Different origins and meanings of acute acting-out in an inpatient psychotherapeutic setting

In this paper I describe four different sources of acute acting-out behaviour as may be observed in long-term hospitalised patients suffering from severe personality disorders. I hope to demonstrate that acute psychological distress does not happen in a vacuum, but that specific intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics within the hospital setting are at the root of what appears overtly as nonspecific emotional and behavioural disturbance. I argue that the hospital team's correct insight into the factors underlying acute acting-out is crucial to the implementation of therapeutic interventions aimed to decrease the patient's disturbed state of mind.     

Remembering and repeating in multiple personality

This paper is a case-history of a student in his early twenties tortured by different personalities of different ages and sexes vying for control of his body. Guilt over an incestuous relationship with his mother is uncovered and understood in the context of his whole life. Confusion between memories of fantasies, memories of sleep dreams, memories of daydreams, and memories of actual memories are described, the elucidation of which lead to clearer thinking and memory, and more tolerance for the previously distorted affectladen situations of his past. Thus his belief that he was experimented on in an alien spaceship becomes the memory of an operating-room diagnostic experience.

A hypothesis is put forward that the separate personalities in the multiple personality are not simply the products of ego splits, but are at the instant they are formed a ‘doubling’ of the personality that is being copied. Immediately thereafter, splitting mechanisms create differences between the two separate personalities, using projective and introjective mechanisms. Integration of the various personalities, the ultimate goal in treatment, is made difficult by the patient's fear of loss of self through fragmentation, when the self is felt to be in danger of being intruded upon.     

On some types of hallucinatory experience

There are types of non-visual hallucinatory experience which occur in the psychoses other than those which have a critical and derogatory content. Wish-fulfilment plays an important part in the formation of the content of these hallucinations. In others, ‘persecutory’ anxiety also occurs. A comparison is made between hallucinatory and dream content. An hypothesis is presented to account for the perceptual quality of these hallucinatory experiences. The therapeutic implications of these considerations concludes this presentation.     

Emotion effects during reading: Influence of an emotion target word on eye movements and processing

Recently, Scott, O'Donnell and Sereno reported that words of high valence and arousal are processed with greater ease than neutral words during sentence reading. However, this study unsystematically intermixed emotion (label a state of mind, e.g., terrified or happy) and emotion-laden words (refer to a concept that is associated with an emotional state, e.g., debt or marriage). We compared the eye-movement record while participants read sentences that contained a neutral target word (e.g., chair) or an emotion word (no emotion-laden words were included). Readers were able to process both positive (e.g., happy) and negative emotion words (e.g., distressed) faster than neutral words. This was true across a wide range of early (e.g., first fixation durations) and late (e.g., total times on the post-target region) measures. Additional analyses revealed that State Trait Anxiety Inventory scores interacted with the emotion effect and that the emotion effect was not due to arousal alone.     

AN EXTENDED BASIC SIGHT VOCABULARY FOR THE PRIMARY GRADES

Extant word lists are typically based on word frequency counts from various types of literature (e.g., basal readers, content textbooks, trade books, adult reading material). The word list described in this study was constructed by determining what words are commonly known (i.e., recognized in their written form) by beginning readers. Almost 7,000 primary grade children were tested for basic sight recognition of 1,800 high frequency words. Using a 90 percent minimum criterion (i.e., 90 percent or more of the students at each grade level recognized each word), a 1,683‐word list was established that consisted of 587 first‐grade words, 861 second‐grade words, and 235 third‐grade words. Implications and uses of the extended basic sight vocabulary are also discussed.     

Teachers With Linguistically Informed Knowledge of Reading Subskills are Associated with a Matthew Effect in Reading Comprehension for Monolingual and Bilingual Students

A longitudinal investigation determined the growth of reading comprehension from third to fifth grades in a cohort of students who received Language Enrichment (LE), an Orton-Gillingham–based literacy program, during first and second grades. The LE instruction was provided by regular education teachers who received comprehensive training in linguistically informed content pertaining to reading subskills. All students were traditionally instructed in kindergarten, third, fourth, and fifth grades. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) confirmed that mono- and bilingual students had significantly advantaged individual growth in reading comprehension as measured on the state-mandated Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) when their teachers had more experience implementing LE over students whose teachers had less experience implementing LE, or students whose teachers had no LE training. Findings showed a fan-shaped spread in achievement from third to fifth grades for all students in the cohort. The significance of the spread was confirmed by reliable covariance between the initial reading level and the growth in reading across grade levels. This fan-shaped growth pattern is often referred to as a Matthew effect in reading comprehension (Stanovich, 1986 Stanovich, K. E. 1986. Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4): 360–407. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). These results provide evidence that the Matthew effect may be associated with specific teaching pedagogies, especially early direct implementation of multisensory linguistically informed language arts instruction. LE instruction emphasizes phonemic awareness, symbol–sound correspondences, morphology, and vocabulary to develop phonological decoding strategies, word recognition accuracy, and comprehension of words in text.     

Attentional biases in dysphoria: An eye-tracking study of the allocation and disengagement of attention

This study looked for evidence of biases in the allocation and disengagement of attention in dysphoric individuals. Participants studied images for a recognition memory test while their eye fixations were tracked and recorded. Four image types were presented (depression-related, anxiety-related, positive, neutral) in each of two study conditions. For the simultaneous study condition, four images (one of each type) were presented simultaneously for 10 seconds, and the number of fixations and the total fixation time to each image was measured, similar to the procedure used by Eizenman et al. (2003) and Kellough, Beevers, Ellis, and Wells (2008). For the sequential study condition, four images (one of each type) were presented consecutively, each for 4 seconds; to measure disengagement of attention an endogenous cuing procedure was used (Posner, 1980). Dysphoric individuals spent significantly less time attending to positive images than non-dysphoric individuals, but there were no group differences in attention to depression-related images. There was also no evidence of a dysphoria-related bias in initial shifts of attention. With respect to the disengagement of attention, dysphoric individuals were slower to disengage their attention from depression-related images. The recognition memory data showed that dysphoric individuals had poorer memory for emotional images, but there was no evidence of a conventional mood-congruent memory bias. Differences in the attentional and memory biases observed in depressed and dysphoric individuals are discussed.     

Depressive implicit associations and adults' reports of childhood abuse

Theory and research suggest that negative events in childhood (e.g., childhood abuse) may contribute to the development of a cognitive vulnerability to depression. A limitation of past research, however, is that the majority has focused on explicit cognitions (e.g., attributional style) and it remains unclear whether similar relations would be observed for more implicit measures of depressive cognitions. This study investigated the relation between young adults' reports of childhood abuse and their implicit depressive cognitions, as measured by the Implicit Association Test. As hypothesised, young adults reporting a history of childhood abuse exhibited stronger implicit associations for depression-relevant stimuli than did individuals with no abuse history. These results were maintained even after statistically controlling for the influence of current depressive symptom levels.     

Goal Theories of Motivation as Rigorous Humanism

Over the past few decades, there has been increasing interest among social, clinical, and personality psychologists in the topic of human agency in general and personal goals in particular. Goal theories of motivation are described and analyzed from the perspective of Rychlak's rigorous humanism. Studying goals may actually be more of a methodology than a theory. A number of different theories could lead to the study of goals as a primary research methodology. However, not all such theories will meet Rychlak's criteria for rigorous humanism. The role of goals in Logical Learning Theory is discussed.     

Types of Aggression among Incarcerated Juveniles: The Roles of Gender and Offense Type

A new instrument, the Psychological Maltreatment Review (PMR), is introduced and its psychometrics are described. The PMR examines adult retrospective reports of child psychological abuse, psychological neglect, and psychological support, measured separately for maternal and paternal figures. Male and female participants (N?=?1,051) completed the PMR and a measure of adult attachment, the Revised Experiences in Close Relationships scale (Fraley, Waller, &; Brennan, 2000). The three scales of the PMR demonstrated very good internal consistency. The structural validity of the PMR was supported by both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, as was the notion of an independent parental support/nonsupport variable. Indicative of the construct validity of this measure, all PMR scales were significantly correlated with anxious and avoidant attachment in close relationships. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that paternal neglect and maternal psychological abuse predicted participants' anxious attachment, whereas less paternal and maternal support was associated with avoidant attachment.