Large groups in treatment and training settings

A review of published work over the past decade and a half supports the effectiveness of the large group in clinical settings. Greater sophistication among practitioners has led to combining administrative, psychotherapeutic, and sociotherapeutic large groups and to the use of effective treatment teams and clearly defined contracts in inpatient hospital work. Some research findings suggest that large treatment groups are as effective as small therapy groups with some patient populations. There appears to be a movement toward convergence in the techniques employed by individual, small group, and large group therapists in practice, while not in theory. This positive trend in the mental health field may lead to more flexible practitioners.He is also on the board of the A. K. Rice Institute and a faculty member of the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute. He would like to thank Walter Stone and Peter Herr for their comments and Lorna Volk for editing.     

Defensive patterns in reflective group supervisions at Child Health Centres

Reflective group supervision with infant healthcare workers has been described in several publications. It aims to enhance their ability to help distressed families, and to comprehend and relieve themselves of the distress that they encounter in such work. The ultimate aim has been formulated as an effort at increasing the professional's reflective function. The present article adds to the literature by applying an ego-psychological perspective on the group process and investigating defensive patterns in such supervisions. This approach includes a critical discussion of the place of the reflective function concept in psychoanalytic metapsychology. The article also suggests a Bionian perspective to account for skewed communicative patterns in groups, so-called basic assumptions. Some technical recommendations are provided on the frame in group supervision. They aim to disarm such defenses and facilitate the group participants’ possibilities of understanding and thus helping their colleague's problematic relationship with the family. To illustrate the discussion, and to help readers form an image of the supervision process, brief detailed accounts of such work are submitted.     

Belonging to a majority reduces the immediate need threat from ostracism in individuals with a high need to belong

Ostracism—being ignored and excluded—threatens the basic human needs for belonging, self‐esteem, control, and meaningful existence. This work introduces belonging to a majority as a buffer against the immediate negative impact of ostracism on basic needs for individuals with a high need to belong, for whom social groups are especially relevant. Three studies show that for individuals high in the need to belong, need threat was attenuated by membership in a majority group, but not by membership in a minority group (Studies 1 and 3) or a group of unknown size (Study 2). By contrast, individuals low in the need to belong—who place less importance on group membership in general—did not benefit from belonging to a majority group. The general pattern replicated across different manipulations of group membership and social exclusion, with two measures of need threat, and with participants from two different countries.     

I am I:A/M—The Therapist as Personification of Hopper's Fourth Basic Assumption

The group therapist often and perhaps necessarily personifies Incohesion and displays its predominant defenses of contact-shunning Aggregation, and merger-hungry Massification. Hence, I am I:A/M. In Hopper's group example, and in each of three of this author's groups, the therapist displayed aggregative and massified defenses, countertansferential duals of basic assumptive transferences. In any therapeutic interaction, it is possible to find elements of incohesion, dependency, pairing, and fight/flight. The incohesion concept has significant clinical utility. A theoretical question remains, whether Hopper's proposed axis of experience and defense merits the special status, basic assumption, or whether incohesion may be collapsed into the existing triad of basic assumptions.     

Do Some People Need Autonomy More Than Others? Implicit Dispositions Toward Autonomy Moderate the Effects of Felt Autonomy on Well‐Being

The present studies examined whether implicit or explicit autonomy dispositions moderate the relationship between felt autonomy and well‐being. Study 1 (N = 187 undergraduate students) presents an initial test of the moderator hypothesis by predicting flow experience from the interaction of autonomy need satisfaction and autonomy dispositions. Study 2 (N = 127 physically inactive persons) used vignettes involving an autonomy (un)supportive coach to test a moderated mediation model in which perceived coach autonomy support leads to well‐being through basic need satisfaction. Again, the effects of need satisfaction on well‐being were hypothesized to be moderated by an implicit autonomy disposition. Study 1 showed that individuals with a strong implicit autonomy (but not power or achievement) motive disposition derived more flow experience from felt autonomy than individuals with a weak implicit autonomy disposition. Study 2 revealed that perceived autonomy support from sports coaches, which we experimentally induced with a vignette method, leads to autonomy satisfaction, leading in turn to positive effects on well‐being. This indirect effect held at high and average but not low implicit autonomy disposition. The results indicate that the degree to which people benefit from autonomy need satisfaction depends on their implicit disposition toward autonomy.     

Work–family interface from a life and career stage perspective: The role of demands and resources

Work–family conflict and enrichment are experiences that occur daily and have substantial consequences for employees, their families, and the organizations that employ them. The aim of the current review is to make a link between life and career stage, work and family conditions, and the work–family interface. The basic proposition is that life stages partly determine career development, and consequently the specific working conditions (job demands and job resources) and family conditions (family demands and family resources) that individuals are exposed to. As a result, the specific demands and resources in the work and family domains determine to what extent individuals experience that work and family are conflicting or enriching life domains. In this review we suggest that individuals in early adulthood will experience high inter‐role conflict and low facilitation due to high demands and low resources in both life domains, while individuals in late adulthood will experience the opposite pattern; that is, low conflict and high facilitation due to low demands and high resources in both domains. Individuals in middle adulthood will experience high work–family conflict but also high family–work facilitation due to the presence of high job demands and resources in both life domains. Integrating life and career stage perspectives and the experience of work–family interface is of notable practical utility because it provides a mechanism to make more informed decisions about the relative need for and corresponding benefits of work–family programs.     

Happiness and despair on the catwalk: Need satisfaction,well-being,and personality adjustment among fashion models

According to self-determination theory, well-being and healthy personality development depend on the fulfillment of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. However, various contextual features can interfere with need satisfaction and undermine well-being. We hypothesized that fashion models, who are often valued for superficial reasons (i.e., their looks) and who may not have regular opportunities to cultivate deep relationships or exercise personal control on the job, might experience lower psychological need satisfaction, less well-being, and less optimal personality adjustment. Two studies were conducted in which professional fashion models (N?=?56 in Study 1; N?=?35 in Study 2) were compared to approximately equally large groups of non-models. Fashion models reported slightly lower need satisfaction and well-being but greater personality maladjustment (personality disorder features). Mediation analyses in Study 1 suggested that the lower well-being among models was explained via unfulfilled basic needs. These findings further substantiate the importance of basic need satisfaction for well-being and optimal adjustment.     

Situation selection is a particularly effective emotion regulation strategy for people who need help regulating their emotions

Situation selection involves choosing situations based on their likely emotional impact and may be less cognitively taxing or challenging to implement compared to other strategies for regulating emotion, which require people to regulate their emotions “in the moment”; we thus predicted that individuals who chronically experience intense emotions or who are not particularly competent at employing other emotion regulation strategies would be especially likely to benefit from situation selection. Consistent with this idea, we found that the use of situation selection interacted with individual differences in emotional reactivity and competence at emotion regulation to predict emotional outcomes in both a correlational (Study 1; N?=?301) and an experimental field study (Study 2; N?=?125). Taken together, the findings suggest that situation selection is an effective strategy for regulating emotions, especially for individuals who otherwise struggle to do so.     

Generic planning: Research results and applications

Older approaches to planning lack the capacity to be responsive to complexity. A new philosophy supporting a new mode of practice could improve significantly the capacity of society to cope with complexity in design, planning, and policy making. The new philosophy and practice must be generic; in other words, it must be divorced in its philosophy and approach from any particular kind of planning activity. It must emphasize the capacity to enhance the work of groups in designing new conceptual structures whether they be plans, policies, or tangible products. John N. Warfield is University Professor and director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, 22030. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a recipient of the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984. His booksSocietal Systems andA Science of Generic Design present theoretical and empirical results relevant to issues of coping with complexity.     

Mental Health and the Prevention of Neurosis by Joachim Flescher

The authors argue that instead of adopting the traditional view that defenses are the “enemy” that impedes therapeutic work, it is generally valuable to conceptualize defense mechanisms as “solutions” to specific intrapsychic or interpersonal conflicts. As such, the defenses offer significant clues to understanding the problems that they presumably alleviate. In the therapy group, the goal of uncovering and interpreting defenses is complicated by the complexity of the source of the defensive operations, either emanating from within the individual patient, the group-as-a-whole, or the group therapist's own countertransference. The group leader must be aware of the three dimensions of defense in order to assist the patients in understanding the effects of their defensive style in both gaining and losing what is sought, promoting insight into the historical incidents that led to the particular defenses, and, finally, facilitating the development of more effective defensive structures.     

An Interview with Michael Walzer

Michael Walzer is currently at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey. Professor Walzer has written Just and Unjust Wars; The Revolution of the Saints and has edited Toward A Global Civil Society. In this interview, he discusses some of the current concerns about education, political theory and the current state of the art of toleration, and acceptance and accommodation of different racial, ethnic, social and minority groups. He has published extensively and his work has been translated in several other languages. In this interview, he responds to questions about his work, his writings and his current concerns.     

Knowing me,knowing you: emotion differentiation in oneself is associated with recognition of others’ emotions

ABSTRACT

Previous research has found that individuals vary greatly in emotion differentiation, that is, the extent to which they distinguish between different emotions when reporting on their own feelings. Building on previous work that has shown that emotion differentiation is associated with individual differences in intrapersonal functions, the current study asks whether emotion differentiation is also related to interpersonal skills. Specifically, we examined whether individuals who are high in emotion differentiation would be more accurate in recognising others’ emotional expressions. We report two studies in which we used an established paradigm tapping negative emotion differentiation and several emotion recognition tasks. In Study 1 (N?=?363), we found that individuals high in emotion differentiation were more accurate in recognising others’ emotional facial expressions. Study 2 (N?=?217), replicated this finding using emotion recognition tasks with varying amounts of emotional information. These findings suggest that the knowledge we use to understand our own emotional experience also helps us understand the emotions of others.     

The making of a group psychotherapist: Needs and goals for graduate and postgraduate training

Group therapy is a widely practiced, effective, but underrated specialty. Unfortunately, group therapy seems to be taught more haphazardly, with less attention to quality, than is individual therapy. Group therapy has a technique, history, and literature of its own and should be taught independently from individual psychotherapy. The training of psychiatric residents is particularly crucial for group therapy to prosper and be seen as more prestigious. A common core of experience is vital for training in group therapy, whether the trainee's background is psychiatry, psychology, social work, pastoral counseling, or nursing. This core consists of: 1) clinical experience doing group therapy; 2) supervision; 3) a professional training group experience; 4) observation of experienced group therapists; 5) exposure to current thinking in the field; 6) personal group therapy; and 7) a didactic course in theory and technique. Clinical experiences involving cotherapy and combined individual and group treatments are especially useful, both as training and as treatment modalities.He is on sabbatical leave from John Jay College of Criminal Justice where he is Professor of Psychology and was founding Chairman of the Psychology Department.The authors wish to thank Arnold Rachman, Ph.D., Michael Lapidus, M.D., Fayek Nakhla, M.D., Nyapati R. Rao, M.D., and Dorothy Gartner, Ph.D., for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and Ms. Deloris J. Johnson for her typing and editorial assistance.     

Authority Defied: Need for Cognitive Closure Influences Regulatory Control When Resisting Authority

The present studies examined whether differences in need for cognitive closure (NCC) were related to differences in regulatory control when confronted with authority. In two studies, levels of regulatory control were measured when participants resisted (Study 1; N = 46) or prepared to resist the influence attempt of an authority figure (Study 2; N = 50). Results showed that resisting the influence attempt from a high‐authority figure was more depleting for participants higher in NCC compared to individuals lower in NCC. However, when they were given instructions and time to prepare the act of resistance, individuals high in NCC actually showed an increase in regulatory control. Authority is usually viewed as a general principle of influence; however, the present studies suggest that there are individual differences that influence how people may experience interactions with authorities.     

The metabolization of primary process in groups

Groups cope with the unbridled character of primary process by assigning to certain members roles that are designed unconsciously to contain and to metabolize those parts, both of the group and individual psyches, that group members, for defensive reasons, must reject. This group process occurs isomorphically throughout the layers of social organization, from society at large, down to small therapy groups.This paper is based on a presentation at the Washington Square Institute Conference on Madness, November 1988.     

Metaphors can give life meaning

Conceptual metaphor theory offers a perspective on how and when people find meaning in life. Whereas life’s meaning can be difficult to grasp, metaphor compares life to a relatively more concrete and structured concept. Supporting this account, American adults (Study 1) and German undergraduates (Study 2) who framed life as a journey reported more meaning in life. The journey metaphor was particularly beneficial for individuals with low levels of perceived coherence in life (Study 2). Study 3 further explored this pattern of moderation: An accessible metaphor, compared to other life framings, benefited participants who lack a strong meaning framework. Study 4 focused on the mechanism behind metaphor’s influence. Participants who imagined events from their life journey perceived stronger interrelatedness among those events as measured with an analog spatial organization task. Perceived interrelatedness in turn predicted meaning in life, particularly for individuals with a strong preference for well-structured knowledge. Finally, participants who applied their own metaphor to life expressed greater meaning (Study 5), especially those high in personal need for structure (Study 6). An internal meta-analysis of these findings provides cumulative evidence for metaphor’s influence on perceived meaning in life and reveals moderating features of the individual.     

Looking for a Family Man? Norms for Men Are Toppling in Heterosexual Relationships

Gender norms indicate that men should be agentic and work-oriented rather than communal and family-oriented. Yet, this traditional expectation conflicts with findings that communion is highly valued in romantic partners. Moreover, because more women in industrialized countries are pursuing careers, they may increasingly seek family-oriented partners to share the second shift of family tasks. Investigating the attractiveness of communal, family-oriented men, we show that 87 female college students in Belgium evaluate more family-oriented men as generally more attractive (Study 1) and that especially college women in Belgium with high work ambitions seek communion and family orientation in ideal partners (Study 2, n?=?224). Lastly, women in 198 Belgian heterosexual dual-earning couples are more satisfied with their lives and experience less work and family conflict the more their partner indicates that he is oriented toward his close family (Study 3). Together, our findings outline the contextualized nature of norms and add to knowledge on norm change, showing how gender equality may be fed through romantic relationships. Moreover, our findings suggest the importance of exploring men’s family orientations in couples therapy, and they call for counselors, as well as policymakers and Human Resources practitioners, to guide men in times of norm change to enable men to be family-oriented and to offer family-friendly work policies.

     

To Belong or Not to Belong. Affective Self-Nationalization in Thailand

Through analyzing conflict narratives regarding Khao Phra Wihan, a territorial conflict important for nationalists in Thailand, this article aims to detangle how nationalization is experienced and performed on an individual level. In this article, the concept “affective self-nationalization” is proposed to analyze the emotional and embodied practices through which individuals fashion themselves into nationalized subjects. In Thailand, self-nationalization is instigated by the governing agency through repeated, regular, mandatory, public performances of loyalty through which individuals create the nation collectively. These performances create automatic feelings to the nation, establishes national others as fearsome, and rule through the basic human need of belonging. At the same time, individuals’ emotions shape the society through how they decide to perform nationalization. The concept of “affective self-nationalization” captures the connections between the official nationalizing program of “outside” society in a form of nationalist emotional socialization with individual experience of nationalizing.     

Technology and morality: Influences on public attitudes toward biotechnology

This study uses national survey data to test effects on individuals’ objections to biotechnology applied to plants and animals. We find that females and individuals who believe in the biblical story of creation have greater intrinsic moral objections to biotechnology than males and those who do not believe the creation story. We also find that the perception of personal benefit from biotechnology significantly decreases the likelihood of moral objection to both plant and animal biotechnology, and that perception of environmental risk from biotechnology significantly increases the likelihood of moral objection to both types of biotechnology. Policy issues are discussed. He has studied biotechnology, development, social change, work and industry. He currently works in the Survey Research Division at Research Triangle Institute in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He engages is applied studies of new technologies and public policies affecting consumers, industry, natural resources and society. He has researched moral attitude and religious affects in biotechnology acceptance, environmentalism, and in relation to numerous controversial social concerns and issues.     

Child Access and Visitation Following Divorce: A Growth Area for Marriage and Family Therapy

Recent federal legislation encourages states to increase noncustodial parents' access and visitation with their children following separation or divorce. The State of Iowa Department of Human Services Bureau of Collections commissioned a pilot study to provide a beginning picture of how parents and professionals experience the child access and visitation process. Two midsized urban centers and a rural community were studied. A total of 14 divorced parents and 16 professionals who work with divorced individuals were interviewed using a 2-hour focus group format. Study findings identified problematic themes regarding child access and visitation, potential solutions, and suggested services to address these problems. The services suggested by the study all fall within the professional expertise of marriage and family therapists. A primary finding of the study was the need for therapy and mediation focused on relational issues.