Shyness: conceptualization and measurement

The concept of shyness and its measurement were investigated in a series of studies (total N = 1,687). Data collection and analysis proceeded in three phases: the revision and continued development of a measure of shyness, the Social Reticence Scale; a psychometric comparison among five measures of shyness; and an examination of the factor structure underlying the construct of shyness. Phase 1 assessed the reliability and validity of the Social Reticence Scale, including ratings of videotaped monologues and ratings by significant others. Phase 2 compared the five shyness measures with one another on indices of internal consistency and with other relevant measures of emotionality, personality, relationships, and behavior. Items from the five shyness measures were combined in a factor analysis in Phase 3, and the resulting factors were correlated with the self-report and rating data obtained in Phase 2. Overall, the results from these studies confirmed that the shyness measures were valid, reliable, and empirically distinct from measures of related constructs. Behavioral validity was observed for several of the shyness scales. Additional analyses suggested that three interpretable factors underlie responses to the shyness scales but provided little support for drawing conceptual distinctions among types of shyness. Discussion focuses on the implications of these data for the measurement and conceptualization of shyness.     

Agoraphobic and claustrophobic anxieties two problems in leaving university for some final-year students

Abstract

This article considers the way final-year students present with agoraphobic and claustrophobic symptoms which have caused them to break down academically before the end of their courses. It presents a brief theoretical discussion of these anxieties in students, and offers a way of thinking about them in terms of a particular understanding of projective identification. Fragments of casework with three students are used to show that the anxieties are brought about when the desire for invisibility for part of the self, the motive for projective identification in these cases, is more exposed by the arrival of the final months leading up to the end of the students' courses.     

An Examination of the Value of the Generation Effect for Learning New Material

The generation effect involves an improvement in memory when learners must complete or modify materials. Several researchers have suggested that this effect involves enhanced access to learners' existing memory representations; therefore, the effect should be less effective with meaningless, low meaningful, or unfamiliar material. In the present study, the authors conducted 4 experiments in which legal nonwords were used, and they found no generation effect. In another 2 experiments in which familiar clichés were contrasted with new sentences and with unfamiliar sentences from textbooks, the results showed a greatly reduced generation effect for the new, unfamiliar material. Those findings suggest that memory strategies that depend on the generation effect will have limited effectiveness when they are applied to new or unfamiliar material.     

Working with the complexities of adolescent mental health problems: applying time-limited adolescent psychodynamic psychotherapy (TAPP)

This article discusses the application in a CAMHS setting of a distinctive intervention for adolescent mental health difficulties, time-limited adolescent psychodynamic psychotherapy (TAPP). TAPP has been developed specifically for working with adolescents and the characteristic developmental and psychosocial complexities they present to mental health services. It is widely recognised that supporting the developmental process in adolescence is central to therapeutic interventions and the therapeutic aim of TAPP is to enable recovery of the capacity to meet developmental challenges. The key factors of TAPP are described, including the formulation and working with a developmental focus, the therapeutic stance, working with transference and counter-transference, working with time limits, and the emphasis is placed on engagement of adolescents in therapy in TAPP. The experiences of introducing and developing TAPP in the CAMHS service are discussed with two brief and one extended case examples and this leads to a discussion of the kinds of outcomes achieved. It is concluded that TAPP is a key and relevant intervention for adolescents in complex and vulnerable situations; further work will be undertaken to continue its application in these settings and to formally assess outcomes.     

Assessing the Five-Factor Model of Personality Description

Several approaches to assessing the dimensions of the five-factor model are reviewed and evaluated. The items in the assessment instrument may be adjectives or phrases, and the instrument itself may have been developed specifically to measure the five factors or may have been reinterpreted in terms of the five-factor model. Data are presented comparing an adjective-based measure of the model (Goldberg, 1990) with two phrase-based measures (Costa & McCrae, 1985; Hogan, 1986), and recommendations are made for the choice of an instrument in different research contexts. Allport's (1937) distinctions between the structure of the trait lexicon and the structure of personality in individuals are reiterated.     

Persistence of chronic nicotine-induced cognitive facilitation.

Nicotine has been found in a variety of species and behavioral paradigms to improve memory performance. The beneficial effect of nicotine has been seen after both acute and chronic administration. Interestingly, improved performance has been seen 24 h after acute injection and for at least 2 weeks after chronic administration. However, it is not clear from previous studies whether the persistence of the improved performance represents a true carryover of the drug effect or is due to the behavioral experience while under nicotine's effect. The current study was conducted to determine whether the facilitating effect of nicotine on learning and memory performance could be seen after withdrawal even if there was no behavioral training during the period of chronic nicotine administration. Rats were administered nicotine chronically for 3 weeks but were not tested during that time. Starting 1 week after withdrawal they were trained on a working memory paradigm in an eight-arm radial maze. The nicotine-treated rats started out at control-like levels of performance, but showed significantly faster learning as detected by three different measures of choice accuracy. By the final phase of testing the control subjects had caught up with the nicotine-treated rats. After the acquisition phase, acute challenges with the nicotinic and muscarinic antagonists, mecamylamine and scopolamine, did not elicit any differential effects in the nicotine-treated and control groups. The current study demonstrated that nicotine-induced cognitive facilitation persists for at least 4 weeks after withdrawal and does not depend upon behavioral test experience under the influence of the drug. The mechanism for this persisting effect is not currently understood.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Judging the strength of designated evidence

Judgments of evidence strength were obtained in a series of vignettes, each containing one or two items of evidence for each of two logically independent hypotheses. Each judgment concerned a designated subset of the presented evidence. Different groups of subjects encountered different but overlapping sets of evidence. We compared groups that judged the same designated evidence for the same hypothesis, but differed in exposure to surrounding (nondesignated) evidence. Results showed clear separation of relevant from irrelevant evidence and of designated from surrounding relevant evidence. This was particularly clear in the second experiment, where judgments of designated evidence remained invariant whether the surrounding evidence supported or contradicted the specified hypothesis. The conjunction fallacy was observed for judgments of evidence strength, but was substantially reduced by a simple instruction. Because subjects can separate evidence, it becomes possible to construct cardinally scaled standards of evidence strength using conjoint-measurement methods.