Assessing adolescents' personality with the NEO PI-R

The suitability of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) to assess adolescents' personality traits was investigated in an unselected heterogeneous sample of 469 adolescents aged 12 to 17 years. They were further administered the Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children (HiPIC) to allow an examination of convergent and discriminant validity. The adult NEO PI-R factor structure proved to be highly replicable in the sample of adolescents, with all facet scales primarily loading on the expected factors, independent of the age group. Domain and facet internal consistency coefficients were comparable to those obtained in adult samples, with less than 12% of the items showing corrected item-facet correlations below absolute value .20. Although, in general, adolescents reported few difficulties with the comprehensibility of the items, they tend to report more problems with the Openness to Ideas (05) and Openness to Values (06) items. Correlations between NEO PI-R and HiPIC scales underscored the convergent and discriminant validity of the NEO facets and HiPIC scales. It was concluded that the NEO PI-R in its present form is useful for assessing adolescents' traits at the primary level, but additional research is necessary to infer the most appropriate facet level structure.     

Immigrant Sex: the Transport of Affection and Sensuality across Cultures

This paper outlines the ways in which an individual’s notions of sexuality are challenged by immigration. It describes four basic facets of sexuality and the ways in which each are rooted in culture. These include (1) the relative importance of sexuality in daily life; (2) potential or overt homosexuality; (3) marriage—whether based on arrangement or love; and (4) cross-cultural romantic and marital relationships. Immigration can stir up conflicts in each of these realms and lead to defensive retreat into familiar customs or a counterphasic plunge into new cultural avenues. Ideally, it would lead to a working-through of these conflicts and subsequent growth in the immigrant’s understanding of his or her sexual self.     

A case study of borderline anxiety andthe process of analytic transformation

Borderline patients present particular treatment problems and require close, devoted understanding of their often chaotic and shifting intrapsychic conflicts. Many of these patients act out, making it difficult to maintain an analytic process. In fact, many terminate early on. When they do stay for longer periods, they exhibit particular constellations of defense, anxiety, and conflict. One extensive case report is used to examine the overlapping cycles of treatment with this population. Frequently, self-destructive acting-out is present in the transference and extratransference. This acting-out is often followed by the self-destructive, antichange attitude of the death instinct. These ways of relating to the self and the object are mobilized within the vehicle of projective identification and are best understood as primitive defenses against core fantasies of loss and persecution. These issues of loss and fear are the final and vital phase of treatment with borderline patients, who are often able to make major fundamental changes in their internal sphere, but only if patient and analyst can tolerate and understand these three levels of intrapsychic experience.     

Explicit and implicit attitudes towards food and physical activity in childhood obesity

This study investigated differences in the explicit and implicit attitudes towards food and physical activities between children with obesity (n=38) and a matched control group (n=38). The implicit attitude was assessed using the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST; J. Exp. Psychol. (50) (2003) 77), a modified version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; J. Personality Social Psychol. (74) (1999) 1464). It was expected that both groups would report a positive explicit attitude towards healthy food and intense physical activities, and a negative explicit attitude towards unhealthy food and sedentary activities. Of particular interest was the hypothesis that children with obesity would have a more positive implicit attitude towards unhealthy food and sedentary activities than the control group. Results revealed no differences between groups in the explicit attitude towards food and physical activity. Children and adolescents with obesity had a more pronounced positive implicit attitude towards food in general. The relevance of these findings in terms of prevention, treatment and further research is discussed.