Developing Effective Leaders: Motivational Correlates of Leadership Styles

The purpose of this study was to examine the motivational correlates (i.e., ability beliefs and motivational and social orientations) of four leadership styles (i.e., servant, transformational, transactional, and passive/avoidant). Participants included 132 high school and college athletes at a military institute emphasizing leadership development who completed a comprehensive questionnaire assessing leadership styles and motivational variables. Canonical correlation results demonstrated that high task orientation, learning beliefs, and affiliation and recognition social orientations, coupled with lower capacity beliefs, were significantly related to more intrinsically oriented leadership styles. Leadership opportunities also demonstrated relationships with leadership consistent with hypotheses. Discussion highlighted implications for leadership development.     

Relationship of Prosody Perception to Personality and Aggression

One-hundred-fifteen participants (73 female, 42 male) were evaluated for prosody, or vocal emotion, perception, personality factors, relational aggression and physical aggression. The male participants reported higher levels of physical aggression, and the female participants reported greater Neuroticism, consistent with other data. For the male participants, better perception of prosody was related to both greater Extraversion and greater Conscientiousness, all involved in interpersonal functioning. These relationships were not found in the female participants, but there was a relationship between perception of prosody and relational aggression. Women who were better at perceiving the emotional status of others based on vocal cues were less relationally aggressive. Perhaps greater relational aggression reflects a poor adaptation to diminished ability to perceive emotional status.     

Finding the Lost Girls: Multiplicity and Dissociation in the Treatment of Addictions

Relational perspectives on the nature of self and the unconscious have transformed how we can understand addictions and substance use problems. Addictions have received little attention in the contemporary literature and therapeutic approaches outside of psychoanalysis have been skeptical of psychoanalytic approaches. It is my contention that viewing substance use problems through the lens of a relational/multiple self-state model offers new clinical possibilities resulting in greater success in treating these patients. In this model, addictive behavior is seen as embedded in dissociated self-states. Therapy focuses on helping the patient to move from dissociation to a true multiplicity and a decreased dependence on substances.     

Getting Personal: Thoughts on Therapeutic Action Through the Interplay of Intimacy,Affect, and Consciousness

How do patients internalize new good object experience and how do these previously closed systems open up? What happens within and between analyst and patient that leads to the opening up of affective channels between them and allows consciousness to become transpersonal? The ways in which self-state experience becomes more fluid and cohesive, or less dissociated, is an affective process. This process occurs intersubjectively, as well as between self-states within each individual. When particular self-states come together between analyst and patient, especially those associated with pain and shame, disruption and instability may result within the mind-system (intrapsychic organization) of either or both partners. Managing the affective strain and psychic destabilization are vital tasks for the analyst and patient, in order for relationships between parts of the self (within one individual) to move from pain and hiddenness to compassionate recognition, thereby allowing and facilitating for parts of the self within the other individual to, in turn, move from pain and hiddenness to compassionate recognition. This is a core process of internal life, leading to the development of intimacy between self-states as well as between individuals.     

In Mediis Rebus

For Quine all talk is in mediis rebus, is itself a physical phenomenon. To grasp what a sentence is, its relation to a language, and what it is for a sentence to be true is to be invited to see that notions of shared meaning across languages, of truth, even of knowledge, are far from what they are ordinarily taken to be. To read Quine reflectively is to plunge with him into the midst of things, shunning the vain support of purported transcendental certainties or Archimedean points, and spurning claims of the intuitive clarity of meaning, thought, and belief, for in the midst of things they themselves are what are most lacking in clarity.     

Past midnight: Semantic processing in an implicit learning task

Four experiments are reported which examine the nature of representations underlying an implicit learning task. When shown a series of clock faces, each bearing a time between 6 and 12 o'clock, subjects subsequently show a selection preference for novel clock faces between these times. Furthermore, they show no signs of being aware of the underlying rule governing this preference. This effect is also present when the representation of time of day is changed from analogue to digital between learning and test. In the final experiment subjects show no preference for seen over unseen clocks between these critical times. These data suggest that, for this particular task, implicit learning involves abstract representations.     

Aging preserves the ability to perceive 3D object shape from static but not deforming boundary contours

A single experiment investigated how younger (aged 18-32 years) and older (aged 62-82 years) observers perceive 3D object shape from deforming and static boundary contours. On any given trial, observers were shown two smoothly-curved objects, similar to water-smoothed granite rocks, and were required to judge whether they possessed the "same" or "different" shape. The objects presented during the "different" trials produced differently-shaped boundary contours. The objects presented during the "same" trials also produced different boundary contours, because one of the objects was always rotated in depth relative to the other by 5, 25, or 45 degrees. Each observer participated in 12 experimental conditions formed by the combination of 2 motion types (deforming vs. static boundary contours), 2 surface types (objects depicted as silhouettes or with texture and Lambertian shading), and 3 angular offsets (5, 25, and 45 degrees). When there was no motion (static silhouettes or stationary objects presented with shading and texture), the older observers performed as well as the younger observers. In the moving object conditions with shading and texture, the older observers' performance was facilitated by the motion, but the amount of this facilitation was reduced relative to that exhibited by the younger observers. In contrast, the older observers obtained no benefit in performance at all from the deforming (i.e., moving) silhouettes. The reduced ability of older observers to perceive 3D shape from motion is probably due to a low-level deterioration in the ability to detect and discriminate motion itself.