Talma Kushnir
Biographic Data
| ID | 326098 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Talma Kushnir |
| GIVEN NAMES | Talma |
| FAMILY NAME | Kushnir |
| SIGNATURE | KUSHNIR T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7656-6292 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Children's cost-benefit analysis about agents who act for the greater good
A Qualitative Investigation Into the Experiences of Medicinal Cannabis Use Among Chronic Pain and PTSD Patients in Israel
In the last two decades, the use of cannabis for medical purposes has become legal in many countries and its use is steadily increasing. One of the most frequently cited reasons for prescribing medicinal cannabis (MC) is management of chronic pain, and in recent years MC has also been used as a treatment of psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, little is known about patients' experiences of the long-term p…
School-age children are more skeptical of inaccurate robots than adults
Testimony and observation of statistical evidence interact in adults' and children's category-based induction
Investigating mood-modification, withdrawal, and sensitization in compulsive sexual behaviour
The results of this study provide conflicting results concerning the model of behavioural addiction. There is supporting evidence for wanting in response to explicit pornography stimuli although it was not associated with increased explicitness. There is also evidence for reduced withdrawal during abstinence. Finally, there was no evidence that mood modification increases craving for pornography, negative mood actually decreased craving. Further …
Being me in times of change
Research from the perspective of parents, educators and mental health professionals has documented the negative impacts of pandemic isolation on children, but few studies have sought children's own perspectives on this difficult year. The current study aims to provide a first‐person perspective on children's psychological health by asking children directly about their experiences of isolating at home. We interviewed 28 seven‐ to eleven‐year‐olds …
Rational learners and parochial norms
Parochial norms are narrow in social scope, meaning they apply to certain groups but not to others. Accounts of norm acquisition typically invoke tribal biases: from an early age, people assume a group's behavioral regularities are prescribed and bounded by mere group membership. However, another possibility is rational learning: given the available evidence, people infer the social scope of norms in statistically appropriate ways. With this pape…
Do Adult Learners Who Engage in Torah Study as a Leisure Activity Report Higher Levels of Meaning in Life than Learners of General Enrichment Studies
Aim. The aim of the research is to assess whether adult learners engaged in Torah/Bible studies report higher levels of psycho-social resources, specifically spirituality, meaning in life, hope, and social support, than learners who attend general enrichment courses, and whether psycho-social resources contribute to their meaning in life. Methods. Participants were 234 men and women over age 55 who study regularly in their leisure time: 56 Torah …
The Relationship between Socio-Demographic Factors, Preventive Health Behaviors and Acceptance of Covid-19 Vaccine among Israeli Pregnant Women during the Coronavirus Pandemic
These findings can be helpful as a preliminary evidence base for policy-making at present and for future epidemics regarding guidelines on PHB adjusted for pregnant women
Leisure Learning's Contribution
Aim The study was aimed to assess whether leisure learners who engage in Torah/Bible studies report higher levels of spirituality than those who study other subjects, and whether higher levels of spirituality result in a higher meaning in life and greater psychosocial resources, specifically hope and quality of life.Methods A survey of 234 participants, who study either Torah or other subjects in their leisure time. Participants completed self–re…
Torah study as leisure activity
This article discusses the contribution of Torah study as leisure activity to social support, hope and quality of life among Israeli adults. It shows that such study is associated positively with learners’ quality of life due to the acquisition of psychological resources that include social support by peers and hope. Shedding light on the world of people who study Torah as a leisure activity, the article also reveals that cultural sources that ar…
The minds of machines
Children are developing alongside interactive technologies that can move, talk, and act like agents, but it is unclear if children's beliefs about the agency of these household technologies are similar to their beliefs about advanced, humanoid robots used in lab research. This study investigated 4-11-year-old children's (N = 127, Mage = 7.50, SDage = 2.27, 53% females, 75% White; from the Northeastern United States) beliefs about the mental, phys…
Culture moderates the relationship between self-control ability and free will beliefs in childhood
We investigate individual, developmental, and cultural differences in self-control in relation to children's changing belief in "free will" - the possibility of acting against and inhibiting strong desires. In three studies, 4- to 8-year-olds in the U.S., China, Singapore, and Peru (N = 441) answered questions to gauge their belief in free will and completed a series of self-control and inhibitory control tasks. Children across all four cultures …
Leaving a Choice for Others
People value those who act with others in mind even as they pursue their own goals. Across three studies (N = 566; 4- to 6-year-olds), we investigated children’s developing understanding of such considerate, socially-mindful actions. By age 6, both U.S. and Chinese children positively evaluate a character who takes a snack for herself in a way that leaves a snack choice for others over a character who leaves no choice (Study 1), but only when the…
Nurses' Knowledge and Attitudes toward Lesbians Seeking Perinatal Care in Israel
In recent decades, there has been an increasing tendency among lesbians to realize their desire to become parents. Nurses provide perinatal care to lesbians at women's healthcare centres from the pregnancy planning stage until childbirth, serving as a source of information, advice and support. However, little is known about nurses' personal and professional characteristics, including knowledge and attitudes concerning perinatal care of lesbians a…
The cultural roots of free will beliefs
Making sense of human actions involves thinking about both endogenous influences (the internal mental states of agents) and exogenous influences (social, moral, and interpersonal constraints). Culture impacts how we weight the relative causal influence of these two influences. To examine these cultural influences in depth, we asked 147 4-11-year-olds in 3 cultural groups (Singaporean Chinese, Singaporean Malay, and U.S. Americans) about the possi…
The choice is yours
Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test…
Selectivity in toddlers’ behavioral and emotional reactions to prosocial and antisocial others
Whereas some evidence suggests that toddlers consider targets' deservingness when deciding whom to help, other research demonstrates that toddlers help indiscriminately. The present findings shed light on this discrepancy by demonstrating that although toddlers do exhibit selectivity in giving behaviors, their emotional responses are comparatively indiscriminate. Specifically, in Experiment 1, 20-month-olds (N = 64) were more likely to give prefe…
The developmental and cultural psychology of free will
This paper provides an account of the developmental origins of our belief in free will based on research from a range of ages-infants, preschoolers, older children, and adults-and across cultures. The foundations of free will beliefs are in infants' understanding of intentional action-their ability to use context to infer when agents are free to "do otherwise" and when they are constrained. In early childhood, new knowledge aboutcausesof action l…
What I don’t know won’t hurt you
Testimony is a valuable source of information for young learners, in particular if children maintain vigilance against errors while still being open to learning from imperfectly knowledgeable sources. We find support for this idea by examining how children evaluate individual speakers who present very different epistemic risks by being previously ignorant or inaccurate. Results across 2 experiments show that children attribute knowledge to (Exper…
Infants Use Statistical Sampling to Understand the Psychological World
Preverbal infants engage in statistical and probabilistic inference to learn about their linguistic and physical worlds. Do they also employ probabilistic information to understand their social world? Do they infer underlying causal mechanisms from statistical data? Here, we show, with looking‐time methods, that 10‐month‐olds attend to statistical information to understand their social–psychological world and plausibly infer underlying causal mec…
When what’s inside counts
This study explores the role of a particular social cue-the sequence of demonstrated actions and events-in preschooler's categorization. A demonstrator sorted objects that varied on both a surface feature (color) and a nonobvious property (sound made when shaken). Children saw a sequence of actions in which the nonobvious property was revealed before (shake-first) or after (shake-last) categorization. Four experiments (N = 150) showed that both 4…
Social context effects in 2- and 4-year-olds’ selective versus faithful imitation
This study asked whether children's tendency to imitate selectively (ignore causally unnecessary actions) versus faithfully (overimitate causally unnecessary actions) varies across ages and social contexts. In the first experiment, 2-year-olds and 4-year-olds were randomly assigned to play 1 of 3 prior games with a demonstrator: a mimicry game, an instrumental game, or a noninteractive control game. They then participated in a puzzle-box imitatio…
Grief and Bereavement of Israeli Dog Owners
Several studies have investigated the grief that owners experience after they euthanized their pets. However, research has not explored the cognitive and emotional processes those dog owners experience. The authors chose an exploratory approach and conducted a content analysis of 29 semistructured interviews of owners in the 2-week period after the death of their dogs. They found 5 main phases in the initial parting process: the decision to eutha…
Who can help me fix this toy?” The distinction between causal knowledge and word knowledge guides preschoolers' selective requests for information
Preschoolers use outcomes of actions to infer causal properties of objects. We asked whether they also use them to infer others' causal abilities and knowledge. In Experiment 1, preschoolers saw 2 informants, 2 tools, and 2 broken toys. One informant (the labeler) knew the names of the tools, but his actions failed to activate the toys. The other (the fixer) was ignorant about the names of the tools, but his actions succeeded in activating the to…
Organizational Commitment in a Male Dominated Profession
The paper analyzes the organizational commitment of North American male andfemale accountants working in professional organizations. Unlike others, the present study controlledfor the critical variables of type of occupation, level and subject of higher education, and type of organization. The independent variables were age, gender, tenure, organizational level, cognitive affective orientation to the job, professional commitment, overalljob satis…
Conditional probability versus spatial contiguity in causal learning
This study examines preschoolers' causal assumptions about spatial contiguity and how these assumptions interact with new evidence in the form of conditional probabilities. Preschoolers saw a toy that activated in the presence of certain objects. Children were shown evidence for the toy's activation rule in the form of patterns of probability: The toy was more likely to activate either when objects made contact with its surface (on condition) or …
Grief and Bereavement of Israeli Dog Owners
Several studies have investigated the grief that owners experience after they euthanized their pets. However, research has not explored the cognitive and emotional processes those dog owners experience. The authors chose an exploratory approach and conducted a content analysis of 29 semistructured interviews of owners in the 2-week period after the death of their dogs. They found 5 main phases in the initial parting process: the decision to eutha…
Who can help me fix this toy?” The distinction between causal knowledge and word knowledge guides preschoolers' selective requests for information
Preschoolers use outcomes of actions to infer causal properties of objects. We asked whether they also use them to infer others' causal abilities and knowledge. In Experiment 1, preschoolers saw 2 informants, 2 tools, and 2 broken toys. One informant (the labeler) knew the names of the tools, but his actions failed to activate the toys. The other (the fixer) was ignorant about the names of the tools, but his actions succeeded in activating the to…
What I don’t know won’t hurt you
Testimony is a valuable source of information for young learners, in particular if children maintain vigilance against errors while still being open to learning from imperfectly knowledgeable sources. We find support for this idea by examining how children evaluate individual speakers who present very different epistemic risks by being previously ignorant or inaccurate. Results across 2 experiments show that children attribute knowledge to (Exper…
Domestic Stress and Well-Being of Employed Women
Work‐load, perceived control and psychological distress in Type A/B industrial workers
The effects of work‐load (WL) and perceived control (PC) on the psychological well‐being of Type A and Type B industrial workers were studied using Karasek's Job Demands‐Control model (1979). Subjects were 3562 male workers from 21 factories in Israel. Compared to Type B, Type As showed higher stress symptoms (irritability, somatic complaints, anxiety) but also higher job satisfaction. Contrary to our hypotheses, Type As were not more stressed un…
The minds of machines
Children are developing alongside interactive technologies that can move, talk, and act like agents, but it is unclear if children's beliefs about the agency of these household technologies are similar to their beliefs about advanced, humanoid robots used in lab research. This study investigated 4-11-year-old children's (N = 127, Mage = 7.50, SDage = 2.27, 53% females, 75% White; from the Northeastern United States) beliefs about the mental, phys…
The cultural roots of free will beliefs
Making sense of human actions involves thinking about both endogenous influences (the internal mental states of agents) and exogenous influences (social, moral, and interpersonal constraints). Culture impacts how we weight the relative causal influence of these two influences. To examine these cultural influences in depth, we asked 147 4-11-year-olds in 3 cultural groups (Singaporean Chinese, Singaporean Malay, and U.S. Americans) about the possi…
Selectivity in toddlers’ behavioral and emotional reactions to prosocial and antisocial others
Whereas some evidence suggests that toddlers consider targets' deservingness when deciding whom to help, other research demonstrates that toddlers help indiscriminately. The present findings shed light on this discrepancy by demonstrating that although toddlers do exhibit selectivity in giving behaviors, their emotional responses are comparatively indiscriminate. Specifically, in Experiment 1, 20-month-olds (N = 64) were more likely to give prefe…
A self-agency bias in preschoolers' causal inferences
Preschoolers' causal learning from intentional actions--causal interventions--is subject to a self-agency bias. The authors propose that this bias is evidence-based, in other words, that it is responsive to causal uncertainty. In the current studies, two causes (one child controlled, one experimenter controlled) were associated with one or two effects, first independently, then simultaneously. When initial independent effects were probabilistic, …
Nurses' Knowledge and Attitudes toward Lesbians Seeking Perinatal Care in Israel
In recent decades, there has been an increasing tendency among lesbians to realize their desire to become parents. Nurses provide perinatal care to lesbians at women's healthcare centres from the pregnancy planning stage until childbirth, serving as a source of information, advice and support. However, little is known about nurses' personal and professional characteristics, including knowledge and attitudes concerning perinatal care of lesbians a…
The choice is yours
Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test…
The importance of familiarization with the history of experimental social psychology
Emotional arousal and affiliation among blood donors
Anticipating Skylab
Business Partnerships
Three studies are presented, all concerned with the preference for men over women as business partners. In the first study subjects made up names of imaginary partners in a law office. The majority of men and women made up masculine names. While these results support the hypothesized preference for men, they could be due to a confounding of the effects of sex bias and the masculine image of the legal profession. Therefore, in the second study a m…
Organizational Commitment in a Male Dominated Profession
The paper analyzes the organizational commitment of North American male andfemale accountants working in professional organizations. Unlike others, the present study controlledfor the critical variables of type of occupation, level and subject of higher education, and type of organization. The independent variables were age, gender, tenure, organizational level, cognitive affective orientation to the job, professional commitment, overalljob satis…
Work‐load, perceived control and psychological distress in Type A/B industrial workers
The effects of work‐load (WL) and perceived control (PC) on the psychological well‐being of Type A and Type B industrial workers were studied using Karasek's Job Demands‐Control model (1979). Subjects were 3562 male workers from 21 factories in Israel. Compared to Type B, Type As showed higher stress symptoms (irritability, somatic complaints, anxiety) but also higher job satisfaction. Contrary to our hypotheses, Type As were not more stressed un…
Burnout and Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Diseases
The burnout syndrome denotes a constellation of physical fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and cognitive weariness resulting from chronic stress. Although it overlaps considerably with chronic fatigue as defined in internal medicine, its links with physical illness have not been systematically investigated. This exploratory study, conducted among 104 male workers free from cardiovascular disease (CVD), tested the association between burnout and two …
Emotional Reactions and Coping Activities of Divorced and Married Mothers in Israel During the Gulf War
Based on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, divorced mothers, who are assumed to possess fewer resources than married mothers, were expected to be more emotionally vulnerable and to cope less adequately during the life-threatening situation of the Gulf War. The findings, however, indicate that on the whole, married mothers were more adversely affected than divorced mothers in this study. The latter were more emotionally stable during the…
Blood Lipids and Lipoproteins in Married and Formerly Married Women
As part of the Cardiovascular Occupational Risk Factors Determination in Israel (CORDIS) study, the association between marriage termination (divorce/separation or widowhood) and blood lipids and lipoproteins was examined in a sample of 351 healthy women employed in industry. Eighty-seven former spouses were each matched with three married women (N = 264) for age, number of children, smoking status, and type of job (blue/white collar). After cont…
Health responsibility and workplace health promotion among women
The importance of health responsibility as one aspect of a health-promoting lifestyle has been emphasized repeatedly. Yet there are only a few empirical studies of its role in preventive behavior. We examined the relationship between health responsibility and early-detection practices for breast and cervical cancer. A group of 253 women employees of a large industrial company participated in a cancer screening program subsidized by the employer. …
Reducing work/home conflicts in employed couples
Live Supervision in Family Therapy and Social Facilitation Effects
Association Between Somatic Symptoms and 24-Hour Ambulatory Blood Pressure Levels
OBJECTIVE: To clarify whether somatic complaints in healthy normotensive men are associated with differential 24-hour blood pressure and heart rate measures. METHOD: Twenty-four-hour ambulatory systolic and diastolic blood pressure was monitored in 114 healthy normotensive men, aged 28 to 63 years, engaged in similar physical work. Means were calculated for each hour, for the whole 24-hour period, and for daytime, nighttime, and work time. Subjec…
Association Between Burnout at Work and Leukocyte Adhesiveness/Aggregation
OBJECTIVE: This study examined whether burnout at work is associated with leukocyte adhesiveness/aggregation (LAA), a phenomenon known to be affected by stress. METHODS: The LAA levels of 179 employees (68 men and 111 women) of Tel Aviv University were determined when the employees underwent their annual routine medical checkup. Blood pressure and toxic chemical exposure were also measured, and background data were retrieved from medical records.…
A Theory of Causal Learning in Children
The authors outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. They propose that children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate "causal map" of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or Bayes nets. Children's causa…
Domestic Stress and Well-Being of Employed Women
Conditional probability versus spatial contiguity in causal learning
This study examines preschoolers' causal assumptions about spatial contiguity and how these assumptions interact with new evidence in the form of conditional probabilities. Preschoolers saw a toy that activated in the presence of certain objects. Children were shown evidence for the toy's activation rule in the form of patterns of probability: The toy was more likely to activate either when objects made contact with its surface (on condition) or …
A self-agency bias in preschoolers' causal inferences
Preschoolers' causal learning from intentional actions--causal interventions--is subject to a self-agency bias. The authors propose that this bias is evidence-based, in other words, that it is responsive to causal uncertainty. In the current studies, two causes (one child controlled, one experimenter controlled) were associated with one or two effects, first independently, then simultaneously. When initial independent effects were probabilistic, …
Grief and Bereavement of Israeli Dog Owners
Several studies have investigated the grief that owners experience after they euthanized their pets. However, research has not explored the cognitive and emotional processes those dog owners experience. The authors chose an exploratory approach and conducted a content analysis of 29 semistructured interviews of owners in the 2-week period after the death of their dogs. They found 5 main phases in the initial parting process: the decision to eutha…
Who can help me fix this toy?” The distinction between causal knowledge and word knowledge guides preschoolers' selective requests for information
Preschoolers use outcomes of actions to infer causal properties of objects. We asked whether they also use them to infer others' causal abilities and knowledge. In Experiment 1, preschoolers saw 2 informants, 2 tools, and 2 broken toys. One informant (the labeler) knew the names of the tools, but his actions failed to activate the toys. The other (the fixer) was ignorant about the names of the tools, but his actions succeeded in activating the to…
Social context effects in 2- and 4-year-olds’ selective versus faithful imitation
This study asked whether children's tendency to imitate selectively (ignore causally unnecessary actions) versus faithfully (overimitate causally unnecessary actions) varies across ages and social contexts. In the first experiment, 2-year-olds and 4-year-olds were randomly assigned to play 1 of 3 prior games with a demonstrator: a mimicry game, an instrumental game, or a noninteractive control game. They then participated in a puzzle-box imitatio…
Infants Use Statistical Sampling to Understand the Psychological World
Preverbal infants engage in statistical and probabilistic inference to learn about their linguistic and physical worlds. Do they also employ probabilistic information to understand their social world? Do they infer underlying causal mechanisms from statistical data? Here, we show, with looking‐time methods, that 10‐month‐olds attend to statistical information to understand their social–psychological world and plausibly infer underlying causal mec…
When what’s inside counts
This study explores the role of a particular social cue-the sequence of demonstrated actions and events-in preschooler's categorization. A demonstrator sorted objects that varied on both a surface feature (color) and a nonobvious property (sound made when shaken). Children saw a sequence of actions in which the nonobvious property was revealed before (shake-first) or after (shake-last) categorization. Four experiments (N = 150) showed that both 4…
What I don’t know won’t hurt you
Testimony is a valuable source of information for young learners, in particular if children maintain vigilance against errors while still being open to learning from imperfectly knowledgeable sources. We find support for this idea by examining how children evaluate individual speakers who present very different epistemic risks by being previously ignorant or inaccurate. Results across 2 experiments show that children attribute knowledge to (Exper…
The choice is yours
Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test…
Psychology (39 works) · Social Psychology (28 works) · Developmental psychology (21 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (15 works) · Cognitive psychology (14 works) · Medicine (13 works) · Clinical Psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Cognition (7 works)