When Victimhood Goes to War? Israel and Victim Claims

Prominent sociopsychological approaches interpret collective victimhood as inseparable, central characteristic of societies involved in intractable conflicts. Victimhood is broadly perceived as an essential conflict-supportive belief also in other disciplines. In the context of Israel, there is a cross-disciplinary consensus that collective victimhood is the country's foundational identity. This project argues that states' employment of this theme changes and is context dependent. It discusses under what conditions Israel's political elites incorporate victim narratives towards armed conflicts. It examines public communication during the 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense (OPD) and the Yom Kippur war of 1973 (YKW). Employing a modified method of narrative conceptualization analysis, the research demonstrates that victim narratives were used almost twice as much during OPD than during YKW. The findings suggest that we need to differentiate between the role these narratives play for collectives versus states. For the latter, the presence of victim narratives is highly variable and reflects strategic developments. The project is the first systematic study exposing that victim narratives can be a challenge for governance. By conceptualizing victim narratives as claims, it captures the dynamic, contextual characteristics of collective victimhood in state affairs offering a theoretical tool for understanding the political dimension of this identification.     

Professional relationships in dangerous times: C. G. Jung and the Society for Psychotherapy

Relying in part on previously unpublished documents of the 1930s, this paper(1) describes the origins and mission of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, both as it existed before Hitler's rise to power and as it was transformed afterward. Jung accepted the Society's presidency in 1933-34, on condition that it be restructured as an international, politically neutral organization, free from the laws of Gleichschaltung (Nazi conformity). The paper also contains a close study of Jung's collaboration with one interesting German colleague, Walter Cimbal. Cimbal, a neurologist, was briefly a member of the Nazi Party and, judging from his early letters to Jung, a Hitler enthusiast. Yet he also seems to have tried, together with Jung, to alleviate the difficulties of German Jewish colleagues whose lives were disrupted by the Hitler revolution. The paper includes translated passages from Cimbal's previously unpublished letters from 1933-36 and the post-war years. It also includes a first-person account by Wladimir Rosenbaum, the Zurich lawyer who assisted Jung in 1934, when Jung tried to mitigate the impact of anti-Jewish laws on his German Jewish colleagues. In the primary materials of this period one discovers more evidence of moral shadow-and also less-than is sometimes assumed.     

Comparing the Characteristics of Homeless Adults in Poland and the United States

This study compared the characteristics of probability samples of homeless adults in Poland (N = 200 from two cities) and the United States (N = 219 from one city), using measures with established reliability and validity in homeless populations. The same measures were used across nations and a systemic translation procedure assured comparability of measurement. The two samples were similar on some measures: In both nations, most homeless adults were male, many reported having dependent children and experiencing out-of-home placements when they themselves were children, and high levels of physical health problems were observed. Significant national differences were also found: Those in Poland were older, had been homeless for longer, showed lower rates on all psychiatric diagnoses assessed (including severe mental and substance abuse disorders), reported less contact with family and supportive network members, were less satisfied when they sought support from their networks, and reported fewer recent stressful life events and fewer risky sexual behaviors. Culturally-informed interpretations of these findings and their implications are presented.     

Show me the Money: The impact of actual rewards and losses on the feedback negativity

The feedback negativity (FN) is an event-related potential component which is typically conceptualized as a negativity in response to losses that is absent in response to gains. However, there is also evidence that variation in the FN reflects the neural response to gains. The present study sought to explore these possibilities by manipulating the context in which loss and gain feedback was presented in a straightforward gambling task. In half the blocks, participants could win or lose money (Value condition), and in half the blocks, participants could not win or lose any money (No Value condition). The degree to which losses and gains were differentiated from one another (i.e., the ΔFN) was greater in the Value condition than in the No Value condition. Furthermore, though the responses to loss feedback and gain feedback were each enhanced in the Value condition relative to the No-Value condition, the effect of the monetary manipulation was substantially larger for the positivity to gains than the negativity to losses. This is consistent with the notion that the FN might reflect two independent processes, but that variation in the FN depends more upon the response to rewards than losses.     

Les programmes de l’Association for Psychological Science (APS) pour l’enseignement de la psychologie scientifique

The Association for Psychological Science (APS) supports the teaching of psychological science as a central part of its mission to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in research, application, teaching, and the improvement of human welfare. APS's teaching-related initiatives include: providing free classroom and educational use of research articles published in APS journals; a series of articles on presenting scientific findings in classroom lessons; sponsoring and hosting conferences on the teaching of psychological science, most notably hosting the popular Teaching Institute at the APS annual meeting and co-sponsoring the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology (NITOP); providing grants for developing teaching resources; a Teaching fellowship; and providing financial and technical support to organizations that focus on teaching psychological science. Many of these activities are supported by the APS Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science, established through an endowment from the David & Carol Myers Foundation. In addition, a core component of the APS Wikipedia Initiative is to involve students and teachers in the development of high-quality accurate information on concepts, findings and methods in psychological science.     

Editorial

This article provides a critique of the IWC's traditional focus on anthropocentric conservation in the governance of whaling. It is argued that this position, which relies on accepting the view that we have no direct moral duties to whales, is out of step with the moral status that now tends, in theory and practice, to be granted to animals. More specifically, anthropocentric conservation conflicts with the widespread acceptance, in theory and practice, that non-human animals such as whales have moral standing, that what we do to them matters to them directly. This does not mean that whaling should necessarily be prohibited on ethical grounds, although the animal welfare analysis of whaling sketched in this article does suggest that, on balance, it is difficult to defend morally. Rather, it is being claimed that it is morally objectionable to deny, as the whaling nations do, that the IWC ought to be mandated to consider the welfare implications of whaling.     

Effects of Sesame Street: A meta-analysis of children's learning in 15 countries

Sesame Street is broadcast to millions of children globally, including in some of the world's poorest regions. This meta-analysis examines the effects of children's exposure to international co-productions of Sesame Street, synthesizing the results of 24 studies, conducted with over 10,000 children in 15 countries. The results indicated significant positive effects of exposure to the program, aggregated across learning outcomes, and within each of the three outcome categories: cognitive outcomes, including literacy and numeracy; learning about the world, including health and safety knowledge; social reasoning and attitudes toward out-groups. The effects were significant across different methods, and they were observed in both low- and middle-income countries and also in high-income countries. The results are contextualized by considering the effects and reach of the program, relative to other early childhood interventions.     

Language difficulties in children adopted internationally: Neuropsychological and functional neural correlates

Children who have experienced deprivation as a result of orphanage care during early development are at increased risk for a number of cognitive, emotional, and social difficulties (MacLean, 2003). This study examined the neuropsychological and behavioral profile of internationally adopted children with language difficulties, one of the most common cognitive challenges (Behen et al., 2008). In addition to neuropsychological testing, fMRI was utilized to examine activation patterns during expressive fluency and receptive language tasks. In comparison to internationally adopted children without language difficulties and nonadopted controls, participants with language difficulty had worse performance on tasks of verbal memory and reasoning, academic skills, and working memory. Behaviorally, all internationally adopted participants, regardless of language ability, had more parent-reported hyperactivity and impulsivity compared with controls. The fMRI tasks revealed reduced activation in traditional language areas in participants with language difficulty. The impact of early adverse experience on later development is discussed.     

International–local remuneration differences across six countries: Do they undermine poverty reduction work?

Despite the rhetoric of a single global economy, professionals in poorer countries continue to be remunerated differently depending on whether they are compensated at a local vs. international rate. Project ADDUP (Are Development Discrepancies Undermining Performance?) surveyed 1290 expatriate and local professionals (response rate = 47%) from aid, education, government, and business sectors in (1) Island Nations (Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands), (2) landlocked economies (Mala?i, Uganda), and (3) emerging economies (India, China). Difference in pay was estimated using purchasing power parity, from the World Bank's World Development Indicators 2007. Psychological measures included self‐reported pay and benefits (remuneration), self‐attributed ability, remuneration comparison, sense of justice in remuneration, remuneration‐related motivation, thoughts of turnover and thoughts about international mobility. We included control measures of candour, culture shock, cultural values (horizontal/vertical individualism/collectivism), personality (from the “big five”), job satisfaction and work engagement. Controlling for these and country (small effects) and organization effects (medium), (a) pay ratios between international and local workers exceeded what were perceived to be acceptable pay thresholds among respondents remunerated locally; who also reported a combination of a sense of relative (b) injustice and demotivation; which (c) together with job satisfaction/work engagement predicted turnover and international mobility. These findings question the wisdom of dual salary systems in general, expose and challenge a major contradiction between contemporary development policy and practice, and have a range of practical, organizational, and theoretical implications for poverty reduction work.     

Remuneration discrepancies in the landlocked economies of Malaŵi and Uganda

Although the original study of remuneration differences between local and expatriate development workers took place in the landlocked economy of Mala?i, the study has never been replicated outside of one sector and organization (the National University), and took place prior to the 2000 Millennium Development Goals. Participating in the present studies were 458 aid and development professionals, working across a range of sectors in Mala?i (n = 241, response rate = 50%) and Uganda (n = 217, response rate = 51%). The size of the gap between local and international workers, measured using the World Bank's purchasing power parity, was higher in Mala?i (4.04:1) than in Uganda (1.97:1). The ratio was more clearly within tolerance levels in Uganda than in Mala?i. Consistent with these differences, and controlling for organization, cultural, and demographic factors, locally remunerated workers reported more and expatriate workers less injustice and demotivation in Mala?i than in Uganda. Although sample sizes for the internationally remunerated are small, the findings suggest that wider disparities may (1) hinder perspective‐taking and (2) decrease motivation. In‐country workshops with stakeholders and subject‐matter experts considered the findings, and potential solutions offered through the survey form. They recommended the implementation of performance‐based remuneration, including competency‐based job analysis and evaluation. Competencies in such functions can be provided by humanitarian work psychology.