Support for Self‐Censorship Among Israelis as a Barrier to Resolving the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict

Self‐censorship, defined as an “act of intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others in the absence of formal obstacles” often serves as a barrier to resolving intractable conflicts. Specifically, in order to protect the group, and in absence of objective constraints such as institutionalized censorship, individuals practice self‐censorship and support its practice by other society members. This prevents free flow and transparency of information, within a society, regarding the conflict and the adversary. In an attempt to investigate the factors that contribute to the functioning of self‐censorship as a sociopsychological barrier to conflict resolution, a longitudinal study was conducted among a large sample of Jews in Israel. The survey was administered in three waves: a few months before, during, and a few months after Israel's Operation Pillar of Defense in the Gaza Strip. The findings showed that armed confrontation can increase support for self‐censorship. In addition, the findings revealed that personal characteristics (e.g., authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, siege mentality) predicted support for self‐censorship, which, in turn, mediated the effect of personal characteristics on support for negotiations and for providing humanitarian aid. The theoretical as well as the applied implications of the findings are discussed.     

Taxonicity of anxiety sensitivity: an empirical test among youth

Taxometric coherent cut kinetic analyses were used to test the latent structure of anxiety sensitivity (AS) among 371 youth. Anxiety sensitivity was indexed by the 18-item Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index (CASI; Silverman et al., J. Clin. Child Psychol. (1991), 20, 162-168). Two sets of manifest indicators of AS were constructed using the CASI: (1) three item-parcel manifest indicators: disease concerns, unsteady concerns, and mental illness concerns; and (2) nine single-item indicators representing each of these three facets of AS. Results from standard and short-scale MAXCOV procedures, internal consistency tests, analyses of simulated Monte Carlo data, and MAMBAC external consistency tests indicated that the latent structure of anxiety sensitivity among youth was taxonic. Estimated base rate of the observed AS taxon ranged between 13.6 and 16.5%. The present findings are discussed in terms of theoretical implications for the study of AS and vulnerability for anxiety psychopathology.     

Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Computerized Cognitive Training on Executive Functions: a Cross-Disciplinary Taxonomy for Classifying Outcome Cognitive Factors

The growing prevalence of neurodegenerative disorders associated with aging and cognitive decline has generated increasing cross-disciplinary interest in non-pharmacological interventions, such as computerized cognitive training (CCT), which may prevent or slow cognitive decline. However, inconsistent findings across meta-analytic reviews in the field suggest a lack of cross-disciplinary consensus and on-going debate regarding the benefits of CCT. We posit that a contributing factor is the lack of a theoretically-based taxonomy of constructs and representative tasks typically used. An integration of the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) taxonomy of broad and narrow cognitive factors and the Miyake unity-diversity theory of executive functions (EF) is proposed (CHC-M) as an attempt to clarify this issue through representing and integrating the disciplines contributing to CCT research. The present study assessed the utility of this taxonomy by reanalyzing the Lampit et al. (2014) meta-analysis of CCT in healthy older adults using the CHC-M framework. Results suggest that: 1) substantively different statistical effects are observed when CHC-M is applied to the Lampit et al. meta-analytic review, leading to importantly different interpretations of the data; 2) typically-used classification practices conflate Executive Function (EF) tasks with fluid reasoning (Gf) and retrieval fluency (Gr), and Attention with sensory perception; and 3) there is theoretical and practical advantage in differentiating attention and working-memory tasks into the narrow shifting, inhibition, and updating EF domains. Implications for clinical practice, particularly for our understanding of EF are discussed.     

Are the Religiously Observant Discriminated Against in the Rental Housing Market? Experimental Evidence from Israel

In this article, I test for discrimination against the religiously observant in the Israeli rental housing market. I perform a correspondence study where half of the requests have a religious signal (“basad” written at the top of the request), while the other half do not. Because the requests are identical otherwise, differences in call‐back rates represent the causal effect of writing “basad” at the top of the request. I find that requests with a religious signal receive 12 percent fewer positive responses than requests with no such signal, with this differential being greater with female landlords and in cities with more left‐leaning voters, higher mean incomes, and higher education levels.     

Parent and Staff Uncertainties Regarding the Philosophy of Early Intervention in a Preschool Autism Program

This study investigated the influences of dominant paradigms in the field of autism on the attitudes and beliefs of stakeholders in an early intervention (EI) program for children with autism. This EI program is based on a developmental approach with the premise that intensive intervention in young children (ages 2–6 years) can change their developmental trajectory given the brain's plasticity. This study was based on 48 interviews with parents and staff, as well as three focus groups with stakeholders at a program serving young children with autism. Qualitative data analysis revealed that parents and staff were most influenced by the curative aspect of the medical model while they did not commonly demonstrate adherence to the principles of EI. Parents also revealed conflicting attitudes simultaneously, as many of them expressed wishes for their children to be cured of autism while at the same time wanting that interventions would continue indefinitely.     

Transitivity,Space, and Hand: The Spatial Grounding of Syntax

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left‐to‐right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a novel method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect.     

The role of higher order image statistics in masking scene gist recognition

In the present article, we investigated whether higher order image statistics, which are known to be carried by the Fourier phase spectrum, are sufficient to affect scene gist recognition. In Experiment 1, we compared the scene gist masking strength of four masking image types that varied in their degrees of second- and higher order relationships: normal scene images, scene textures, phase-randomized scene images, and white noise. Masking effects were the largest for masking images that possessed significant higher order image statistics (scene images and scene textures) as compared with masking images that did not (phase-randomized scenes and white noise), with scene image masks yielding the largest masking effects. In a control study, we eliminated all differences in the second-order statistics of the masks, while maintaining differences in their higher order statistics by comparing masking by scene textures rather than by their phase-randomized versions, and showed that the former produced significantly stronger gist masking. Experiments 2 and 3 were designed to test whether conceptual masking could account for the differences in the strength of the scene texture and phase-randomized masks used in Experiment 1, and revealed that the recognizability of scene texture masks explained just 1% of their masking variance. Together, the results suggest that (1) masks containing the higher order statistical structure of scenes are more effective at masking scene gist processing than are masks lacking such structure, and (2) much of the disruption of scene gist recognition that one might be tempted to attribute to conceptual masking is due to spatial masking.     

Integrating haptic-tactile feedback into a video-capture-based virtual environment for rehabilitation.

Video-capture virtual reality (VR) systems are gaining popularity as intervention tools. To date, these platforms offer visual and audio feedback but do not provide haptic feedback. We contend that adding haptic feedback may enhance the quality of intervention for various theoretical and empirical reasons. This study aims to integrate haptic-tactile feedback into a video capture system (GX VR), which is currently applied for rehabilitation. The proposed multi-modal system can deliver audio-visual as well as vibrotactile feedback. The latter is provided via small vibratory discs attached to the patient's limbs. This paper describes the system, the guidelines of its design, and the ongoing usability study.     

Anxiety Sensitivity Moderates Relations Among Tobacco Smoking,Panic Attack Symptoms,and Bodily Complaints in Adolescents

The present study evaluated associations among smoking and anxiety sensitivity (fear of anxiety and anxiety related sensations) in predicting panic attack symptomatology, somatic complaints, and depressive symptomatology in a community sample of adolescents (ages 12 to 17 years; N=206). As predicted, the combination of high levels of anxiety sensitivity and being a current smoker predicted panic symptomatology and somatic complaints, but not depressive symptomatology. These findings suggest anxiety sensitivity may moderate the relation between smoking and prototypical panic psychopathology variables (panic attacks and somatic complaints) even after controlling for gender and negative affectivity, and that these associations are specific to panic-relevant processes. The primary implication of the study findings is that there may be segments of the adolescent population who are at relatively greater risk for panic-related problems by virtue of individual differences in AS and smoking status.