Rabbis and Health: A Half-Century Review of the Mental and Physical Health Care Literature:1950–1999

Electronic searches were conducted on PubMed and the American Psychological Association's database (PsycINFO) for articles that discussed the role of rabbis in relation to some aspect of healthcare. The two searches were conducted in each electronic database using the search-terms: (1) (rabbi OR rabbinical OR synagogue) OR (2) (Judaism OR Jewish) AND (clergy OR chaplain). Articles were classified by the year of their publication, professional discipline, type of journal (either religious or secular), and type of article: either research, or narrative and expositional. Rabbis were discussed most often in psychology, psychiatry, and behavior-related fields, and close to two-thirds of the articles dealt with mental health concerns. A statistically significant increase in articles across decades was found in the secular journals, r=.98, p≤.01, with over 70% of the articles about rabbis in the secular journals being published between 1980 and 1999. Many of the articles addressed collaboration between rabbis, psychiatrists, and other and mental health professionals and discussed previously identified themes related to professional collaboration and referral.     

Effects of hormone replacement therapy and aging on cognition: evidence for executive dysfunction

The present study was designed to explore whether the frontal lobe hypothesis of cognitive aging may be extended to describe the cognitive effects associated with estrogen use in postmenopausal women. Postmenopausal estrogen-only users, estrogen + progesterone users, and non-users (60-80 years old), as well as young, regularly cycling women (18-30 years old) completed an item and source memory task. Since source memory is thought to rely more on executive processes than item memory, we hypothesized that aging and estrogen effects would be greater for source memory than for item memory. Neuropsychological tests explored whether the effects of aging and estrogen use were revealed on other tests of frontal lobe function. Results from the experimental task revealed greater aging and estrogen effects for source memory than for item memory, and neuropsychological results revealed aging and estrogen effects on a subset of tests of executive function. Women on estrogen + progesterone therapy did not outperform non-users, suggesting that the addition of progesterone to hormone therapy may mitigate the benefits induced by estrogen use alone. Overall, findings support the hypothesis that estrogen use may temper age-related cognitive decline by helping to maintain functions subserved by the frontal lobes.     

A cross-cultural survey of the effects of anxiety on the relationship between child rearing and cognition

A cross-cultural study involving a basic pool of 44 societies throughout the world was conducted to analyze the effect of anxiety on the relationship between certain child-rearing variables and cultural measures of cognitive complexity and self-esteem. The research demonstrated that societies utilizing anxiety-arousing techniques did so consistently across a variety of apparently contradictory child-rearing variables. The introduction of anxiety to the rearing experience had the general effect of changing previously established patterns of interaction, sometimes with major sex differences. Thus, socialization toward group norms and away from independent activity was positively associated with indicators of cognitive development (Zern, 1983). When anxiety over the socialization experience existed, however, no systematic relationship was demonstrated for either sex. Self-esteem was also positively related to pressures to socialize when no anxiety existed. For women, when anxiety was introduced, there was a strong negative relationship. For men, anxiety caused no systematic connections of any kind between pressures to socialize and self-esteem.     

Slowed lexical access in nonfluent aphasia: a case study.

A list priming paradigm (LPP) was used to examine the hypothesis that nonfluent aphasics are literally slowed down in automatic access to lexical information. In this paradigm, words are presented visually, and the subject's task is to make a lexical decision on each word as quickly as possible after its presentation. As soon as a lexical decision is made on one word, that word is removed and, after a predetermined interword interval, the next word is presented. In this way, a continuous "list" effect is obtained. Prior studies with both college-age and elderly subjects using the LPP have shown that, independently of age, on the LPP, priming obtains at interword delays of 500 to 800 msec, but not at either shorter or longer interword delays. In the study reported here, the LPP was used to examine delays at which priming obtained for LD, a nonfluent aphasic with a lesion primarily in the left frontal region. Examining interword delays ranging from 500 to 1800 msec, the subject showed priming only at a delay of 1500 msec, a considerably longer delay than that at which neurologically intact subjects have shown priming. Based on these results, it is argued that while automatic access is retained, that access is much slower in a nonfluent aphasic than in neurologically intact elderly subjects. These results are discussed in terms of how slowed lexical access might impact on discourse comprehension.     

Examining the generality of eyewitness hypermnesia: A close look at time delay and question type

Three studies investigated whether requiring eyewitnesses to provide multiple accounts of a crime prompted them to exhibit more accurate and complete recall (i.e. hypermnesia) or towards providing more inaccurate and confabulated testimony. Subject-witnesses viewed videotapes enacting several types of crimes. Subjects exhibited hypermnesia in two studies in which they were asked to provide accounts of the incident via a free-recall procedure. Indeed, there tended to be roughly a 10–20 per cent increase in the number of facts accurately recalled from the initial interview to the third. The number of incorrect recollections and confabulations did not reliably increase. In the second experiment, hypermnesia was observed even when eyewitness memory was degraded by delaying the initial interview until a week after the witness viewed the crime. In a third study, which employed a multiple-choice questioning procedure, subjects exhibited neither hypermnesia nor heightened incorrect responding. Discussion centres on possible factors influencing the hypermnesia effect and implications of the present research for theory on hypermnesia.     

Values,Beliefs, and Proenvironmental Action: Attitude Formation Toward Emergent Attitude Objects1

Discoveries in environmental science become the raw material for constructing social attitude objects, individual attitudes, and broad public concerns. We explored a model in which individuals construct attitudes to new or emergent attitude objects by referencing personal values and beliefs about the consequences of the objects for their values. We found that a subset of the major clusters identified in value theory is associated with willingness to take proenvironmental action; that a biospheric value orientation cannot yet be discerned in a general population sample; that willingness to take proenvironmental action is a function of both values and beliefs, with values also predicting beliefs; and that gender differences can be attributed to both beliefs and values. Our model has promise for explicating the factors determining public concern with environmental conditions.     

Scientific Meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Person perception: Effects of sex,marital status,and sex-typed occupation

A sample of 208 male college students evaluated a briefly described stimulus person on 20 7-point bipolar scales which described personality traits and professional performance characteristics. Each subject rated one of 16 persons who were described as either female or male; never married, divorced, widowed, or unmarried; and employed in either a feminine or masculine sex-typed occupation. Female stimulus persons generally were rated more favorably than male stimulus persons. The personality traits of married persons of both sexes were evaluated more favorably than those of unmarried persons. Individuals in sex-typical and sex-atypical occupations received similar evaluations.Parts of this article were presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, August 1981.