Purpose. The present study examined the relationship between major personality dimensions and attitudes towards peace and war.Design. Three samples--two consisting of British psychology students (N = 64 and 121) and one ofIsraeli students (N = 80), responded to measures of some or all of: Five-Factor inventory; SYMLOG trait form; General Survey (GS) including authoritarianism; Attitudes towards Peace and War; specific attitudes towards peace and war policy.Findings. The general attitude measures were associated with the specific attitudes. Both were associated with authoritarianism but not consistently with other personality dimensions.Limitations: descriptive findings might not generalize..Research Implications: Authoritarianism should be measured in any studies of attitudes related to peace, war, conflict and structural violence.Practical Implications: Practitioners of peace education may first need to address high authoritarianism and low integrative complexity. Also, countering structural violence related, for instance, to poverty or prejudice/discrimination may require a comprehensive approach including collaborative work with clinical psychologists applying both implicit and explicit assessment tools.Originality/value: Documenting links (and lack of them) among personality variables and attitudes towards peace and war has practical and theoretical value-and may contribute to organizational schemes shaped by personality structure and bearing implications for negotiations. In terms of a paradigm by Morton Deutsch, our results show individual differences in, and associations among, variables relating to the remediable likelihood of parties being differentially likely to find themselves (a) in negatively vs. positively interdependent situations and (b) carrying out effective instead of "bungling" actions.

Since the publication of the Rorschach Inkblot Method (Rorschach, 1921/1942 ), theorists, researchers, and practitioners have been debating the nature of the task, its conceptual foundation, and most important its psychometric properties. The validity of the Rorschach Comprehensive System (CS; Exner, 1974 , 2003; Exner & Weiner, 1995 ) has been supported by several meta-analyses that used different types of nontest external criterion for validating individual variables. In a recent meta-analysis, Mihura, Meyer, Dumitrascu, and Bombel ( 2013 ) found coefficients ranging from modest to excellent for most of the selected CS variables, with 13 of them reported as showing "little to no support." This article focuses on these variables. Although endorsing Mihura et al.'s mainly validating findings, we also suggest that the evidence presented for the little or no validity of these 13 variables is not quite compelling enough to warrant changing their definition or coding, or removing them from the system. We point to some issues concerning the description and interpretation of these variables and the appropriateness of the external criteria used for exploring their validity, and suggest considering these issues in further CS research. Implications of Mihura et al.'s meta-analysis for clinical and forensic practice are discussed.

The current study explores a psychoanalytic conceptualization of dissociation based on Winnicott's (1971) construct of potential space and Ogden's (1986) model of using this construct to capture different types of psychopathological states. Following Smith (1990), we apply the Rorschach Reality-Fantasy Scale (RFS; Tibon, Handelzalts & Weinberger, 2005) to Rorschach protocols of 100 patients with severe dissociative disorders (Brand, Armstrong, & Loewenstein, 2006). Overall, the results support the conceptualization of dissociation as a form of collapse of potential space. When compared with a normative sample, the dissociative patients demonstrated significantly elevated RFS-S scores, indicative of fluctuations between reality-bound and fantasy-derived Rorschach responses, in which reality and fantasy are experienced as parallel, disconnected conditions. Furthermore, the RFS-S significantly added to detecting dissociative disorders, above and beyond isolated Rorschach markers known to be indicative of dissociation. In line with previous research, the results demonstrate the advantages of using the Rorschach in general, and the RFS in particular, for empirically exploring psychoanalytic conceptualizations of psychopathological states.

Various studies suggest that individual differences in personality patterns of functioning are strong determinants of both psychopathological manifestations and negotiation effectiveness in high functioning individuals. It has been argued that the lack of empirical confirmation for these claims is attributable to methodological limitations. The present paper suggests using the Reality-Fantasy Scale Version 2 (RFS-2), as a measure of these patterns while confronting the ambiguous task of the Rorschach Inkblot Method. Participants were three samples of young Israeli adults collected in three periods that differ in terms of frequency and severity of terrorist attacks conducted against civilians. The findings point out that unlike the level of subjective distress, which was lower in less threatening periods, fundamental personality characteristics (i.e. the capacity for differentiation and integration of internal and external realms of experience) were found to be similar in all the three samples despite notable changes in external circumstances of the long standing, fluctuating political conflict in the Middle East.