Clinician-Guided Assessment of Personality Using the Structural Interview and the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO)

This article demonstrates the utility of a theory-guided psychodynamic approach to the assessment of personality and personality pathology based on the object relations model developed by Kernberg (1984). We describe a clinical interview, the Structural Interview (SI; Kernberg, 1984), and also a semistructured approach, the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO; Clarkin, Caligor, Stern, & Kernberg, 2004) based on this theoretical model. Both interviews focus on the assessment of consolidated identity versus identity disturbance, the use of adaptive versus lower level defensive operations, and intact versus loss of reality testing. In the context of a more clinically oriented assessment, the SI makes use of tactful confrontation of discrepancies and contradictions in the patient's narrative, and also takes into account transference and countertransference phenomena, whereas the more structured approach of the STIPO incorporates clinical judgment informed by clinical theory into a well-guided interaction with the patient. Both interviews have good interrater reliability and are coherent with the alternative model for personality disorder diagnosis proposed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.), Section III. Finally, they provide the clinician with specific implications for prognosis and treatment planning and can rationally guide clinical decision making.     

Exploring Ethical Pharmacy Practice in Jordan

Science and Engineering Ethics - Patient-centered pharmacy practice involves increased pharmacist engagement in patient care. This increased involvement can sometimes require diverse...     

Who May Enter? The Impact of In-Group Identification on In-Group/Out-Group Categorization

An experiment was conducted to examine the impact of identification with the in-group on the categorization of pictures depicting in-group and out-group faces. Findings showed that high identifiers classified fewer pictures as in-group members than did low identifiers. High and low identifiers also differed in their categorization latencies. Whereas high identifiers seemed more concerned with erroneously including an out-group member in the in-group, low identifiers seemed concerned with accuracy. The results are discussed with regard to the motivations underlying social categorization as well as to other phenomena that have been discovered through research on social identity theory.     

The effect of the belief in free market ideology on redressing corporate injustice

Many people in the major Western economies (e.g., United States, UK, and Germany) subscribe to free market ideology (FMI), which claims that institutional oversight of the market is unnecessary for public reaction can force corporations to regulate their own behavior. The question then becomes how people's belief in FMI affects their reactions to corporate transgressions. Given its ingroup‐centered values, we hypothesized that FMI beliefs would bias reactions to corporate transgressions. We report results of a pilot study showing that FMI beliefs are predicted by selfishness, tradition, conformity, and lack of universalism. We then report three experiments, which showed that stronger FMI beliefs predict weaker demands to redress corporate injustices committed by ingroup (but not outgroup) corporations (Studies 1–3), especially when victims of corporate wrongdoings belong to an outgroup (rather than the ingroup; Study 3). The findings inform our conceptual understanding of FMI and give insights about its implications for market justice.     

Money Doesn’t Stink. Or Does It? The Effect of Immorally Acquiring Money on Its Spending

Building on magical contagion literature, we show that the way in which money is acquired colors the perception of the money itself, and thus affect the way it is spent. In a hypothetical scenario participants who imagined acquiring money immorally (versus morally) experienced more guilt about the way in which they acquired it and spent less of it. Furthermore, in the immoral, but not the moral condition, guilt correlated significantly with spending: the greater the guilt, the less money was spent. We interpret this finding as stemming from individuals?? desire not to handle what they see as ??dirty?? money.     

Preserved and impaired task-switching abilities in non-demented patients with Parkinson's disease

Existing studies on task switching in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients have led to somewhat different results. In particular, it is unclear whether PD patients have a deficit in attentional control. In this study, we assessed task-switching abilities in samples of non-demented PD patients and elderly controls. We used a paradigm in which there was a random task sequence and the task was cued in every trial. This allowed the investigation of both task-set reconfiguration and task-set dissipation. In terms of the proportion of errors made, the patients showed increased switch cost and congruency effects. For reaction times, PD patients showed enlarged congruency effects on switch trials, specifically in the condition in which we used a short constant response-cue interval (RCI). Nevertheless, in a similar fashion to older controls, the patients showed reductions in reaction time switch cost from a short to a long cue-target interval (CTI) and from a short to a long RCI. While these latter findings, respectively, suggest unimpaired task preparation and task dissipation on correct trials in the PD patients, the overall results show that they have a deficit in biasing and selecting currently relevant task sets and more generally argue in favour of a failure of attentional control in PD.     

A new illusion of height and width: taller people are perceived as thinner

It is commonly said that tall people look thinner. Here, we asked whether an illusion exists such that the taller of two equally wide stimuli looks thinner, and conversely whether the thinner of two equally tall stimuli looks taller. In five experiments, participants judged the horizontal or vertical extents of two identical bodies, rectangles, or cylinders that differed only in their vertical or horizontal extents. Our results confirmed the folk wisdom that being tall makes you look thinner. We similarly found that being thin makes you look taller, although this effect was less pronounced. The same illusion was present for filled rectangles and cylinders, but it was consistently stronger for both photographs and silhouettes of the human body, raising the question of why the human form should be more prone to this illusion.     

The benefits of collective responsibility: How ingroup reputation concern motivates prosociality in intergroup contexts

Collective responsibility processes have been investigated from the perspectives of the outgroup (e.g., collective blame) and the ingroup (e.g., collective guilt). This article extends theory and research on collective responsibility with a third perspective, namely that of the individual actor whose behavior triggers the attribution of collective blame. Four experiments (n = 78, 118, 208 and 77, respectively) tested the hypotheses that collective responsibility processes influence the individual actors' appraisals, emotions and behavior. The possibility of collective blame for their individual action prompted more prosocial behavior among participants (Experiment 1). Participants also experienced more ingroup reputation concern and in turn more negative emotions (Experiment 2–4) for a past wrongdoing if it could reflect negatively on the ingroup in the eyes of outgroups. The increased negative emotions then motivated participants to improve the ingroup's image (Experiment 4). The effects were moderated by perceived ingroup entitativity, in that activating collective blame increased ingroup reputation concern and negative emotions only for ingroups perceived as highly entitative (Experiment 3).