The 40 Members of the Toronto 18: Group Boundaries and the Analysis of Illicit Networks

Increases in studies on the network dynamics of crime groups and co-offending has led many scholars to reflect on potential measurement biases arising from a reliance on official data sources. A problem of official data is that it forces boundaries on criminal groups that are much more fluid and dynamic than they seem. Drawing from interviews with an individual embedded in a terrorist organization and court documents records, we apply longitudinal network methods to examine the extent to which official data influences assessments of a criminal group. Findings show that only a minority of participants interacting with the group were charged for a crime. Yet the majority had an impact on the evolution of the group. Ignoring non-criminal affiliates masks the full scope of covert groups and the variation that can assist in understanding how groups emerge and evolve.     

基于恐怖分子的恐怖主义心理学述评

关于恐怖主义的定义至今仍没有达成共识。文章中的恐怖主义是指任何个体、团体或组织为了达成某种政治、宗教或社会目的, 而对无辜者非法使用暴力或其他胁迫性手段, 企图引起目标对象或公众的注意, 并制造恐怖气氛的行为。其形成和发展可以用综合症模型、自恋–攻击模型、挫折–攻击模型、工具模型、社会情境模型和其他综合性模型来解释。作者对这些模型进行了述评并提出了相应的防止恐怖主义的心理学策略。心理学界对于恐怖主义的实证研究较少, 而且侧重于描述和解释, 在预测和应用上有待进一步发展。     

Recognizing Terrorism

It has been claimed that most of the world’s preventable suffering and death are caused not by terrorism but by poverty. That claim, if true, could be hard to substantiate. For most terrorism is not publicly recognized as such, and it is far commoner than paradigms of the usual suspects suggest. Everyday lives under oppressive regimes, in racist environments, and of women, children, and elders everywhere who suffer violence in their homes offer instances of terrorisms that seldom capture public attention. Or so this essay argues, through exploring two models of terrorism and the points of view highlighted by each.     

Anxiety sensitivity interacts with marijuana use in the prediction of anxiety symptoms and panic-related catastrophic thinking among daily tobacco users

The present investigation evaluated whether anxiety sensitivity interacted with marijuana use in relation to the prediction of panic-relevant variables among young adult tobacco smokers (n=265). Approximately 73% of the sample was composed of current marijuana smokers, with 78.5% of this sub-sample using marijuana more than once per week. As expected, after covarying cigarettes per day, alcohol use, and negative affectivity, the interaction between marijuana use and anxiety sensitivity predicted anxiety symptoms and agoraphobic cognitions. Partially consistent with prediction, the interaction between frequency of marijuana use and anxiety sensitivity predicted only anxiety symptoms. These results are discussed in relation to better understanding the potential role of regular marijuana use and anxiety sensitivity for panic-relevant emotional vulnerability among regular tobacco smokers.     

Book Reviews

Panic attacks and depression frequently co‐occur, and the presence of this co‐morbidity is often associated with worse outcomes compared with each disorder alone. Despite this, not everyone who experiences panic attacks also suffers from depression, suggesting that individual difference factors may play a role in this co‐morbidity. The purpose of this study was to provide a preliminary investigation of two such individual difference factors, examining the role of anxiety sensitivity and lack of emotional approach coping in depressive symptom severity among a non‐clinical sample of uncued panickers. A sample of 79 college students reporting the occurrence of uncued panic attacks within the past year completed a series of questionnaires assessing the lower‐order factors of anxiety sensitivity, emotional approach coping, panic attack frequency, panic‐related disability, panic symptom severity and depressive symptom severity. Participants with more severe depressive symptoms reported greater anxiety sensitivity, panic attack frequency, panic symptom severity, panic‐related disability and lack of emotional approach coping. The particular anxiety sensitivity dimension of fear of cognitive dyscontrol and lack of emotional approach coping emerged as the best predictors of depressive symptom severity. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the improved understanding of this co‐morbidity, as well as its treatment.     

Authoritarian reactions to terrorist threat: Who is being threatened,the Me or the We?

Endorsement of authoritarian attitudes has been observed to increase under conditions of terrorist threat. However, it is not clear whether this effect is a genuine response to perceptions of personal or collective threat. We investigated this question in two experiments using German samples. In the first experiment (N = 144), both general and specific authoritarian tendencies increased after asking people to imagine that they were personally affected by terrorism. No such effect occurred when they were made to think about Germany as a whole being affected by terrorism. This finding was replicated and extended in a second experiment (N = 99), in which personal and collective threat were manipulated orthogonally. Authoritarian and ethnocentric (ingroup bias) reactions occurred only for people highly identified with their national ingroup under personal threat, indicating that authoritarian responses may operate as a group‐level coping strategy for a threat to the personal self. Again, we found no effects for collective threat. In both studies, authoritarianism mediated the effects of personal threat on more specific authoritarian and ethnocentric reactions. These results suggest that the effects of terrorist threat on authoritarianism can, at least in part, be attributed to a sense of personal insecurity, raised under conditions of terrorist threat. We discuss the present findings with regard to basic sociomotivational processes (e.g., group‐based control restoration, terror management) and how these may relate to recent models of authoritarianism.