (and memories in general), as well as some methodological implications with regard to the usage of oral history.     

Self‐ and maternal representations,relatedness patterns,and problem behavior in middle childhood

The present study investigated the association between children’s representations of their mothers’ and teachers’ reports of children’s problem behavior. The research team conducted semistructured narrative interviews with a community sample of 203 Israeli 9‐ to 11‐year‐old children. Ten months later, researchers collected teachers’ reports of children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. This study investigated whether children’s self‐representation narratives and their maladaptive relatedness stances questionnaire scores mediated this association. Results indicated that children reporting benevolent representations of their mothers exhibited lower levels of problem behavior. More positive self‐representations and lower levels of skewness in children’s relatedness stances to their mothers both mediated this association. This article includes a discussion of these results in light of factors contributing to maladjustment in middle childhood.     

The imperative to support Black youths in resisting low and limiting expectations

Harmful narratives circulate about Black youths in North America. Deficit narratives portray them, their culture, and their communities as problems, narratives about policing encourage their control and punishment, color-evasive narratives ignore how race shapes their experiences, and essentialist narratives erase their distinct and often intersectional experiences by presenting them as monolithic. Community psychology and allied fields do not escape these trends, which in turn infuse practice, research, and teaching involving Black youths. The present paper highlights four principles that community psychology and allied fields can adopt to support Black youths in resisting these negative and narrow narratives. They are: (1) emphasizing Black youths' and Black communities' strengths, (2) supporting their agency, (3) adopting culturally relevant practices, and (4) developing critical consciousness through reflections on and deconstruction of these narratives. We hope that the reflections shared in this paper will expand the perspectives infused by researchers and practitioners in community psychology, social work, urban studies, and allied fields who work with Black youths.     

‘Journeys’ in the Life-Writing of Adult-Child Dementia Caregivers

This article explores how Alzheimer’s disease caregivers struggle under the impact of a parent’s memory loss on their own personality. In particular, it analyses how caregivers perceive and, thus, present their experiences of the ever intensifying caregiving activity in terms of a ‘journey’. In doing so, this work takes into account both the patient’s continuing bodily as well as cognitive decline and its intricately linked influence on the caregiver’s physical and emotional stability. Equally, this study investigates how caregivers portray memory loss, and how their portrayal fits into our conceptualisation of illness narratives and the culture of autobiographical writing.     

Interpersonal self‐support and attentional bias on negative and positive interpersonal information

Interpersonal self‐support is an indigenous Chinese personality concept. It represents the idealized notion of the kind of personality traits that help individuals deal with interpersonal problems and develop and maintain the harmonic and appropriate social relationships required in China's collectivistic and interdependent culture. It also was assumed to be a protective personality factor with regard to mental health and was found to be negatively related to psychosomatic symptoms. In the current study, cognitive processing of interpersonal information is assumed to be an underlying mechanism that connects interpersonal self‐support with interpersonal relationships and mental health. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments to investigate whether attentional bias on positive and negative interpersonal information was related to high and low interpersonal self‐support. A spatial cueing task and the emotional Stroop task were administered to two samples of high and low interpersonal self‐support Chinese undergraduate students to measure attentional bias. The results from both experiments suggested that high interpersonal self‐support students had an attentional bias toward positive interpersonal information, while low interpersonal self‐support students preferentially attended to negative interpersonal information. Study 1 indicated that attentional bias toward positive interpersonal information was easily engaged in the high interpersonal self‐support group, while attentional bias toward negative interpersonal information was both easy to engage and difficult to disengage in the low interpersonal self‐support students. These results support our hypotheses that high interpersonal self‐support people engage in positive processing of interpersonal information, whereas low interpersonal self‐support people engage in negative processing of interpersonal information. The differential balance between positive and negative processing on interpersonal information may explain why interpersonal self‐support predicts both mental health and interpersonal relationships. In addition, the relational schema may explain why interpersonal self‐support is associated with an attentional bias toward interpersonal information.     

Support for religio‐political aggression among teenaged boys in Gaza: Part I: psychological findings

Politically aggressive militant groups usually rely on support from a larger community, although evidence suggests that only some members of that larger community support that aggression. A major subtype of political aggression is that associated with religious differences—or Religio‐Political Aggression (RPA). Little previous research has explored demographic or psychological factors that might distinguish supporters from non‐supporters of RPA. In an exploratory study, we investigated whether factors previously associated with aggression might correlate with support for RPA in the case of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. During the second intifada, fifty‐two 14‐year‐old Palestinian boys in Gaza completed self‐report measures of life events, emotional status, and political attitudes. Teenaged boys who reported family members having been wounded or killed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) expressed greater support for RPA (t(50)=?2.30, P=.026). In addition, boys who felt their group was treated unjustly reported greater support for RPA compared with those who did not (t(50)=?2.273, P=.027). Implications of these preliminary data are discussed. Aggr. Behav. 36:219–231, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Inside‐Out: Representational Ethics and Diverse Communities

The purpose of this paper is to write about insights and special considerations for researchers who are, to some degree, “insiders” to the communities they study by expanding on the concept of representational ethics as applied to research in community psychology with diverse and marginalized groups. Representational ethics refers to the ways that researchers, artists, or corporations represent the identities of the people they portray in their communications. As community psychologists we generate and disseminate knowledge about the communities we work with, and in that process, create narratives about the people who participate in our studies. In preparing a report on psychological issues among Evangelical Christian refugees from the former Soviet Union, Dina Birman struggled with her portrayal of this group and her own status of being both an insider and an outsider to this community. When investigating academic aspirations and psychological distress among Muslim high school students, Ashmeet Oberoi was forced to acknowledge the one‐sidedness of the discourse on autonomy and cultural socialization of Muslim adolescents. In her research with Cuban‐educated doctors in Miami, Florida, Wendy Moore encountered similar issues as she considered how to represent gender dynamics among her participants.     

How children narrate happy and sad events: does affective state count?

The influence of induced affective states on children's narratives of personal events was investigated. The affective state of 5‐to‐6‐year‐old children, 128 in number, was manipulated by way of winning or losing a game. They were then asked to narrate happy or sad personal events. A self‐report instrument indicated that a different affective state was indeed induced by the two game conditions. Narratives were coded for agency, affective aspects and structural complexity (antecedents). The negative condition influenced attribution of causality and intention to agent and addressee, according to a self‐serving bias and affected number of antecedents. Moreover, in the negative condition, global intensity revealed a congruency effect, in line with the Affect Infusion Model. However, mental states varied with event valence, independent of affect‐inducing condition. Results are discussed in terms of the complexity of the relation between emotional event narratives and children's affective state. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Victims” Versus “Righteous Victims”: The Rhetorical Construction of Social Categories in Historical Dialogue Among Israeli and Palestinian Youth

Informed by social identity theory and a rhetorical approach to the study of social category construction in social interaction, this study analyzed the nature and function of participant utterances in two conditions of intergroup dialogue about history between Israelis and Palestinians. Across conditions that sought to either emphasize recategorization into a common in‐group identity or subcategorization into mutually differentiated identities, Palestinian and Arab Israeli utterances primarily reflected the theme of victimization, while Jewish Israeli utterances primarily reflected themes of justification and victimization. The way in which these utterances produced social competition for victim and perpetrator roles and reproduced master historical narratives of Palestinian victimization versus Jewish Israeli “righteous” victimization is illustrated. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of narrative and rhetoric about social categories in settings of intractable political conflict, and implications for dialogue‐based intervention about history are addressed.     

Self‐framing of risky choice

Previous research on framing effects has largely focused on how choice information framed by external sources influences the response of a decision maker. This research examined how decision makers framed choice options and how the hedonic tone of self‐framing influenced their risk preference. By using pie charts and a complementary sentence‐completion task in Experiment 1, participants were able to interpret and frame the expected choice outcomes themselves before making a choice between a sure option and a gamble in either a life–death or a monetary problem. Each of these self‐frames (phrases) was then rated by a group of independent judges in terms of its hedonic tone. The hedonic tone of self‐frames was mostly positive and was more positive in the life–death than the monetary context, suggesting a motivational function of self‐framing. However, positive outcomes were still more likely to be framed positively than negative outcomes. In Experiment 2, choice outcomes were depicted with a whole‐pie chart instead of a pie slice in order to emphasize positive and negative outcomes equally. The results showed that the hedonic tone of self‐framing was still largely positive and more positive in the life domain than the monetary domain. However, compared to Experiment 1, the risk preference in the life–death domain was reversed, showing an outcome salience effect: when the pie‐slice chart emphasized only survival outcomes, participants were more risk taking under positive hedonic frames whereas when the whole‐pie chart depicted both survival and mortality outcomes, they became risk averse under positive frames. In sum, self‐framing reflected a positive bias in encoding risk information and affected the risk preference of the decision maker. Like the tone of voice used in communication, the hedonic tone of self‐framing, either positive or negative, can affect risk perception of a choice problem. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ingroup bias in the minimal group paradigm shown by three‐person groups with high or low state self‐esteem

From social identity theory a negative relation between self‐esteem and ingroup bias can be deducted. Much research has been done to test this proposition and largely failed to confirm this relation. Unlike many existing studies, we conducted an experiment in which (a) self‐esteem is not conceived as a trait entity but much more situation‐specific, (b) the self‐esteem manipulation is not relative to the outgroup, and (c) the measure of intergroup differentiation is unrelated to the self‐esteem manipulation. We categorised our participants into two arbitrary minimal groups (Klee or Kandinsky fans) and afterwards formed homogeneous three‐person groups (all persons were either Klee or Kandinsky fans). We manipulated the state self‐esteem of these real groups by giving them positive or negative feedback concerning their performance in a problem‐solving task. Afterwards, all groups distributed money to ingroup and outgroup members via Tajfel distribution matrices. Low state self‐esteem groups were found to exhibit stronger ingroup bias than high state self‐esteem groups overall, although the variability of intergroup discrimination was larger in the low state self‐esteem groups, pointing to more heterogeneous reactions to low state self‐esteem. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is war a good or a bad thing? The attitudes of Croatian,Israeli, and Palestinian children toward war

It has been documented that children's basic attitudes to social issues such as war and peace are formed during the early school‐age period. The aims of the study were threefold: (1) to examine the attitudes of Croatian school‐age children toward war and peace; (2) to explore the relationship between these attitudes and children's gender, age, and amount of experience with war and violence; and (3) to compare the attitudes of Croatian children toward war and peace with the attitudes of Israeli and Palestinian children examined using the same scale 18 years earlier. The sample consisted of 230 children aged 11–14 years who attended school in Zagreb. The results indicate that Croatian children generally have a negative attitude toward war, but strongly support the fight for the freedom of their nation. A relationship was found between the children's gender, age, and war experiences and their attitudes toward war. A comparison between Croatian, Israeli, and Palestinian children showed that nationhood had an influence on attitudes toward war. However, there is greater similarity in the attitudes of today's Croatian and former Israeli children than between today's Croatian and former Palestinian children, and between Israeli and Palestinian children 18 years ago.     

Moral judgments of the powerless and powerful in violent intergroup conflicts

The present research examined observers' moral judgments of groups in conflict. Study 1 found support for the prediction that actions are interpreted as more moral in the context of low power. People judged the violent actions of a fictitious group as more moral and justifiable when done by a smaller, less powerful country compared to a larger one. However, a second study found that violence may undermine the moral advantage accorded underdog groups. People reading about Israeli construction of settlements in Palestinian territories judged the Israeli actions to be more moral when Palestinians resisted violently compared to when they used non-violent resistance tactics. Together, these studies demonstrate how moral judgments of the actions of groups in conflict are influenced by contextual factors independent of the actions themselves.     

Perception of the minority's collective identity and voting behavior: the case of the Palestinians in Israel

The author investigated how Palestinian (n = 130) and Jewish (n = 153) Israeli university students perceived the collective identity of the Palestinian minority in Israel. The Palestinian and Jewish respondents perceived the "identity space" of the minority as linear, or bipolar, with 1 pole defined by the national (Palestinian) identity and the other defined by the civic (Israeli) label. The Palestinian respondents defined their collective identity in national (Palestinian, Arab) and integrative (Israeli-Palestinian) terms; the Jewish respondents perceived the minority's identity as integrative (Israeli-Palestinian). Different political outlooks among Palestinian respondents were related to their identification with the civic (Israeli) identity but not to their identification with the national (Palestinian) identity. In contrast, different political outlooks among Jewish respondents were related to their inclusion, or exclusion, of the national (Palestinian) component in their definition of the minority's identity. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of a minority acculturation model (J. Berry, J. Trimble, & E. Olmedo, 1986).     

Emotion and information search in tactical decision-making: Moderator effects of feedback

Information search during decision-making may be influenced both by selective attention and by the criterion used for ceasing to search. When the items searched are themselves emotive, the affective state of the decision-maker may bias these search processes. If an automatic selective attention bias operates, it may produce mood-congruent effects irrespective of context; e.g., negative affect may focus attention on negative items of information. An alternative possibility, suggested by the mood-as-input model, is that the influence of affect on search may depend on how decision-makers understand their emotions within a given context. The present study tested predictions derived from relevant theories of affective bias, using feedback as a means to generate a context of success or failure. Hundred and sixty participants were required to access positive and negative items of information in choosing between different routes for a search-and-rescue mission. Outcomes of choices were manipulated experimentally, so that in one condition participants received mostly positive feedback, and in a second condition participants received mostly negative feedback. Results showed that the feedback manipulation influenced affect, but there was considerable variation in affective state within each condition. Associations between affect and information search were moderated by feedback condition. For example, positive affect was associated with more frequent sampling of positive information in the negative feedback condition, but the association reversed when feedback was positive. Findings were consistent with the mood-as-input hypothesis, but not with an automatic selective attention bias. Context may influence how the decision-maker interprets their affective state.     

Sense of community coherence and inter-religious relations

ABSTRACT

The current article attempts to broaden the individual-based concept of sense of coherence to the community level. We examine sense of community coherence and its connection with perceptions of collective narratives and acculturation tendencies in the social context of Palestinian Muslims and Christians living in Israel. Questionnaires that were developed and adapted for the unique population in this study were distributed to a representative sample of 1034 Muslims (455 males) and 720 Christians (354 males), all Israeli citizens aged 18 and up. As expected, sense of community coherence was negatively related to the level of acceptance of the out-group collective narratives and positively related to the level of acceptance of the in-group collective narratives. In the same vein, it was also positively related to the tendency for separation and negatively related to the tendency for integration and assimilation. The discussion focuses on the contribution of the research findings to the deepening of our understanding of the concepts of sense of coherence and sense of community coherence.     

The Shadar–host economy: new perspectives on the travels of emissaries from the Holy Land

“Shadars” were rabbinic emissaries from Ottoman Palestine who raised funds in the diaspora. While Israeli historians studied the Shadar for his status as a representative of the Palestinian yishuv, this study focuses on the reciprocal relationship between the Shadar and his host community. Focusing on Hayyim Yoseph David Azulay, the preeminent Shadar, I portray this relationship as an economy, in which two sides give and receive “goods.” The primary gift is the funds for the Holy Land, but we shall see that the Shadar and his hosts exchanged material, social, intellectual and spiritual goods.