Groundhog day: The individual,the couple,the group and the space between

Abstract

The film Groundhog Day first came out in 1993. Five years later, it is still cited in a variety of contexts. The author proposes that this is because the film is a cultural artefact which both elucidates and frustrates the ideal of romantic love in the couple as the agent of internal change.

The author also proposes a re-viewing of the meaning of the concept of couple. The convergence of object relations theories with group analysis suggests that the mind works by repeating and externalizing internal group structures in social relationships. The couple, then, becomes an intermediary structure between the individual and the group where intimacy facilitates a re-working of group internal structures. It is the collapsing and the opening of the ‘space between’ which is the agent of change. This process creates strength, power and a feeling of wholeness. But it also implies the expression of anger, pain and disappointment. The author illustrates these points with an interpretation of the Groundhog Day film and with a clinical case study of a couple in therapy.     

When voices get emotional: A corpus of nonverbal vocalizations for research on emotion processing

Nonverbal vocal expressions, such as laughter, sobbing, and screams, are an important source of emotional information in social interactions. However, the investigation of how we process these vocal cues entered the research agenda only recently. Here, we introduce a new corpus of nonverbal vocalizations, which we recorded and submitted to perceptual and acoustic validation. It consists of 121 sounds expressing four positive emotions (achievement/triumph, amusement, sensual pleasure, and relief) and four negative ones (anger, disgust, fear, and sadness), produced by two female and two male speakers. For perceptual validation, a forced choice task was used (n = 20), and ratings were collected for the eight emotions, valence, arousal, and authenticity (n = 20). We provide these data, detailed for each vocalization, for use by the research community. High recognition accuracy was found for all emotions (86 %, on average), and the sounds were reliably rated as communicating the intended expressions. The vocalizations were measured for acoustic cues related to temporal aspects, intensity, fundamental frequency (f0), and voice quality. These cues alone provide sufficient information to discriminate between emotion categories, as indicated by statistical classification procedures; they are also predictors of listeners’ emotion ratings, as indicated by multiple regression analyses. This set of stimuli seems a valuable addition to currently available expression corpora for research on emotion processing. It is suitable for behavioral and neuroscience research and might as well be used in clinical settings for the assessment of neurological and psychiatric patients. The corpus can be downloaded from Supplementary Materials.     

EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, biphones, and bisyllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users either to upload a set of words to receive their properties or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/espal/.     

Quality of Life in Women Following Various Surgeries of Body Manipulation: Organ Transplantation, Mastectomy, and Breast Reconstruction

This study aimed to determine biopsychosocial differences (anxious-depressive symptomatology and quality of life) among three groups of patients who underwent surgical interventions related to body manipulation, as well as to assess the clinical significance of these results versus reference values. Four groups were compared: women who underwent organ transplant (n = 26), mastectomy for breast cancer (n = 36), breast reconstruction (n = 36), and general population (n = 608). The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and the EORTC QLQ-C30 were used. Women who underwent mastectomy showed the highest anxious-depressive symptomatology and quality-of-life impairment in comparison to the remaining groups, and they also displayed the most clinically significant deterioration in the majority of dimensions (large effect sizes). In contrast, the group with implantation of a healthy organ (transplantation) only showed higher biopsychosocial impairment than the group with reconstruction of an organ (breast reconstruction) in gastrointestinal dysfunctions and in the global self-perception of health.     

Auditory Hallucinations as Social Self-Positions: A Theoretical Discussion from a Single-Case Study

This work uses social positioning analysis to investigate the phenomenon of the auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) in schizophrenia in order to describe its social and interactive nature. We focus in detail on a single-case study of a patient who verbalized her AVHs. We analyze 3 significant excerpts from an interview with a person with paranoid schizophrenia. This interview is part of a larger study conducted with 18 participants about life narrative construction in the sociocultural context of care homes. The interaction between the patient and her voices is examined closely to reveal the dynamic between interviewer, patient, and voices. The analysis differentiates the voice of the patient from that of the hallucination and reveals “social interaction” between this dyad and the interviewer. We discuss a possible social and interactive framework to understand the origin of AVHs and the self-construction process.     

Bibliometric Review of the Repertory Grid Technique: 1998–2007

This bibliometric review covers the scientific production with or about the repertory grid technique (RGT; Kelly, 1955/1991) between 1998 and 2007. An analysis of previous reviews suggests the need for a more careful and broad process of bibliographic research. With this aim, 24 bibliographic sources were used to cover a wide range of specialties. We began by drawing up an explicit protocol in which the research terms were detailed. Then we consulted the bibliographic sources, taking into account a specification of inclusion and exclusion criteria. As a result of this process, 973 references were obtained: 468 journal papers, 335 book chapters, 108 doctoral theses, and 62 books. The review also evaluates the types of documents found, the evolution of the number of works published, the repertory grid's fields of application, and the degree of openness to other disciplines. The most relevant authors, their affiliations, countries, and the publication language are also revealed in this article, as well as the major journals contributing to dissemination of the work done with this technique.     

Cognitive Factors in Fibromyalgia: The Role of Self-Concept and Identity Related Conflicts

Fibromyalgia is a syndrome characterized by the presence of diffuse and chronic musculoskeletal pain of unknown etiology. Clinical diagnosis and the merely palliative treatments considerably affect the patient's experience and the chronic course of the disease. Therefore, several authors have emphasized the need to explore issues related to self in these patients. The repertory grid technique (RGT), derived from personal construct theory, is a method designed to assess the patient's construction of self and others. A group of women with fibromyalgia (n = 30) and a control group (n = 30) were assessed using RGT. Women with fibromyalgia also completed the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire and a visual-analogue scale for pain, and painful tender points were explored. Results suggest that these women had a higher present self–ideal self discrepancy and a lower perceived adequacy of others, and it was more likely to find implicative dilemmas among them compared to controls. These dilemmas are a type of cognitive conflict in which the symptom is construed as “enmeshed” with positive characteristics of the self. Finally, implications of these results for the psychological treatment of fibromyalgia are suggested to give a more central role to self-identity issues and to the related cognitive conflicts.     

Viewing Cognitive Conflicts as Dilemmas: Implications for Mental Health

The idea that internal conflicts play a significant role in mental health has been extensively addressed in various psychological traditions, including personal construct theory. In the context of the latter, several measures of conflict have been operationalized using the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT). All of them capture the notion that change, although desirable from the viewpoint of a given set of constructs, becomes undesirable from the perspective of other constructs. The goal of this study is to explore the presence of cognitive conflicts in a clinical sample (n = 284) and compare it to a control sample (n = 322). It is also meant to clarify which among the different types of conflict studied provides a greater clinical value and to investigate its relationship to symptom severity (SCL-90-R). Of the types of cognitive conflict studied, implicative dilemmas were the only ones to discriminate between clinical and nonclinical samples. These dilemmas were found in 34% of the nonclinical sample and in 53% of the clinical sample. Participants with implicative dilemmas showed higher symptom severity, and those from the clinical sample displayed a higher frequency of dilemmas than those from the nonclinical sample.     

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Low-Income,Predominantly African American Women With PTSD and a History of Intimate Partner Violence

In this article, we consider the use of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR; Kabat-Zinn, 1991) as a community-based intervention for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among low-income, predominantly African American women with a history of intimate partner violence (IPV). The results of a pilot randomized clinical trial (RCT) of MBSR as an intervention for PTSD with this population are forthcoming. In this article, we present our rationale for using MBSR as an intervention for PTSD with this population, describe MBSR and our adaptation of the curriculum and its implementation, and discuss the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention based on participants’ feedback and our observations.     

Difficulties,skills and therapy strategies in interventions with court-ordered batterers in Spain

As a consequence of its coercive context, psychological interventions with men convicted of intimate partner violence in Spain involve a series of challenges in the design and development of the therapy program. This article reviews the main international contributions that have considered the difficulties produced by the context and analyzes the most important skills that the therapist can utilize in order to facilitate the therapeutic process. The difficulties have been grouped in accordance with origin: (a) difficulties derived from the context of the intervention; (b) the characteristics of the offender; (c) the therapist. The principal skills and strategies of the therapist seem to be related to the clear definition of the intervention context, the management of therapeutic relationship and the therapist's capacity for analysis and reflection. Finally, this work recognizes the need for research projects that focus on the therapist and aspects of the therapeutic process that could optimize the implementation of therapist training actions and improve treatment results.