Separation‐Individuation,Adult Attachment Style,and College Adjustment

The authors examined the relationship between separation‐individuation, adult attachment styles, and college adjustment. One hundred fifty‐six young adults completed the Psychological Separation Inventory (J. A. Hoffman, 1984; J. A. Hoffman & B. Weiss, 1987), 2 subscales from the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (R. W. Baker & B. Siryk, 1989), a measure of pathology of separation‐individuation (R. M. Christenson & W. P. Wilson, 1985), and assessments of adult attachment style (K. Bartholomew & L. Horowitz, 1991). College adjustment was positively associated with secure adult attachment and counterindicated by fearful and preoccupied attachments. Implications for counseling practice and directions for future research are discussed.     

Temporal Contiguity and Contingency Judgments: A Pavlovian Analogue

The two experiments reported examine the role of temporal contiguity on judgments of contingency in a human analogue of the Pavlovian task. The data show that the effect of the actual delay on contingency judgment depends on the observer's expectation regarding the delay. For a fixed contingency between the cue and the outcome, ratings of the contingency are higher when the actual delay is congruent with the observer's expectation than when it is incongruent. We argue that our data can be understood within the context of the temporal coding hypothesis.     

Personality Disorder Attributes as Supplemental Goals for Change in Interpersonal Psychotherapy

Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) is a manualized, short-term (usually 12–16 sessions) based on the assumption that psychological disorders often emerge secondary to social and interpersonal problems that require active intervention to achieve symptom remission. The time-limited nature of IPT compels therapists to establish the goal of diminishing, on a weekly basis, a small number of focused interpersonal problems with a decided emphasis on proximal rather than historic conflicts and associated patterns of behavior. This strategy discourages the adoption of diffuse therapy goals and directions that have more opportunity to emerge in long-term, unstructured treatment modalities. The role of traditional personality testing in short-term therapy, when it occurs, is to identify and quantify symptom clusters that warrant attention as dependent measures in the treatment process. The role of personality factors in the genesis or maintenance of psychological disturbance is rarely addressed. The present article explores theoretical and pragmatic objections to the use of personality testing in IPT. A method is proposed for the limited but systematic incorporation of personality testing in the IPT treatment process using the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI-III). While unreasonable to expect personality transformation through short-term therapy, the partial attenuation of maladaptive behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional reactions to stressors could prove exceedingly helpful to short-term treatments such as IPT.     

I—Jennifer Hornsby

ABSTRACT The central claim is that the semantic knowledge exercised by people when they speak is practical knowledge. The relevant idea of practical knowledge is explicated, applied to the case of speaking, and connected with an idea of agents'knowledge. Some defence of the claim is provided.     

Developmental differences in the use of task goals in a cued version of the stroop task

The ability of children (M= 8.8 years) and adults (M= 25.6 years) to maintain task goals was examined by comparing their performance on a cued version of the Stroop colour‐word task. The experimental task presented a cue on each trial that instructed the participant to either read aloud the forthcoming word or name the colour of the word's lettering. Participants were tested with each of two cue‐stimulus delays (1,000 and 5,000 ms). Analysis of error rates in the colour‐naming condition revealed that children experienced greater interference than adults at each of the cue‐stimulus delays. In an effort to separate the relative contributions of colour‐naming and word‐reading processes, additional analyses were performed based on the process dissociation procedure of Lindsay and Jacoby (1994) . While colour‐naming process estimates did not vary with age group or cue‐stimulus delay, word‐reading process estimates were found to vary with age group and cue‐stimulus delay. Specifically, adults were superior to children in the inhibition of irrelevant word information only during a long cue‐stimulus delay. Collectively, these findings indicate that children have difficulty maintaining task goals in order to suppress stronger, goal‐irrelevant responses.