How to Maintain Emotional Health When Working with Trauma

Vicarious traumatization, compassion fatigue, or secondary traumatization refers to the cumulative effect of working with survivors of traumatic life events as part of everyday work. Although this issue has been acknowledged and addressed among professionals such as police officers and medical professionals, it has been discussed less among juvenile and family court judges who also experience secondary traumatic stress. In fact, in one recent study, a majority of judges reported one or more symptoms of secondary traumatization. This article describes the common signs and symptoms of secondary trauma, job‐related factors that contribute to secondary trauma among judges, and the potential negative impact on organizational performance. The authors conclude with specific recommendations tailored for juvenile and family court judges.     

Asymmetry and Corrective Public Policy in Contests

The proposal of an inefficient policyusually stimulates a political strugglebetween the affected interest groups. Theresulting wasteful lobbying activities mayreduce welfare, even if the proposed policyis not approved. In this paper weshow that sufficient asymmetry in payoffsnot only tends to reduce lobbying effortsin standard rent-seeking contests, as iswell known, but it is, in fact, a necessarycondition for the implementation of asuccessful effective correctivetax-transfer policy that complements theproposal of the inefficient policy. Such apolicy induces an efficient equilibriumoutcome which is, in addition, optimal fromthe viewpoint of the players that take partin the public-policy game.     

Two remarks on the effect of increased equalitarianism in decisional skills on the number of individuals that maximizes group judgmental competence

Employing the symmetric uncertain dichotomous choice model, this paper is concerned with the effect of two types of changes in individual decisional competencies on the optimal collective decision rule and, in particular, on the optimal number of essential decision makers (individuals who are effectively involved in the decision-making process). The first change is simply a decrease in the decisional skills of some of the existing more competent essential decision makers. The second change is a rank and mean-preserving equalization of decisional skills. We show that the number of essential decision makers is not necessarily positively related to both of these changes. This surprising observation implies that a more egalitarian distribution of decisional skills may justify a reduction in the optimal number of individuals effectively participating in the collective decision-making process.     

Coping styles of learning disabled adolescents and their parents

The study compares coping styles of 50 learning disabled and nonlearning dis-abled adolescents and their parents. Analyses indicate that learning disabled adolescents show less ability to appraise a source of stress and seek information in the various domains with which they are expected to cope. Also, they reveal a higher level of pessimism about problems in academic-related domains. Coping patterns of parents of learning disabled adolescents do not show clear differences from parents of nonlearning disabled. Yet mothers of learning disabled adolescents tend more to seek and accept help. Learning disabled adolescents' coping is clearly related to coping or more specifically to difficulties in coping of their parents. Results are discussed in the context of the special difficulties of the learning disabled during adolescence and the role their parents play during this developmental stage.Received Ph. D. from Bar Ilan University. Research interests include developmental and family processes in normal and pathological adolescents.Received Ph.D. from University of Minnesota. Main interests are developmental and family processes in adolescence.Received M.A. in counseling from Tel Aviv University.Received M.A. in counseling from Tel Aviv University.     

Regime Types and Discrimination against Ethnoreligious Minorities: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of the Autocracy–Democracy Continuum

Although many assume that the relationship between the autocracy–democracy continuum and discrimination is linear, with autocracies discriminating the most and democracies discriminating the least, the assumption is not universal. This study uses the Minorities at Risk dataset to test this relationship with regard to government treatment of religiously differentiated ethnic minorities (ethnoreligious minorities) as well as ethnic minorities that are not religiously differentiated. The results show that the pattern of treatment of ethnoreligious minorities differs from that of other ethnic minorities. The extent to which a state is democratic has no clear influence on the level of discrimination against non-religiously differentiated ethnic minorities, but it has a clear influence on the level of discrimination against ethnoreligious minorities. Autocracies discriminate more than democracies against ethnoreligious minorities, but semi-democracies, those governments that are situated between democracies and autocracies, discriminate even less. This result is consistent on all 11 measures used here and is statistically significant for seven of them, and it remains strong when controlling for other factors, including separatism. This phenomenon increases in strength from the beginning to the end of the 1990s. Also, democracies discriminate against ethnoreligious minorities more than they do against other minorities. The nature of liberal democracy may provide an explanation for this phenomenon.     

Injustice Abroad,Authority at Home? Democracy,Systemic Effects,and Global Wrongs

Multiple normative theorists currently link political authority to democratic political procedures. I explore how proponents of this influential view can address a fundamental, but overlooked, puzzle. The puzzle begins from the firm judgment that even a government that keeps democratic procedures intact loses its general authority if it enacts abhorrent major laws. This judgment means that the moral failure of some laws can dissolve the moral authority of other laws—even ones that are quite distinct in their content. But how can we explain these systemic effects of specific laws? I confront this challenge by introducing a global perspective into the discussion of political authority. First, I suggest that we should only adopt an account of systemic effects that can explain how the worst global conduct dissolves a government's general authority. Second, after developing such an account, I use it to reflect on thornier global cases.     

The Rules of the Game—Nationalism,Globalisation and Football in Spain: Barça and Bilbao in a Comparative Perspective

This paper discusses the triangular relation between nationalism, globalisation and football in Spain. The aim of the work is to compare the way two Spanish football clubs—the Catalan FC Barcelona (known as “Barça”) and the Basque Athletic Bilbao—respond to the challenges posed by the game's globalisation, and through this comparison learn about the nexus between nationalism and globalisation. The main claim is that the differences between the two clubs’ behaviour can be attributed to varying characteristics of Basque and Catalan nationalism. Focusing on different path dependency, the development of a civic Catalan nationalism is contrasted with the growth of Basque nationalism as essentially ethnic. These characteristics emerged and crystallised primarily during the regions’ industrialisation, and the nationalist response to this advent of modernism would later shape the response to post-modern globalisation. The diametrically opposed ways in which the two football clubs react to the game's globalisation reflect the significant differences between the two national movements’ core values. This illustrates the importance of path dependency as a factor that produces diverse responses to globalisation—the results of which are not predetermined.