Building Bridges: Teresa of Avila and self psychology

Utilizing concepts from self psychology, the author demonstrates the ways in which God functioned as a selfobject for Teresa of Avila. In addition, parallels are drawn between the spiritual journey as described by Teresa of Avila and the psychotherapeutic journey. Building bridges between the psychological and spiritual realms of experience can greatly increase our understanding of each, and enable us to help our clients become more integrated, whole persons.     

The use of decomposition in probability assessments of continuous variables

In this study, decomposition is used as a tool for the assessment of continuous probability distributions. The goal of using decomposition is to obtain better calibrated probability distributions by expressing a variable as a known function of several component variables. Three target quantities were used in the study. Each was assessed holistically and using two different decompositions. Thus, each subject provided three distributions for each of the three target quantities. The recomposed assessments were compared to holistic assessments. The distributions obtained using decomposition were found to be much better calibrated than those obtained holistically. Two methods of aggregating distributions from multiple subjects were also examined. One involves aggregating (averaging) distributions before recomposing while the second method involves recomposing and then averaging distributions for the target variable. The second method was found to be slightly better, although both showed better calibration than was found in the individual assessments.     

Calculation of additional heart rates using oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production: A comparative analysis

Research, to date, on the occurrence of additional heart rates during behavioral stressors has employed oxygen consumption as the index of metabolic activity. Although this is the obvious first choice, in certain situations measures of carbon dioxide production may be more readily obtained. The analysis presented in this paper explored the intuitively appealing notion that, since oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production are themselves intimately related, carbon-dioxide-production measures may also be appropriate in the “additional heart rate” methodology. Data from the most recent additional-heart-rate paper by Turner and colleagues were thus reexamined, and additional heart rates during mental arithmetic and a video game were separately calculated for the 24 subjects by first using oxygen consumption and then by using carbon dioxide production. The values obtained were very highly correlated; the coefficients for the task: periods themselves were 0.99 and 0.96, respectively. Use of carbon-dioxide-production data-in this manner would, therefore, seem to be appropriate.     

Role played self-disclosure as a function of liking and knowing

Subjects identified persons from their own lives whom they liked and knew to varying degrees. At a later session, subjects role-played a self-disclosing conversation with each identified person. Verbal behavior was recorded and analyzed with respect to the personalness of disclosure. Analysis of variance results for both self-report and observational measures show significant effects for liking and knowing on personal, but not impersonal, self-disclosure. The pattern of results over all dependent measures indicates that liking has a more specific effect on personal disclosure than does knowing, but that liking and knowing do not differ in relative control over impersonal disclosure. A correlational analysis involving subjects' perceptions of the experimental situation and the dependent disclosure measures supported this interpretation.     

Children's understanding of their own phonological forms

The ability of young children to understand their own and other children's deviant phonological forms was tested. Children were better at understanding an unfamiliar adult's speech than they were at understanding their own or other childrens' speech. Their understanding was found to be related to the degree to which the deviant speech resembled the adult phonological form. It was concluded that children do not store their own deviant phonological forms for recognition in the same way that they store adult forms.     

Selective punishment early and late in fixed-ratio schedules of food reinforcement

Pigeons key pecked for grain on a fixed-ratio 100 schedule; electric shocks occurred intermittently at the fifteenth or eighty-fifth response in the ratio. In Experiment I, shock was at the fifteenth response for two birds, and at the eighty-fifth response for two others, in every sixth, twelfth, or eighteenth ratio. Rate of responding decreased as frequency of shock increased, and the pattern of responding included an increased initial pause and low rates or pause-run sequences that extended further into the ratio when shock was at the fifteenth response than when it was at the eighty-fifth response. Shock early in the ratio engendered longer initial pauses than shock late in the ratio. In Experiment II, four birds responded on a two-component multiple schedule in which shock occurred at the fifteenth response of the third ratio in the presence of a white keylight and at the eighty-fifth response of the third ratio in the presence of a green keylight. The overall rates of responding decreased as shock intensity increased. All four birds responded differentially to the white and green keylights, but with a pattern that varied between birds. In general, punishment reduced the probability of responses that preceded it, regardless of the ordinal position of those responses. Both studies confirm that the probability of responding is reduced less by aversive stimuli produced late in a fixed-ratio than by aversive stimuli produced early in a fixed-ratio.     

Contrast effects on the auditory evoked response and its relation to psychophysical judgments

An auditory average evoked response (AER) procedure was used to search for a physiological counterpart of the contrast effect-the tendency for a S’s judgment of the intensity of a stimulus to be modified by the intensity of prior stimulation. When a tone was preceded by a softer tone, its AER amplitude increased; conversely, when a tone followed a louder tone, amplitude decreased. Irregular intervals between tones decreased the AER contrast effect, as did increasing the interval between tones. Further, significant correlations were found between individual scores on the AER contrast procedure and performance on a battery of psychophysical tasks.