The benefits of emotional expression for math performance

This study investigated the effects of emotional expression on actual and perceived math performance. Female participants were either asked to express their emotions or given no special instructions before taking a math test under stereotype threat or no stereotype threat conditions. Participants in the emotional expression condition performed better on the math test than participants in the control condition. Under stereotype threat, participants in the emotional expression condition believed they performed better on the math test. Emotional expression appears not only to have health benefits (e.g., Pennebaker, 1997), but academic benefits as well, including for stereotyped threatened individuals.     

Sándor Ferenczi: From Clinical Turmoil to Theoretical Articulations

The article deals with concepts proposed by Sándor Ferenczi: confusion of tongues, disavowal and progressive trauma, illustrated by a clinical example, in which excessive life experiences deeply determined the psychic construction, compromising the integrity of the self-image and the potentiality of egoic capacities. We attempt to understand the uniqueness of the patient's history, and the ethical practice of deep analytic listening.     

No More Away: Techno-Attachments and the Relational Future

This paper speculates about the impact of techno-connectedness on our children, ourselves, our grandchildren. Triggered by recollections from Victorian novels that describe European summers “away” from home, a concern about loss of opportunity, the “space” for self-discovery in this young generation will be explored in a relational context. Brought about by pervasive dependence upon computer technology, is self-experience fragmented and attachment changed by the ubiquitous technological presence and is the more isolated, reflective experience being eroded?     

Psychosis: A Synthesis of Motivational and Defect Perspectives

Based on the evolution of human intelligence and the tremendous cognitive capacities arising from it, we have an innate tendency for the extreme thought content, thought form, and sensory perceptions of psychosis. During the conscious and awake state, cognitive regulatory control processes block these more extreme variants to facilitate reality congruency necessary for adaptive functioning. While asleep there is no need for reality congruency and the cognitive regulatory control processes are deactivated allowing psychotic equivalents to be expressed in dreams. This paper helps synthesize the two dominant perspectives regarding the etiology of psychosis: the neuroscience defect perspective and the psychoanalytic motivational perspective. Regarding the former, defective cognitive regulation arising from certain conditions, such as the deficit state of schizophrenia, allows extreme cognitive distortions, thought form variants, and sensory perceptual experiences to intrude into the conscious and awake state, thereby producing psychosis. Consistent with the psychoanalytic motivational perspective, defensive processes can motivate extreme cognitive distortions, thought form variants and sensory perceptual experiences, and also facilitate their expression by deactivating the relevant cognitive regulatory control processes.     

Critical Transference in a Case of Severe Epilepsy

In this paper, the author presents a summary of a brief treatment with a young woman, suffering from severe epileptic illness, which describes the mutuality of cross-transferences of deep and intense feelings and the unorthodox way to receive, to take in persons affected with critical phenomena. This treatment was deeply influenced by the traumatic triad, borrowed from Ferenczi: "amnesia, anaesthesia, aboulia," the ways of forgetting (or erasing) the past/the present/the future. The investigation led us to clarify, on the one hand, the incestophilic-or perhaps incestuous-source in the family, and on the other, the burdensome and tragic genealogy and history of each parent. At the end of this short treatment, which took place at a frequency of one session a week (with the patient sitting, standing, lying on the floor; with sometimes severe fits, deliria, threats; bringing of letters, texts, drawings; and a few phone calls), there was an alleviation of the critical phenomena and revival.     

Stress in Clinical Psychology Trainees: Current Research Status and Future Directions

The purpose of this article is to present the current status of the literature related to stress in clinical psychology trainees (CPTs), and to offer research directions for investigating stress in this population and ways to enhance self‐care in these individuals. The following conclusions emerge from the review: (1) CPTs are vulnerable to elevated stress; (2) undue stress can negatively impact CPTs' personal and professional functioning and, in turn, result in less than optimal standards of care for clients; (3) there is a dearth of studies on stress in this population and no published intervention studies; (4) incorporating self‐care strategies into clinical psychology training is recommended; and (5) “third‐wave” cognitive behaviour therapy stress management interventions have been efficacious in comparable populations. In view of the potential costs of elevated stress to trainees themselves and their clients, research on stress and stress management in this population is of a high priority. Broad research agendas are proposed for these two domains. Modifications to clinical training programmes to reduce trainee stress are required and should be evidence‐based and systematically revaluated.     

Boundaries of reciprocity: Incompleteness of information undermines cooperation

Past research has revealed that people have a strong tendency to respond to others' cooperative behavior with cooperation and to others' noncooperative behavior with noncooperation. Yet it is unclear whether or not this tendency still holds when people have only incomplete information about their interaction partner's past behavior. To address this question, we designed a new paradigm - a coin allocation paradigm - in which participants were provided with incomplete information about another person's degree of cooperative behavior (i.e., coin allocations to the participant). Consistent with our hypotheses, two experiments revealed that incompleteness of information undermines both expectations about another person's cooperation as well as one's own cooperation. Moreover, complementary analyses indicated that the detrimental effects of incompleteness of information on cooperation were mediated by expectations of other's cooperation. We suggest that a relatively strong belief in self-interest serves to fill in the blanks when information is incomplete, which undermines expectations of other's cooperation as well as one's own cooperative behavior.