Albert Ellis at 85: Personal Reflections

Coinciding with his 85th birthday, Michael Bernard interviewed Albert Ellis focusing on more personal than professional issues. Topics addressed in the interview include: a) morning mood, b) management of physical ailments, c) spirituality, d) recent pleasant moments, e) mentors, and f) regrets.     

The Search for Glory in Madame Bovary: A Horneyan Analysis

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Content and formulation writing argumentative texts in Paris

The article propose a new way of looking at the relationship between content elaboration and formulation during the production of written argumentative texts. It is hypothesized, that younger students elaborate contents by formulating them, whereas in older students both processes are clearly distinguished. 8 pairs of students aged 10 and 14 and adults with academic background produce a text in a collaborative situation. Three aspects of the production of the first and the last sentence are analyzed in looking at the recorded dialogues: elaboration of argumentative plans; the independant elaboration of contents; the variation of linguistic forms. The results gives the hypothesis credit and show a deep reorganisation of the production process of argumentative texts in ontogenesis.     

The control of responding by auditory stimuli: interactions between different dimensions of the stimuli.

Sounds have position in addition to other dimensions, such as intensity and frequency. Position rapidly gains control of spatially contiguous responses and this may interfere with control of responding by other acoustic dimensions. These experiments investigated interference of a tone-noise discrimination by the discrimination of acoustic position. Squirrel monkeys were studied when responding was differentially reinforced in the presence of both spectral content (tone-noise) and positional differences between the stimuli, and when responding was differentially reinforced only in the presence of spectral differences. Under the first condition, responding rapidly came under the control of the position of the noise in the two monkeys tested. The position of the tone controlled responding in one monkey; in the second monkey, responding came under the control of the spectral content of the tone. Under the second condition, responding was initially under the control of the noise in all three monkeys tested. This persisted for the duration of the condition for two of the monkeys; in one monkey, responding came under the control of the spectral content of the noise. Under the second condition, responding was also initially under the control of the position of the tone for all monkeys, but control by spectral content of the tone relatively rapidly developed in two of three monkeys.     

Aggression and power restoration: The effects of identifiability and timing on aggressive behavior

The study was designed to demonstrate that one function of aggression is the restoration of power. It was predicted that, after an individual had his power reduced, greater aggression would be emitted when the individual could be identified as the attacker by his victim than when he could not. It was felt that only when the aggressor was identifiable could he completely restore his power vis-à-vis the victim. A second aim of the study was to investigate the effects of timing of aggression on the intensity of aggression. It was predicted that in a learning situation, if aggression were utilized solely as a teaching device, greater aggression would be emitted by the “teacher” when the “learner” made mistakes early as opposed to late in the task. However, if the individual were motivated to restore his power by aggressing, greater aggression would occur when the mistakes were made late since having to wait should frustrate the teacher's desire to restore power through aggression. The design of the study was a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial in which subjects were either insulted or not, given the opportunity to aggress either anonymously or when clearly identified, and able to aggress either early or late in a learning task. The results supported the power-restoration hypothesis: Subjects who were insulted aggressed more when identifiable than when anonymous. Also, there was greater aggression in the early as opposed to late conditions under all circumstances except in the insultidentifiable condition.     

PERCEPTION DE FORMES GÉOMÉTRIQUES ET d'ILLUSIONS CHEZ DES ENFANTS FRANCAIS ET AMÉRICAINS1

Perception of geometric forms and optical illusions in French and American children. — A 30-item series of perceptual problems involving geometric forms and optical illusions was administered to 357 French and 732 American children, ages 8 through 16 years. A developmental gradient was observed in both samples: performance correlated +.33 with age in the French sample and +.22 in the American. Age-by-age comparison of means gave approximately identical results, except at age 12 where the French children scored significantly higher. Prior research has shown the perceptual series to be uncorrelated with verbal and linguistic ability, but significantly related to performance on tasks (such as the embedded figures test) which reflect analytic capacity. These findings, plus the cross-national stability of age norms and developmental gradients found here, suggest that the series may have value as a research tool for cross-cultural study of interpersonal effectiveness and analytic aptitude.     

Is preparation of responses precluded by choice reaction time testing?

Choice reaction times for short (Dit) and long (Dah) Morse key presses were measured using a number of different left hand/right hand Dit/Dah 2-response combinations. When Dit and Dah responses were made with the same hand, Dits were initiated significantly faster, which confirms the finding of Klapp et al. (1974). The absolute sizes of Dit and Dah CRT's, however, varied significantly from one test situation to another; and the Dit:Dah difference was shown to be intransitive. Such context effects cast doubt on the extrapolative power of CRT findings, and on the usefulness of CRT as a measure of movement complexity. Latencies were reduced when subjects knew in advance which hand would be used; but the usefulness of response duration pre-knowledge was not unambiguously demonstrated. Preparation of responses is, therefore, not precluded by CRT testing; and possible explanations for these savings in terms of response selection and motor preprogramming were discussed. On balance, the hypothesis that the longer reaction times of Dah responses are due to their greater movement complexity (Klapp et al. 1974) was rejected, in favour of the explanation that subjects adopt a strategy of preferentially preparing Dit responses.