Arab and Jewish Youth in Israel: Voicing National Injustice on Campus

Haifa University (HU) is the stage for a prolonged social drama between Arabs (20%) and Jews. 86 students (38 Arabs and 48 Jews) were interviewed on their experiences of injustice. Three major differences emerged. For the Arabs, 92% of injustice took place on campus compared to 40% for the Jews. Arabs attributed injustice to discrimination (60%), Jews to the actors' personal characteristics (58%); the Arabs transformed injustice events into a political struggle for national recognition, identity, and narratives. The analysis intimates that Arabs' "social being" is developing through the staging of negative expressive acts, namely, respect/contempt and power/weakness. Thus actors at HU can stage social processes, and change sites of surveillance and injustice into places of reconciliation and coexistence.     

Contact Theory Extended: The Effects of Prior Racial Contact on Current Social Ties

Objective . We address methodological limitations in tests of contact theory. Just as importantly, we extend its theoretical focus to behaviors. Linking insights from social and cognitive psychology with contact theory, we hypothesize that prior racial contact will have significant effects on the racial diversity of contemporary social ties. Methods . Using the 1999–2000 Lilly Survey of Attitudes and Social Networks, we conduct univariate and multivariate analyses to test our hypotheses. Results . Those who had experienced prior interracial contact in schools and neighborhoods were more likely, as adults, to have more racially diverse general social groups and friendship circles. They were more likely to attend multiracial as opposed to a uniracial religious congregations, and to be interracially married. In general, these findings applied not only to all Americans, but to whites, African Americans, and Hispanics separately. They did not apply to Asians. Conclusions . Contact theory can and should be extended, rendering it more fruitful for studying race relations. Except when groups are an extremely small percentage of the population, even limited prior contact in multiracial settings appears to have important effects on contemporary social ties. These findings have important policy implications.     

马克思与怀特海:对中国和世界的意义

文章通过分析马克思与怀特海的理论契合,揭示了以强调动态的变化、和谐的关系、整体思维和对人类社会的前进性发展抱有深刻的乐观态度为特征的马克思的社会哲学和怀特海的过程哲学对创造性地解决当代世界特别是中国社会和经济发展所面临的许多难题所具有的理论指导意义,提出中国应走一条整合式的发展道路。     

The Role of the Family Context in the Development of Emotion Regulation

This article reviews current literature examining associations between components of the family context and children and adolescents' emotion regulation (ER). The review is organized around a tripartite model of familial influence. Firstly, it is posited that children learn about ER through observational learning, modeling and social referencing. Secondly, parenting practices specifically related to emotion and emotion management affect ER. Thirdly, ER is affected by the emotional climate of the family via parenting style, the attachment relationship, family expressiveness and the marital relationship. The review ends with discussions regarding the ways in which child characteristics such as negative emotionality and gender affect ER, how socialization practices change as children develop into adolescents, and how parent characteristics such as mental health affect the socialization of ER.     

Problems of research on a delicate topic: A personal view

Research into sexuality has been severely handicapped because of public ambivalence about sex. This ambivalence has often led to the stigmatizing of those individuals who have engaged in sex research. This paper briefly surveys such stigmatization in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries and then gives a personal example     

Diseased and Damaged

In recent publications, Reiss has proposed three sexual ideologies that he believes represent major belief patterns of U.S. sexual attitudes: Traditional Romantic, Modern Naturalistic, and Abstinence. Reiss claims that adherents of each ideology would have predictable beliefs in the following four areas of public controversy: (a) abortion, (b) genetic differences between the sexes, (c) pornography, and (d) sexual normality. A 92‐item Likert format questionnaire, containing 16 scales constructed to measure both ideology and substantive beliefs, was administered to a sample of 259 students and 136 nonstudents. Using measures of ideology tenet belief as the clustering variables, four patterns of tenet and substantive area belief were identified. Two of these patterns corresponded to Reiss' Modern Naturalistic and Abstinence ideologies. The remaining two patterns, one popular with women and one with men, appear to be either separate ideologies or transitional patterns leading to acceptance of the Modern Naturalistic Ideology.     

Using Electronic Contact to Reduce Homonegative Attitudes,Emotions, and Behavioral Intentions Among Heterosexual Women and Men: A Contemporary Extension of the Contact Hypothesis

The current study experimentally examined the potential for a contemporary extension of the contact hypothesis, known as electronic contact, or E-contact, to reduce sexual prejudice, intergroup anxiety, and avoidant behavioral intentions among heterosexuals. It also extended the sexual minority contact literature by examining the role of participant and interaction partner sex as a possible boundary condition of this contact–prejudice relationship. To test our hypotheses, 140 heterosexual female and male university students were randomly allocated to interact with a homosexual or heterosexual, female or male E-contact partner, in a collaborative and text-only online interaction before completing the outcome measures. Overall, the results demonstrated that interacting online with a female, as opposed to a male, homosexual E-contact partner reduced heterosexual men’s feelings of intergroup anxiety, which in turn was associated with lower sexual prejudice and outgroup avoidance. For heterosexual women, however, E-contact did not influence the outcome variables. In the context of sexual prejudice, these results suggest that E-contact may be particularly useful as a prejudice-reduction strategy among individuals who typically require it most: heterosexual men.