Lament as a Contributor to the Healing of Trauma: an Application of Poetry in the Form of Biblical Lament

Pastoral Psychology - Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians begins with exuberant praise to the “God of all comfort who comforts us in all our affliction.” Many today suffer...     

High self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success

What good is self‐control? We incorporated a new measure of individual differences in self‐control into two large investigations of a broad spectrum of behaviors. The new scale showed good internal consistency and retest reliability. Higher scores on self‐control correlated with a higher grade point average, better adjustment (fewer reports of psychopathology, higher self‐esteem), less binge eating and alcohol abuse, better relationships and interpersonal skills, secure attachment, and more optimal emotional responses. Tests for curvilinearity failed to indicate any drawbacks of so‐called overcontrol, and the positive effects remained after controlling for social desirability. Low self‐control is thus a significant risk factor for a broad range of personal and interpersonal problems.     

Fragmenting pictures on the apple macintosh computer for experimental and clinical applications

A set of procedures implemented in Microsoft BASIC is described that creates fragmented versions of pictures scanned into the Apple Macintosh, stores them as resource files, and presents them in a computerized perceptual memory test. A total of 150 pictures were selected from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) set for fragmentation. The perceptual memory test provides for five forms of 30 pictures each, divided into two sets of 15 that serve alternately as the training or old set and the new set. A training set of 15 pictures is presented for identification during the first (training) phase of the test. The second (test) phase presents the training pictures again, randomly mixed with 15 new pictures for identification. The performance of 100 subjects on the memory test is presented, along with results for each form. Overall, subjects showed improvement on the task with practice (skill learning), indexed by a decrease in thresholds from the training set to the new set. Subjects also showed large savings for the repeated pictures (perceptual learning), indexed by a decrease in thresholds from the new to the old set.     

When self-help materials help: Examining the effects of self-discrepancy and modes of delivery of positive self-statements

Self-help materials inculcating individuals with positive self-statements are popular in recent years, although the effectiveness of such self-statements on improving individuals’ psychological well-being has not yet been confirmed. Using a control-group pre-test/post-test design, we examined how positive self-statements may or may not benefit individuals’ mood. Individual characteristics and modes of delivery were found to moderate mood changes resulting from positive self-statements. Specifically, we found that participants experienced negative mood change after reading positive self-statements, if they have low level of need satisfaction. However, we also found that participants experienced a mood boost after listening to positive self-statements, and this effect was unrelated to self-esteem or need satisfaction. These findings suggest that self-help materials with a focus on positive self-statements should be used with caution.     

Psychometric Validation of a Simplified Form of the PICTS for Low-Reading Level Populations

The Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) is one of the most widely used measures of criminal thinking. Although the PICTS has adequate psychometric qualities with many general population inmates, the measurement confound of reading ability may decrease its construct validity in low-literacy inmates. To help resolve this confound, we present psychometric evaluation of a simplified version of the PICTS (PICTS-SV) in which item language was simplified but item content was preserved. We first conducted Lexile analyses to confirm the reading level of the PICTS-SV is significantly lower than the original PICTS (i.e., sixth grade versus ninth grade). We then tested a bifactor model to confirm the PICTS-SV contains the same two factors as the original PICTS: proactive and reactive criminal thinking. These PICTS-SV results are commensurate with the factor structure of the original PICTS. Results suggest the PICTS-SV is a valid alternative for assessing criminal thinking in inmates with low reading ability.     

Perceptual dominance during lipreading

Two experiments were pedormed under visual-only and visual-auditory discrepancy conditions (dubs) to assess observers’ abilities to read speech information on a face. In the first experiment, identification and multiple choice testing were used. In addition, the relation between visual and auditory phonetic information was manipulated and related to perceptual bias. In the second experiment, the “compellingness” of the visual-auditory discrepancy as a single speech event was manipulated. Subjects also rated the confidence they had that their perception of the lipped word was accurate. Results indicated that competing visual information exerted little effect on auditory speech recognition, but visual speech recognition was substantially interfered with when discrepant auditory information was present. The extent of auditory bias was found to be related to the abilities of observers to read speech under nondiscrepancy conditions, the magnitude of the visual-auditory discrepancy, and the compellingheSS of the visual-auditory discrepancy as a single event. Auditory bias during speech was found to be a moderately compelling conscious experience, and not simply a case of confused responding or guessing. Results were discussed in terms of current models of perceptual dominance and related to results from modality discordance during space perception.