Israeli Psychologists Research Articles

Advancing L2 Dynamic Assessment: Innovations in Chinese Contexts

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue, L2 Dynamic Assessment Research in China, examines the theoretical foundations of Dynamic Assessment (DA) in the writings of L. S. Vygotsky, with particular attention to the concepts of praxis, mediation, and zone of proximal development, while also recognizing contributions from notable DA researchers such as Israeli psychologist and educator Reuven Feuerstein. Trends in the general and L2 DA research literatures are considered, including: flexible, open-ended mediation (interactionist DA) and standardized, scripted mediation (interventionist DA); formats of embedding mediation in assessment procedures (so-called ‘sandwich’ and ‘cake’ formats of DA); DA administered in classroom and group settings; DA in formal testing contexts, including computerized DA procedures; mediated scores and learning potential scores; and uses of learner profiles resulting from DA to inform instructional enrichment programs. Each article in the special issue reports original research conducted by scholars in China. How the individual studies take up and extend trends in L2 DA research is explained. Given that learning activities and the thinking associated with them are deeply saturated in specific cultural practices and norms, it is argued that extension of DA principles to new cultural contexts, such as those reported in the special issue, is informative not only for assessment researchers in China but for the international community of assessment scholars, and it is essential for the continued development of DA frameworks.

"Angela's psych squad": Black psychology against the American carceral state in the 1970s.

This article examines the duality of the Black psychology movement in the United States as both a distinctly American and a postcolonial approach to mental health. The Westside Community Mental Health Center in San Francisco served as the organizational hub for the Association for Black Psychologists (ABPsi) in the 1970s. The Westside clinicians understood forensic psychology as a kind of preventative care as California, more so than any other state, was seduced by the eugenic dream of human improvement through therapeutic interventions in schools and prisons intended to correct the wayward deviant. Their community's mental wellbeing required dismantling the interlinked disciplinary apparatus which disproportionately surveyed, tracked, and confined young Black men. These psychologists mounted a legal challenge to the use of intelligence testing to sort Black children in schools, seeking to replace standardized tests with "dynamic assessments" inspired by Israeli psychologist Reuven Feuerstein's work with refugee children. They consulted on the voir dire process in the highly politicized Angela Davis trial to minimize the presence of racially prejudiced jurors. They offered expert testimony on the psychological damage of solitary confinement on behalf of prison activists. The Westside team artfully developed and deployed the psychological concept of "bias" in their confrontations with local manifestations of the American carceral state. In their theoretical writings, these psychologists reflected upon their historical positionality, understanding themselves as products of the decolonial moment. Bay Area encounters with Third World internationalism, the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Nation of Islam, and community-led substance abuse programs shaped clinical care at Westside and inspired the Afrocentric consciousness many came to espouse. ABPsi initially had a significant impact on the historically white American Psychological Association's training practices. However, the two organizations split over the IQ controversy at a moment when psychologists became increasingly enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

FIE as a Tool for Correcting Deficient Functions in Children and Students with Behavioral Disorders

The paper has a theoretical and application character. Nowadays, the issue of education of children and pupils with behavioural disorders (specific as well as non-specific disorders) is highly topical as their number is constantly growing in regular primary and secondary school classes. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the specifics of their education. In the theoretical part, the authors deal with the issue of the disorders; they describe its etiology as well as the symptoms as possible consequences of the present impairment of partial functions in the perceptual-cognitive area. The application part of the paper is focused on presenting the essence and content of the instrumental enrichment method, the creator of which is the Israeli pedagogue and psychologist, Professor Reuven Feuerstein.

Explaining Michael Lewis: Literary Form and Behavioural Economics in The Undoing Project (2017)

This essay is concerned with the literary dimensions of Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project (2016), a journalistic depiction of the famous intellectual collaboration of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Tversky and Kahneman are the Israeli psychologists whose work provided a new theoretical understructure for what is now called “behavioral economics,” which has challenged norms of thinking that have longed presumed that consumer or business markets perform based on individuals’ rational assessment of their own self-interest. The current public perception of Lewis is to see him as the master of the so-called explainer, the newswriting mode that supposedly draws from the Anglo-American journalistic traditions of realism and “plain speaking” transparency; the explainer itself has become more prominent across media platforms (e.g. in podcasts) in the U.S. in recent decades. However, what this interpretation of Lewis’s writing overlooks, in the case of the Undoing Project, is the polyglot assemblage of literary and cultural debts Lewis mobilizes –from Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, American vaudeville and Yiddish humor, Voltaire and romantic comedy –to plot his explainer in the form of a love story. Through this literary strategy, moreover, Lewis tries to self-reflexively incorporate the theories behind behavioral economics into his own storytelling. In doing so, however, Lewis also confronts the ambiguous role that those theories play in contemporary history and, especially, U.S. political governance.

ЗВ’ЯЗОК ЕМОЦІЙНОГО ІНТЕЛЕКТУ ВІЙСЬКОВОСЛУЖБОВЦЯ З ПСИХОЛОГІЧНОЮ СУМІСНІСТЮ У ВІЙСЬКОВОМУ ПІДРОЗДІЛІ

Understanding of emotional intelligence and emotional competence for successful individual work not only in the process of their professional development but also in special conditions, including work in military units during military aggression on the territory of Ukraine, was the crucial objective. The importance of emotional intelligence on the psychological compatibility of the unit and the factual existence of such an influence was the topic of our research as it is not examined sufficiently by military experts. We distinguished the category of conscripted personnel and the process of their appointment to new military groups. We also confirm that apart from the process of blending in new communities, the military units were changed in their psychological structure and cooperation, which was also interesting to study. In our work we focused on new paradigm of understanding emotions, based on the theory of emotions construction - we consider it as a radical perspective on what means to be a human, which stands for the newest researches in neurobiology area. Therefore the theory of emotions construction forms the connection of all three directions. It borrowed the idea of cultural influence and perceptions importance from social construction. It also took the postulate, that emotions are constructed by the main brain and body systems from psychological construction and the conclusion that the experience forms the brain links from neuroconstruction. We also highlighted the perspectives on the emotional intelligence of famous psychologists. Reuven Bar-On is an Israeli psychologist and one of the leading innovators, theorists and researchers in the concept of emotional intelligence. The notion of emotional capability was concerned in a book “Emotional Leadership: The Art of Managing People Based on Emotional Intelligence” on the co-authorship of D. Goulman with Richard Boyacis and Annie Mackey. The concept of emotional competence was suggested by David McClelland, a psychologist at Harvard University.Several obstacles that the military experts faced while working with military personnel have been identified. In order to study the level of servicemen’s development of emotional intelligence a Hall test was conducted to diagnose the emotional intelligence. The rapid assessment methodologies presented by S. Mikhalyuk and A. Shalit. were carried out for the study of the socio-psychological climate. The results are not encouraging, but they represent the real state of affairs and the need to address and solve the identified problems.

How Searches Fail: Cognitive Bias in Literature Searching

ABSTRACTCognitive bias is a phenomenon applicable to many areas of life, baseball and medical diagnosis among them. The concept originated with Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, Israeli psychologists. Biases such as satisficing, attribute substitution and the curse of knowledge affect literature searching as well, skewing the results. Simple steps can help us to debias our thinking.

Dynamic Assessment and Second Language Development: Realizing the “Undiscovered Country” in the Twenty-First Century

Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky and Israeli psychologist and educator Reuven Feuerstein, although working in different times and cultural contexts, arrived at a commensurable and indeed complementary set of theoretical proposals that hold considerable potential for reenvisioning educational activity. One area, in particular, where their theories converge concerns the diagnosis of learner abilities and use of this information to inform targeted interventions to guide psychological development. Specifically, Vygotsky’s (1987) formulation of the Zone of Proximal Development as cooperative activity undertaken with learners to reveal and promote abilities that have not yet formed but are still emerging provides a conceptual framework that aligns with Feuerstein’s elaboration of procedures for identifying learner needs and abilities by engaging with them around specially designed tasks and materials, an approach he referred to as Mediated Learning Experience. Together, these proposals provide the basis for Dynamic Assessment (DA). DA has been widely pursued in the areas of special and cognitive education, where it has been shown to provide insights into the full range of learner abilities and has proven directly relevant to interventions to help all learners develop. This article traces the influence of Vygotsky’s and Feuerstein’s ideas on the field of second language (L2) education. While the field has a long tradition of drawing upon Vygotskian theory to interpret processes of L2 development in instructional contexts, only more recently have researchers begun to invoke it as a basis for organizing educational practices. This has coincided with efforts to understand the relevance of Feuerstein’s research to the domain of children and adult learners of languages beyond their first. Beginning with Poehner’s (2008) examination of DA with learners of L2 French, a sub-field within the area of L2 assessment has emerged that has included applications of DA principles in group formats and computerized procedures and with learners of a wide range of languages and in a variety of cultural contexts. With the continuing trend to elevate certain languages to a “global” status and the growing populations of displaced and immigrant learners, the need for educational approaches that look beyond manifest functioning in order to construct a future with learners has perhaps never been greater.

Israeli Psychotherapy, Politics and Activism: Is There a Way Out of the Trap?

This article examines psychotherapy in context—political, social, cultural and historical. It does so by taking a close look at the Israeli psychotherapeutic community and how it changed over the years. Through this narrative and analysis the author wishes to illustrate how social-political context and professional practices plug into each other. It will be demonstrated how at difficult times when their country faces internal and external hardship and threats, Israeli psychologists have tended to withdraw and, whether unwittingly or not, affirm and support the status quo. This is paradoxical: when mostly needed psychotherapists may become silent and socially or politically passive. A possible way out of this trap, through a change in psychotherapists’ professional position and views, will be discussed. In addition, a politically sensitive alternative will be presented, one that may enable psychotherapists to maintain an independent praxis, which models a proactive and optimistic stance while serving society as agents of personal, social and political change.

Метод развития познавательного потенциала Р. Фейерштейна и Р. Гузмана

The article is devoted to the description and analysis of method of development of intelligence Reuven of Feierstein, a distinguished Israeli scholar and a follower of J. Piaget and L.S. Vygotsky. Based on theoretical experience of his great predecessors R. Feuerstein has developed practical methods to develop cognitive functions in children. A significant role is given to training in adult (mediator), whose tasks include the direction and organization of the learning process by using specially developed techniques. Later, Israeli psychologist R. Guzman has adapted these methods for children suffering from Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder, as well as for born blind people. The exception of the visual perception channel in the proposed set of original methods allows children suffering from Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder, to avoid extra stimulation of brain activity and to focus on completing the tasks given by the mediator. Meanwhile, using the tactile methods when working with born blind people, on the contrary, promotes creating “the library of visual images”. Carrying out consistent lessons based on tactile methodology lead to the behavior correction of the children who suffer from Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder and of born blind people of all age groups, as well as it caused the development of immature or absent cognitive functions.

A Critical Look at Psychological Testing in Israel and Comparisons With Its European Neighbors

While psychological tests are used extensively in Israel, the current controls over testing practices in Israel deserve some attention. Specifically, unlike in some European countries and the United States, (a) no specific certifications are offered to Israeli psychologists in the area of testing; (b) Israeli psychologists are not obligated to pursue continued professional education programs; and (c) the tests published in Israel are seldom reviewed independently for quality and local usability. This study surveyed a sample of Israeli psychologists (N = 338) on the topic of psychological testing in Israel and compared the results with the mean results from a similar European survey (Muniz et al., 2001). Overall, the findings confirm the wide use and high value of testing among Israeli psychologists, but they indicate that a greater level of professional supervision is still required to better ensure the competence of test users and the quality of tests being used.

What Motivates Professionals to Learn and Use Hypnosis in Clinical Practice?

The authors devised and validated a questionnaire assessing the various possible motivations for learning and using hypnosis and administered it to 125 Israeli psychologists, physicians, and dentists who study and/or use hypnosis in their clinical work. The results suggest that most professionals were motivated by a desire to improve their professional performance and that a majority of professionals were primarily influenced in their desire to learn hypnosis by colleagues in academically or clinically oriented settings.

The Certainties of History and the Uncertainties of Representation in Post-Holocaust Writing

The Certainties of History and the Uncertainties of Representation in Post-Holocaust Writing

Genocide and the Terror of History

The Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson initiated the Taskforce for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research in 1998 after visiting a Nazi concentration camp and...

Clinical psychologists do politics: Attitudes and reactions of Israeli psychologists toward the political

This article presents an analysis of a survey among Israeli clinical psycholo- gists, examining their attitudes towards diverse political issues. The survey involved the distribution of 600 questionnaires, 115 of which were returned. Within this framework, psychologists were asked to relate to questions regarding political issues in psychotherapy and the ways of dealing with them, socio-political issues in psychology studies and training processes, socio-political involvement of psychologists as citizens or as professionals, and more. This inquiry enabled the current state of affairs to be portrayed with regard to common professional-political conceptions and stances toward political aspects of psycho- therapeutic work. The survey's fi ndings point to a divide within the Israeli psychologist community, as expressed by divergent and contradictory opinions that arise in response to a sizable portion of the issues examined. It is quite possible that this rift marks a process of change and indicates the decline of the conservative psychodynamic conceptual system. This theo- retical perspective had, up until recently, a hegemonic position within the Israeli psycho- therapeutic milieu. In most cases this standpoint was applied in a dogmatic manner, justifying a passive social-political stance in the name of anonymity and neutrality. It appears that still, today, this epistemic position is predominant within the Israeli psycho- therapeutic culture. However, nowadays, a large minority of Israeli clinical psychologists seems to be sensitive to different political aspects of psychotherapy and favourable toward working in a politically informed and socially responsible manner. As political issues are almost entirely absent from psychology academic programs and clinical training processes, there is much confusion and helplessness as to how such issues and phenomena should be treated in therapy. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves (review)

JUDITH TYDOR BAUMEL and TOVA COHEN, eds. Gender, Place, and Memory in Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves. Parkes-Wiener Series on Jewish Studies. London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2003. Pp. xxii + 297.Gender, Place, and Memory M Modern Jewuih Experience: Re-Placing OurJelveJ is an unusual collection that brings together a *wide range of scholars from Israel, Kurope, and United States with a focus on historical memory from a variety of perspectives - sociological, historical, literary, artistic, and architectural. Like many anthologies especially on gender, this volume also grows out of a conference, in this case, an interdisciplinary gathering at Bar-Ilan University m January 2001. As editors tell us in their introduction, it was conference and its focus on interplay between gender, place, and memory that inspired this publication. Different memories of different places and different gendered experiences provide backdrop to understand variation of .Jewish life and identity. These places and experiences shade Jewish memories in a myriad of shades, forming rainbow of colors of *which modern Jewish life is composed (p. xix). This alluring statement frames our understanding of conference and its mandate, although it is unfortunate that editors never make clear specific relationship between these goals and volume before us. Regretfully, they never flesh out how differences of place, memory, and gender come together and are in conversation -within modern Jewish life. other -words, -we never learn about conversations, discussion -within and between sessions and papers that took place at Bar-Ilan and might have helped readers -were not there understand how these fascinating essays are in conversation -with each other. Instead, editors have chosen more or less to allow essays and three sections of volume to speak for themselves. this, they begin their introduction by describing complexities of modern identity in general and modern Jewish identity formation in particular. As they explain, for Jews not only are there issues of -who -we are, -where we come from and how -we remember our past but also questions about (p. xix). As they explain, In certain cases, being Jewish is still a pivotal part of a person's self-definition. For others, it is but one of a number of factors which personal whole is now composed (p. xix). They conclude this discussion by explaining that for still other modern Jews, Jewishness is but a nostalgic recollection with little bearing on one's future. Unfortunately, they never return to any of these issues to help explain their choice of essays and their ordering.In many ways these brief statements are all that readers get from editors about logic of volume, especially ways that three sections work together to get at these larger thematic issues. Instead we are told following: Given importance of place and history in this collection, articles in this book are divided according to three geographical/historical coordinates. The first Kurope prior to and during Second World War, second is United States, and third is, Zionist movement, Yishuv and State of Israel (pp. xix- xx). There is in editors' own words little clarity about relationships among and between these categories or why it is that United States is presented so vaguely with no clear reference to specific geographical locations or for that matter historical moments covered. part this is 'what is most frustrating about this collection. The editors have brought together a terrific range of essays by distinguished scholars but offer readers no clear indication about how a reader might draw links between these various sections. The fact that sections culminate with the State of Israel itself suggests a kind of teleological reading, especially given that final essay returns to most of terms of book's title, Time, Place, Gender and JViemory: From Perspective of an Israeli Psychologist. …

The Impact of Terrorism on Jews in Israel

Abstract In searching for information on the effects of living with the ongoing threat of terrorism, Israel was an obvious place to turn. For several years now reports of acts of terrorism and violence occurring in Israel have appeared in the news media as frequently as several times a week. Moreover, one of the more common types of terrorist acts regularly taking place there, suicide bombing, coincides with the method used in the September 11th attacks in the U.S. The impact of ongoing terrorism on children and their families has been an area of expertise of Israeli psychologist Ofra Ayalon for many years now. Dr. Ayalon was interviewed by Frances S. Waters, a clinical social worker and licensed marriage and family therapist in independent practice in Marquette, Michigan. The interview was conducted via telephone on January 12, 2002.

From Working Through the Holocaust to Current Ethnic Conflicts: Evaluating the TRT Group Workshop in Hamburg

The TRT (To Reflect and Trust) approach of bringing together descendants of Holocaust survivors and descendants of Nazi perpetrators relies on group dialogues in which participants share their personal life stories, thereby enabling them to reflect on their personal and collective histories as victims and victimizers. This process was initiated and led by the second author—an Israeli psychologist and a specialist in group processes—in the context of the socially and historically contextualized approach to group interventions that he has developed. The present study describes a new phase of the TRT group that brought together, in the framework of a workshop, professionals from South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel and the Palestinian Authority—all of whom were working with victims and victimizers in current conflicts. Our question was whether the TRT process, using methods of storytelling to address a past catastrophe of human making, could help the professionals who try to help other people move out of current conflicts into peace-building. We found that the TRT storytelling approach facilitates the working through of current ethnic conflicts. Participants' responses to the workshop indicated the importance of the storytelling process and of the emotional support provided by the TRT group members. We focus here on the special significance of the group process between Germans, Jews, and Palestinians, which emerged as highly significant for the Jewish participants in their efforts to reconcile being both victims and victimizers (within two separate historical contexts: German/Jewish and Israeli/Palestinian).

The Silence of Psychologists

Unlike certain Israeli historians or sociologists who have developed a critical “post‐Zionist” approach, Israeli psychologists display few signs of this critical trend. This is especially disquieting in light of the latest back and forth movement between warfare to the peace process—a movement that created many new social and individual dilemmas that would benefit from an open debate within social and clinical psychology. This paper tries to account for this deficiency by looking at its possible historical, political, and cultural roots. The historical aspects relate to the influence of European and American psychological traditions. Two political aspects are presented: (1) Israeli psychologists, through their involvement in the military and their acceptance of the Zionist claim for security, tend to belong to the political mainstream (Gergen, 1973, 1989); and (2) a hyper‐political atmosphere scared Israeli psychologists into neutrality and objectivism. This provided a convenient rationale for apoliticism, especially when Israeli political polarization in the 1980s and 1990s was perceived as threatening psychologists' professional authority. Culturally, the psychologists, like the European social strata from which most of them originated, tended to adopt the American tradition of individualism as a reaction to the strong collectivist trend that dominated Israeli society during its early years. This may account for their weak and delayed social response of humanism, feminism, and constructivism. Exceptions to this general trend are highlighted, and the question of how Israeli psychology might become more politically sensitive and critical is explored. This discussion may have relevance for the development of political psychology in other societies, especially those going through transition of values or suffering from long, violent conflicts.

Thinking skills in music education

After working with many groups that have been culturally displaced, from victims of the holocaust to black teenagers from the ghetto, Reuven Feuerstein, an Israeli psychologist, has come to the conclusion that we learn everything through cultural transmission. Without a common value system young people do not have the necessary tools to connect with mainstream education. From this starting point Feuerstein believes learning has to be ‘modelled’ and mediated by the teacher to ensure understanding and progression. Above all, Feuerstein sees knowledge and skills as transferable, so that children who develop skills in one activity should be able to examine what they've accomplished and apply this in other areas of activity. Feuerstein's ideas have been seen to be universally applicable in education as a whole, and these principles have much to offer the class music teacher.

En lokalsamfunns-orientert psykiatrisk helsetjeneste i Massachusetts, USA

The new organization and structure of the comprehensive mental health services in the Chicopee-Holyoke-area of Massachusetts, USA, are described. The services, which until 1975 were mostly located to a mental hospital, were rather bad. Patients and their relatives appealed to the court, which decided that the State of Massachusetts had to develop alternative services within the local communities. These services should take care of all kinds of patients, also “the most disturbed”. Today five types of services exist in the communities in addition to the mental hospital ward. These are: 1. residential services, 2. case management. 3. crisis units, 4. vocational services, 5. day care centre with an out-patient-clinic. A certain therapeutic mode “Social Competency Model” originally developed by the israeli psychologist M. Spivak has been successfully applied in the work with the most deviantly behaving patients. The hospital ward has been reduced to one tenth of its size in 1975. “The revolving patients” to th...