Emotional time distortions: the fundamental role of arousal

An emotion-based lengthening effect on the perception of durations of emotional pictures has been assumed to result from an arousal-based mechanism, involving the activation of an internal clock system. The aim of this study was to systematically examine the arousal effect on time perception when different discrete emotions were considered. The participants were asked to verbally estimate the duration of emotional pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The pictures varied either in arousal level, i.e., high/low-arousal, for the same discrete emotion (disgust or sadness) or in the depicted emotion, e.g., disgust/fear for pictures matched for arousal (high-arousal). The results systematically revealed a lengthening effect on the perception of the duration of the emotional compared to the neutral pictures and indicated that the magnitude of this effect increased with arousal level. Nevertheless, variations in time perception were observed for one and the same arousal level, with the duration of disgust-inducing pictures (e.g., body mutilation) being judged longer than that of fear-inducing pictures (e.g., snake). These results suggest that arousal is a fundamental mechanism mediating the effect of emotion on time perception. However, the effect cannot be reduced to arousal, since the impact of the content of pictures also plays a critical role.     

Crossing borders and demolishing boundaries: the connected history of the Israeli transgender community 1953–1986

ABSTRACT

This is the first study to examine the early history of the Israeli transgender community. It covers three decades of transgender activity, from Rina Nathan’s public campaign in the 1950s to permit gender confirmation surgeries in the country to the decision in 1986 to allow surgeries in one public hospital after a lengthy vetting process that de facto held up or disqualified the great majority of applications. The main focus of this study is the generation of “founding mothers” of the transgender community in the 1960s and 1970s and their quest to obtain knowledge, medical technology and paperwork necessary for their gender journeys. We argue that decades before the creation of the internet, Israeli trans pioneers crossed domestic and international boundaries (both social and spatial) and created a network, which later generations of transgender women and men would depend on. This article relies on oral history, contemporaneous media reports and archival documents.     

Personifying the Radical

This study examines relationships among individual dispositions, news framing of civil liberties restrictions, security concerns, and political tolerance. We theorize that news frames condition the effects of individual dispositions on security and tolerance attitudes. To explore these relationships, an online‐survey experiment was conducted with 650 respondents. This experiment presented alternative versions of news stories about domestic security policies following September 11, and the policies' implications for a fringe activist group. One factor was whether the activists targeted by the government advocated for a cause supported or opposed by the respondent; another factor was whether the story framed government actions against the activists at the individual or group level. Findings show that individual framing—as opposed to group framing—made participants less tolerant of radicals they opposed and more tolerant of radicals they supported. Similar effects were observed for political ideology. Implications of personification as a framing device are discussed.     

Halakhah as Torat Hayyim: the values-conscious visions of Eliezer Berkovits and Emanuel Rackman

In the third quarter of the twentieth century, Eliezer Berkovits and Emanuel Rackman were two of the most articulate spokesmen of an approach to the interpretation and application of Jewish law, in the United States, identified with modern Orthodoxy. Each viewed their understanding of the development of Halakhah as an organic expression of the millennia-old process that is torat hayyim, living Torah. Both Berkovits and Rackman moved to Israel in the 1970s; each was, increasingly, marginalized in the world of organized Orthodoxy.

The tropes sounded by Berkovits and Rackman were remarkably consistent over their careers. One particular area that both recognized as urgently calling for halakhic development was matters relating to women. In this connection, as with other issues they addressed, they maintained that Torah principles of the ethical have a significant role to play in Jewish legal development. This essay focuses on the visions of halakhic development articulated by Berkovits and Rackman during the third quarter of the twentieth century.     

The Relationship of Drug Use to Suicide Ideation and Attempts Among African American,Hispanic, and White Non-Hispanic Male Adolescents

This study presents self-report cross-sectional and longitudinal data on associations between drug use, suicide ideation, and attempts in a multiethnic sample of seventh- and eighth-grade male adolescents attending school in the greater Miami, Florida, area. African Americans had the highest prevalence of 6-month ideation (20.5%), and Haitians had the highest attempts (11.4%). For the total sample, tranquilizers had the highest odds ratio for ideation (3.4), and PCP for attempts (6.2). Psychoactive drug-use was consistently related to attempts among Hispanics, white non-Hispanics, and African Americans. Acculturation strains interacted with cocaine and crack to predict suicide attempts among Hispanic respondents.     

Avoidance Behavior Following Terror Event Exposure: Effects of Perceived Life Threat and Jewish Religious Coping

The current research was designed to examine associations of perceived life threat (PLT) and religious coping with the development of avoidance behavior following terror event exposure. Based upon the terror management theory (TMT), we hypothesized that religious coping, through its effect on religious beliefs as a meaning system, would moderate the impact of threat, as expressed in PLT, on an individual's reaction to terror event exposure, as manifested in avoidance behavior. Participants were 591 Israeli Jewish students who were vicariously or directly exposed to a terror event in the past. We report a significant interaction between PLT and negative religious coping. PLT was positively associated with avoidance behavior but this relationship was more profound among persons who reported high negative religious coping. Secular students reported higher rates of avoidance behavior and negative religious coping and were more likely than religious students to report intrapersonal religious conflict. Our findings suggest that terror event exposure is associated with an elevated sense of threat, which is, at least in part, associated with a weakening of prior religious beliefs.