Daydreaming, Consciousness, and Self-Representations: Empirical Approaches to Theories of William James and Sigmund Freud

In honor of Saul Rosenzweig's lifelong efforts to provide empirical tests of psychoanalytic theories, this paper has focused on a series of research approaches to examining the concepts of William James and Sigmund Freud relating to waking fantasy, ongoing thought, and beliefs about the self. Studies involving projective methods, psychometric analyses of self-report questionnaires, laboratory tests of daydreaming during signal-detection tasks, thought-sampling during natural daily activities and psychological correlates of actual-self and ideal-self discrepancies are described. Clinical applications of these methods are also presented. The findings in general point to the value of James's conception of conscious thought as an important basis along with cognitive unconscious processes for studying clinical phenomena, personality, and even the metaphors of dreams. Rosenzweig's emphasis on formal research testing of psychoanalytic processes is supported.     

The Expanded Skills Confidence Inventory: Measuring basic dimensions of vocational activity

This series of studies describes the development and psychometric evaluation of 17 scales measuring confidence or self-efficacy with respect to basic domains of vocational activity. The confidence scales assessed previously measured interest dimensions such as Writing, Mechanical Activities, and Public Speaking, but also included dimensions reflective of recent changes in the nature of work or the culture of the workplace, for example, Using Technology, Creative Production, and Cultural Sensitivity. The scales were internally consistent, showed predictable patterns of gender differences and similarities, and were in generally most highly related to the predicted Holland confidence theme. Discriminant analyses of scores across the eight largest occupational groups represented indicated large improvements over chance, or a priori probabilities, in the prediction of occupational group membership. Further research on and use of these 17 new scales in joint interpretations of parallel measures of interest and confidence are discussed.     

Development and validation of a measure of an individual’s lateness attitude

The authors developed and validated a measure of employees’ attitudes toward lateness at work. Analyses provided clear evidence of the reliability and validity of the new measure. Specifically, high reliabilities were observed in both student (α = .82) and employee (α = .84) samples. Using objective lateness data from organizations, the measure significantly predicted two lateness behaviors, lateness frequency (r = .25, p < .01) and duration (r = .24, p. < .01), over a six-month period. Most importantly, lateness attitude improved prediction of lateness behavior above and beyond prediction made with only general job attitudes and conscientiousness.     

The Effects of a Mental Health Video on the Social Skills Knowledge and Attitudes of Mexican Immigrants1

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a Spanish mental health video, “Cuida Su Salud Mental”, on the relationship attitudes and social skills knowledge of a Mexican immigrant sample. Subjects consisted of 72 Spanish speaking English as a second language (ESL) students recruited from the Paramount Adult School, in the county of Los Angeles. The Solomon (1949) Four Group Design was used. Half of the subjects were pretested on knowledge and attitudes about effective communication skills and relationships, respectively. All subjects view either the mental health video or a control video, and then were posttested on knowledge and attitudes. Results indicated that the mental healthy video (MHV) group exhibited more knowledge, F(1, 62) = 10.61, p= 0.002, and less risky attitudes, F(1, 62) = 4.29, p= 0.043, than the control video group. The MHV group also showed an increase in knowledge from the pretest to the posttest, F(1, 35) = 7.36, p= 0.01. Finally, both video groups reported a decrease in risky attitudes from pretest to posttest, F(1, 34) = 18.21, p= 0.001. These results support the use of “Cuida Su Salud Mental” as a productive and cost-effective mental health intervention that can be used to reach a large segment of the Spanish speaking community.     

Selective adaptation of English consonants using real speech

Most English consonant-vowel (CV) syllables have other CV syllables embedded within them. For example, splicing sufficient energy from the onset of [k^ha] yields [p^ha], splicing into [ma] or [va] yields [ba], and splicing into [?a] yields [da]. We spliced successively longer segments from naturally spoken CV syllables to produce sequences of CV syllables which varied in discrete acoustic steps from [k^ha] to [p^ha], from [?a] to [da], from [ma] to [ba], from [fa] to [ba], and from [va] to [ba]. Random presentation of syllables in each series resulted in identification functions with typically sharp phoneme boundaries. For example, in the seven-syllable [?a]-[da] series (where [?a] was the original or first syllable), there were98% [?a] responses to Syllable 3, but only 12% [?a] responses (88% [da] responses) to Syllable 5. Following the identification test, subjects listened to 180 repetitions of either the first or last syllable in the test series, and were again required to identify randomly presented syllables from the test series. A shift in the phoneme boundary toward the repeated (adapting) syllable was observed for 11 of the 12 repeated syllables. Repeated presentation of [?a], for example, resulted in fewer [?a] responses to syllables in the [?a]-[da] series, compared to performance on the previous identification test. Likewise, repeated listening to [da] resulted in a decrease in [da] responses. Adaptation was selective in that syllables near the phoneme boundary were most affected by the adapting syllable. A shift in the phoneme boundary was also observed for two different continua when the adapting stimulus contained an acoustic feature identical to syllables in the test series. Thus, selective adaptation was found along a [ma]-[ba] continuum following repeated presentation of [na] and following repeated presentation of nasal resonance removed from its syllable context. A second major result, observed in five different experiments, was an asymmetrical adaptation effect. A greater shift in the phoneme boundary was observed following repeated presentation of the first syllable in each series (e.g., [?a]) than for the final embedded syllable (e.g., [da]). The results were discussed in terms of two different models of-selective adaptation.     

Adolescents who apparently are invulnerable to drug, alcohol, and nicotine use

As part of a large survey of addictive behavior in high school students, a group of 43 girls and 34 boys was identified who denied any use of drugs, alcohol, or tobacco. These apparently invulnerable adolescents were compared to the rest of the "user" sample on the remaining items of the questionnaire. The invulnerable students reported generally better physical and mental health and academic achievement. They also indicated a significantly lower rate of similar problems in their parents.