Will It Help? Identifying Socialization Discourses That Promote Sexual Risk and Sexual Health Among African American Youth

Because much of the existing research examining sexual communication to African American youth focuses on demographic and parental factors predicting sexual risk behaviors, less is known about factors predicting sexual health, and little is understood about the contributions of peer communications. The current study aimed to expand existing approaches by assessing which socialization discourses communicated by parents and peers contribute to sexual risk and health outcomes (sexual assertiveness, positive sexual affect, and condom self-efficacy). Participants were 631 African American undergraduates (73% female) who indicated the extent to which they had received from their parents and peers each of 28 messages representing four cultural discourses: abstinence, relational sex, sex positive, and gendered sexual roles. As expected, parents were perceived to emphasize relational sex and abstinence messages more than peers, and peers were perceived to communicate sex-positive and gendered sex role messages more than parents. Greater exposure to abstinence messages predicted lower levels of sexual experimentation, whereas exposure to sex-positive messages predicted higher levels. In addition, exposure to relational sex and sex-positive messages predicted higher levels of sexual assertiveness and positive sexual affect. Implications are discussed concerning sexual communications that could help Black youth develop healthy sexual perspectives.     

Religion and Mental Health Among Israeli Jews: Findings from the SHARE-Israel Study

This study investigates the impact of religiousness on mental health indicators in a population sample of Israeli Jews aged 50 or older. Data are from the Israel sample of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE-Israel), collected from 2005 to 2006. Of the 1,287 Jewish respondents, 473 (36.8 %) were native-born Israelis and 814 (63.2 %) were diaspora-born. Religious measures included past-month synagogue activities, current prayer, and having received a religious education. Mental health outcomes included single-item measures of lifetime depression and life satisfaction, along with the CES-D and EURO-D depression scales, the CASP-12 quality of life scale, and the LOT-R optimism scale. Participation in synagogue activities was found to be significantly associated with less depression, better quality of life, and more optimism, even after adjusting for effects of the other religious measures, for sociodemographic covariates, for the possibly confounding effect of age-related activity limitation, and for nativity. Findings for prayer were less consistent, including inverse associations with mental health, perhaps reflecting prayer’s use as a coping response. Finally, religious education was associated with greater optimism. These results underscore a modest contribution of religious participation to well-being among middle-aged and older adults, extending this research to the Israeli and Jewish populations.     

Quantity Competition When Most Favored Customers are Strategic

Legal studies usually treat a policy of a manufacturer or retailer as socially harmful if it reduces product output and increases the price. We consider a two‐period model where the first‐period price is fixed and resellers endogenously decide to use meet‐the‐competition clause with a most‐favored‐customer clause (MFC) to counteract strategic customer behavior. As a result of MFC, the second‐period (reduced) price increases and resellers’ inventories decrease. However, customer surplus may increase and aggregate welfare increases in the majority of market situations. MFC can mitigate the losses in welfare and resellers’ profits due to strategic customers. Moreover, under reseller competition, MFC may even lead to higher levels of these values than with myopic customers, that is, to gain from increased strategic behavior. With growing competition, benefits or losses from MFC can be higher than losses from strategic customer behavior.     

The factor structure of the pregnancy anxiety scale.

This paper presents a measurement model of a ten-item scale of maternal anxiety during pregnancy. Using confirmatory factor analysis, its reliability and validity are examined in a hospital sample of mothers (N = 266) surveyed postpartum in Galveston, Texas. According to several indices of overall fit as well as individual parameter estimates, a latent internal structure of three interrelated dimensions is confirmed for the scale items. These first-order constructs are anxiety about being pregnant, childbirth, and hospitalization. This model exhibits a considerably better fit than both a no-factors model and a model in which the dimensions are uncorrelated. Finally, several exogenous constructs expected to be associated with pregnancy anxiety--age, marital status, and worry over health--exert significant effects on dimensions of the model or on a second-order factor.     

The effects of income and inflation on personal satisfaction: Functional measurement in economic psychology

Controlled experimental designs and functional measurement procedures were used to study how people perceive the effects of changes in major economic variables. In experiment I one group of subjects rated economic well-being and another group of subjects rated personal satisfaction for a variety of economic scenarios described by variations in salary, rate of increase in salary (annual raise), and annual rate of inflation. Stimulus interaction effects were found for each response scale showing that there is not a simple subtractive relationship between wage gains and inflation in determining perceived economic impact. Experiment 2 further investigated the interactive effects of raise and inflation on personal satisfaction. Results were discussed in terms of two complementary psychological processes: a “negativity effect” whereby unfavorable levels of raise and inflation have disproportionate weight, and a comparison of raise and inflation rate whereby personal satisfaction is incremented disproportionately when raise changes from below the inflation rate to above the inflation rate. Psychological concepts revealed in this study were related to economic concepts of “elasticity of demand” and “money illusion”.     

Times of Transition: Elder Abuse and Neglect in Israel

ABSTRACT

The present paper addresses the advancement of research, policies, legislation, and practice experiences designed to deal with the phenomenon of elder abuse and neglect in Israel in times of transition. The paper presents a short overview of the demographic scene, reflecting population characteristics and needs that impact care giving as well as elder abuse and neglect. The developments of scientific knowledge and its accumulation, especially the empirical data from the first national survey on elder abuse and neglect are discussed. Further, legislative developments relating to four generational laws and the advancement of policies and innovative practice experiences are described and analyzed. Finally, future challenges in the field are identified.     

Law and Older People—The Rise and Fall of Israel's Senior Citizens' Act

Within the broad and complex framework of those Israeli laws that relate to the social welfare of the older population, this article uses a case study approach to focus on Israel's Senior Citizens' Act of 1989. During its hitherto brief life, this law has undergone numerous transformations, additions, and deletions as well as successes and failures. At the time of its enactment, many hoped that this law would considerably bolster the rights of older people. Echoing legal and political theories of the 1980s, it seemed to reflect the fact that politicians were sensitive to the potential power of the pensioner vote, while echoing the approach to social engineering that advocated the use of the law both as a means for social change and a symbol of power. As of today, however, this article argues that the law has failed to realize what were declared to be its objectives. Instead of promoting social change and providing older people with political power, the Senior Citizens' Act has become an empty symbol that hides the fact that the older generation in Israel still lacks the real political power it needs in order to use the law to improve society's treatment of older people.     

Market failure in light of non-expected utility

This paper merges the non-expected utility approach (Tversky and Kahneman, J Risk Uncertain 5:297–323, 1992 and Quiggin, J Econ Behav Organ 3:323–343, 1982) into Akerlof’s (Quart J Econ 84:488–500, 1970) model of Market for Lemons. We derive the results for different probability weighting functions and analyze the phenomenon of market failure in light of non-expected utility maximization. Our main finding suggests that when the proportion of traded lemons is high (low), the problem of market failure is mitigated (enhanced). In addition, for the case of Cumulative Prospect Theory, we show that (a) the higher the loss aversion is, the more pronounced is the market failure; (b) gain-domain elevation is negatively related to the extent of market failure; and (c) the value function is (i) negatively monotonic in the gain-domain diminishing sensitivity parameter when the market is characterized by a high proportion of “peaches,” and (ii) positively monotonic in the loss-domain diminishing sensitivity parameter when the market is characterized by a high proportion of “lemons.”