Winning the victim status can open conflicting groups to reconciliation: Evidence from the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict

Members of conflicting groups often engage in ‘competitive victimhood’, that is, they are motivated to gain acknowledgment that their ingroup is the conflict's ‘true’ victim. The present study found that compared with a control group, Israeli Jews and Palestinians reassured that their ingroup had won the victim status showed increased willingness to reconcile with the outgroup and held less pessimistic, fatalistic views of the conflict. Moreover, for members of the stronger party—Israeli Jews—winning the victim status also led to increased group efficacy and consequent readiness to take action toward resolution. These findings extend previous theorizing about the positive effects of addressing group members' need for acknowledgement of their victimization. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Information‐Theoretic Properties of Auditory Sequences Dynamically Influence Expectation and Memory

A basic function of cognition is to detect regularities in sensory input to facilitate the prediction and recognition of future events. It has been proposed that these implicit expectations arise from an internal predictive coding model, based on knowledge acquired through processes such as statistical learning, but it is unclear how different types of statistical information affect listeners’ memory for auditory stimuli. We used a combination of behavioral and computational methods to investigate memory for non‐linguistic auditory sequences. Participants repeatedly heard tone sequences varying systematically in their information‐theoretic properties. Expectedness ratings of tones were collected during three listening sessions, and a recognition memory test was given after each session. Information‐theoretic measures of sequential predictability significantly influenced listeners’ expectedness ratings, and variations in these properties had a significant impact on memory performance. Predictable sequences yielded increasingly better memory performance with increasing exposure. Computational simulations using a probabilistic model of auditory expectation suggest that listeners dynamically formed a new, and increasingly accurate, implicit cognitive model of the information‐theoretic structure of the sequences throughout the experimental session.     

The Relative Importance of Self-Focused and Society-Focused Values in Explaining Political Attitudes in Europe

Personal values predict political attitudes. Previous research in the United States suggests that so-called “society-focused” personal values such as universalism or conservation do so more than “self-focused” values such as self-direction and power. This study seeks to test the relevance of this distinction in a different context with four political attitudes using the European Social Survey. Three mechanisms are suggested to explain effects of self-focused values on political attitudes. Although society-focused values were generally found to be more important in predicting political attitudes, self-focused values made a significant and often substantial contribution. On average, self-focused values were able to predict around half of the variance in political attitudes that society-focused values were. Power in particular played a role in predicting political attitudes, especially support for economic redistribution. Further analyses support the ideas that (1) even the most self-focused value (i.e., hedonism) can play a relevant role in predicting political attitudes, and (2) self-interest may play a role in explaining the effect of self-focused values on political attitudes. Together, these findings highlight that a priori excluding self-focused values from analyses of political attitudes—as studies have done in the past—may lead to important effects being overlooked.     

Field Trial of a Complicated Grief Psychosocial Program for Adolescents in Occupied Palestine

The current study evaluated the new “Children and Grief” program for Palestinian adolescents (n = 158), aged 10–18, referred to counselors for complicated grief. A mixed methods quasi-experimental design involved non-randomized intervention group (n = 79), waitlist (n = 79), and measures of program fidelity and cost. Traumatic loss was identified from case files. Standardized measures assessed complicated grief, posttraumatic stress, and depression at pre and post-test. Interviews of 9 adolescents and 9 presenters explored subjective experience of program delivery. Analysis involved multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and quasi-qualitative analysis of interviews. A large effect size was found for reduced complicated grief. Randomized control trials, longitudinal research, and studies that explore the impact of martyrdom on coping with grief are needed.     

Gender Roles in the Arab World: Development and Psychometric Properties of the Arab Adolescents Gender Roles Attitude Scale

Scant research has been conducted on gender in the Arab world; one explanation is due to a lack of Arabic measures on gender-related issues. To advance scientific work on gender in the Arab world, we developed the Arab Adolescents Gender Roles Attitude Scale (AAGRAS), the first known reliable and valid Arabic measure of gender-role attitudes. To develop this measure, we conducted two studies based on data collected from 776 high school students 15–19 years-old from the state of Qatar. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis produced 12 items divided equally into two subscales. One subscale assesses traditional gender-role attitudes, whereas the other measures egalitarian gender-role attitudes. Our findings indicate that young men are more likely to resist gender equality than young women are. Moreover, those who hold traditional attitudes are more likely to disapprove of women occupying positions of authority. The AAGRAS is a useful assessment tool that policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and educators can use to study gender-role attitudes in the Arab world and to develop educational and intervention programs that encourage adolescents to identify, confront, and avoid prejudice and discrimination against women and ultimately adopt more egalitarian gender roles.     

Responses to outgroup help: The role of type of help and sense of control

Helping may be motivated by a variety of reasons, including the desire of helpers to enhance the power of the ingroup and diminish the power of the outgroup. Accordingly, receiving unsolicited assistance from an outgroup member is often responded to negatively by ingroup members because it can undermine feelings of the efficacy of one's group and ultimately threaten the position of one's group relative to the helper's group. The present research explored how a sense of control, induced incidentally, can ameliorate such negative consequences of being helped. Two studies employed a minimal group paradigm and examined the response to an offer of help from a member of another group (Experiments 1 and 2) compared to an offer from a member of the same group (Experiment 2). The results of these two experiments converged to reveal that having the opportunity to exert control, even incidentally, can ameliorate negative responses to an outgroup helper and to the outgroup as a whole. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications. Identifying factors, such as control, that can promote the acceptance of assistance from members of other groups can complement previous work focusing on influences that exacerbate negative reactions to help, providing a more comprehensive understanding of intergroup helping relations and informing interventions to improve relations between groups. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed.