REVIVING GERMAN-JEWISH COMEDY: DANI LEVY'S FAMILY FARCE GO FOR ZUCKER!

Dani Levy's film Go for Zucker! (2004) won a myriad of prizes in 2005 and was touted as the first Jewish comedy to be produced in Germany since the rise of National Socialism. Critics and scholars who have analysed Levy's popular film tend to focus on its presentation of Jewish characters as something other than victims of the Shoah and on its comic engagement with persistent social and cultural divisions between East and West Germans in post-reunification Germany. What these otherwise valid approaches ignore, however, is an additional historical and cultural layer of interpretation, one that more aptly fulfils Levy's goal of paying homage to pre-Shoah forms of self-deprecating German-Jewish humour. Such examples of the Jewish comedic tradition reach even further back in time than the early twentieth-century films of Ernst Lubitsch and the Hollywood films of Billy Wilder to include turn-of-the-century Jargon theatre and the metropolitan revue show, forms of popular entertainment that thrived in Imperial Berlin and delighted mixed audiences of Jews and Gentiles. By reviving a comic past, in which Jewishness could be staged in a variety of ways without derision, Levy's film provides hope that contemporary Germany might once again become a place where Jewish and non-Jewish Germans can laugh together.     

Evaluation of Women in Economics: Evidence of Gender Bias Following Behavioral Role Violations

Sex Roles - Drawing on social role theory (Eagly & Wood, 2016), this paper seeks to understand the nature and causes of gender bias in student evaluations of teaching (SETs) by looking at...     

Working with Older Adults: Predictors of Attitudes Towards Ageing in Psychology and Social Work Students,Faculty, and Practitioners

The Australian population is experiencing a rapid ageing of the population, and as such, an increased need for gerontological practitioners in the helping professions will continue to grow. Terror management theory (TMT), which was used to frame this study, posits that because of the fact that humans are aware of their own mortality, they are compelled to avoid the anxiety associated with it. Personal ageing and interaction with older adults may be reminders of the unavoidable decline and death that faces us all. The purpose of this study is to examine comfort in spending time with older adults amongst students, academic teaching staff, and practitioners in the fields of psychology and social work. We sought to determine if TMT helped predict fear of being with older adults. Ageism, contact with older adults, and known demographic factors associated with attitudes towards older adults were also examined. Hierarchical multiple regression explained nearly 46% of the variance in comfort with older adults and indicated that fear of ageing, positive ageism, negative ageism, contact with older adults, and sex were significant predictors. Educational efforts aimed at addressing beliefs about ageing and older adults may contribute to further comfort in working with older adults.     

Deaf readers’ response to syntactic complexity: Evidence from self-paced reading

This study was designed to determine the feasibility of using self-paced reading methods to study deaf readers and to assess how deaf readers respond to two syntactic manipulations. Three groups of participants read the test sentences: deaf readers, hearing monolingual English readers, and hearing bilingual readers whose second language was English. In Experiment 1, the participants read sentences containing subject-relative or object-relative clauses. The test sentences contained semantic information that would influence online processing outcomes (Traxler, Morris, & Seely Journal of Memory and Language 47: 69–90, 2002; Traxler, Williams, Blozis, & Morris Journal of Memory and Language 53: 204–224, 2005). All of the participant groups had greater difficulty processing sentences containing object-relative clauses. This difficulty was reduced when helpful semantic cues were present. In Experiment 2, participants read active-voice and passive-voice sentences. The sentences were processed similarly by all three groups. Comprehension accuracy was higher in hearing readers than in deaf readers. Within deaf readers, native signers read the sentences faster and comprehended them to a higher degree than did nonnative signers. These results indicate that self-paced reading is a useful method for studying sentence interpretation among deaf readers.     

Perspective taking instructions and self-other overlap: Different motives for helping

In two studies (N’s = 57 and 115), we demonstrate that type of perspective-taking instruction (“imagine self” vs. “imagine other”) differentially affects two motives for helping: self-other overlap and empathic concern. Imagine-self instructions produce greater self-other overlap than imagine-target and objective instructions, while both types of perspective-taking instruction promote empathic concern relative to an objective condition. In Study 2, imagine-self instructions indirectly increased the likelihood of helping via empathic concern and self-other overlap, while imagine-target instructions led indirectly to greater helping only through empathic concern. We discuss how different perspective-taking instructions may implicate different emotional and motivational paths to increasing helping.     

Instrumental and expressive violence in Belgian homicide perpetrators

The present study aimed to examine offender types in a sample of Belgian single‐perpetrator/single‐victim homicide cases. First, it was investigated if the distinction between instrumental and expressive aggression could be documented in crime scene and offender background characteristics. Second, the instrumental and expressive themes from the first analysis were examined in relation to the motives the perpetrators themselves provided for their offence. A sample of 97 solved homicide cases was analysed using the non‐metric multidimensional scaling procedure Proxscal. The results revealed that 62% of the homicide crime scenes and 67% of the offender backgrounds could be classified as either expressive or instrumental. The self‐reported motives did not correspond with the themes according to the Proxscal analysis. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Resource depletion does not influence prospective memory in college students

This paper reports an experiment designed to investigate the potential influence of prior acts of self-control on subsequent prospective memory performance. College undergraduates (n = 146) performed either a cognitively depleting initial task (e.g., mostly incongruent Stroop task) or a less resource-consuming version of that task (e.g., all congruent Stroop task). Subsequently, participants completed a prospective memory task that required attentionally demanding monitoring processes. The results demonstrated that prior acts of self-control do not impair the ability to execute a future intention in college-aged adults. We conceptually replicated these results in three additional depletion and prospective memory experiments. This research extends a growing number of studies demonstrating the boundary conditions of the resource depletion effect in cognitive tasks.     

Emotion Regulation in Youth with Emotional Disorders: Implications for a Unified Treatment Approach

Given the relationship between internalizing disorders and deficits in emotion regulation in youth, the emotion science literature has suggested several avenues for increasing the efficacy of interventions for youth presenting with anxiety and depression. These possibilities include the identification and addition of emotion-regulation skills to existing treatment packages and broadening the scope of those emotions addressed in cognitive-behavioral treatments. Current emotion-focused interventions designed to meet one or both of these goals are discussed, and the developmental influences relevant to the selection of emotion-focused treatment goals are explored using the framework of a modal model of emotion regulation. These various lines of evidence are woven together to support the utility of a novel emotion-focused, cognitive-behavioral intervention, the Unified Protocol for the Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Youth, a transdiagnostic treatment protocol that aims to treat the range of emotional disorders (i.e., anxiety and depression) simultaneously. Avenues for future directions in treatment outcome and assessment of emotion regulation are also discussed.     

Virtual Reality and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Driving Anxiety and Aggression in Veterans: A Pilot Study

Within the U.S. military, motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) are the leading cause of preventable morbidity and mortality. Prior combat exposure and anxiety symptoms are associated with risky and aggressive driving, which is responsible for over half of MVA fatalities. Therefore, interventions are needed to reduce driving anxiety and aggression in veterans in order to mitigate the public health impact of MVAs. Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) offers safe, controlled exposure to distressing stimuli. The current study piloted a novel virtual reality and cognitive behavioral intervention (VRET + CBT) for veterans that integrated both anxiety and anger management components. Virtual reality driving scenarios were delivered in a driving simulator and tailored for the military population. Six previously deployed veterans completed eight intervention sessions, as well as pre/post, one month follow-up and six to nine month follow-up assessments. Repeated measures ANOVAs demonstrated significant decline and large effect sizes for PTSD symptoms, driving phobia, hyperarousal in driving situations, anxiety/anger-related thoughts and behaviors, and risky driving. Hyperarousal in driving situations declined by 69%, aggressive driving declined by 29%, and risky driving declined by 21%. Treatment gains were maintained at follow-up. Recruitment, retention, immersion, simulator sickness scores, and qualitative feedback demonstrated feasibility of the intervention. Implications for future research and adaptation are discussed.     

An Evidence-Based,Community-Engaged Approach to Develop an Interactive Deliberation Tool for Pediatric Neuromuscular Trials

Duchenne/Becker muscular dystrophy (DBMD) and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) are rare neuromuscular disorders that present challenges to therapeutic and clinical trial decision making. We developed an interactive, evidence-based online tool designed to encourage thoughtful deliberation of the pros and cons of trial participation and to inform meaningful discussions with healthcare providers. Prior research demonstrates the importance of tool availability at the time each family is considering trial participation, which may be prior to the informed consent process. The tool is intended to be easily modified to other pediatric disease communities. Tool development was informed by prior qualitative research, literature reviews, and stakeholder input. Specific items were derived based on an online exploratory questionnaire of parents whose children participated in a trial for DBMD or SMA to understand motivations for participation. Parent participants in the exploratory survey reported strong impact of altruistic and individual benefit motivations and placed much greater emphasis on anticipated trial benefits than on harms when making participation decisions. We used this data to develop the evidence-based deliberation tool using a community-engaged approach. We initially targeted the tool for DBMD while using SMA survey data to evaluate ease of transition to that population. We conducted two iterative sets of activities to inform development and refinement of the tool: (1) community engagement of key stakeholders and (2) user experience testing. These activities suggest that the tool may increase deliberation and the weighing of benefits and harms. Ongoing evaluation will determine the acceptability and efficacy of this online intervention.