Why Should We Lower Our Defenses About Defense Mechanisms?

Personality and social psychologists already use ideas that are closely related to defense mechanisms, but few of our paradigms include extensive theoretical or empirical treatment of such mechanisms. Yet defense mechanisms focus on negative affect and protection of the self, and many of the controversies, issues, and impasses contemporary researchers confront also concern negative affect and self-protection. This article discusses whether we might find systematic consideration of defense mechanisms and defensive processing to be broadly useful across several related areas of personality and social psychology in which the relationships between self and affect are implicated. Areas considered include positive illusions and adaptation, the interpretation of reports of negative affect, and related concepts from the coping, self-regulation, affect regulation, and goals literature. Thinking about defense mechanisms would seem to have both specific value for sharpening our understanding of different possible interpretations of our data, and broad heuristic value for thinking about personality integration and social behavior.     

Therapeutic Document in Group Counseling: An Active Change Agent

In this article, the authors provide a therapeutic document model using language as an active change agent. The practice of the therapeutic letter has demonstrated substantial power in narrative therapy to foster client change. No literature, however, has applied this construct in group counseling. Grounded in social constructionism, re-authoring therapy and the power of written language, this model transforms the usually time-consuming and frequently nontherapeutic client documentation into a functional intervention. As a competency-based intervention, this model provides counselors with principles and procedures to enhance clients' self-agency and expedite the change process in group counseling.     

Object-based inhibition of return in static displays

After attention has been oriented to a location, inhibition mechanisms prevent the return of attention shortly afterward. This inhibition can be associated with an object in such a way that after cuing attention to the object, inhibition can move with the object to a new location. Recent research has noted that the object-based inhibition of return effect in moving displays is much smaller than the effect observed in static displays, and hence may be of little functional utility. However, we demonstrate that, on the contrary, the large effects observed in static displays are produced precisely because of the existence of object-based frames, which can be additive with location-based frames of reference.     

Long Term Outcomes to Family Caregiver Empowerment

The Vanderbilt Caregiver Empowerment Project evaluated a training program designed to enhance empowerment of caregiver and their subsequent involvement in the mental health treatment of their children. The intervention utilized a multi-component parent training curriculum that was designed to enhance: (a) knowledge of the service system; (b) skills needed to interact with the mental health system; and (c) the caregiver' s mental health services self-efficacy designed to improve caregivers beliefs in their ability to collaborate with service providers. The resulting increased empowerment was hypothesized to increase caretaker involvement, which should affect service use and ultimately the mental health status of the child. A randomized design was used to test the effectiveness of this model with caregivers of children receiving mental health services. The results one-year after the training replicated the intermediate outcomes of the project conducted 3-months after the training. The initial training continued to significantly influence the parent's knowledge and mental health services self-efficacy. However, the intervention had no effect on caregiver involvement in treatment, service use or the mental health status of the children.     

Creative Change: The Life and Work of Four Novelists: Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth

Robert Kastenbaum has argued that we need to take a life-span approach to the lives of artists in order to determine what factors affected their creativity. To that end, I briefly review the lives of four writers, Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth. Each followed a different pattern: Austen wrote productively until her early death; Forster ceased to write novels after his midlife success; Barbara Pym continued to write until her death from cancer; and Henry Roth restarted his moribund career in his seventies. These differences suggest that creativity is closely connected to life events and the artist's psychological state of mind.     

The effects of stimulus movement and attention on peripheral stimulus localization by 8- to 26-week-old infants

This study examined the effect of stimulus movement on localization probability and latency during attention and inattention. Forty infants, 10 each at 8, 14, 20, and 26 weeks of age were presented with a central stimulus. Then, a peripheral stimulus was presented (static or dynamic checkerboard). Stimulus movement did not affect localization probability. Infants localized the dynamic peripheral stimulus more quickly than the static peripheral stimulus when there was no focal stimulus. Focal stimulus attention attenuated this difference in localization latency between static and dynamic stimuli. Signal detection analysis showed that sensitivity to the peripheral stimulus increased over this age range along with a decrease in the bias against responding. The effects of attention were on response bias rather than stimulus sensitivity. These results imply attention affected the localization response to the peripheral stimulus but did not affect the sensitivity of the sensory and perceptual pathways to peripheral stimuli.     

A study of pragmatic skills of clutterers and normal speakers

In communication dyads, three junior high clutterers interacted verbally with three matched control subjects in a task that required one member of the dyad to explain a complicated route (from a marked map of a town center) to the other (who had an unmarked map.) Members played both roles in the dyads. These six subjects were compared with one group of normally speaking control subjects carrying out the same task. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that, compared with normal speaking pupils, clutterers frequently manifested pragmatic errors and communication failures.