Pathways to women's crime: differences among women convicted of drug, violence and fraud offenses

The current study was conducted on 60 Israeli female inmates. Our aim was to examine the differences among women convicted for drug, violence, and fraud offenses by socio-demographic variables and self-control and aggression levels. Results revealed that the drug group was characterized by measures attributed to chronic delinquency, and the fraud group was found to fit the pathway to low crime. At the same time, the violence group was not characterized by any of these patterns. The findings were discussed in relation to their theoretical contribution and applicability.     

Israeli counsellors facing terrorism: coping and professional development

The current study examined the characteristics and functioning of 12 Israeli school counsellors located at different stages of professional development who worked in schools affected by terrorist attacks. Semi-structured interviews explored the counsellors' professional behaviour, activities, and coping with terror and its effects. Consensual qualitative research analysis revealed five major domains: role definition, organisational characteristics, affective reactions, dilemmas, and barriers and resources. Counsellors at different stages of professional development demonstrated different patterns of behaviour across the domains' categories and subcategories. Implications for research and supervision are discussed.     

Do Applicants Fake Their Personality Questionnaire Responses and How Successful are Their Attempts? A Case of Military Pilot Cadet Selection

This paper presents the results of three interrelated studies investigating the occurrence of response distortion on personality questionnaires within selection and the success of applicants in faking situations. In Study 1, comparison of the Big Five personality scores obtained from applicants in a military pilot cadet selection procedure with participants responding honestly, faking good, and faking an ideal candidate revealed that applicants responded more desirable than participants responding honestly but less desirable than respondents under fake instructions. The occurrence of faking within the military pilot selection process was replicated in Study 2 using the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and another comparison group. Finally, in Study 3, comparison of personality profiles obtained in selection and ‘fake job’ situations with experts' estimates indicated that participants were partially successful in faking the desirable profile.     

Working in the hidden economy: Associations with the latent benefits and psychological health

Hidden economy working can provide income and cushion the financial hardship during unemployment; can it also substitute for some latent functions of regular employment? According to Jahoda's theory, the latent functions include the time structure, regular shared experience, information about personal identity, a link with the collective purpose, and enforced regular activity. This article explores whether the undeclared working reduces the degree of deprivation of these functions during unemployment and, consequently, improves the psychological health of a person. The data were collected from a sample of unemployed persons (N = 1138) registered with the Croatian Employment Bureau. A series of questions about their day-to-day activities were used to estimate the amount of undeclared working, an ad hoc developed scale to assess the extent of their latent deprivation, and the SF-36 Health Survey to measure their psychological health. The ANCOVA revealed that the participants who were often engaged in the hidden economy working exhibited reduced latent deprivation and improved psychological health compared to those who were sometimes engaged. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that their better psychological health was partially mediated through reduced latent deprivation. However, the unemployed who were never engaged in undeclared working exhibited a relatively high psychological health as well.     

Individual differences in the linguistic competence of referential and expressive subjects

The aim of this work was to examine individual differences in referential and expressive style through a longitudinal study. The composition of the first 50 words, communicative gestures, the conversational style of dyads and the percentage of vocabulary produced from 12 to 24 month-olds were analyzed. The vocabulary was collected through interviews to parents and sessions of mother-infant interaction in the laboratory. Significant differences in the proportion of common nouns and frozen phrases between referential and expressive children in the frequency of communicative gestures and style conversation were found. Thus, referential children and their mothers used more pointing gestures than the expressive children and their mothers. Additionally, mothers of referential children used completing more frequently.     

Validity Evidence for a Croatian Version of the Conditional Reasoning Test for Aggression

The Conditional Reasoning Test for Aggression (CRT‐A) is based on the idea that aggressive individuals use motive‐based cognitive biases to see their behavior as reasonable and that those biases can be measured with inductive reasoning tasks. Although the initial validation efforts for the CRT‐A in the United States have been reasonably successful, there has been no attempt to determine if the evidence of validity and reliability generalizes to other cultural contexts. In this paper, we describe four studies designed to systematically accumulate validity evidence for the CRT‐A using Croatian participants. Our analyses revealed that the Croatian adaptation of the CRT‐A yielded psychometric characteristics that were similar to those obtained on the US samples (Study 1). CRT‐A scores that predicted counterproductive work behaviors occurrence beyond self‐reported personality (Study 2) were independent from general mental ability as measured with an abstract reasoning test (Study 3), and not susceptible to faking (Study 4).     

Unemployed people in search of a job: Reconsidering the role of search behavior

A three-wave longitudinal study of unemployed persons in Croatia was used to examine the antecedents of job-seeking behavior and reemployment. A series of demographic, motivational and job-constraint variables were posited to influence job-seeking behavior, which, in turn, was hypothesized to affect (re)employment. The participants were surveyed in 2003 (N = 1138), and their employment status was checked in 2004 (N = 601) and 2005 (N = 452). Regression analyzes supported only one slice of the model—the antecedent-job-search relations. All motivational variables, in particular employment commitment and perceived financial strain, proved to be relatively strong predictors of job-search intensity. However, they appeared to be only weakly related to the (re)employment outcome. Demographic variables—in particular education, age, and employment duration—appeared to be the main determinants of (re)employment, operating presumably through their influence on employers’ hiring decisions. It was suggested that existing theory and heuristic frameworks overstate the importance of job-seeking activity. Further research is suggested to examine why purposeful and proactive job searching does not pay more.