Reasons for Living versus Reasons for Dying: Examining the Internal Debate of Suicide

The Reasons for Living vs. Reasons for Dying (RFL/RFD) Assessment was used to obtain suicidal outpatients' top five reasons for living and for dying, respectively. Forty-nine suicidal university counseling center patients provided 173 RFL and 145 RFD responses. These responses were organized into eight RFL coding categories and nine RFD coding categories. Two coders trained in the RFL/RFD coding system showed high levels of inter-rater reliability (K_RFL = .81; K_RFD = .80). Chi-square results for RFL and RFD coding categories showed that the coding categories were not equally salient to these suicidal patients.     

Marriage Before the Bench: Divorce Law and Litigation Strategies in Thirteenth-Century Ashkenaz

Scholars regularly refer to independently operating Jewish courts as prime evidence of Jewish autonomy and self-rule in medieval Christian Europe. Yet few have focused on the largely anonymous individuals who populated these forums, despite the vital role that litigants played in fueling the judicial system. This article joins a growing body of research devoted to a bottom-up examination of the institutions of law and justice in premodern Europe, highlighting the activities of those who made use of the courts rather than the structures that authorized them. Specifically, it considers a divorce suit adjudicated in the mid-thirteenth century by the rabbinic court of Rabbi Hezkiah b. Jacob of Magdeburg as a lens onto the legal knowledge of lay litigants, their expectations of the judicial system, and the litigation strategies they developed. The reactions of R. Hezkiah and his colleagues to these tactics demonstrate that litigation in the Jewish courts not only reflected current legal trends but could also affect them.     

The role of facial orientation in newborn infants’ preference for attractive faces

Several previous experiments have found that newborn and young infants will spend more time looking at attractive faces when these are shown paired with faces judged by adults to be unattractive. Two experimental conditions are described whose aim was to find whether the ‘attractiveness effect’ is affected by the orientation of the facial stimuli. Pairs of attractive and less attractive faces (as judged by adults) were shown to newborn infants (mean age 2 days 20.5 hours), where each pair was presented both upright and inverted through 180°. In the former (upright) condition, but not the latter (inverted) condition, the infants looked longer at the attractive faces, and the difference in attractiveness preference between the conditions was statistically significant. These findings are clear evidence that infants’ early representation of faces contains information about faces that is orientation‐specific. The results are discussed in terms of innate facial representations and rapid learning about faces in the hours from birth.     

In the Eyes of the Beholder: how Adolescents,Teachers and School Counselors Construct Adolescent Images

This study had two objectives: (a) to examine the adolescent image teachers and school counselors construct (category-based images) by comparing it with the adolescent's self-image (self-as-target based), and (b) to explicate the discrepancy between category-based adolescent images as constructed by teachers, counselors, and adolescents by underlying social cognitive processes. To this end, 269 eighth-grade adolescents and 104 junior high school teachers and school counselors responded to the self-image questionnaire for young adolescents (SIQYA). Adolescents responded either to self-image questionnaires or to an adolescent-your-age version and school staff to an eighth-grader image version. One-way MANOVAs comparing the nine SIQYA scales indicated that overall, teachers' and school counselors' adolescent images were less positive than adolescents' adolescent images (as reported both regarding the self or another adolescent). These findings were interpreted in terms of two social psychological processes: positive illusion and adolescent stereotypes. Discussion also addresses the implications of these findings for educators' knowledge regarding normal adolescent processes and psychological hardships intensified during adolescence.