DAVID BEN‐GURION ON PLATO

The purpose of this article is to clarify the relationship between David Ben‐Gurion’s political thinking, his political practice and his interpretation of some aspects of Plato’s political philosophy. Ben‐Gurion ascribed to Plato three main political values: activism, or the ability to reject existing norms and mold society after the moral laws of man; a striving to create a unified society; and the ideal of a society based on justice. These values also form the bedrock of Ben‐Gurion’s Zionism. The “Jewish Revolution”—as he called the profound changes brought by the Zionist movement—is an active effort to control Jewish destiny. Its main goal is to create a unified people and realize moral norms. Activism and unity were also, as the article tries to demonstrate, the central guiding principles of Ben‐Gurion’s practice as a political leader, as exemplified in his reliance on pioneering and in fostering a strong political centre of authority.     

Young Israelis' Reactions to National Trauma: The Rabin Assassination andTerror Attacks

This study examined the cognitive and emotional reactions of 477 Israeli high school students to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (immediately after the event as well as 5 months later) and to a series of terror attacks. The respondents' reactions to the two events were compared as a function of gender and political orientation. About 50% of the respondents who changed their political views immediately after the assassination reverted to pre-event attitudes 5 months later. Emotional reactions to the assassination showed substantial fading after 5 months, with extent of fading unaffected by gender or political orientation. The intensity of emotional reactions was affected by political orientation: Although Rabin's supporters and his opponents reacted with equal intensity to the terror attacks, supporters reacted with the same intensity to Rabin's assassination, whereas opponents' reactions to the assassination were less intense.     

Functional connectivity abnormalities during contextual processing in schizophrenia and in Parkinson’s disease

Functional connectivity was evaluated in patients with schizophrenia (SC) and in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) during the performance of a local contextual processing paradigm, to investigate the proposition that functional disconnection is involved with contextual processing deficits in these populations. To this end, we utilized event-related EEG signals, synchronization likelihood and graph theoretical analysis. Local context was defined as the occurrence of a predictive sequence of stimuli before the presentation of a target event. In the SC patients, we observed a decrease in path length (L) in the beta band, for the predictive sequence and for predicted and random targets, compared with controls. These abnormalities were associated with weaker frontal-temporal-parietal connections. In the PD patients we found longer L (theta band) for predicted targets, and higher cluster coefficients for both the predictive sequence (theta band) and predicted targets (alpha and theta bands), compared with controls. Detection of predicted targets was associated with weaker frontal-parietal connections in PD. No group differences were found for randomized standard stimuli in both SC and PD patients. These findings provide evidence of task-specific functional connectivity abnormalities within frontal networks during local contextual processing.     

Emotional Involvement in Marriage During the Last Trimester of the First Pregnancy: A Comparison of Husbands and Wives

This study examined the emotional involvement of 27 husbands and wives in their marriage relationships during the stressful period of the last trimester of the first pregnancy. Four behavioral dispositions indicated a state of high emotional involvement in the marriage: (a) striving to gratify interpersonal needs primarily through the marital relationship; (b) needing to receive affection and desiring to provide support; (c) desiring to satisfy these needs in a mutually satisfying way; and (d) becoming irritated and hostile when maritally dissatisfied. The results show, according to all indicators except the desire to support one's spouse, that husbands were less emotionally involved in the marital relationship than wives. The finding that husbands showed a low level of emotional involvement in marriage supports Laws's (1971) suggestion that husbands' mode of being-in-the-marriage is basically unresponsive to changes and stresses in the family.