Defensiveness and Defense Mechanisms

This introduction to the Journal of Personality's special issue on the topic of defense mechanisms raises the question of why defenses have been largely overlooked in personality research. Although defenses were originally discussed in the context of psychopathology, for the past 60 years psychodynamically oriented psychologists have understood that defenses play an important part in normal psychological development. Recently, psychologists outside the field of personality have incorporated the ideas of unconscious mental processes and of defenses into their research programs. In this issue, personality researchers discuss their ideas about defense mechanisms, organized around three topical areas: current conceptualizations of defense, the measurement of defense mechanisms, and the integration of defense mechanisms into personality research. The issue concludes with a commentary on these articles and provides suggestions for future work.     

Threat to Gender Representation: Identity and Identification

To investigate the effect of a threat to gender identity on the use of defense mechanisms, college students were given false feedback regarding their sex-role identity. Male and female students who were given gender-contrary feedback showed a marked increase in the use of the defense of identification, as compared to students who were given gender-consistent feedback. Further, both affect change and the use of identification was a function of the degree of discrepancy between feedback condition and conscious gender identity.     

A thought on the nature of psychoanalytic theory

In this paper I suggest that much of recent experiment in analytic theory, even widely diverse approaches, has a common denominator the problem of the conceptual vacuum created by the shift away from a central creative position of the idea of psychic mechanisms. I try to illustrate, by comparing theories of Bion and George Klein, that this movement seems to point in the direction of considering now what is uniquely psychoanalytic about our theories. I content that what is unique about psychoanalytic theories is that they are involved in the experiential core-function of the applied science by becoming internalized and used symbolically to aid the analyst inwardly to endure persecutory anxiety and loss of the sense of objective reality, and so maintain the analytic position.     

Signal-detection analysis of luminance generalization in goldfish using latency as a graded response measure

ROC curves were determined from response latencies of goldfish in a single-stimulus generalization task. The resulting functions were similar to ROC curves obtained by rating methods with human Os.     

On browne's solution for oblique procrustes rotation

Browne [1967] has given a method of solving the problem (originally stated by Mosier, [1939]) of finding a least squares fit to a specified factor structure. The problem is one of minimizing the sum of squared residuals of —FT with Diag (T'T)=I. Browne's solution involves the eigenvectors and values ofF'F and leads to an iterative solution.This paper gives a form of the solution which does not involve solution of an eigenvalue problem but does require an iteration similar to Browne's. It suggests the possible existence of a singularity, and a simple modification of Browne's computational procedure is proposed which deals with this case. A better starting value for the iteration is also proposed for which convergence is guaranteed using the ordinary Newton iteration.Part of this work was presented at the April 1969 meetings of the Psychometric Society. The anthor is indebted to Dr. Ledyard Tucker for some helpful discussions. This work was supported in part by a PHS Research Grant No. MH-10006 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and Grant No. GM-12868 from the Institute of General Medical Sciences, Public Health Service.