Socio-psychological barriers for peace making and ideas to overcome them / Barreras sociopsicológicas para la paz e ideas para superarlas

Intensive and violent intergroup conflicts that rage in different parts of the world are real. These conflicts center over disagreements focusing on contradictory goals and interests in different domains and must be addressed in conflict resolution. It is well known that the disagreements could potentially be resolved if not the powerful socio-psychological barriers which fuel and maintain the conflicts. These barriers inhibit and impede progress towards peaceful settlement of the conflict. They stand as major obstacles to begin the negotiation, to continue the negotiation, to achieve an agreement and later to engage in a process of reconciliation. These barriers are found among both leaders and society members that are involved in vicious, violent and protracted intergroup conflicts. They pertain to the integrated operation of cognitive, emotional and motivational processes, combined with a pre-existing repertoire of rigid supporting beliefs, world views and emotions that result in selective, biased and distorted information processing. This processing obstructs and inhibits the penetration of new information that can potentially contribute to facilitating progress in the peace-making process. The paper elaborates on the nature of the socio-psychological barriers and proposes preliminary ideas of how to overcome them. These ideas focus on the unfreezing process which eventually may lead to cessation of adherence to the repertoire that supports the continuation of the conflict, its evaluation and arousal of the readiness to entertain of alternative beliefs that support peace making.     

Collective Emotions in Conflict Situations: Societal Implications

It is well established today that emotions are an important part of most societal dynamics. The current article focuses on the role of different collective emotional elements in creating, preserving, and resolving conflicts. The main premise is that collective emotions play a pivotal role in shaping individual and societal responses to conflicting events and in contributing to the evolvement of a social context that maintains the emotional climate and collective emotional orientation that have developed. The first part of the article provides a conceptual framework to discuss the relations between conflict, context, and collective emotions. The second part uses the conceptual framework to discuss the societal implications of the articles presented in this issue. Taken together, the parts create a platform for future research on the role of collective emotions in conflict resolution and the construction of cultures of peace.     

Professional vitality and career success: Mediation,age and outcomes

We propose a model that explains the complex phenomenon of successful career at work, and focuses on the antecedents of professional vitality at the workplace. The model sheds light on the role of professional vitality as an essential ingredient for successful careers. Using a survey design, we tested our model with a sample of 545 managers and professionals. The findings suggest effects of career attitudes on career outcomes, mediated by professional vitality. The relationship between professional vitality and age at work environment forms an inverse U shape curve, peaking at age of fifties, an optimistic note for the global aging workforce.     

Social norms, rationales and policies: reframing farmland protection in Israel

This paper analyzes the role of legitimization processes in the struggle over farmland protection policies in Israel. In the early sixties a centralized farmland protection program was institutionalized, curtailing private land owners‘ and leaseholders’ property rights on farmlands. The legitimacy accorded to such measures is explained as a function of the congruence between social norms, power structure and dominant ideology at the time. Then, the paper follows the changes in power, ideology, social norms, sanctioned discourse and the role of agriculture in the economy. These changes undermined the basis of the farmland protection rationales, and led to a crisis of legitimacy in the early nineties. As a result of several institutional and policy shifts in the early nineties, a time of rapid growth, concern shifted to the implications of growth for the future of open spaces. This concern over the loss of positive externalities was shared by environmentalists, urban and exurban consumption interests, planners and several elements within the rural establishment. As a result a new set of plans was introduced. Focusing on the central district, where the most severe development pressures are felt, the paper compares the sanctioned discourse and use of rationales in the new plans and documents to those of previous plans. These plans focus on averting the loss of positive externalities, rather than productive capacity, and are couched in economic terms, rather than ideological terms, reflecting the shift in language of the sanctioned discourse. It shows that the choice of rationales for legitimizing countryside conservation reflects the struggle over rural landscapes, as the rationales are used to cobble a coalition of planners, environmentalists, farmers, urbanites and exurbanites, against a powerful development coalition.     

Complexity in applying spatial analysis to describe heterogeneous air-trapping in thoracic imaging data

In this paper we consider a novel approach to analyzing medical images by applying a concept typically employed in geospatial studies. For certain diseases, such as asthma, there is a relevant distinction between the heterogeneity of constriction in airways for patients compared to healthy individuals. In order to describe such heterogeneities quantitatively, we utilize spatial correlation in the realm of lung computer tomography (CT). Specifically, we apply the approximate profile-likelihood estimator (APLE) to simulated lung air-trapping data selected based on potential interest to pulmonologists, and we explore reference values obtainable through this statistic. Results indicate that APLE values are independent of air-trapping values, and can provide useful insight into spatial patterns of these values within the lungs in situations where other common metrics, such as the coefficient of variation, reveal little. The APLE relies on a neighborhood weights matrix to define spatial relatedness of considered regions, and among a few weight structures explored, a working optimal choice seems to be one based on the inverse distance squared between regions of interest. The application yields a new method to help analyze the degree of heterogeneity in lung CT images, which can be generalized to other medical images as well.     

Ethnic Coexistence in Deeply Divided Societies: The Case of Arab Athletes in the Hebrew Media

This article examines the various elements affecting reconciliation and coexistence in deeply divided societies through the case of Arab soccer players in the Israeli media. We analyze the discourse surrounding the concept du‐kium (coexistence) in the Israeli media between the years 2002 and 2008. Our findings reveal that Jewish journalists and public figures interpret coexistence as Arab citizens' complete acceptance of the Jewish perspective and narrative. Arab soccer players are expected to underplay their Palestinian identity, master Hebrew, and identify with the Jewish narrative and views. We contrast the Israeli case with two other cases of prolonged conflict—Rwanda and Bosnia‐Herzegovina. The study highlights that cognitive perceptions and schemes may hinder genuine reconciliation even when various groups reject overt racism and profess candid desire for coexistence.     

The strength of family ties: A meta-analysis and meta-regression of self-reported social support and mortality

Perceived social support has long been recognized as associated with better health and longevity. However, important factors that may moderate this relationship have not been sufficiently explored. The authors used meta-analyses and meta-regressions to examine 178 all-cause mortality risk estimates from 50 publications, providing data on more than 100,000 persons. The mean hazard ratio (HR) for mortality among those with lower levels of perceived social support was 1.11 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.05, 1.17) among multivariate-adjusted HRs. Meta-regressions suggest that support from family members was more beneficial than support provided by friends, and that a moderate level of support may be enough to achieve positive results. The results also show that the importance of having support increases with age. No substantial difference was found between men and women with respect to the relationship between support and mortality.