Narcissistic Acts in Everyday Life

This article presents a series of studies on narcissism, a personality syndrome receiving increasing theoretical and practical attention. Four empirical studies were carried out to (a) identify narcissistic acts in everyday life, (b) identify the acts subsumed by dispositions that are seen as central components of narcissism, (c) identify which acts and which dispositions are most and least central to narcissism, (d) test the hypothesis that the conceptually specified component dispositions of the narcissistic personality disorder indeed covary sufficiently to merit the designation of narcissism as a syndrome, (e) identify sex differences in the acts through which narcissism is manifested, (f) validate the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (a major personality instrument developed to assess narcissism), and (g) locate narcissistic act performance within each of three major taxonomies of personality psychology.     

A digital frequency discriminator for biofeedback research

The design and construction of a digital frequency discriminator, useful in various research and clinical applications of biofeedback, is presented. The module may be constructed for approximately $25 (excluding power supply and mounting hardware).     

Patients’ Initial Doubts, Reservations and Objections to the ABC’s of REBT and their Application

This exploratory research set out to develop an initial framework and categorization scheme for understanding patients’ initial doubts, reservations and objections to the ABC’s of REBT and their application. 60 patients were asked to write down their doubts following a pre-therapy “Introduction to REBT” session. Subsequently, an emergent content analysis was carried out to identify main themes. The content analysis revealed five general categories, of which the two largest ones concerned theoretical doubts about the ABC model, and doubts about putting the ABC model into practice. Further sub-categorization revealed a variety of concerns that related to these categories. For example, a large proportion of doubts about putting the ABC model into practice were sub-categorized as concerning the perceived difficulty of doing so. In turn, this sub-category contained further sub-categories of difficulty-related beliefs.

Spousal caregiver confidence and recovery from ambulatory activity limitations in stroke survivors.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined whether spousal confidence in care-recipient recovery can predict recovery from activity limitations following stroke and how spousal confidence relates to stroke survivor self-efficacy for recovery. DESIGN: A prospective design was used. Measures were gathered from stroke survivor/spouse dyads at two time points, both postdischarge from the hospital following stroke (N=109). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The dependent variable was recovery from ambulatory activity limitations over 6 weeks, as measured by the Functional Limitations Profile. A single spousal confidence item was tailored to an ambulatory behavior that the stroke survivors could not perform at Time 1. RESULTS: Spousal confidence was correlated with ambulation recovery (r=-0.23, p<.05) and stroke survivor self-efficacy for recovery (r=.25, p<.05). Higher spousal confidence was associated with a better recovery and greater stroke survivor self-efficacy for recovery, but not with initial health status or practical support received. CONCLUSION: The relationship between caregiver confidence, care-recipient self-efficacy for recovery, and recovery outcomes needs further elucidation.     

A Comprehensive Training Initiative for Educators to Develop and Implement Effective Anti-Bullying Policies in K–12 Schools

Although most states across the United States have enacted anti-bullying legislation, state laws vary greatly in detail and direction, leaving many school districts wondering how to best address the problem of bullying and comply with their state’s legislative requirements. In response, a comprehensive, statewide training initiative was conducted for school personnel to offer guidance on developing and implementing such policies at the local level. In the present piece, the authors explicate the process by which they (a) derived theoretically grounded, empirically driven recommendations; (b) developed training materials and a project website; and (c) disseminated the material and recommendations across the state. They also present key outcomes as a result of this training initiative.     

Target prototypicality moderates racial bias in the decision to shoot

Research shows that target race can influence the decision to shoot armed and unarmed Black and White males (e.g., Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002). To date, however, research has only examined category level effects by comparing average responses to Blacks and Whites. The current studies investigated whether target prototypicality influences the decision to shoot above and beyond the effect of race. Here, we replicated racial bias in shoot decisions and demonstrated that bias was moderated by target prototypicality. As target prototypicality increased, participants showed greater racial bias. Further, when targets were unprototypic, racial bias reversed (e.g., participants mistakenly shot more unarmed Whites than Blacks). Study 2 examined whether these effects were observed among police officers. Although police showed no racial bias on average, target prototypicality significantly influenced judgments. Across both studies, sensitivity to variability in Whites' prototypicality drove these effects, while variation in Black prototypicality did not affect participants' decisions.     

Using perceptrons to explore the reorientation task

The reorientation task is a paradigm that has been used extensively to study the types of information used by humans and animals to navigate in their environment. In this task, subjects are reinforced for going to a particular location in an arena that is typically rectangular in shape. The subject then has to find that location again after being disoriented, and possibly after changes have been made to the arena. This task is used to determine the geometric and featural cues that can be used to reorient the agent in the arena. The purpose of the present paper is to present several simulation results that show that a simple neural network, a perceptron, can be used to generate many of the traditional findings that have been obtained using the reorientation task. These results suggest that reorientation task regularities can be explained without appealing to a geometric module that is a component of spatial processing.     

The merman: recovering from early abuse and loss

This paper explores once-weekly psychotherapy with a 10-year-old boy who had been physically abused and spent six years in various foster-homes before being placed with his birth father and family. This case has many parallels with the experience of late adopted children who may struggle to think about and emotionally digest the experiences of their early lives, while also facing the challenge of joining a new family. This boy's longing for, resentment of and identification with his birth mother were actively communicated through drawings and re-enactments. His expectation of an object as unpredictable and unreliable made it difficult for him to apprehend different experiences with his family and in therapy. Exploring the nature of his internal objects and gradually enabling him to bring feeling and thought into closer proximity provided one way of giving meaning to experiences he could not remember or understand. Technical difficulties in working with a child who actively flaunted the boundaries of the sessions are considered, as is the importance of a containing network surrounding the child.