The Prediction of Family Interaction from a Battery of Projective Techniques

This study first explored the adequacy of items on the Rorschach Rating Scale (RRS), which measures Rorschach constructs from a variety of scoring systems. Analyses determined that all items had an adequate capacity to differentiate people and none were clearly redundant. At the same time, the current version of the RRS requires good reading comprehension skills for accurate completion (13th grade level). Next, we developed two sets of RRS scales. Factor analysis of observer ratings (N = 234) indicated the RRS contained six broad, empirically derived factors. In addition, 19 conceptually derived scales were developed from the RRS item pool. Both sets of scales were evaluated for reliability and then compared to the Big Five model (B5M) of personality through a series of factor and regression analyses. Results indicated that RRS scales do not provide adequate definition of all B5M dimensions and B5M scales do not provide adequate definition of all RRS dimensions. We discuss the place of psychotic processes within a comprehensive model of personality and other implications from these findings.     

'To walk the last bit on my own' - narcissistic independence or identification with good objects: issues of loss for a 13-year-old who had an amputation

This paper describes two years of psychotherapy with Michael, a 13-year-old boy who had undergone a recent emergency amputation of his leg and hip for bone cancer. The work follows Michael's struggle with the enormity of the loss, in the face of his, as well as the system's, use of denial. The amputation as an 'attack' on his physical and emotional autonomy strikes at his early adolescent development. The therapeutic process is aided by his capacity 'to go back to the unhappiness'. The therapy develops from his initial shock, to despair and self-blame, as he struggles with a tendency - in the middle period of the therapy - to lose his mind as well as his leg in a retreat to withdrawal and mindlessness, or to mania. He struggles between an omnipotent, at times self-destructive, wish to 'go it alone', versus a capacity to feel sad and to value life. His capacity to think about the trauma and to find meaning emerges. The paper raises questions about whether some trauma can ever be fully assimilated, and whether, for Michael, the mourning process could lead to a reintegrated sense of self and of a 'psychic intactness', dependent on the survival of his good 'internal couple'. Hospital and ward-based child psychotherapy and its limitations are explored.     

Intentional fixation of behavioural learning,or how R-O learning blocks S-R learning

Four experiments deal with the acquisition of knowledge for the control of voluntary behaviour. Subjects had to accomplish a computer-controlled learning task that required them to learn which one of four actions (R) had to be performed in order to attain a certain one of four outcomes (O) in the presence of one of four situational contexts (S). Reinforcements were assigned to actions according to two schedules: In the S-R condition each of the four actions was consistently reinforced in the presence of a certain situation, whereas in the R-O condition each of the actions was either always (Experiments 1-3) or mostly (Experiment 4) reinforced if a certain outcome was required. Furthermore, the type of feedback was varied. In Experiment 1, only positive or negative reinforcements were fed back, whereas in Experiments 2-4 the actions resulted in outcomes that had to be compared with the required outcomes in order to determine successes and failures. The results indicate a preference for learning R-O contingencies over learning S-R contingencies. Most subjects were so fixated on learning R-O relations that they remained completely blind to the consistent reinforcement of S-R mappings. The data suggest that, in line with the ideomotor principle, the acquisition of behavioural competence is based primarily on the formation of bidirectional action-outcome relations. Specifications of the underlying learning mechanisms are discussed.     

The Influence of Autonomy and Supervisor Political Skill on the Use and Consequences of Peer Intimidation in Organizations

Based on social influence theory, we develop a model in which the use of peer intimidation by Machiavellian employees results in greater promotability ratings by supervisors. However, consistent with interdependence theory, we expect that this process is qualified by job autonomy and the political skill of the supervisor making the promotability rating. Based on a sample of 204 supervisor–subordinate dyads, we find that peer intimidation mediates the Machiavellianism–promotability relationship when supervisor political skill is low rather than high, and when job autonomy is high rather than low, thereby yielding a pattern of moderated mediation, and supporting the hypotheses. These results suggest that job autonomy and supervisor political skill represent key interdependent mechanisms that regulate the effectiveness of social influence attempts made with intimidation in organizations.     

Children’s strategy use when playing strategic games

Strategic games require reasoning about other people’s and one’s own beliefs or intentions. Although they have clear commonalities with psychological tests of theory of mind, they are not clearly related to theory of mind tests for children between 9 and 10 years of age “Flobbe et al. J Logic Language Inform 17(4):417–442 (2008)”. We studied children’s (5–12 years of age) individual differences in how they played a strategic game by analyzing the strategies that they applied in a zero, first, and second-order reasoning task. For the zero-order task, we found two subgroups with different accuracy levels. For the first-order task, subgroups of children applied different suboptimal strategies or an optimal strategy. For the second-order task only suboptimal strategies were present. Strategy use for all tasks was related to age. The 5- and 6-year old children were additionally tested on theory of mind understanding and executive functioning. Strategy-use in these children was related to working memory, but not to theory of mind after correction for age, verbal ability and general IQ.     

A survey of clergy practices associated with premarital financial counseling

The purpose of this exploratory study was to gain an understanding of the state of clergy-led premarital financial counseling. Clergy respondents (n = 223) indicated that they often include a financial component in their formal premarital counseling. The most frequently discussed financial topics are budgeting, managing debt and credit, and saving. The most frequently cited obstacles to providing premarital financial counseling are lack of time and lack of subject matter expertise.     

Children's 5-HTTLPR genotype moderates the link between maternal criticism and attentional biases specifically for facial displays of anger

Theorists have proposed that negative experiences in childhood may contribute to the development of experience-specific information-processing biases, including attentional biases. There are also clear genetic influences on cognitive processes, with evidence that polymorphisms in specific candidate genes may moderate the impact of environmental stress on attentional biases (e.g., a functional polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene; 5-HTTLPR). In the current study, we tested a gene×environment (G×E) model of risk for attentional biases. We hypothesised that children whose mothers exhibit high levels of expressed emotion criticism (EE-Crit) would display attentional biases specifically for angry, but not happy or sad, faces, and that this link would be stronger among children carrying one or two copies of the 5-HTTLPR short allele than among those homozygous for the long allele. Results generally supported these hypotheses, though we found that carriers of the 5-HTTLPR short allele who also had a critical mother exhibited attentional avoidance of angry faces rather than preferential attention.     

Shades of emotion: What the addition of sunglasses or masks to faces reveals about the development of facial expression processing

Three studies investigated developmental changes in facial expression processing, between 3years-of-age and adulthood. For adults and older children, the addition of sunglasses to upright faces caused an equivalent decrement in performance to face inversion. However, younger children showed better classification of expressions of faces wearing sunglasses than children who saw the same faces un-occluded. When the mouth area was occluded with a mask, children under nine years showed no impairment in expression classification, relative to un-occluded faces. An early selective focus of attention on the eyes may be optimal for socialization, but mediate against accurate expression classification. The data support a model in which a threshold level of attentional control must be reached before children can develop adult-like configural processing skills and be flexible in their use of face- processing strategies.