Fear of war: Relations to values, gender, and mental health in Germany and Israel.

Abstract

We examine the extent to which fear of conventional and of nuclear war are related to value priorities in samples of German and Israeli university students. Value priorities are postulated to influence the appraisal of threat. As hypothesized, fear of war is greater among those who attribute greater importance to values that express concern for others-universalism and benevolence, and to values that emphasize preservation of the social order-security and conformity. In Israel, fear of nuclear war is also greater among those who attribute greater importance to values that legitimate self-enhancement-power and achievement. Fear of war is greater among women than among men, a finding attributable both to stereotypic response bias and to role socialization. Fear of war is not related to a variety of indicators of mental health.Fear of war has long been on the agenda of psychological peace research. Miiller-Brettel(1993) comprehensively reviewed the work in the field from 1900 to 1991. Most research concerned the effects of war on children, although studies of adolescents and of young adults were conducted as well. Early research was Requests for reprints should be sent to Klaus Boehnke,

Worries and Values

“…For a full understanding of worries, of course, other factors must be studied as well. Variation in exposure to objective threat is undoubtedly important (Boehnke & Schwartz, 1997), especially for micro worries. Variation in actual and in subjective coping ability may also have an impact, as may the cultural variables just noted.…”

Parties, Lads, Friends, Love and Newcastle United: A study of young people's values

“…These were power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity and security. Research has shown that values such as these are established in adolescence and can be linked to personality (Yik & Tang, 1996), parental socialisation (Grusec & Kuczynski, 1997;Homer, 1993), health-related behaviours (Bery & Mckenna, 1995;Conrad, 1994;Prokhorov et al, 1993;Schulenberg et al 1997), self-concept (Gari & Kalantzi-Azizi, 1998), media in uence (Larson et al, 1989;Cheung & Chan, 1996), social competence (Allen & Weissberg, 1989), pro-social development (Eisenberg & Carlo, 1995), career choice (Bregman & Killen, 1999;Schulenberg, Vondracek & Kim, 1983), voting behaviour (Barnea & Schwartz, 1998), religiosity (Roccas & Schwartz, 1997;Schwartz & Huismans, 1995), fear of war (Boehnke & Schwartz, 1997) and general well-being (Salmela-Aro & Nurmi, 1997). In particular, there has been a strong research interest in identifying similarities and differences in values cross-culturally.…”

Social dominance orientation and gender: The moderating role of gender identity

“…Feather, 1977). This has been illustrated in a number of sociopolitical domains; women score lower on measures of prejudice (Ekehammer, Nilsson, & Sidanius, 1987), anti-egalitarianism (Ekehammer, 1985), authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1981(Altemeyer, , 1996, are more fearful of the prospect of international conflict (Boehnke & Schwartz, 1997), and generally hold less punitive attitudes (Ekehammer, 1985) to name but a few.…”