Identity‐based motivation and consumer behavior

Choices are often identity-based yet the identity-to-choice link is not necessarily obvious for reasons articulated by the identity-based motivation model (Oyserman, D. (2009). Identity-based motivation: Implication for action-readiness, procedural readiness and consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology). Specifically, which identities are salient and what identities mean in the moment are highly dependent on situational cues. Though they feel stable, identities are dynamically shaped by situational affordances and constraints and this shaping process can occur without conscious awareness. This implies that product use, including use of utilitarian products, can become identity-based, as can both self-constructive and self-destructive choices. Over time, broader identities are more likely to be cued than more narrow ones, though any identity can be cued in the right circumstances. The commentaries apply the model to culture-contingent effects of power (Shavitt, S., Torelli, C. &; Wong, J. (2009). Identity-based motivation: Constraints and opportunities in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Psychology), charitable giving (Aaker, J. &; Akutsu, S. (2009). Why do people give? The role of identity in giving. Journal of Consumer Psychology), and the consequences of salient identities for self-constructive vs. self-destructive choices (Kirmani, A. (2009). The self and the brand. Journal of Consumer Psychology) and this commentary addresses some of the questions they raise.     

Category learning from equivalence constraints

Information for category learning may be provided as positive or negative equivalence constraints (PEC/NEC)—indicating that some exemplars belong to the same or different categories. To investigate categorization strategies, we studied category learning from each type of constraint separately, using a simple rule-based task. We found that participants use PECs differently than NECs, even when these provide the same amount of information. With informative PECs, categorization was rapid, reasonably accurate and uniform across participants. With informative NECs, performance was rapid and highly accurate for only some participants. When given directions, all participants reached high-performance levels with NECs, but the use of PECs remained unchanged. These results suggest that people may use PECs intuitively, but not perfectly. In contrast, using informative NECs enables a potentially more accurate categorization strategy, but a less natural, one which many participants initially fail to implement—even in this simplified setting.

Self-reported posttraumatic growth predicts greater subsequent posttraumatic stress amidst war and terrorism

Background and objective: This study tested three alternative explanations for research indicating a positive, but heterogeneous relationship between self-reported posttraumatic growth (PTG) and posttraumatic stress symptoms (PSS): (a) the third-variable hypothesis that the relationship between PTG and PSS is a spurious one driven by positive relationships with resource loss, (b) the growth over time hypothesis that the relationship between PTG and PSS is initially a positive one, but becomes negative over time, and (c) the moderator hypothesis that resource loss moderates the relationship between PTG and PSS such that PTG is associated with lower levels of PSS as loss increases. Design and method: A nationally representative sample (N?=?1622) of Israelis was assessed at three time points during a period of ongoing violence. PTG, resource loss, and the interaction between PTG and loss were examined as lagged predictors of PSS to test the proposed hypotheses. Results: Results were inconsistent with all three hypotheses, showing that PTG positively predicted subsequent PSS when accounting for main and interactive effects of loss. Conclusions: Our results suggest that self-reported PTG is a meaningful but counterintuitive predictor of poorer mental health following trauma.     

The Politics of Trauma Studies: What Can We Learn From Women Combatants' Experiences of Traumatic Events in Conflict Zones?

Wars, combat, and political developments triggered the study of trauma. Knowledge about trauma initially emerged from the experiences of men combatants in the battlefield. At a later stage, the study of trauma focused on women and children subject to violence and abuse. The current research suggests that additional aspects of trauma can be understood through the study of competent women exposed to traumatic events and not merely as victims of war or abuse. The study offers an analysis of women combatants' narratives of their exposure to traumatic events in conflict zones. Data were obtained from two focus groups and a series of 30 personal interviews of women veterans who served in the IDF. Interviewing women combat soldiers revealed a variety of narratives of their war experiences, including the intertwining of the emotional and the physical. The window to understanding the trauma was opened by analysis of the responses of the women combatants to potentially traumatic events rather than by focusing on post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) per se. We emphasize the need for a critical perspective in the study of trauma and combat trauma and propose that there is value in engaging with and listening to diverse narratives of trauma.     

The predicament of masculinity: Towards understanding the male's experience of infertility treatments

Sex Roles - The commonsense notions that associate fertility and femininity are shared by the medical establishment, and have led to the concentration of research on women in the area of fertility....     

Mediation of Mothers’ Anxiety and Parenting in Children’s Behavior Problems during COVID-19

The outbreak of COVID-19 is affecting the lives of millions of families around the world. The current study was carried out in Israel, following the pandemic’s initial outbreak and during the resulting enforced quarantine, confining parents and children to their homes. A sample of 141 Israeli mothers with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 12 (M?=?6.92, SD?=?2.55) participated as volunteers. About half the sample (50.7%) consisted of girls. Most mothers were cohabiting with a spouse (93%). Mothers completed online questionnaires about their perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, availability of social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and their children’s behavior problems. Results showed expected significant associations between the mothers’ reports about having little social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and children’s externalizing problems. Likewise, expected significant associations were found between mothers’ perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive parenting behavior, and children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Importantly, maternal anxiety and hostile/coercive parenting behavior mediated the associations between lack of support, negative perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, and children’s behavior problems. These findings stress the importance of mothers’ mental health and parenting behaviors for children’s socioemotional adaptation in the context of COVID-19. Implications of the findings for family interventions intended to help parents and children at this time are suggested.

     

Collective Trauma From the Lab to the Real World: The Effects of the Holocaust on Contemporary Israeli Political Cognitions

This research tested whether chronic or contextually activated Holocaust exposure is associated with more extreme political attitudes among Israeli Jews. Study 1 (N = 57), and Study 2 (N = 61) found that Holocaust primes increased support for aggressive policies against a current adversary and decreased support for political compromise via an amplified sense of identification with Zionist ideology. These effects, however, were obtained only under an exclusive but not an inclusive framing of the Holocaust. Study 3 (N = 152) replicated these findings in a field study conducted around Holocaust Remembrance Day and showed that the link between Holocaust exposure, ideological identification, and militancy also occurs in real‐life settings. Study 4 (N = 867) demonstrated in a nationally representative survey that Holocaust survivors and their descendants exhibited amplified existential threat responses to contemporary political violence, which were associated with militancy and opposition to peaceful compromises. Together, these studies illustrate the Holocaustization of Israeli political cognitions 70 years later.     

Memory for faces: Are caricatures better than photographs?

Because photographs capture an individual at a moment in time, they contain fleeting features as well as more stable ones. Caricature line drawings, however, include stable features and emphasize distinctive ones. As such, caricatures are closer to schematic memory representations than are photographs. Three experiments using faces of public figures test the hypothesis that caricatures yield better performance than do photographs. Contrary to hypothesis, photographs lead to better performance than do line-drawing caricatures in three different tasks: name recall, face recognition, and name-face verification reaction time. Photographs are also rated as more characteristic or representative of their targets than are line-drawing caricatures.     

Possible selves and delinquency

The relationship between possible selves and delinquency is explored. In this study, 238 youths between the ages of 13-16 who varied in the degree of their delinquency were asked to describe their possible selves. Although many similarities were found among their hoped-for selves, the groups of youth differed markedly in the nature of their expected and feared selves. The balance between expected possible selves and feared possible selves was the particular focus. Balance is hypothesized to occur when expected possible selves are offset by countervailing feared selves in the same domain (e.g., expecting a job, but fearing being unemployed). It was found that the officially nondelinquent youths were quite likely to display balance between their expectations and fears, unlike the most delinquent youth. In contrast, a conventional measure of self-esteem that indicates how people feel about themselves currently did not predict degree of delinquency.