Abstract The study explores adolescents' attitudes toward seeking help for emotional problems. The personal service gap is examined by asking adolescents about their willingness to refer themselves ...and others to formal (psychologists) and informal (friends) help sources, using a within-subjects design. The study included 662 Israeli adolescents in the 10th and 12th grades. The results indicate that adolescents refer peers more than themselves to a psychologist and to a friend. They are also more willing to refer themselves and peers to a friend rather than to a psychologist. Barriers to seeking psychological help are explored and significant correlations between perceptions of psychological benefit, problem severity and barriers to help seeking are described. Recommendations for increasing adolescents' awareness and use of help sources are suggested.
This study investigates the psychological effects of a set of societal beliefs termed the ethos of conflict, which develops in the context of intractable conflict—as, for example, the Israeli-Arab ...conflict. The premise was that the ethos of conflict constitutes a type of ideology that serves as a powerful prism through which individuals perceive the reality of an intractable conflict. The study's findings confirmed this premise, showing that participants with a high level of ethos of conflict tended to perceive photos depicting encounters between Jews and Palestinians differently than did those with a low level of ethos of conflict. The former tended to perceive the Palestinians as more aggressive, to blame them more for such attributed aggressiveness, and to explain this perceived aggressiveness more in terms of internal and stable causes. They also tended to stereotype Palestinians more negatively and Jews more positively
We investigated the gap between parents’ willingness to seek help for their children and their willingness to refer other parents to help, and the relationship of this gap to gender. Two hundred and ...eleven parent couples with elementary-school children reported their willingness to seek help from professional and informal sources for a hypothetical problem with their child, and their willingness to refer a friend’s child with an identical problem to similar help. Attitudes toward help seeking and parental behaviors were also measured. Findings revealed that parents were more willing to refer a friend’s child to professional help than they were to seek such help for their own child, although no gap was found regarding informal help. No gender differences were found regarding willingness to seek help or to refer another, although gender was related to variables that predicted help seeking.
This study examines the difference between adolescents' willingness to seek help for themselves and their willingness to refer others for help. Participants were 512 Israeli adolescents (219 males, ...293 females) in grade 10. Adolescents' willingness to seek help from five sources was evaluated with respect to themselves and others, for both severe and minor problems. Adolescents were more willing to refer another person than themselves to most of the sources of support. Differences were more pronounced for severe problems and referrals to psychologists, school counsellors and teachers. Girls were more willing than boys to seek help from their parents and friends. Actual help-seeking behaviour was positively related to willingness to seek help from various sources of support. The results are discussed with reference to the threat to self mechanism and other costs.
An environmental assessment was used to compare an experimental high school that had incorporated Corsini's (1977) individual education program with a relatively conventional high school. Both ...schools belong to the same network of schools and are in urban settings. The Corsini program emphasizes responsibility, respect, resourcefulness, and responsiveness; students are responsible for their own studies and assume an active and egalitarian relationship with the teachers. The high-inference Classroom Environment Scale (CES) (Moos & Trickett, 1974) was administered to 13 teachers and classes in the experimental school and to 14 teachers and classes in the conventional school. The perceived classroom environments of both teachers and classes in the two schools differed according to the contrasting educational philosophies of the schools, for example, experimental classes showed more teacher support, involvement, and innovation, whereas conventional classes emphasized the environmental dimensions of task orientation, competition, and teacher control. The results of the study indicate the advantageous use of environmental instruments as a criterion variable in global assessments of the classroom.
The present study examines students' perception of the teacher's role as epistemic authorities, that is, a source of determinative influence on the formation of individuals' knowledge, from three ...perspectives. First, it examines 7th and 10th graders' perception of their teachers as epistemic authorities. The results showed that a teacher's subject matter, as well as students' age and gender, influence perception of him/her as an epistemic authority. In addition, interest in the subject matter was found to be an important predictor of students' perception. The second part focuses on teachers' self-perceptions as epistemic authorities. The results indicated that teachers' personal efficacy is the most powerful predictor of their self-perception. Finally, the study compares students' perceptions of teachers as epistemic authorities, teachers' self-perceptions in these terms and teachers' perceptions of how their students perceive them. Two main findings showed the following: (a) teachers perceive themselves as being more of an epistemic authority than their students consider them; (b) teachers believe that students perceive them as being more of an epistemic authority than the students actually think.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This study examined the cognitive and emotional reactions of 477 Israeli high school students to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (immediately after the event as well as 5 months ...later) and to a series of terror attacks. The respondents' reactions to the two events were compared as a function of gender and political orientation. About 50% of the respondents who changed their political views immediately after the assassination reverted to pre-event attitudes 5 months later. Emotional reactions to the assassination showed substantial fading after 5 months, with extent of fading unaffected by gender or political orientation. The intensity of emotional reactions was affected by political orientation: Although Rabin's supporters and his opponents reacted with equal intensity to the terror attacks, supporters reacted with the same intensity to Rabin's assassination, whereas opponents' reactions to the assassination were less intense.
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