The 2001 Á/2002 terror campaign against Israel's heartland was an unprecedented string of deadly bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. The violence touched the lives of countless Israelis and has negatively affected the general mood of many. The objective of this investigation was to assess the level of exposure to terrorism for individuals residing in the affected areas and to examine psychological responses and ways of coping during the peak of the violence. A random sample of 327 adults, purposely over-sampled from the hardest-hit areas, was surveyed. Although citizens residing in the most severely hit locales were also those who suffered most from posttraumatic symptoms, the effects of major national trauma were not limited to those directly exposed to it. These results suggest that objective measures of exposure or loss may not be sensitive predictors of reactive distress. Acceptance of the situation and its uncontrollability was both the most commonly used way of coping employed and the only effective one.

This study assessed women's vulnerability to the threats of terrorism; 326 Israeli citizens (198 women and 128 men) from cities that were hit hard by terrorist violence were interviewed to identify their level of exposure to terrorist events, symptoms of posttraumatic distress, and coping styles. Although the women were less exposed to terrorist events than were the men, they reported higher levels of indirect and subjective exposure (such as helping survivors or having the sense of a lucky escape). They suffered higher levels of negative mood and posttraumatic distress and reported using coping behaviors, particularly problem-solving strategies, more intensely than did the men. The results are discussed from the sociological and feminist perspectives.

The debates of the 1980s regarding responsible use of computer-based test interpretation (CBTI) software have mostly disappeared, as CBTI use has become common practice. We surveyed 364 members of the Society for Personality Assessment to determine how they use CBTI software in their work and their perspectives on the ethics of using CBTI in various ways. Psychologists commonly use CBTI software for test scoring and to provide a complementary source of input for case formulations. Most do not use CBTI software as the primary way to formulate a case, nor as an alternative to a written report. Controversy and uncertainty were expressed about importing sections of CBTI narratives into psychological reports. We distinguish between support and replacement functions of CBTI use, arguing that adequate research evidence should be present before using CBTI as a replacement for established assessment procedures.

We hypothesized that exposure to Type IV trauma (involving alteration in a person's basic relation to the environment), associated with prolonged terrorist threats, would impact posttraumatic distress and that exposure to terrorism would impact the intensity of coping. The relationships revealed by the data proved to be in line with this model. Our data suggested that the relationship of exposure and coping was not direct, but seemed to be mediated by posttraumatic distress, that demoralization at the height of an unrelenting terror campaign was unrelated to trauma exposure, and that acceptance was a distinct way of coping adopted by targeted Israelis. Acceptance showed the weakest association with posttraumatic distress and was related inversely to our index of low morale.

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