Engagement in community activities and trust in local leaders as concomitants of psychological distress among Israeli civilians exposed to prolonged rocket attacks

Background and objectives: Present study, conducted in the aftermath of the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, investigated psychological toll of exposure to rockets attacks in a sample of residents of central and southern Israel. Analyses focused on the distress-protective functions of collectively grounded resources: engagement in community activities and trust in local leadership.

Design: This cross-sectional study was conducted between 2 and 3 months after the hostilities.

Method: Participants (N?=?764) were recruited by an online survey company that distributed a questionnaire assessing, in addition to focal predictors, sociodemographic factors and prior exposure to trauma. The outcome variables were post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and nonspecific distress symptoms.

Results: Conservative regression analyses revealed that greater exposure to rocket attacks was predictive of higher levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms. Higher engagement in community activities exhibited a partial trauma-buffering function. However, higher levels of trust in local leaders appeared to exacerbate, rather than diminish, negative impact of rocket exposure on PTSD. Symptoms of psychological distress were not influenced neither by trauma exposure nor by stressor interactions with resources. Trust in local leadership exerted a beneficial main effect on distress.

Conclusions: Collectively based resources are important for coping in times of community-wide stressors, yet their role is complex.     

Religion and politics: examining the impact of faith on political participation

This study examines the relationship between religion and political activity. It theorises religious influences on political activity and tests the impact of various religious factors on political participation in a large cross-national sample (1981–2014). This study integrates longitudinal data from the aggregated World Values Survey with country-level data in the hierarchical multilevel analysis that allows teasing out the individual-level religious influences, including membership in religious organisations, religiosity and self-identification with various religious denominations, and the country-level impacts. The temporal and spatial coverage of the data used in the study includes more than 65% of the world’s population. The seven types of political participation examined in the study include signing petitions, joining in boycotts, participating in demonstrations, taking part in unofficial strikes, occupying buildings and factories, voting and membership in political parties. We find that religion matters but not always in the expected ways. Religiosity, by itself, often serves as a deterrent rather than mobilising force for political engagement, regardless the denominational differences. It is the membership in religious organisations and other voluntary associations of a secular nature that make individuals more likely to engage in political activity.     

Treatment Effectiveness of PMTO for Children's Behavior Problems in Iceland: Child Outcomes in a Nationwide Randomized Controlled Trial

Well‐documented treatment methods must be tested following their implementation in community service agencies and across different cultures to ensure continuing effectiveness. This study was a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Parent Management Training—the Oregon model (PMTO), conducted within a nationwide implementation in Iceland. Families of 102 clinically referred children with behavior problems were recruited from five municipalities throughout Iceland. Child age ranged from 5 to 12; 73% were boys. Families were randomly assigned to either PMTO or services usually offered in the communities (SAU). Child adjustment was measured with a latent construct based on parent, child, and teacher reports of externalizing and internalizing problems and social skills. Prepost intent‐to‐treat analyses showed that PMTO treatment led to greater reductions in child adjustment problems relative to the comparison group, obtaining a modest to medium effect size based on the construct score. Only one indicator (parent‐rated Social Skills) showed significant change independently and information on amount and kind of treatment in the SAU was limited. Overall, findings indicate that PMTO is an effective method to treat children's behavior problems in a Northern European culture and supply evidence for the method's successful implementation in community settings in Iceland. This is one of few nationwide implementation studies of PMTO outside the United States and the first RCT in Iceland to test a treatment model for children's behavior problems.     

Morality and political orientations: An analysis of their relationship

Groups are social constructions with differences. People spontaneously attempt to explain differences between groups. Stereotypes often play this explanatory role. Specifically, group members tend to attribute different essences to social categories. Given widespread ethnocentrism, it is not surprising that individuals reserve “the human essence” for their ingroup, while other groups are attributed a lesser humanity. This phenomenon is called infra‐humanisation and happens outside people's awareness. Secondary emotions (e.g., love, hope, contempt, resentment) are considered uniquely human emotions in contrast to primary emotions (e.g., joy, surprise, fear, anger) that are shared with animals. The research programme summarised in this chapter demonstrates through various paradigms that members of groups not only attribute more secondary emotions to their ingroup than to outgroups, but are also reluctant to associate these emotions with outgroups. Moreover, people behave less cooperatively with an outgroup member who expresses himself with secondary emotions than with an ingroup member who uses the same terms. Interestingly, infra‐humanisation occurs for both high‐ and low‐status groups, even in the absence of conflict between groups.     

Wilhelm Reich and Anna Freud: His expulsion from psychoanalysis

This article describes the growth of hostility towards Wilhelm Reich in the psychoanalytic community over his Marxist ideology and activism as well as disagreements over the death instinct. It brings to the fore the behind the scenes political manipulations between Ernest Jones and Anna Freud to effect the expulsion of Reich both from the Vienna and Berlin local psychoanalytic societies and from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). It describes Reich's reactions to these events and the pressure placed on other psychoanalysts to stop supporting him and also the revision of history about the expulsion. It discusses the use of the term "crazy" as it was used in the psychoanalytic movement. Further the article discusses personality attributes of Anna Freud leading to counter-transference possessiveness to children and women, especially patients. It briefly touches on the attitudes of both Sigmund and Anna Freud toward sex and how this furthered the clash with Reich. It discusses the similarity between Anna's actions toward the Burlingham children and what happened to the children of Reich.     

International Human Rights and National Discretion

This paper argues that the EuropeanCourt of Human Rights couldserve as a model for an international court ofhuman rights to be builtupon the United Nations Committee on HumanRights. It argues that theconcerns states might have over the surrenderof a significant portion oftheir national sovereignity might be lessenedif such an internationalcourt were to incorporate the margin ofappreciation doctrine employed bythe European Court of Human Rights. Thisdoctrine is intended to respectthe customs and traditions of sovereign statesin dealing with humanrights issues, while maintaining that somerights such as the right not tobe tortured will be considered as basic andwill stand independently ofthe customs and traditions of sovereignstates.     

Moral foundations and political attitudes: The moderating role of political sophistication

Political attitudes can be associated with moral concerns. This research investigated whether people's level of political sophistication moderates this association. Based on the Moral Foundations Theory, this article examined whether political sophistication moderates the extent to which reliance on moral foundations, as categories of moral concerns, predicts judgements about policy positions. With this aim, two studies examined four policy positions shown by previous research to be best predicted by the endorsement of Sanctity, that is, the category of moral concerns focused on the preservation of physical and spiritual purity. The results showed that reliance on Sanctity predicted political sophisticates' judgements, as opposed to those of unsophisticates, on policy positions dealing with equal rights for same‐sex and unmarried couples and with euthanasia. Political sophistication also interacted with Fairness endorsement, which includes moral concerns for equal treatment of everybody and reciprocity, in predicting judgements about equal rights for unmarried couples, and interacted with reliance on Authority, which includes moral concerns for obedience and respect for traditional authorities, in predicting opposition to stem cell research. Those findings suggest that, at least for these particular issues, endorsement of moral foundations can be associated with political attitudes more strongly among sophisticates than unsophisticates.     

Personality,Ideological Attitudes,and Group Identity as Predictors of Political Behavior in Majority and Minority Ethnic Groups

Prior research on personality and politics has largely investigated relationships using national samples from North America and Europe. In contrast, we used multigroup path analysis to assess how Big Five personality, ideological attitudes (RWA, SDO), and group identities (National and Ethnic Identification) predicted right versus left Political Behavior (party support, past voting, present voting intention) across majority and minority ethnic groups in a New Zealand national sample (N = 6,333). The effects of personality on ideological attitudes and group identities were mostly invariant across ethnic groups and consistent with prior findings. In contrast, the effects of ideological attitudes on Political Behavior varied across ethnic groups being moderately strong for the European majority but nonsignificant for the minorities. Group identities had little effect on Political Behavior. We discuss cultural and contextual factors that might account for this disconnect between ideology and politics among the minority ethnic groups.     

Mass Response to the Lewinsky Scandal: Motivated Reasoning or BayesianUpdating?

This study attempts to account for the vastly different trajectories taken by mass andelite opinion in the wake of the Lewinsky affair. Data from a panel study, collected before andjust after the scandal broke, suggest that Clinton's prior popularity indelibly colored massresponse to the scandal, thereby constraining citizens' reactions. As would be predicted bytheories of "motivated reasoning," the influence of various considerations (like thecredibility and importance of the allegations) on reactions to the scandal was conditional uponprior affect for the president. Such findings are difficult to accommodate within the more rational"Bayesian updating" perspective. These data shed light on mass response to theLewinsky scandal in particular and citizen reaction to presidential behavior more generally, aswell as on the cognitive mechanisms that facilitate motivated reasoning in candidate evaluation.     

Terrorist threat,dehumanization, and right‐wing authoritarianism as predictors of discrimination

This study analyzed the relationship between terrorist threat and discrimination, operationalized by support for retributive justice against Islamic groups suspect of terrorist crimes. Two experimental studies were performed. Study 1 (N = 215) showed that the terrorist threat against the ingroup raises the support for the retributive procedures through the dehumanization of the outgroup. Study 2 (N = 304) analyzed how the mediating role of dehumanization in the relationship between terrorist threat and support for retributive justice is moderated by right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA). In addition, the study aimed to verify if the dehumanization of outgroup and RWA could explain the relationship between terrorist threat and discrimination of Muslim immigrants. The results indicated that adherence to RWA favors dehumanization of the outgroup and, consecutively, the discrimination, operationalized as support for the use of retributive justice. The adherence to RWA has been identified as the mechanism that explains the discrimination against Muslim immigrants.