BRITISH JEWISH PREACHERS IN TIME OF WAR (1800–1918)

Beginning in the eighteenth century, occasions related to war became a significant new venue for Jewish preaching. The declaration of war or its conclusion, a government‐proclaimed Day of National Fasting and Prayer or of Thanksgiving, a major victory or defeat of the nation’s armed forces – all generated sermons by Jewish preachers, who not infrequently publicized what they said beyond the synagogue walls. These sermons reflect the patriotic identification of Jews with the nation where they resided, the desire to demonstrate this loyalty to the larger society, the homiletical application of classical texts and historical precedents to new situations, the challenge presented by war to assumptions about human progress, the theological conundrum of enemy nations praying for victory to the same God, the poignant agony of Jews fighting against other Jews. This article reviews Jewish sermons delivered by British preachers mobilizing the rhetorical resources of Jewish and general literatures to express absolute identification with the Crown, the Government and the Empire, as well as sermons that express deep discouragement about the devastating cost of war in material, cultural, psychological and religious terms.     

THE ARTIFICIALITY OF GERMAN IN MODERN YIDDISH POETRY

One of the chief debates in Yiddish linguistics and literary criticism concerns the issue of daytshmerish (Germanesque). Specifically, scholars question the incorporation of lexical elements from New High German into the literary language of modern Yiddish. After examining the arguments of the major Yiddish linguists and literary critics who pronounced on this subject, this article will highlight examples of this so‐called “borrowing” in the poems of the American Yiddish “sweatshop” poet Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923). In particular, it will show the way in which these Germanic elements, specifically lexical ones, function on a stylistic level in Rosenfeld’s poetry and contribute to his general poetics.     

The Effect of Rater Expectations on the Evaluation of a Hypothetical Subordinate

In a laboratory study of the effect of rater expectations on the evaluation of a hypothetical subordinate's performance, 159 undergraduates role played the part of a sales manager who had been given high, low, or no expectations about a subordinates's potential along with hypothetical concrete or abstract performance data. Hypotheses regarding the interaction of performance data and expectations on evaluations were not supported. Although evaluations of the subordinate's performance did not vary across conditions, the student raters recommended larger raises for the subordinate for whom they had low expectations than for the subordinate for whom they had high expectations. The key predictor of a recommended raise appeared to be the extent to which the subordinate met or exceeded rater expectations. These results were reconfirmed with an independent cross-validation sample of 168 subjects.     

Mind-wandering and dysphoria

Mind-wandering shares a number of important similarities with thinking in depression. This experiment examines whether mind-wandering provides a useful marker of cognition in dysphoria during a word learning task. Dysphoria was associated with more accessible mind-wandering when attempting to encode verbal items. In addition, in the dysphoric population, periods when the mind wandered led to greater decoupling from task-relevant processing as indexed by slower response times, and greater physiological arousal, as indexed by faster heart rates. In the general population, periods of mind-wandering when attempting to encode information were associated with poor retrieval and high skin conductance. Finally, the extent to which mind-wandering was associated with poor retrieval was associated with an individuals’ latency to retrieve specific autobiographical memories from outside the laboratory. These results provide strong evidence for the utility of mind-wandering as a marker for depressive thinking and suggest a number of important implications for therapy for depression.     

How should the History of Education be Written? Some Reflections about the Nature of the Discipline from the Perspective of the Reception of our Work

How should history of education be written? To put the question is far more easier than to provide a concrete answer. In contemporary research, there continue to be pedagogistic complaints about finding answers to present-day educational problems via history. In our view, such an ahistorical utilitarianism as well as the legitimizing and/or mythologizing belief in a particular pedagogical system, in which the history of this field is so rich since the institutionalization of the discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, should be avoided at all costs. But the danger of presentism lurks around the corner as a sine qua non condition in any form of historical research. As can be found out via the comments on our own work, much of the criticism goes back to old conceptions of the discipline, conceived as historical pedagogy rather than as history of education. Apparently, in the field of pedagogy people are still convinced that the history of education, even if it does not provide edifying examples and useful lessons, must in any case have a training value for professionals – which in the light of modern, advanced research is rather a difficult idea to defend.     

Reorganization in coping behavior at 1 1/2 years: dynamic systems and normative change

By the age of 1 year toddlers demonstrate distinct coping habits for dealing with frustration. However, these habits may be open to change and reorganization at subsequent developmental junctures. We investigated change in coping habits at 18-20 months, a normative age for major advances in social cognition, focusing on the dynamic systems principles of fluctuation and novelty at transitions. Specifically, we asked whether month-to-month fluctuation, novel behavioral habits and real-time variability increased at the age of a normative transition, despite individual differences in the content of behavior. Infants were given frustrating toys while their mothers sat nearby without helping, on monthly visits at 14-25 months (before, during and after the hypothesized transition). State space grids representing patterns of behavioral durations were constructed for each episode and compared over age. As predicted, month-to-month fluctuation in grid patterns increased temporarily between 17 and 20 months, partly independently of a concurrent peak in distress, and new behavioral habits replaced old ones at the same age. Coping habits changed differently for high-and low-distressed toddlers. However, changes in real-time variability did not generally meet our expectations.     

Merging the senses into a robust percept

To perceive the external environment our brain uses multiple sources of sensory information derived from several different modalities, including vision, touch and audition. All these different sources of information have to be efficiently merged to form a coherent and robust percept. Here we highlight some of the mechanisms that underlie this merging of the senses in the brain. We show that, depending on the type of information, different combination and integration strategies are used and that prior knowledge is often required for interpreting the sensory signals.     

How research in behavioral pharmacology informs behavioral science

Behavioral pharmacology is a maturing science that has made significant contributions to the study of drug effects on behavior, especially in the domain of drug-behavior interactions. Less appreciated is that research in behavioral pharmacology can have, and has had, implications for the experimental analysis of behavior, especially its conceptualizations and theory. In this article, I outline three general strategies in behavioral pharmacology research that have been employed to increase understanding of behavioral processes. Examples are provided of the general characteristics of the strategies and of implications of previous research for behavior theory. Behavior analysis will advance as its theories are challenged.     

Multistable syllables as enacted percepts: a source of an asymmetric bias in the verbal transformation effect

Perceptual changes are experienced during rapid and continuous repetition of a speech form, leading to an auditory illusion known as the verbal transformation effect. Although verbal transformations are considered to reflect mainly the perceptual organization and interpretation of speech, the present study was designed to test whether or not speech production constraints may participate in the emergence of verbal representations. With this goal in mind, we examined whether variations in the articulatory cohesion of repeated nonsense words--specifically, temporal relationships between articulatory events--could lead to perceptual asymmetries in verbal transformations. The first experiment displayed variations in timing relations between two consonantal gestures embedded in various nonsense syllables in a repetitive speech production task. In the second experiment, French participants repeatedly uttered these syllables while searching for verbal transformation. Syllable transformation frequencies followed the temporal clustering between consonantal gestures: The more synchronized the gestures, the more stable and attractive the syllable. In the third experiment, which involved a covert repetition mode, the pattern was maintained without external speech movements. However, when a purely perceptual condition was used in a fourth experiment, the previously observed perceptual asymmetries of verbal transformations disappeared. These experiments demonstrate the existence of an asymmetric bias in the verbal transformation effect linked to articulatory control constraints. The persistence of this effect from an overt to a covert repetition procedure provides evidence that articulatory stability constraints originating from the action system may be involved in auditory imagery. The absence of the asymmetric bias during a purely auditory procedure rules out perceptual mechanisms as a possible explanation of the observed asymmetries.     

The Effects of Cumulative Risks and Promotive Factors on Urban Adolescent Alcohol and Other Drug Use: A Longitudinal Study of Resiliency

Resiliency theory provides a conceptual framework for studying why some youth exposed to risk factors do not develop the negative behaviors they predict. The purpose of this study was to test compensatory and protective models of resiliency in a longitudinal sample of urban adolescents (80% African American). The data were from Years 1 (9th grade) and 4 (12th grade). The study examined effects of cumulative risk and promotive factors on adolescent polydrug use including alcohol, tobacco and marijuana. Cumulative measures of risk/promotive factors represented individual characteristics, peer influence, and parental/familial influences. After controlling for demographics, results of multiple regression of polydrug use support the compensatory model of resiliency both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Promotive factors were also found to have compensatory effects on change in adolescent polydrug use. The protective model of resiliency evidenced cross-sectionally was not supported in longitudinal analysis. The findings support resiliency theory and the use of cumulative risk/promotive measures in resiliency research. Implications focused on utilizing multiple assets and resources in prevention programming are discussed.