Interaction Process Differences between Groups of Paranoid Schizophrenic and Depressed Patients

Group psychoanalytic treatment has special value for helping people form intimate attachments, in particular, for enabling them to resolve lifelong unconscious resistances to closeness. The group serves both as an amphitheater and as an agent for change.

As group therapists, we may break the task down into three stages. First, we bring the character resistances into play; second, we resolve the fears underlying them; and third, we empower our patients to develop mature ways of expressing intimacy.

Our task requires that we establish a contract with our patients so as to study any breach as a possible resistance to intimacy with other members. We study these resistances, which are expressed in words and attitudes. Beneath such resistances lie various fears, which we bring to the surface. As our patients resolve these fears, they begin to act toward each other as they did toward significant figures in their formative years. We work with these vestigial modes of relating, and help our patients turn them into mature modes of expression.     

A Technologically Mediated Phenomenon Affecting Human Dynamics

This paper will suggest a mapping for human dynamics to see where emerging digital technology currently and could further affect the dynamics of the human, technological and natural, and the cultural forms that define them. Emerging technology will be seen to reveal and surpass the limitations of human measures built on human abilities and perception. and the social structures that are derived from them. The formation of this conceptual mapping is based on the premise that digital technology has the ability to better relay and hence refine dynamics working at points where culture is created and necessitated in our perception of a shared reality. Technology thus alleviates the layering, representation, labelling, and reification notions of culture that are based in human perceptual limitations. Information as referential will be seen against the tendency of technology to offer succinct mediation and direct actions as a format for any change and application with refined cultural constructions. The mapping presents a notion of homeostasis or more bereft of balance at the point where the proximal dynamics of the unit, that is, the individual, is closely supported by the technology with a changing orientation to the dynamics of a natural environment. The notion of a person as an individual is also reconsidered in terms of technology and how this changing definition is part of how we conceptualize a balanced world. Nonlinear mapping rendered in a complex will be introduced to align these mixed dynamics. Complex is here defined as a concurrence of dynamics evident in shifts of change that act as a whole and where each action affects the whole. As measures are revealed so, too, will be the source of notions of linearity and nonlinearity; mapping; point of view as a basis of complexity; and evolutionary theory as a function of a labeling of cultural dynamics.     

Is evaluative conditioning really resistant to extinction? Evidence for changes in evaluative judgements without changes in evaluative representations

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is defined as the change in the evaluation of a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to its pairing with a positive or negative unconditioned stimulus (US). Although several individual studies suggest that EC is unaffected by unreinforced presentations of the CS without the US, a recent meta-analysis indicates that EC effects are less pronounced for post-extinction measurements than post-acquisition measurements. The disparity in research findings suggests that extinction of EC may depend on yet unidentified conditions. In an attempt to uncover these conditions, three experiments (N = 784) investigated the influence of unreinforced post-acquisition CS presentations on EC effects resulting from simultaneous versus sequential pairings and pairings with single versus multiple USs. For all four types of CS–US pairings, EC effects on self-reported evaluations were reduced by unreinforced CS presentations, but only when the CSs had been rated after the initial presentation of CS–US pairings. EC effects on an evaluative priming measure remained unaffected by unreinforced CS presentations regardless of whether the CSs had been rated after acquisition. The results suggest that reduced EC effects resulting from unreinforced CS presentations are due to judgement-related processes during the verbal expression of CS evaluations rather than genuine changes in the underlying evaluative representations.     

Are “implicit” attitudes unconscious?

A widespread assumption in recent research on attitudes is that self-reported (explicit) evaluations reflect conscious attitudes, whereas indirectly assessed (implicit) evaluations reflect unconscious attitudes. The present article reviews the available evidence regarding unconscious features of indirectly assessed "implicit" attitudes. Distinguishing between three different aspects of attitudes, we conclude that (a) people sometimes lack conscious awareness of the origin of their attitudes, but that lack of source awareness is not a distinguishing feature of indirectly assessed versus self-reported attitudes, (b) there is no evidence that people lack conscious awareness of indirectly assessed attitudes per se, and (c) there is evidence showing that, under some conditions, indirectly assessed (but not self-reported) attitudes influence other psychological processes outside of conscious awareness. Implications for the concept of "implicit attitudes" are discussed.     

Counterintuitive cross-linguistic differences: More morphological computation in English than in Finnish

This study investigates the role of derivational morphology in lexical processing in two typologically quite different languages: Finnish and English. While Finnish is a language with an extremely rich morphology, English morphology is relatively poor. Consequently, the role of morphology in storing and processing words would be expected to be greater in Finnish than in English. With a series of visual lexical decision experiments in both languages, we find that the opposite is the case for derivational morphology: for English, parsing of morphological constituents is often required, whereas for Finnish, full-form storage and access seems to be the rule. We try to explain this counterintuitive finding by making an appeal to the lexical-statistical properties of both languages.     

Recommendations for standardized human pedigree nomenclature

The construction of an accurate family pedigree is a fundamental component of a clinical genetic evaluation and of human genetic research. Previous surveys of genetic counselors and human genetic publications have demonstrated significant inconsistencies in the usage of common pedigree symbols representing situations such as pregnancy, termination of pregnancy, miscarriage, and adoption, as well as less common scenarios such as pregnancies conceived through assisted reproductive technologies. The Pedigree Standardization Task Force (PSTF) was organized through the Professional Issues Committee of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, to establish recommendations for universal standards in human pedigree nomenclature. Nomenclature was chosen based on current usage, consistency among symbols, computer compatibility, and the adaptability of symbols to reflect the rapid technical advances in human genetics. Preliminary recommendations were presented for review at three national meetings of human genetic professionals and sent to >100 human genetic professionals for review. On the basis of this review process, the recommendations of the PSTF for standardized human pedigree nomenclature are presented here. By incorporating these recommendations into medical genetics professional training programs, board examinations, genetic publications, and pedigree software, the adoption of uniform pedigree nomenclature can begin. Usage of standardized pedigree nomenclature will reduce the chances for incorrect interpretation of patient and family medical and genetic information. It may also improve the quality of patient care provided by genetic professionals and facilitate communication between researchers involved with genetic family studies.Reprinted with permission from theAmerican Journal of Human Genetics 56:745–752, 1995, The University of Chicago Press. © 1995 by The American Society of Human Genetics. All rights reserved.     

A comparison of the differential effects of three different baseline conditions within an ABA1B1 experimental design

The use of the ABA₁B₁ design over recent years in applied behavioural research has prompted many researchers to comment on its strengths and weaknesses (Kazdin, 1973; Kazdin and Bootzin, 1972; Liberman, 1972; Peck and Thorpe, 1971). One major problem is that many different types of non-contingent or no-reinforcement conditions have been used and that different types of baseline conditions may produce different effects. Despite the volume of research using a derivative of this design, surprisingly little is known about the effects of different baseline conditions.The baseline conditions most frequently used include the following: 1. No reinforcement (O'Leary and Becker, 1967; Hall et al., 1972; Aitchison and Green, 1974). 2. Threats (Phillips et al., 1971). 3. Reinforcing other types of behaviour (Ayllon and Azrin, 1965). 4. Equivalent amounts of reinforcement given in baseline and experimental conditions with all baseline reinforcement given non-contingently at the beginning or end of the phase (Wincze et al, 1972; Fernadez et al., 1973; Burchard, 1967). 5. Equivalent amounts of reinforcement in baseline and experimental conditions with baseline reinforcement given non-contingently at regular intervals or randomly throughout the phase (Foxx and Azrin, 1973; Baer and Wolf, 1970).Baer and Wolf (1970) have stated that: ‘Non-contingent reinforcement as a method of extinction has certain characteristics which may make it the method of choice for some experimental designs: especially those designs in which the adult offers reinforcers to a child’. They feel that this method is to be preferred because the total amount of reinforcement can be held constant over all conditions and thus will not be a confounding variable between conditions. However, as Skinner (1948) demonstrated, rate of behaviour can be changed by non-contingent reinforcement when ‘superstitious’ causal relations appear between behaviour and presentation of reinforcement. In effect the rate of behaviour increases because it has accidentally occurred before the presentation of reinforcement and so a connection is established whereby the probability of the behaviour is increased despite the fact that it is not causally related to reinforcement. Morse and Skinner (1957) have said about superstitious conditioning ‘Such effects must always be allowed for in designing experiments on complex behaviour’. Catania and Cutts (1963) and Yelen (1971) have shown that such superstitious conditioning can occur with human subjects.The present experiment employed three groups each trained under the same conditions but with different baseline conditions—1, 4 and 5 above. A multiple baseline design was used in which all possible responses were recorded in a four choice situation so that any accidental contingencies established would be evident.     

Where the Girls (and Women) Are

This paper takes up a theoretical and empirical investigation of how two community-based projects for young women both create safety from community and domestic violence but how, in the process, discourses of multicultural inclusion define one site, and racist discourses of exclusion float through the other site. By relying on two intensive qualitative case studies of community-based organizations for girls, one exclusively White and working class and the other expressly multicultural and antiracist, we try to identify those structures and practices that support feminist, but inadvertently racist, work and those structures and practices that enable, at once, feminist and antiracist consciousness and praxis.     

Affixal homonymy triggers full-form storage, even with inflected words, even in a morphologically rich language

This paper investigates whether affixal homonymy, the phenomenon that one affix form serves two or more semantic/syntactic functions, affects lexical processing of inflected words in a similar way for a morphologically rich language such as Finnish as for morphologically restricted languages such as Dutch and English. For the latter two languages, there is evidence that affixal homonymy triggers full-form storage for inflected words (Bertram, R., Schreuder, R., and Baayen, R. H. (in press). The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: the role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Sereno and Jongman (1997). Processing of English inflectional morphology. Memory and Cognition, 25, 425-437). Two visual lexical decision experiments show the same pattern for Finnish. Apparently, the substantially richer morphology in Finnish does not prevent full-form storage for inflected words when the affix is homonymic.