Childhood maltreatment and adult personality disorder symptoms in a non‐clinical sample

It can be argued that the well‐substantiated relationship between childhood maltreatment and adult personality disorder (PD) symptoms may be confounded by comorbid symptoms of depression, anxiety or dysfunctional childhood family environments. Therefore, the current study was designed to test the hypothesis that retrospective reports of childhood maltreatment would still be significantly related to reports of more PD symptoms when statistically controlling for these factors. One hundred and seventy‐eight non‐clinical participants were divided into groups reporting childhood maltreatment (n = 54) or not (n = 124) according to scores on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Participants also completed questionnaires measuring current depression, anxiety, and PD symptoms as well as retrospective reports of their childhood environment. Results showed that individuals reporting childhood maltreatment reported more symptoms of PD than those not reporting childhood maltreatment, even when statistically controlling for depression, anxiety and retrospective reports of dysfunctional family environment. These findings underscore the relevance and independent contribution of childhood maltreatment to the development of PDs, with important implications for further research and clinical practice.     

Klinische Supervision

Clinical supervision is of central significance within different phases of training and is seen as a central part of adequate psychotherapy. Based upon different definitions and models of supervision, this article reviews clinically relevant results of psychotherapy research dealing with issues of supervision. Although the significance of supervision for the quality of psychotherapeutic treatment is sometimes still critically discussed, the amount of evidence for their positive effects increases. The review shows a number of current research deficits that should be compensated in the future.     

A phase transition model for the speed-accuracy trade-off in response time experiments

Most models of response time (RT) in elementary cognitive tasks implicitly assume that the speed-accuracy trade-off is continuous: When payoffs or instructions gradually increase the level of speed stress, people are assumed to gradually sacrifice response accuracy in exchange for gradual increases in response speed. This trade-off presumably operates over the entire range from accurate but slow responding to fast but chance-level responding (i.e., guessing). In this article, we challenge the assumption of continuity and propose a phase transition model for RTs and accuracy. Analogous to the fast guess model (Ollman, 1966), our model postulates two modes of processing: a guess mode and a stimulus-controlled mode. From catastrophe theory, we derive two important predictions that allow us to test our model against the fast guess model and against the popular class of sequential sampling models. The first prediction--hysteresis in the transitions between guessing and stimulus-controlled behavior--was confirmed in an experiment that gradually changed the reward for speed versus accuracy. The second prediction--bimodal RT distributions--was confirmed in an experiment that required participants to respond in a way that is intermediate between guessing and accurate responding.     

Behandlungs- und Kunstfehler in der Psychoanalyse

Failures and transgressions in psychoanalyses are nowadays more often published and also ascribed to mistakes made by the therapists. In German professional literature, however, no difference is made between treatment errors due to the special method and serious malpractice. The authors show in case studies transgressions in the psychoanalytic setting und discuss their causes and consequences.     

Group cohesion: A new multidimensional model

Based upon a careful perusal of all major theoretical reviews and most available controlled, empirical studies from the last 30 years, a five factor model of group cohesion is proposed. These factors are: attraction and bonding; support and caring; listening and empathy; self-disclosure and feedback; and process performance and goal attainment. To understand more fully the complex phenomenon of group cohesion, certain preconditions to the cohesive therapy group must be considered. The most significant of these are: selection of suitable participants; a balanced composition of the group; and effective orientation, training, and contracting. Important early group conditions are: resolving conflict and rebellion; constructive norming and culture building; and reducing avoidance and defensiveness. This new, generic, multidimensional model of group cohesion should prove of great value both to the clinician and the researcher in the group psychotherapy field and related areas.The author is indebted to the following colleagues for constructive criticisms of earlier versions of this report: S. Budman, R. R. Dies, K. R. MacKenzie, W. E. Piper, M. A. Richardsen, and I. D. Yalom.     

Learned helplessness deficits: Uncontrollable outcomes or perceived failure?

An experiment is described showing that learned helplessness deficits are produced by prior exposure to uncontrollable outcomes rather than perceived failure. Although the controllability manipulation did produce differences in perceived success or failure, similar differences were also induced by means of instructional feedback. These latter differences, within the controllable and uncontrollable groups, were not associated with poorer performance by subjects given failure feedback. Moreover, the instructional feedback did not influence subjects' perceptions of controllability or uncontrollability. The results confirm that helplessness deficits cannot be explained as reactions to task failure.This research was supported by Research Grant A28015473 from the Australian Research Grants Scheme.     

Psychodynamik und neurophysiologischer Befund bei einem Patienten mit einer zwanghaften Lesestörung

The present single case study is aimed to investigate neuro-physiological correlates of checking and ordering compulsions in a 40 years old patient suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) by means of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) method. After the presentation of the psychogenesis and psychodynamic of the OCD case, the cardinal symptom, a compulsive reading disturbance, is described in detail. Based on the symptom analysis eight different texts, hierarchically arranged by their degrees of difficulty were composed and presented to the patient for reading during fMRI. The results of the fMRI during symptom provocation display significant increase of activation in fronto-thalamic-cortical neural circuits with the occurence of compulsive reading disturbances compared with unproblematic texts and with the reading of a control subject. The findings are discussed in relation to the neurobiologic literature as well as to an object-psychological model of the OCD.     

Gender-related assessment of childhood play

Parent-report based scales for the assessment of sex-dimorphic behavior are an important tool in research on psychosexual differentiation and its disorders. This paper presents the factor analysis and corresponding scale development for the slightly expanded Child Game Participation Questionnaire (Bates & Bentler, 1973), based on the parents of a demographically diverse school sample of 355 girls and 333 boys aged 6 to 10 years. Evidence supporting each of three theoretical positions in gender assessment — unidimensional bipolar, two-dimensional unipolar, and multidimensional — was provided. Effect sizes were unusually large for gender, but small for age, socioeconomic level, and race/ethnicity.This research was supported in part by a NICHD postdoctoral fellowship (NRSA HD06726; sponsor: Dr. Meyer-Bahlburg) awarded to Dr. Sandberg, by grants to Dr. Ehrhardt and Dr. Meyer-Bahlburg from the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and NIMH (center grant 2-P50-MH43520, Anke A. Ehrhardt, Ph.D., Principal Investigator), and by the NIMH Clinical Research Center grant MH-30906.We thank the children and parents who participated in the study. Dr. Jacob Cohen consulted on statistical matters. Ms. Patricia Connolly provided word processing services. A portion of this work was presented as a poster at the XIth Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 3–7, 1991 (Abstracts, p. 285).