Early childhood experiences and current emotional distress: what do they tell us about aspiring psychologists?

Motivation underlying the career choice of mental health professionals may include a desire to resolve personal psychological distress from childhood or the need to continue the caretaking role held in the family (A. DiCaccavo, 2002; J. D. Guy, 1987). The authors examined whether psychology students whose future vocational aspirations lie in the clinical domain (N = 40) differed from psychology students with no clinical aspirations (N = 35) and from business students (N = 91) in reported childhood experiences and current psychological functioning. Psychology students who wanted to work in the clinical domain reported higher rates of perceived childhood sexual abuse and neglect as compared with both psychology students with no clinical aspirations and business students. They also reported more parentification experiences between the ages of 14 years and 16 years as compared with business students. There were no significant differences between groups in reported levels of current negative emotions.     

Exposure to acute physical and psychological stress alters the response of rat macrophages to corticosterone, neuropeptide Y and beta-endorphin

The objective of the present study was to investigate the effect of acute exposure to electric tail shock stress (ES) and a stress witnessing procedure (SW), as models for physical and psychological stress paradigms, respectively on adherence, phagocytosis and hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)) release from rat peritoneal macrophages. In addition, we studied the in vitro effects of corticosterone (CORT), neuropeptide Y (NPY) and beta-endorphin (BE) on adherence, phagocytosis and H(2)O(2) release from macrophages isolated from control rats and from rats that had been exposed to ES or SW procedures 24 h earlier. ES and SW comparably diminished phagocytosis and H(2)O(2) release, but did not influence macrophage adherence. In vitro treatment with CORT and NPY notably suppressed phagocytosis and potentiated H(2)O(2) release from macrophages. BE suppressed both phagocytosis and H(2)O(2) release from macrophages. Previous exposure to ES and SW altered the responsiveness of the isolated macrophages to their in vitro treatment with mediators of stress, making the cells less sensitive to the influence of CORT and NPY and to a lesser extent to BE. It could be concluded that changes in the local macrophage milieu induced by ES and SW 24 h earlier modify macrophage responses to subsequent in vitro exposure to the stress mimics, CORT, NPY and BE.     

We are the opposite of you! Mirroring of national,regional and ethnic stereotypes

The content of stereotypes can be shaped by multiple mechanisms, one of them possibly being the “mirroring effect.” Mirroring describes a phenomenon whereby people rate their ingroup characteristics as opposite to characteristics typical of a relevant outgroup. The aim of our study was to explore mirroring in three intergroup contexts—in national, regional, and ethnic stereotypes. In Study 1, 2,241 participants rated national ingroup stereotype and outgroup stereotypes of five Central European countries. In Study 2, 741 Czech participants rated regional ingroup and outgroup stereotypes of people living in two distinct parts of the Czech Republic. In Study 3, 463 majority and Hungarian minority participants in Slovakia rated ethnic ingroup and outgroup stereotypes. The results showed a clear presence of mirroring in all three contexts.     

Facilitating empathy through virtual reality

This research experimentally investigated whether virtual reality experience can prompt greater empathy and whether greater engagement with a virtual reality connects this virtual reality experience to empathy. Randomly assigned participants viewed a documentary featuring a young girl living in a refugee camp either in a virtual reality format or in a control two-dimensional format. Results indicated that the virtual reality experience resulted in greater engagement and a higher level of empathy for the refugee girl compared to the control condition. Greater engagement was a process connecting the virtual reality experience to empathy. Virtual reality has the potential to influence interpersonal emotions such as empathy.     

“Dear Employer,Let Me Introduce Myself” – Flow,Satisfaction with Work–Life Balance and Millennials’ Creativity

With creativity being recognised as a key driver of organizational success, organizations emphasize the need for their employees to be creative and to work long hours. This article takes a step toward understanding the factors contributing to the creativity of millennials, a generation pursuing meaningful work and cherishing a work–life balance. In Study 1 (n = 238), the relationships between creativity, flow, satisfaction with work–life balance and job crafting were explored; in Study 2 (n = 120) the focus was on examining flow as the mediator in the relationship between satisfaction with work–life balance and creativity. In experimental Study 3 (n = 90), the findings from Study 2 were replicated. Overall, the results of the three studies established flow as the mediating variable and demonstrated the beneficial role of satisfaction with the work–life balance and job crafting in the process leading to creativity.     

The Structure of Domination Today: A Lacanian View

Two topics determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness and the obsessive fear of harassment: the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other. The central human right in late-capitalist society, namely the right to be free from all harassment by the Other including the violent imposition of ethical norms, contrasts sharply with the violent imposition of divine Mosaic law – the Decalogue – from which the idea of human rights ultimately derives. The underlying discursive shift can be analyzed with the help of Lacan: the discourse of the Master had been replaced by university discourse. While the Master's decision is per se violent, university discourse is enunciated from the position of neutral Knowledge. The truth of the university discourse is power: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things.     

The characteristics of separation-individuation in Turkish High School students

The aim of the present study was examine the characteristics of separation-individuation in Turkish high school students and to investigate the contribution of sociodemographic variables on this second individuation process of adolescence. The sample consisted of 618 adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18 in three urban and two rural high schools (338 females and 280 males). Measures used included a demographic questionnaire and the Separation-Individuation Test of Adolescence (SITA), developed by Levin, Green, and Millon (1986). Results indicated that the 16-year-old group had significantly higher mean scores on the Engulfment Anxiety, Dependency Denial, and Rejection Expectancy subscales than the 15-year-old group. Males had significantly higher scores on the Practicing-Mirroring subscale than girls. Tenth graders had significantly higher mean scores on the Practicing-Mirroring, Nurturance Seeking, Peer Enmeshment, Teacher Enmeshment, and Healthy Separation subscales but the mean scores on the Dependency Denial and Engulfment Anxiety subscales decreased. The means scores on the Practicing-Mirroring, Dependency, Denial, Separation Anxiety, Teacher Enmeshment, and Rejection Expectancy subscales were significantly different among the socioeconomic status groups. Also, rural adolescents can be distinguished from urban counterparts by their increased tendency to perceive themselves as self-centered, to experience separation anxiety, to seek close interpersonal ties with caretakers, teachers, and peers, and by an integration of needs for dependence and independence. The general pattern of results investigating the separation-individuation development of Turkish adolescents suggested that compared with individualistic Western cultures, Turkish culture stressed the importance of connection as well as separation and psychic restructuring and interpersonal relatedness changes leading to an autonomous self within relational contexts.     

Function transformation without reinforcement

In studies of function transformation, participants initially are taught to match stimuli in the presence of a contextual cue, X; the stimuli to be matched bear some formal relation to each other, for example, a relation of opposition or difference. In a second phase, the participants are taught to match arbitrary stimuli (say, A and B) in the presence of X. In a final test, A often displays behavioral functions that differ from those of B, and can be predicted from the nature of the relation associated with X in the initial training phase. Here we report function-transformation effects in the absence of selection responses and of their reinforcers. In three experiments with college students, exposure to relations of difference or identity modified the responses given to later stimuli. In Experiment 1, responses to a test stimulus A varied depending on preexposure to pairs of colors that were distinct from A but exemplified relations of difference or identity. In Experiment 2, a stimulus A acquired distinct functions, depending on its previous pairing with a contextual cue X that had itself been paired with identity or difference among colors. Experiment 3 confirmed the results of Experiment 2 with a modified design. Our data are consistent with the notion that relations of identity or difference can serve as stimuli for Pavlovian processes, and, in compound with other cues, produce apparent function-transformation effects.     

Precompetitive anxiety and affective state of climbers in indoor climbing competition

The purpose of this study was to measure the precompetitive anxiety and affective states of climbers, particularly with regard to sex and types of competition. 37 men (M=25.9, SD=3.8 yr.) and 10 women (M=25.9, SD=4.2 yr.), climbers who enrolled in Indoor Sport Climbing Competition, voluntarily participated in two different types of competition-speed and difficulty indoor climbing. The Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule were administered to all climbers just before the competition. The Sport Competition Anxiety Test was also administered to control competitive trait anxiety. Multivariate analysis of covariance yielded a significant interaction of sex and type of competition for affective state (Hotelling T2=0.21; F2,33=3.43, p<.05). Follow-up univariate analysis indicated that the mean Negative Affect score of women climbers before the difficulty competition was higher than mean Negative Affect scores of men before both speed and difficulty competitions and also the mean for women climbers before the speed competition (F1,34 = 6.15, p <.05). The results partially supported the hypothesis of differences in negative affect by sex and types of competition.     

Interpretation of pronouns in VP-ellipsis constructions in Dutch Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia

In this paper, we investigate the ability of Dutch agrammatic Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics to assign reference to possessive pronouns in elided VP constructions. The assumption is that the comprehension problems in these two populations have different sources that are revealed in distinct patterns of responses. The focus is primarily on the performance of the agrammatic group whose errors in comprehension are not viewed as a consequence of a breakdown of grammatical knowledge but as a result of limited processing resources (for an overview see Grodzinsky, 2000). The results of the present study provide evidence for the psycholinguistic reality of the economy hierarchy as proposed in the Primitives of Binding (Reuland, 2001). According to the economy hierarchy proposed for the non-brain-damaged, the more economical semantic dependencies are preferred over the costlier discourse dependencies. This hierarchy is reflected in agrammatic aphasia where the semantic dependencies are available on time and preferred over the discourse dependences that are not available on time as a result of the lack of processing resources with consequences for comprehension.