Genome wide association study and genomic risk prediction of age related macular degeneration in Israel.

The risk of developing age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is influenced by genetic background. In 2016, the International AMD Genomics Consortium (IAMDGC) identified 52 risk variants in 34 loci, and a polygenic risk score (PRS) from these variants was associated with AMD. The Israeli population has a unique genetic composition: Ashkenazi Jewish (AJ), Jewish non-Ashkenazi, and Arab sub-populations. We aimed to perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for AMD in Israel, and to evaluate PRSs for AMD. Our discovery set recruited 403 AMD patients and 256 controls at Hadassah Medical Center. We genotyped individuals via custom exome chip. We imputed non-typed variants using cosmopolitan and AJ reference panels. We recruited additional 155 cases and 69 controls for validation. To evaluate predictive power of PRSs for AMD, we used IAMDGC summary-statistics excluding our study and developed PRSs via clumping/thresholding or LDpred2. In our discovery set, 31/34 loci reported by IAMDGC were AMD-associated (P < 0.05). Of those, all effects were directionally consistent with IAMDGC and 11 loci had a P-value under Bonferroni-corrected threshold (0.05/34 = 0.0015). At a 5 × 10-5 threshold, we discovered four suggestive associations in FAM189A1, IGDCC4, C7orf50, and CNTNAP4. Only the FAM189A1 variant was AMD-associated in the replication cohort after Bonferroni-correction. A prediction model including LDpred2-based PRS + covariates had an AUC of 0.82 (95% CI 0.79-0.85) and performed better than covariates-only model (P = 5.1 × 10-9). Therefore, previously reported AMD-associated loci were nominally associated with AMD in Israel. A PRS developed based on a large international study is predictive in Israeli populations.

The affective gap: a call for a comprehensive examination of the discrete emotions underlying affective polarization.

Bakker and Lelkes (2024) point at a critical gap in research on affective polarisation: the limited understanding of its affective components, mainly due to the reliance on a unidimensional operationalisation of affect in affective polarisation. They advocate for a broader approach to study affect, integrating explicit and implicit measures, and call on emotion specialists to address this gap. Acknowledging the complexity of affect in the ideological divide, we argue that the lack of a thorough examination of the distinct role of discrete emotions constitutes the primary "affective gap". Drawing from studies on the relationship between ideological groups and utilising a discrete emotions approach, we contest the prevailing assumption that hatred predominantly underlies affective polarisation. Instead, we propose that disappointment, better captures the intricate dynamics between ideological groups. We argue that such nuanced approach, regarding the affective component of affective polarisation enhances our understanding of the phenomenon and shed light on its implications for societies.

Zoom out: An intervention on the virtual learning environment improves minority students' grades in two field experiments in Israel.

Closing the achievement gap for minority students in higher education requires addressing the lack of belonging these students experience. This paper introduces a psychological intervention that strategically targets key elements within the learning environment to foster the success of minority students. The intervention sought to enhance Palestinian minority student's sense of belonging by increasing the presence of their native language. We tested the effectiveness of the intervention in two field experiments in Israel (n > 20,000), at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when all classes were held via Zoom. Lecturers in the experimental condition added a transcript of their names in Arabic to their default display (English/Hebrew only). Our findings revealed a substantial and positive impact on Palestinian student's sense of belonging, class participation, and overall grades. In experiment 1, Palestinian student's average grade increased by 10 points. In experiment 2, there was an average increase of 4 points among Palestinian students' semester grade. Our intervention demonstrates that small institutional changes when carefully crafted can have a significant impact on minority populations. These results have significant implications for addressing educational disparities and fostering inclusive learning environment.

Personalized mood prediction from patterns of behavior collected with smartphones.

Over the last ten years, there has been considerable progress in using digital behavioral phenotypes, captured passively and continuously from smartphones and wearable devices, to infer depressive mood. However, most digital phenotype studies suffer from poor replicability, often fail to detect clinically relevant events, and use measures of depression that are not validated or suitable for collecting large and longitudinal data. Here, we report high-quality longitudinal validated assessments of depressive mood from computerized adaptive testing paired with continuous digital assessments of behavior from smartphone sensors for up to 40 weeks on 183 individuals experiencing mild to severe symptoms of depression. We apply a combination of cubic spline interpolation and idiographic models to generate individualized predictions of future mood from the digital behavioral phenotypes, achieving high prediction accuracy of depression severity up to three weeks in advance (R2 ≥ 80%) and a 65.7% reduction in the prediction error over a baseline model which predicts future mood based on past depression severity alone. Finally, our study verified the feasibility of obtaining high-quality longitudinal assessments of mood from a clinical population and predicting symptom severity weeks in advance using passively collected digital behavioral data. Our results indicate the possibility of expanding the repertoire of patient-specific behavioral measures to enable future psychiatric research.

Between victory and peace: Unravelling the paradox of hope in intractable conflicts.

Previous research on group-based hope has predominantly focused on positive intergroup outcomes, such as peace and harmony. In this paper, we demonstrate that hope experienced towards group-centric political outcomes, such as a victory in a conflict and defeating the enemy, can be detrimental to peace. In Study 1, conducted among Israeli Jews, hope for victory over the Palestinians was uniquely associated with more support for extreme war policies, whereas hope for peace generally showed the opposite associations. In Study 2, we replicated these results among Muslim Pakistanis regarding the Pakistan-India dispute. Notably, in both Studies 1 and 2, only hope for victory significantly predicted personal violent extremist intentions. In Study 3, conducted with a representative sample of Israeli Jews, we found three latent profiles of hope: victory hopers, peace hopers, and dual hopers (hoping for both peace and victory). Finally, in preregistered Study 4, we longitudinally investigated how hopes for victory and peace changed from a relatively calm period in 2021 to the Israel-Hamas War of 2023, utilizing a Bivariate Latent Change Score analysis. Increases in hope for victory during the highly intense war explained the increase in support for violence. We discuss implications, limitations, and directions for future research.

Defend, Deny, Distance, and Dismantle: A New Measure of Advantaged Identity Management.

The experience of privilege can trigger psychological conflict among advantaged group members. Nonetheless, little work has explored strategies that advantaged group members use to manage their identities as privileged actors. Building on Knowles et al.'s framework and theories of intergroup relations, we address the conceptualization and measurement of advantaged group identity-management strategies. We aim to refine theorizing and validate a measure of these strategies across three contexts (U.S.'s White-Black relations, Israel's Jewish-Arab/Palestinian relations, and U.S.'s gender relations). This process yielded two novel conceptual and empirical contributions. First, we add a strategy-defend-in which advantaged-group members overtly justify inequality. Second, we discover that distancing has two facets (distancing from inequality and from identity). Across six studies, we find support for our proposed factor structure, measurement invariance, and construct validity. We discuss how advantaged groups contend with privilege and offer a tool for studying these strategies across domains and contexts.

When Are Social Protests Effective?

Around the world, people engage in social protests aimed at addressing major societal problems. Certain protests have led to significant progress, yet other protests have resulted in little demonstrable change. We introduce a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of social protest made up of three components: (i) what types of action are being considered; (ii) what target audience is being affected; and (iii) what outcomes are being evaluated? We then review relevant research to suggest how the framework can help synthesize conflicting findings in the literature. This synthesis points to two key conclusions: that nonviolent protests are effective at mobilizing sympathizers to support the cause, whereas more disruptive protests can motivate support for policy change among resistant individuals.

How our ideological out-group shapes our emotional response to our shared socio-political reality.

What shapes our emotional responses to socio-political events? Following the social identity approach, we suggest that individuals adjust their emotional responses to socio-political stimuli based on their ideological out-group's responses, in a manner that preserves the comparative and normative fit of ideological in-group-out-group categories. In Study 1 and Study 2 (pre-registered), Jewish-Israeli leftists and rightists were exposed to their ideological out-group's alleged emotional response to a stimulus associated with Israeli-Palestinian relations, which was either stereotypical (leftists expressing low anger and rightists expressing high anger) or non-stereotypical (leftists expressing high anger and rightists expressing low anger). Across studies, participants reported more positive affect towards their ideological out-group when its response to the stimulus was non-stereotypical versus stereotypical, yet their own response to the stimulus became more "extreme" (towards the low end of the anger scale for leftists, and towards the high end of the anger scale for rightists), shifting farther away from their ideological out-group norm. Our findings suggest that in highly polarized contexts, where "leftist" and "rightist" identities are largely defined in comparison to one another, the "positioning" of ideological groups relative to one another plays a role in shaping their responses to their shared socio-political reality.

Disadvantaged group members are prouder of their group when using the language of the dominant group compared to their native language.

In ethnically and linguistically diverse societies, disadvantaged groups often face pressures to acquire and speak the advantaged group's language to achieve social inclusion and economic mobility. This work investigates how using the advantaged group's language affects disadvantaged group members' in-group pride and collective self-esteem, relative to using their native language. Across six experimental studies involving Palestinian citizens of Israel (total N = 1,348), we test two competing hypotheses: Disadvantaged group members may experience greater in-group pride when using a) their native language, due to its emotional significance (the nativity hypothesis), or b) the language of the advantaged group, due to activation of habituated compensatory responses to dominance relations (the identity enhancement hypothesis). We found that respondents reported significantly higher in-group pride when responding to a Hebrew survey when compared to performing the same activity in Arabic (Studies 1a and 1b), regardless of whether the researchers administering the survey were identified as Jewish or Arab (Studies 2a and 2b). Study 3 replicated this effect while employing the "bogus pipeline" technique, suggesting the pride expression was authentic, not merely driven by social desirability. Finally, Study 4 (pre-registered) examined additional measures of positive regard for the in-group, finding that participants described their group more positively in an attribute selection task, and reported greater collective self-esteem, when surveyed in Hebrew, rather than in Arabic. Taken together, these findings suggest that language use influences disadvantaged group members' perceptions and feelings concerning their group when those languages are associated with relative position in an intergroup hierarchy.

SLIViT: a general AI framework for clinical-feature diagnosis from limited 3D biomedical-imaging data.

We present SLIViT, a deep-learning framework that accurately measures disease-related risk factors in volumetric biomedical imaging, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans, and ultrasound videos. To evaluate SLIViT, we applied it to five different datasets of these three different data modalities tackling seven learning tasks (including both classification and regression) and found that it consistently and significantly outperforms domain-specific state-of-the-art models, typically improving performance (ROC AUC or correlation) by 0.1-0.4. Notably, compared to existing approaches, SLIViT can be applied even when only a small number of annotated training samples is available, which is often a constraint in medical applications. When trained on less than 700 annotated volumes, SLIViT obtained accuracy comparable to trained clinical specialists while reducing annotation time by a factor of 5,000 demonstrating its utility to automate and expedite ongoing research and other practical clinical scenarios.

Intergroup psychological interventions: The motivational challenge.

Social scientists have increasingly applied insights from descriptive research to develop psychological interventions aimed at improving intergroup relations. These interventions have achieved marked success-reducing prejudicial attitudes, fostering support for conciliatory social policies, and promoting peacebuilding behaviors. At the same time, intergroup conflict continues to rage in part because individuals often lack motivation to engage with these promising interventions. We take a step toward addressing this issue by developing a framework of approaches for delivering interventions to an unmotivated target audience. Along with (a) directly motivating targets by increasing their values and expectancies for addressing intergroup conflict, researchers can deliver interventions by (b) satisfying other psychological motivations of the target audience, (c) providing an instrumental benefit for engaging with the intervention, (d) embedding the intervention in a hedonically captivating medium, or (e) bypassing motivational barriers entirely by delivering the intervention outside of targets' conscious awareness. We define each approach and use illustrative examples to organize them into a conceptual framework before concluding with implications and future directions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Motives and Barriers for Sustained Collective Action Toward Social Change.

Israel's year-long protest calling for Prime Minister Netanyahu's resignation created an opportunity to examine unique factors influencing sustained collective action (SCA; i.e., repeated participation in social movement action for the same cause). As little is known about how to explain such dedication, we compared a well-established set of predictors of one-time collective action (CA) with a new predictors set of SCA, focusing on collective instrumental and socio-emotional (CISE) motivations grounded in previous participation experience, to predict subsequent participation. In a unique longitudinal design, we tracked protestors over 6 weeks. Our findings showed that less emotional exhaustion, more subjective effort into participation, and a perceived closer timeframe for desired social change positively predicted SCA. This differentiates SCA from CA-moreover, as one-time CA predictors did not predict SCA, this suggests a need for a new model to explain SCA based on CISE motivations that reflect continuous goal pursuit.

Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person.

Evidence-based interventions to favor more harmonious interactions in difficult relationships remain scarce. This study examined whether compassion training may have beneficial effects in an ongoing tense relationship with a disliked person, by reducing schadenfreude toward them and increasing felt interpersonal closeness. 108 participants were assigned to one of three 5-week trainings in a longitudinal randomized controlled study: compassion training, reappraisal training (emotion regulation control condition), or Italian language training (neutral active control condition). The disliked person was not targeted during the trainings to test potential transfer effects. Misfortune scenarios and a measure of interpersonal closeness were used to test whether schadenfreude and closeness feelings toward a disliked person changed from pre- to post-training, across different experimental and control groups. Only compassion and reappraisal trainees reported a decrease of schadenfreude feelings toward the disliked person compared to their pre-training ratings, no changes were observed in the Italian language training. Importantly, feelings of closeness toward the disliked person increased in the compassion training group compared to the other two groups. This increase of closeness feelings could be a central mechanism for improving social interactions. These transfer effects open new perspectives concerning emotion regulation interventions in conflict resolution.

Genome-wide association study and genomic risk prediction of age-related macular degeneration in Israel.

Purpose: The risk of developing age-related macular degeneration(AMD) is influenced by genetic background. In 2016, International AMD Genomics Consortium(IAMDGC) identified 52 risk variants in 34 loci, and a polygenic risk score(PRS) based on these variants was associated with AMD. The Israeli population has a unique genetic composition: Ashkenazi Jewish(AJ), Jewish non-Ashkenazi, and Arab sub-populations. We aimed to perform a genome-wide association study(GWAS) for AMD in Israel, and to evaluate PRSs for AMD. Methods: For our discovery set, we recruited 403 AMD patients and 256 controls at Hadassah Medical Center. We genotyped all individuals via custom exome chip. We imputed non-typed variants using cosmopolitan and AJ reference panels. We recruited additional 155 cases and 69 controls for validation. To evaluate predictive power of PRSs for AMD, we used IAMDGC summary statistics excluding our study and developed PRSs via either clumping/thresholding or LDpred2. Results: In our discovery set, 31/34 loci previously reported by the IAMDGC were AMD associated with P<0.05. Of those, all effects were directionally consistent with the IAMDGC and 11 loci had a p-value under Bonferroni-corrected threshold(0.05/34=0.0015). At a threshold of 5x10 -5 , we discovered four suggestive associations in FAM189A1 , IGDCC4 , C7orf50 , and CNTNAP4 . However, only the FAM189A1 variant was AMD associated in the replication cohort after Bonferroni-correction. A prediction model including LDpred2-based PRS and other covariates had an AUC of 0.82(95%CI:0.79-0.85) and performed better than a covariates-only model(P=5.1x10 -9 ). Conclusions: Previously reported AMD-associated loci were nominally associated with AMD in Israel. A PRS developed based on a large international study is predictive in Israeli populations.

The aversive bystander effect whereby egalitarian bystanders overestimate the confrontation of prejudice.

Everyday expression of prejudice continues to pose a social challenge across societies. We tend to assume that to the extent people are egalitarian, they are more likely to confront prejudice-but this might not necessarily be the case. We tested this assumption in two countries (US and Hungary) among majority members of society, using a behavioral paradigm for measuring confronting. Prejudice was directed at various outgroup minority individuals (African Americans, Muslims and Latinos in the US, and Roma in Hungary). Across four experiments (N = 1116), we predicted and found that egalitarian (anti-prejudiced) values were only associated with hypothetical confronting intentions, but not with actual confronting, and stronger egalitarians were more likely to overestimate their confronting than weaker egalitarians-to the point that while intentions differed, the actual confronting rate of stronger and weaker egalitarians were similar. We also predicted and found that such overestimation was associated with internal (and not external) motivation to respond without prejudice. We also identified behavioral uncertainty (being uncertain how to intervene) as a potential explanation for egalitarians' overestimation. The implications of these findings for egalitarians' self-reflection, intergroup interventions, and research are discussed.

The mother of violations: Motherhood as the primary expectation of women.

Recent conservative political rhetoric support women having careers but emphasize that this should not be an obstacle to having children. We propose that this sentiment reflects the hierarchy of gender norms in today's society whereby motherhood is the ultimate role that women are expected to fulfil and denying such role evokes social penalties, above and beyond other prescribed gender norms. Across five experiments (N = 738), we predicted and found that voluntarily childless women elicit more negative reactions than mothers, and importantly, also more than women violating other gender norms in the realm of occupation (Study 1), power (Study 2) or sexual orientation (Study 3). We demonstrate that these patterns cannot be explained merely by a perceived lack of communal qualities of the non-mothers (Study 4) and also show that involuntary childless women do not receive the same negativity (Study 5). We discuss this, often neglected, gender bias and its resistance to social change.

Communicating with ethnic minorities during COVID-19: An experimental test of the effect of self-, ingroup-, and intergroup-focused messages.

Developing messaging to encourage minorities to adhere to health recommendations has been a complex task for governments worldwide during the COVID-19 crisis. Here, we propose and tests a new typology of messages among minorities that can be used to mobilize compliance and engagement. This typology comprises three messaging treatments emphasizing personal, ingroup, and intergroup benefits. We examine, via an experimental field study, whether there is a difference in the effect of these messages on two policy outcomes, social distancing and vaccine hesitancy, among the Arab minority living in Israel. The findings suggest that social messages, i.e., ingroup and intergroup messages, positively affect social distancing, while self-messaging harms social distancing compliance. Regarding vaccine intake, within the social messages tested, intergroup-focused messages were more effective than ingroup-focused messages for vaccination intentions only among citizens with low trust in the government. We discuss the findings in detail and propose new avenues in theory and practice to foster health policy compliance among minorities.

Educating for inclusion: Diversity education programs can reduce prejudice toward outgroups in Israel.

Intergroup prejudice is pervasive in many contexts worldwide, leading to discrimination and conflict. Existing research suggests that prejudice is acquired at an early age and that durably improving intergroup relations is extremely challenging, often requiring intense interventions. Building on existing research in social psychology and inspired by the Israeli TV series "You Can't Ask That," which depicts charismatic children from minority groups broaching sensitive topics at the core of intergroup relations, we develop a month-long diversity education program. Our program exposed students to the TV series and facilitated follow-up classroom discussions in which students constructively addressed various sensitive topics at the core of intergroup relations and learned about intergroup similarities, intragroup heterogeneity, and the value of taking others' perspectives. Through two field experiments implemented in Israeli schools, we show that integrating our intervention into school curricula improved Jewish students' attitudes toward minorities and increased some pro-diversity behavior up to 13 wk posttreatment. We further provide suggestive evidence that the intervention was effective by encouraging students to take their outgroups' perspectives and address an element of scalability by delegating implementation responsibilities to classroom teachers in our second study. Our findings suggest that theoretically informed intensive education programs are a promising route to reducing prejudice at a young age.

SNV-FEAST: microbial source tracking with single nucleotide variants.

Elucidating the sources of a microbiome can provide insight into the ecological dynamics responsible for the formation of these communities. Source tracking approaches to date leverage species abundance information; however, single nucleotide variants (SNVs) may be more informative because of their high specificity to certain sources. To overcome the computational burden of utilizing all SNVs for a given sample, we introduce a novel method to identify signature SNVs for source tracking. Signature SNVs used as input into a previously designed source tracking algorithm, FEAST, can more accurately estimate contributions than species and provide novel insights, demonstrated in three case studies.