Simulation-oriented scenarios

This editorial introduction advocates the need to learn from experiences with crisis management in enhancing crisis preparedness and crisis management capabilities. It introduces the concepts of crisis, crisis management, and crisis decision making and goes on to present the method of reconstructive logic as a method of promoting learning about crises. In particular, it stresses the importance of developing alternative scenarios of crisis development and crisis management on the basis of empirical reconstruction of historical cases. Using what if methodology may challenge analysts and practitioners alike to achieve a more sophisticated understanding of crisis events and how they may be handled.     

Community-based applications to enhance road safety

Road safety plays an increasing role in communities throughout the entire world. According to estimates, road accidents will have moved from ninth to third in the worldwide ranking of burden of disease by 2020. This theme issue is dedicated to community-based applications that have the aim to enhance road safety. Although various interventions will be demonstrated, this issue provides by no means an exhaustive overview of community-based applications. The applications presented in this issue are predominantly meant to stimulate ideas and discussion on what can be done to enhance road safety.     

Impact of parental holocaust traumatization on offsprings' reports of parental child-rearing practices

The impact of severe parental traumatization on child rearing was investigated in a nonselective nonclinical group of Israeli adolescents, offspring of Holocaust survivors (N=76). Adolescents' reports of parental behavior were correlated with a measure of severity of parental Holocaust traumatization. For boys, the severity of paternal traumatization (PT) correlated negatively with reported child-rearing practices denoting both paternal nurturance and paternal control. Mothers were perceived by boys as withholding nurturance and exerting hostile control as a function of their spouses' degree of traumatization (PT). Females perceived fathers as being inconsistent socializers, with anxiety-provoking and enforcement overtones as a function of PT. PT is, however, uncorrelated with any maternal practices as reported by girls. The severity of maternal traumatization (MT) was correlated with fathers' refrainment with girls from harsh modes, such as control, hostile control, and instilling anxiety. MT correlated for boys with maternal refrainment from harsh child-rearing practices, such as hostile control and enforcement. The results clearly point to the existence of significant associations between degree of parental traumatization and reported child-rearing experiences. The pattern of correlations indicate specific intragender and intergender transgenerational interactions.Received his Ph.D. at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1976. Fulbright scholar in Child Development at UCLA (1977). Major interests are personality assessment, personality development, and transgenerational aftermath of holocaust traumatization.Received his M.D. at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany, in 1952. Major interests are problems of trauma, mourning and bereavement, transgenerational transmission of identity in families, and psychoanalytic aspects of historical processes.     

Evaluation of a community-based intervention to enhance road safety

A total of 300 motorists were recruited at public places to answer a self-report questionnaire on a new community-based intervention to enhance road safety. The intervention consisted of a speed-displaying device that was mounted next to the road and was visible to both motorists and the public. The device gives feedback about the current speed of the motorist. The majority of motorists believed these devices influenced compliance with the speed limit. They indicated they approached locations with these devices more slowly than similar locations without such devices. Moreover, they slowed down if they were going faster than the speed limit. They also said that their reaction to the devices was not influenced by whether they were driving in a community where they had friends or in a community where nobody knew them. These results were consistent across gender, age, levels of education, and professions.     

Introduction: the politics of public justification

ABSTRACT

Introducing the special issue, this introduction sketches a broad frame for studying public justification. Addressing the relevance of studying this phenomenon, we contend that justificatory processes are very much at the core today’s politics. Defining the concept inclusively, we highlight the relevance of communicative agency and, at the same time, the salience of communicative contexts that enable this agency. Casting our net widely, we show how public justification is related to other, more thoroughly studied concepts, such as legitimacy, authority and power. Encouraging students of public justification to add to our understanding of justificatory processes, we highlight multiple fruitful methodological avenues for studying the concept.     

Be Yourself! How Am I Not myself?

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs is mostly animalistic; only self-actualization is uniquely human. Yet even this token of “human exceptionalism” is hampered by subscribing to essentialist, rather than existentialist, authenticity. If the former is just about recovering an innate, latent, core, it robs humans of their freedom to (re)create who they are. If we dare to choose, we cannot but be ourselves.