Reactions to ambiguous stimuli among paranoid personalities

The psychological literature on paranoia and paranoid schizophrenia is extensive, particularly in the area of perceptual and cognitive processing. However, there has been a relative neglect of paranoid personality. The present study investigates whether paranoid personalities differed from controls in their responses to ambiguous or incomplete stimuli. Paranoid personalities (PP), other personality controls (OP), and normal subjects (NR) were exposed to blurred pictures of zoo animals which became progressively clearer. Subjects were asked to identify the content of such pictures from a list provided and to rate their confidence in their respective identifications. The PPs were unique in suspecting that correct answers were not provided by the experimenters. The confidence levels of the PPs also decreased significantly during the course of the experiment, whereas the OP and NR subjects' levels did not. The PP group made significantly earlier attempts at identifying the ambiguous slides and were significantly more accurate in doing so compared to the NR group. Neither group differed significantly from the OR controls on these two measures. The significance of the results are discussed.     

Personality Moderating Variables: A Warning about Statistical Artifact and a Comparison of Analytic Techniques

ABSTRACT Personality moderating variables act to qualify the relationship between a personality trait measure and a relevant behavioral criterion. Two data analytic techniques that can be used to test for significant moderating effects are the "median split" (MS) approach and the "moderated multiple regression" (MMR) approach. The goals of the present research were ( a ) to apply the MS approach to computer-simulated data in which the moderator and trait extremity are confounded, to determine the extent of artifact, and ( b ) to compare the performance (Type I and Type II error rates) of the two approaches when applied to confounded and nonconfounded data. It was found that when the MS approach was applied to confounded data in which no real moderating effect existed, this approach produced an alarming rate of apparent, but spurious, moderating effects. When the MMR approach was applied to the same data, the rate of spurious effects was reduced to that expected by chance. When both approaches were applied to simulated data which contained genuine moderating effects, the MMR approach consistently resulted in more correct detections of these effects than the MS approach. We conclude that researchers should always employ the MMR rather than the MS approach when testing for personality moderator variable effects.     

Returning to the Fire: Surviving the Holocaust and “Going Back”

This paper examines the multiply determined factors in Holocaust survivors who return to their native countries and sites of persecution. Citing material from archived interviews and consultations with a gravely ill survivor, as well as published accounts from others, the author explores historical, cultural, and psychodynamic dimensions. Intrapsychic, developmental, and traumatic aspects are considered, such as the fantasy of reunion with the lost maternal object, unresolved grief, the repetition compulsion, attempts at mastery, and the use of counterphobic or hypomanic defenses. This constellation of factors is seen in the context of the Jewish premium on remembering and the political realities of post war Europe. The role of the Second Generation in assisting the survivor parents in the working through process is also emphasized.     

ABSTRACT OF LITERATURE

This report from a research team describes problems in obtaining a sample to do family research. Institutional barriers, attitudinal barriers, procedural barriers, and guidelines for penetrating the barriers are discussed. Sample acquisition can be very time-consuming and nonrewarding unless researchers design techniques to deal with these problems in their projects.     

Gradients of attraction as a function of the fit between social setting and stimulus person characteristics: Studies of the differentiation of attitude

Two experiments compared three alternative hypotheses concerning differences in attraction to a person across interaction settings: A compartmentalization hypothesis assumes that a person's (A's) intimate and nonintimate characteristics only affect attraction to him in intimate and nonintimate interactions, respectively, and that there is no generalization of attraction across levels of intimacy. An intimacy dominance hypothesis assumes that a person's intimacy-related characteristics determine attraction to him at all levels of interaction. Finally, an intimacy threshold hypothesis assumes that a person's intimacy-related characteristics become increasingly relevant to attraction as the intimacy of interaction increases, but that these characteristics need not influence attraction at nonintimate levels of interaction. Experiment 1 supported the compartmentalization hypothesis. Attraction to a formal teacher decreased as the intimacy of the anticipated setting increased, while attraction to an informal teacher increased with increasing setting intimacy. In Experiment 2, agreement on intimate topics promoted liking for a peer while no effect was found for agreement on superficial topics. This effect only emerged for intimate interaction settings, supporting the intimacy threshold hypothesis. High positive correlations between distance preference and attraction were obtained in Experiment 1, while analogous data obtained in Experiment 2 had less clear implications.     

ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE

Two case examples are presented in support of the hypothesis that family therapy is useful in situations in which the identified patients are students at a university counseling center. The core dynamic issues focus around separation from parents. It is felt that the family therapy is a useful adjunct to the individual psychotherapy.     

Sensitivity and decisional factors in the psychological refractory period

Three trained Ss responded to a pair of events presented at fixed interstimulus intervals (ISIs) of 33, 67, and 100 msec. Each event was the independent presence of a visual stimulus (S-P) or its absence (S-A), to which Ss were to respond or not, with a set for speed over accuracy. The probabilities of Sop occurrence [P(S)] to each of the events were varied. Pretrial verbal reports or behavioral hypotheses (BHs) werealso obtained. P(S), ISI, BH, and order (first vs second event) were all generally determinants of both RT to Sop and inhibition probability to S-A. However, when the RT data were corrected for inhibition probability, order was the only systematic effect that remained. The results were discussed in terms of approaches to the psychological refractory period derived from signal detection theory involving differential sensitivity as opposed to criterion.     

Effects of constraint and validity of sentence contexts on lexical decisions

Recent models of sentence context effects predict that the pattern of facilitation and inhibition of response to sentence completions should be influenced by the experiment-wide contextual “environment.” In the present experiments, this environment was manipulated in several ways, including the degree to which contexts constrained possible completions, the probability of predictable completions’ being presented, and the probability of congruous completions’ being presented. In Experiment 1, decreasing the proportion of congruent test words had no effect on either the facilitation for highly likely words or the inhibition for incongruent words; increasing the proportion of predictable words produced no increase in facilitation for these words, but did increase the inhibition for incongruous words. In Experiment 2, contexts with very high or very low degrees of constraint produced equivalent results when predictability was uniformly low: no facilitation for unlikely but congruent words, and inhibition for incongruent words. In general, the patterns of change in facilitation and inhibition caused by changes in the contextual environment were more consistent with the modified two-process model (Stanovich & West, 1983) than with the verification model (Becker, 1982). But the limited range of influence suggests that, under conditions approximating normal reading, little use is made of such “metacontextual” information.     

ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE

This is a report on the methodology for an outcome study of marital therapy, comparing an interpretative approach with a direct, behavioral approach based on operant conditioning principles. A control group will receive common sense, nondirective, and noninterpretive therapy. All three types of treatment will be given by the same therapist. Assessment will be done by an independent assessor, blind to treatment, and by questionnaires filled out separately by each partner, covering work, leisure, social, and sexual spheres, as well as symptoms. Sessions will be given every other week, usually up to ten sessions, but cases could be stopped earlier. An example of each of the three approaches is given, and preliminary impressions of treatment are reported.