Preventing Sexual Violence: A Behavioral Problem Without a Behaviorally Informed Solution.

What solutions can we find in the research literature for preventing sexual violence, and what psychological theories have guided these efforts? We gather all primary prevention efforts to reduce sexual violence from 1985 to 2018 and provide a bird's-eye view of the literature. We first review predominant theoretical approaches to sexual-violence perpetration prevention by highlighting three interventions that exemplify the zeitgeist of primary prevention efforts at various points during this time period. We find a throughline in primary prevention interventions: They aim to change attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge (i.

Zoom out: An intervention on the virtual learning environment improves minority students' grades in two field experiments in Israel.

Closing the achievement gap for minority students in higher education requires addressing the lack of belonging these students experience. This paper introduces a psychological intervention that strategically targets key elements within the learning environment to foster the success of minority students. The intervention sought to enhance Palestinian minority student's sense of belonging by increasing the presence of their native language.

Prejudice Reduction: Progress and Challenges.

The past decade has seen rapid growth in research that evaluates methods for reducing prejudice. This essay reviews 418 experiments reported in 309 manuscripts from 2007 to 2019 to assess which approaches work best and why. Our quantitative assessment uses meta-analysis to estimate average effects.

Developing ReApp: an emotion regulation mobile intervention for intergroup conflict.

People living in areas of intractable conflicts experience extreme negative emotions which ultimately lead to support of aggressive policies. Emotion regulation and particularly cognitive reappraisal has been found to be effective in reducing negative emotional experiences and shifting policy preferences. Therefore, it is important to develop scalable, evidence-based interventions aimed at regulating negative emotions in such contexts.

Group-based emotion regulation: A motivated approach.

The regulation of group-based emotions has gained scholarly attention only in recent years. In this article, we review research on group-based emotion regulation, focusing on the role of motivation and distinguishing between different emotion regulation motives in the group context. For that purpose, we first define group-based emotions and their effects on both intragroup and intergroup processes.

When there's a will, there's a way: Disentangling the effects of goals and means in emotion regulation.

Emotion regulation involves activating an emotion goal (e.g., decrease negative emotions) and using an emotion regulation strategy (e.

Motivated emotion and the rally around the flag effect: liberals are motivated to feel collective angst (like conservatives) when faced with existential threat.

A careful look at societies facing threat reveals a unique phenomenon in which liberals and conservatives react emotionally and attitudinally in a similar manner, rallying around the conservative flag. Previous research suggests that this rally effect is the result of liberals shifting in their attitudes and emotional responses toward the conservative end. Whereas theories of motivated social cognition provide a motivation-based account of cognitive processes (i.

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness.

Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself.

Moderating attitudes in times of violence through paradoxical thinking intervention.

In the current paper, we report a large-scale randomized field experiment, conducted among Jewish Israelis during widespread violence. The study examines the effectiveness of a "real world," multichanneled paradoxical thinking intervention, with messages disseminated through various means of communication (i.e.

Successful emotion regulation requires both conviction and skill: beliefs about the controllability of emotions, reappraisal, and regulation success.

To succeed in self-regulation, people need to believe that it is possible to change behaviour and they also need to use effective means to enable such a change. We propose that this also applies to emotion regulation. In two studies, we found that people were most successful in emotion regulation, the more they believed emotions can be controlled and the more they used an effective emotion regulation strategy - namely, cognitive reappraisal.

Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures.

We test the theory that shame evolved as a defense against being devalued by others. By hypothesis, shame is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition, motivation, physiology, and behavior in the service of: (i) deterring the individual from making choices where the prospective costs of devaluation exceed the benefits, (ii) preventing negative information about the self from reaching others, and (iii) minimizing the adverse effects of devaluation when it occurs. Because the unnecessary activation of a defense is costly, the shame system should estimate the magnitude of the devaluative threat and use those estimates to cost-effectively calibrate its activation: Traits or actions that elicit more negative evaluations from others should elicit more shame.

What we want is what we get: Group-based emotional preferences and conflict resolution.

Imagine yourself facing someone who might attack your group--if you could control your emotions, how would you want to feel toward that person? We argue that the goals people have for their group dictate how they want to feel on behalf of their group. We further propose that these group-based emotional preferences, in turn, influence how people actually feel as group members and how they react to political events. We conducted 9 studies to test our proposed model.

God rest our hearts: Religiosity and cognitive reappraisal.

Although religiosity is often accompanied by more intense emotions, we propose that people who are more religious may be better at using 1 of the most effective emotion regulation strategies-namely, cognitive reappraisal. We argue that religion, which is a meaning-making system, is linked to better cognitive reappraisal, which involves changing the meaning of emotional stimuli. Four studies (N = 2,078) supported our hypotheses.

Unfreezing cognitions during an intractable conflict: Does an external incentive for negotiating peace and (low levels of) collective angst increase information seeking?

A core feature of intractable conflicts is the tendency to cognitively freeze on existing, pro-ingroup beliefs. In three experiments, conducted in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we tested the idea that an external incentive for negotiating peace helps unfreeze cognitions. In Experiment 1, making salient that peace with the Palestinians would reduce the Iranian nuclear threat (an external incentive) led to a process of unfreezing.

Together we cry: Social motives and preferences for group-based sadness.

Group-based emotions play an important role in helping people feel that they belong to their group. People are motivated to belong, but does this mean that they actively try to experience group-based emotions to increase their sense of belonging? In this investigation, we propose that people may be motivated to experience even group-based emotions that are typically considered unpleasant to satisfy their need to belong. To test this hypothesis, we examined people's preferences for group-based sadness in the context of the Israeli National Memorial Day.

Paradoxical thinking as a new avenue of intervention to promote peace.

In societies involved in an intractable conflict, there are strong socio-psychological barriers that contribute to the continuation and intractability of the conflict. Based on a unique field study conducted in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we offer a new avenue to overcome these barriers by exposing participants to a long-term paradoxical intervention campaign expressing extreme ideas that are congruent with the shared ethos of conflict. Results show that the intervention, although counterintuitive, led participants to express more conciliatory attitudes regarding the conflict, particularly among participants with center and right political orientation.

Can emotion regulation change political attitudes in intractable conflicts? From the laboratory to the field.

We hypothesized that an adaptive form of emotion regulation-cognitive reappraisal-would decrease negative emotion and increase support for conflict-resolution policies. In Study 1, Israeli participants were invited to a laboratory session in which they were randomly assigned to either a cognitive-reappraisal condition or a control condition; they were then presented with anger-inducing information related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Participants in the reappraisal condition were more supportive of conciliatory policies and less supportive of aggressive policies compared with participants in the control condition.