“Doing the Right and the Good”: Thinking Against Mass Incarceration

In 1952, Rabbi Eliezer Yehudah Waldenberg (a member of the Supreme Rabbinical Court of Israel) and Rabbi Ben Zion Meir Chai Uziel (the Rishon LeTziyon and Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel) addressed the question of incarceration in a Jewish state according to the halakhic tradition. A generation later, Rabbi Chaim David Halevi the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv-Yaffo) also addressed this question. Their approaches shed light on the way we should be thinking about incarceration in general, and the overwhelming problem of the current moment in the United States: mass incarceration.     

Wilhelm Reich Revisited: The role of ideology in character analysis of the individual versus character analysis of the masses and the Holocaust

Abstract

One of the most controversial members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and Freud’s intimate for many years, Reich is known not only for his seminal contributions to therapeutic and social psychoanalysis in his 1933 classic Character analysis, but also for his notoriety as a discoverer of an energy he named orgone. This paper is devoted to Reich the psychoanalytic sociologist and reformer, with special prominence given to his other, now somewhat forgotten, 1933 book The mass psychology of Fascism.     

Triangulating causality between childhood obesity and neurobehavior: Behavioral genetic and longitudinal evidence

Childhood obesity is a serious health concern that is not yet fully understood. Previous research has linked obesity with neurobehavioral factors such as behavior, cognition, and brain morphology. The causal directions of these relationships remain mostly untested. We filled this gap by using the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study cohort comprising 11,875 children aged 9–10. First, correlations between the age- and sex-specific 95th BMI percentile (%BMIp95) and neurobehavioral measures were cross-sectionally analyzed. Effects were then aggregated by neurobehavioral domain for causal analyses. Behavioral genetic Direction of Causation modeling was used to test the direction of each relationship. Findings were validated by longitudinal cross-lagged panel modeling. %BMIp95 correlated with impulsivity, motivation, psychopathology, eating behavior, and cognitive tests (executive functioning, language, memory, perception, working memory). Greater %BMIp95 was also associated with reduced cortical thickness in frontal and temporal brain areas but with increased thickness in parietal and occipital areas. Similar although weaker patterns emerged for cortical surface area and volume. Behavioral genetic modeling suggested causal effects of %BMIp95 on eating behavior (β = 0.26), cognition (β = 0.05), cortical thickness (β = 0.15), and cortical surface area (β = 0.07). Personality/psychopathology (β = 0.09) and eating behavior (β = 0.16) appeared to influence %BMIp95. Longitudinal evidence broadly supported these findings. Results regarding cortical volume were inconsistent. Results supported causal effects of obesity on brain functioning and morphology. The present study highlights the importance of physical health for brain development and may inform interventions aimed at preventing or reducing pediatric obesity.

Research Highlights

• A continuous measure related to obesity, %BMIp95, has correlations with various measures of brain functioning and structure
• Behavioral genetic and longitudinal modeling suggest causal links from personality, psychopathology, and eating behavior to %BMIp95
• Results also indicate directional links from %BMIp95 to eating behavior, cognition, cortical thickness, and cortical surface area
• Obesity may play a role for healthy brain development during childhood