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This study investigates the effect of three psychopolitical factors on children's psychological adjustment. The three factors are exposure to political life events, impact assigned to experienced events, and perception of threat. Subjects were 397 Israeli children aged 12-13 sampled from three residential areas, which differed along a religious-ideological axis—West Bank settlements, the Golan Heights, and greater Tel Aviv. All children responded to a political life events scale, a questionnaire battery assessing threat perception and ideological conviction, and the Brief Symptom Inventory. Results for two factors confirm the central hypothesis that the factors will be related linearly to distress, indicating increased distress levels with magnification of perceived impact of political events and perception of threat. A secondary hypothesis that ideology mediates the psychopolitical variables to distress relation was not confirmed. These results have implications for comprehension of political environmental dimensions impairing children's mental health.

Young children compare durations correctly and explain their conclusions logically only when no interfering cues such as distance and speed are introduced. We investigated whether type of cue and additivity of interfering cues affect children's duration comparisons. 4- and 5-year-old children were asked to compare the burning times of pairs of partially synchronous lights differing in intensity, bulb size, or both. Those who erred tended to attribute longer duration to the brighter or larger bulb, brightness having a stronger interfering effect than size. Since brightness might qualify as "work" more than bulb size might, the finding that the former interferes more than the latter supports Piaget's basic claim of children's confusion of time with "work." The fact that bulb size interferes at all, which does not fit into Piaget's framework, may be explained in terms of children's inability to distinguish clearly between time-related and time-unrelated cues and their assumption of direct relations between dimensions. Additivity of interference did not emerge, indicating that the previous finding which suggested its existence--distance plus speed interfering with duration comparisons more than speed alone--should be reassessed in terms of type of interfering cues, that is, distance interferes more than speed with time.

The current study presents results of a survey of 3,215 calls received at seven centers of telephone emergency services (TES) in Israel during the Gulf War, when citizens of Israel experienced severe stress resulting from SCUD missile attacks. Whereas former surveys have shown that characteristics of calls to TES in Israel are generally not affected by external stressogenic events, a remarkable change was recorded in both the quantity and quality of calls received in TES centers in Israel during the Gulf War. The relative frequencies of problem categories presented by callers during the Gulf War revealed a significant increase in "environmental pressures," a category that reflected the stressful situation of the war, as opposed to intra- or interpersonal problems typical of peacetime calls. A comparison between this group of "war calls" and a control group of "nonwar calls," revealed that the two groups represented populations of callers differing in sociodemographic characteristics, expectations, and benefits from the calls. Results are discussed in reference to the unique role of TES as a source of psychological first-aid in a community crisis situation.

The study focuses on the discursive self-construction of suicidal help seekers in an open computer-mediated forum for mental help. Our theoretical framework is inspired by a functionalist approach to discourse, which emphasizes that language resources are selfdisplaying. It also espouses discursive psychology, which prioritizes the study of psychological and social phenomena in discursive processes. In addition, we adopt the Four World Approach to the analysis of positioning. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that the density of ‘irrealis’ (i.e. negation, future and wishes) units and figurative forms was significantly higher in the suicidal messages compared with the messages of other troubled selves, who produced more ‘realis’ units (i.e. specific and generic stories) and information questions. We interpret these findings as showing that in their attempt to conceptualize conflict and pain, suicidal help-seekers shied away from the narration of past experience and focused instead on the construction of death. The other troubled help seekers used realis units and questions in order to describe their experience to guarantee that help would be provided.