Relationships and Emotional Experience in a Process of Gay Identity Development: A Case-Study Based on Personal Construct Theory

A case-study of gay identity development is presented based on Kelly's personal construct theory. The subject is a married man in his early thirties. Repertory grid technique is used to investigate the subject's construing of his relationships with gay men, and Kelly's account of emotion in terms of constructs of transition is used in analysing the emotional dimensions of the subject's experience. Three dimensions of interpersonal construing emerged from the grid analysis: emotional impact, negative affect and friendship. Five aspects of the subject's emotional experience are discussed: aggression, threat, anxiety, hostility and guilt. Some implications of the study for counselling are outlined, its limitations noted, and possible avenues for further research identified. It is argued that the study serves to illustrate the value of Kelly's perspective in understanding the interpersonal and emotional dimensions of gay identity development.     

贮备格栅技术：一种对企业组织有价值的工具

角色建构贮备格栅技术是由乔治凯利在 1 95 5年首创的 ,能有效地应用于企业组织中。本文先讨论个人建构心理学的一些有关的主要概念 ;然后 ,对格栅的实质及其分析作了阐述 ,包括它们在心理测量方面的一些特点。对员工选择 /职业指导的文章 ,包括那些有关工作分析、工作各方面的意义和处理工作问题的那些文章作了介绍。     

A Structural Analysis of a Psycho-oncology Unit

Abstract

This Action Research study came out of a mutual cooperation between the psychosomatic and psychotherapy departments of a large clinic in Germany. The perceptions of a number of members of a team of caretakers within an Oncology Ward were investigated using a Repertory Grid. The paper comments on the similarities and differences bewteen the various team members. In particular, it focuses on the Repertory Grids from the patient and the physician. Recognizing that teams are the building blocks of organizations, the paper suggests that Repertory Grid technology, when implemented as an heuristic device, can provide the basis for team members to consider their various roles and negotiate their aims and objectives.     

Spirituality and Cardiovascular Risk

This study extended current research linking spirituality to health by investigating the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic spirituality and cardiovascular risk factors. Participants included 111 healthy males and females, ages 28 to 63. Measurements consisted of the Lifestyle Assessment Questionnaire (LAQ), a version of Kelly's Repertory Grid, hematological analysis, and blood pressure. A greater sense of spirituality was associated with lower cholesterol risk ratios (total cholesterol/HDL) and triglyceride levels. In addition, the structural or organizational characteristics of intrinsic spirituality were associated with several other hematological measures. Further research will help clarify the association between mechanisms underlying spirituality and health, including susceptibility to cardiovascular disorders.     

Motivation in Personal Construct Theory: A Conceptual Critique

Kelly's attempt to derive apparently motiwtional phenomena (hostility, guilt, etc.) solely from the confirmation or disconfirmation of personal constructs cannot adequately explain such phenomena. His account of hostility assumes that some beliefs are so resistant to change that the person seeks to compel confirmation of them; however, this resistance is incompatible with Kelly's own Choice Corollary. Anxiety is said to derive from the fact that disconfirmation would leave one's world in chaos, but “chaos” is shown to be an illogical concept. Humor, in turn, cannot be explained just by cognitive incongruity, since incongruity may as well lead to anxiety or hostility. Finally, guilt cannot be explained without reference to underlying fears of punishment and their rationalization in terms of supposedly objective moral concepts. Nevertheless, Kelly's Repertory Grid technique, supplemented by laddering, may be useful in indicating primary needs, moral convictions, and sources of anxiety.     

Psychological treatment and reconstruction with a chronic pain patient

This article describes the psychological treatment of a chronic pain patient using a single case design methodology in order to evaluate changes in symptomatic measures as well as in Repertory Grid Test scores. These changes included a substantial reduction in levels of subjective pain and anxiety as well as a reduction in symptom superordinacy, level of self-dissatisfaction, and positive meaning (“payoff”) of anxiety. Results are discussed in relation to the literature on pain and on personal construct theory.     

Construing of others in psychotherapy: Personal construct perspectives

Regardless of the initial complaints, psychotherapists frequently interpret their client's problems as involving difficulties in personal relationships. This makes achieving a better understanding of the nature of interpersonal construing important for a theory of psychotherapy. George Kelly's psychology of personal constructs provides a perspective on this issue that can illuminate several recent developments in psychodynamic therapy, including Arlene Wolberg's and Hyman Spotnitz's treatment techniques for severely disturbed clients. These techniques are viewed as ways of helping the client to develop more comprehensive and flexible construct systems for understanding other people. A neglected aspect of empathy is also discussed.A version of this paper was presented at the first meeting of the North American Personal Construct Network, Cincinnati, OH, June, 1984.     

Individual versus provided constructs, cognitive complexity and extremity of ratings in person perception

Abstract.— Bruner & Tagiuri's (1954) concept of implicit personality theory, and Kelly's (1955) theory of personal constructs were used as a basis for a hypothesis that an individual's own constructs mediate more differentiated perceptions of other people than constructs provided by the experimenter. The hypothesis was tested by using four indices of cognitive complexity and one index of extremity of ratings to measure differentiation. The individual constructs were derived by using Reptest. The provided constructs were Semantic Differential and Personality Differential scales. The subjects were 36 psychology students. Two experimenters were employed to control experimenter effects. The data did not support the hypothesis but showed that differences between individual constructs and provided constructs are dependent upon which criterion is chosen to contrast the two types of constructs, which indices are used to measure the chosen criterion, and what type of provided constructs are compared with individual constructs.     

Viewing Cognitive Conflicts as Dilemmas: Implications for Mental Health

The idea that internal conflicts play a significant role in mental health has been extensively addressed in various psychological traditions, including personal construct theory. In the context of the latter, several measures of conflict have been operationalized using the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT). All of them capture the notion that change, although desirable from the viewpoint of a given set of constructs, becomes undesirable from the perspective of other constructs. The goal of this study is to explore the presence of cognitive conflicts in a clinical sample (n = 284) and compare it to a control sample (n = 322). It is also meant to clarify which among the different types of conflict studied provides a greater clinical value and to investigate its relationship to symptom severity (SCL-90-R). Of the types of cognitive conflict studied, implicative dilemmas were the only ones to discriminate between clinical and nonclinical samples. These dilemmas were found in 34% of the nonclinical sample and in 53% of the clinical sample. Participants with implicative dilemmas showed higher symptom severity, and those from the clinical sample displayed a higher frequency of dilemmas than those from the nonclinical sample.     

The Multi-Center Dilemma Project: an investigation on the role of cognitive conflicts in health

The Multi-Center Dilemma Project is a collaborative research endeavour aimed at determining the role of dilemmas--a kind of cognitive conflict, detected by using an adaptation of Kelly's Repertory Grid Technique--in a variety of clinical conditions. Implicative dilemmas appear in one third of the non-clinical group (n = 321) and in about half of the clinical group (n = 286), the latter having a proportion of dilemmas that doubles that of the non-clinical sample. Within the clinical group, we studied 87 subjects, after completing a psychotherapy process, and found that therapy helps to dissolve those dilemmas. We also studied, independently, a group of subjects diagnosed with social phobia (n = 13) and a group diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome (n = 13) in comparison to non-clinical groups. In both health related problems, dilemmas seem to be quite relevant. Altogether, these studies, though preliminary (and with a small group size in some cases), yield a promising perspective to the unexplored area of the role of cognitive conflicts as an issue to consider when trying to understand some clinical conditions, as well as a focus to be dealt with in psychotherapy when dilemmas are identified.     

Viewing Cognitive Conflicts as Dilemmas: Implications for Mental Health

The idea that internal conflicts play a significant role in mental health has been extensively addressed in various psychological traditions, including personal construct theory. In the context of the latter, several measures of conflict have been operationalized using the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT). All of them capture the notion that change, although desirable from the viewpoint of a given set of constructs, becomes undesirable from the perspective of other constructs. The goal of this study is to explore the presence of cognitive conflicts in a clinical sample (n = 284) and compare it to a control sample (n = 322). It is also meant to clarify which among the different types of conflict studied provides a greater clinical value and to investigate its relationship to symptom severity (SCL-90-R). Of the types of cognitive conflict studied, implicative dilemmas were the only ones to discriminate between clinical and nonclinical samples. These dilemmas were found in 34% of the nonclinical sample and in 53% of the clinical sample. Participants with implicative dilemmas showed higher symptom severity, and those from the clinical sample displayed a higher frequency of dilemmas than those from the nonclinical sample.     

A Repertory Grid analysis of perceptions of vocational counseling roles

A Repertory Grid was constructed to determine the perceptions held by 143 secondary school students of people who gave them vocational counseling. Responses on the 22 × 22 grid were averaged over the whole group and for subgroupings of the sample, using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering analysis to examine the pattern of relationships and the composition of clusters of elements and constructs. As predicted, it was found that the subjects made their discriminations between people on two major construct dimensions, an intimacy and a potency factor, and that people filling vocational counseling roles appeared in two of the generalized figure clusters, each having different characteristics attributed to them. Eighteen subjects were unable to complete their grids. When school achievement was assessed there was no evidence that a relationship existed between academic achievement and the capacity of subjects to complete grid protocols.     

A difficulty with the functionally independent construction measure of cognitive differentiation

Abstract

Much effort has gone into development of measures of cognitive differentiation. One of the most frequently used measures is Landfield's Functionally Independent Construction (FIC). The present study of the personal constructs of psychotherapists raises issues regarding the validity of FIC. Forty therapists were administered a repertory grid (Rep Grid) assessing their construal of self, clients, and acquaintances on both elicited and supplied constructs. Ratings were completed using a seven-point Likert-type scale (? 3 to + 3). FIC was calculated separately for the parts of the Rep Grid involving acquaintance construal, client construal, the total elicited construct Rep Grid, and the total Rep Grid. These FIC scores were correlated with the number of zero ratings in the grids, producing correlations greater than .70. It is proposed that these results are largely due to the method of computing FIC.     

Construct similarity, self-meaningfulness, and interpersonal attraction

Self-meaningfulness, a concept arising from personal construct theory research, has been defined in terms of the importance of the self in the personal construct system Forty-two undergraduate volunteers completed Repertory Grid ratings of the self and 15 individuals (five liked, five disliked, and five toward whom the subject was neutral) It was found that high self-meaningfulness individuals' ratings of attraction were more strongly associated with the perception of similarity than were the ratings of low self-meaningfulness subjects High self-meaningfulness subjects saw liked individuals as significantly more similar to the self than did low self-meaningfulness subjects In addition, liked, neutral, and disliked figures were seen as significantly different from one another on the similarity to self-measure for high self-meaningfulness subjects Only disliked figures were judged as more distant from the self for low self-meaningfulness subjects These findings were discussed in terms of the importance of investigating individual differences in similarity-attraction     

Defense mechanisms: An approach from the perspective of personal construct psychology

The psychoanalytic concept of defense mechanisms was theoretically and empirically approached from the perspective of personal construct psychology, in an attempt to investigate its cognitive components. Thirty neurotic clients of the Psychotherapeutic Center in Stuttgart, Federal Republic of Germany, were investigated by means of the Questionnaire for Defense Categories (Ehlers & Peter, 1989) and the Repertory Grid Test (Kelly, 1955). Tight construing, extremity of emotional evaluation, construal of the symptom as having positive implications, and construed similarity between certain aspects of the self were observed in clients who frequently used the defense mechanisms denial, rationalization, and turning against the object.     

Dealing with the Intellectual-Insight Problem in Cognitive and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

A client is said to have intellectual, but not emotional, insight when he or she acknowledges that holding a particular belief is irrational, but says that he or she still does not believe, or cannot accept, that fact. The intellectual-insight problem may arise because the client's negative core or irrational belief is embedded in a broader belief system that must be explored before the client will be able to surrender the negative core or irrational belief. In this case one appropriate intervention is to ask what the consequence of giving up the belief would be. Kelly's (1955) theory of personal constructs and DiGiuseppe's (1991) concept of personal paradigms offer ways to conceptualize the problem and its solution.     

Structural representations of person perception A comparison between own and provided constructs

Abstract.— The dimensions of perceiving other people were compared from two types of data, one representing a person's individual constructs and indexed by two different rating methods (Reptest technique and Similarity Ratings), the other constructs provided by the experimenter, also measured by two methods (Semantic Differential and Personality Differential). Thirty-one female psychology students, rated fifteen role figures by using the four methods. Indices of factorial and cluster similarity of roles showed that the different rating methods yielded highly similar role structures. Each congruent factor and cluster could also be characterized by identical trait properties, but there were also important differences between the methods. Especially family roles formed factors and clusters that were not similar in the four sets of data. The results are discussed within the context of Kelly's personal construct theory.     

What are the relationship experiences of in which one member identifies as transgender? A systematic review and meta-ethnography

Transgender individuals and their partners may face unique challenges that other couples do not. These unique challenges merit investigation, understanding and consideration by systemic practitioners in order to provide a culturally attuned service for transgender clients. A systematic review of the literature into the experiences of couples in which one member is transgender identified 22 qualitative papers. A translation and synthesis of constructs from these papers utilising a meta-ethnographic approach generated a number of third order constructs organised into nine overarching themes. These themes included experiences of stigma and discrimination, issues of power, privilege, visibility and identity, and experiences of dissonance and dysphoria that required adjustments and negotiations on the personal and relationship levels. Implications for practice and avenues for future research are discussed.