The concept of the fully functioning person

Conclusion Here then is my theoretical model of the person who emerges from therapy—a person functioning freely in all the fullness of his organismic potentialities; a person who is dependable in being realistic, self-enhancing, socialized and appropriate in his behavior; a creative person, whose specific formings of behavior are not easily predictable; a person who is ever changing, ever developing, always discovering himself and the newness in himself in each succeeding moment of time. This is the person who in an imperfect way actually emerges from the experience of safety and freedom in a therapeutic experience, and this is the person whom I have tried to describe for you in pure form.My purpose has not been to convince you of the correctness of this view. Indeed I would have to confess that I have written this paper primarily for my own satisfaction, to clarify the thoughts which have been stirring in me. But if this presentation causes you to formulate your view of the person who emerges from therapy, or enables you to point out flaws in my own thinking which I have not yet seen, or arouses in you the desire to put to objective test either this picture or one which you paint for yourself, then it will have fully served both its primary and its secondary purpose.Reprinted by permission from Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, Vol. 1, No. 1, August, 1963.     

Overtraining, transfer to proprioceptive control and position reversal

If rats are overtrained on a visual discrimination they generally learn the reversal of the discrimination faster than non-overtrained rats. In position discriminations, however, this effect does not generally hold—indeed several investigators have found overtraining to retard position reversal. One of the important differences between the two types of problem seems to be the presence of irrelevant cues in visual discriminations, and their absence in position discriminations. It is suggested that a second important feature of position discriminations is that overtraining usually causes control of the maze running habit to be transferred from external to proprioceptive stimuli, and that successful reversal cannot normally occur until external control is re-established. In two experiments a study by Krechevsky and Honzik (1932) is repeated with certain modifications, with results that support this hypothesis; and a third experiment provides direct evidence of transfer to proprioceptive control in a T-maze. It is shown that this analysis will explain the apparently conflicting results of all recent position reversal experiments.     

Tenacious goal pursuit and flexible goal adjustment: explication and age-related analysis of assimilative and accommodative strategies of coping

Crises and critical life transitions activate 2 distinct but complementary modes of coping, (a) transforming developmental circumstances in accordance with personal preferences (assimilative tendency) and (b) adjusting personal preferences to situational constraints (accommodative tendency). Assimilative and accommodative tendencies were measured by a questionnaire comprising 2 independent scales (Tenacious Goal Pursuit and Flexible Goal Adjustment). Both scales predict high life satisfaction and low depression and are positively related to generalized internal control beliefs. The scales evinced an opposite relation to age: Cross-sectional analyses on a sample of 890 Ss in the age range from 34 to 63 years revealed a gradual shift from an assimilative to an accommodative mode of coping. Implications for theories of depression and successful aging are discussed.     

Preserved organization of semantic attributes in Alzheimer's disease

This study investigated whether Alzheimer's disease (AD) disrupts the basic organization of the semantic attributes of concepts. Young and normal older subjects and AD patients were presented with a target concept followed by a stimulus word and were to decide whether the stimulus was related to the target. On those trials where it was, the stimulus was either a high-, medium-, or low-dominance attribute of the target. The higher the normative dominance, the more important the attribute to concept meaning. In all 3 subject groups, decision time varied as a function of dominance. The higher the dominance, the faster the decision. Attribute dominance affected the performance of AD patients more than that of normal subjects. These results suggest that AD patients retain their knowledge of the relative importance that the different attributes of a concept have for concept meaning.