Listening to Themes in a Review of Psychoanalytic Literature About Lesbianism

Using the bibliography of the Committee on Homosexuality of the American Psychoanalytic Association as a resource, a wide review of the psychoanalytic literature on lesbianism and bisexuality in women was undertaken. An evolution in theory, over time, was observed in the writing by authors more familiar to most analysts. A second group of less widely known writers has also written extensively on the subject. This chapter focuses on the predominant, recurring themes found in the second body of work. These themes include: separating the concepts of gender identity and object choice; reexamining assumptions about developmental pathways; fluidity in object choice in women; dilemmas in lesbian experience; and treatment issues. Dilemmas include feeling different, coming out, relationship patterns, and decisions about parenting. Similarities between the ideas found in the two bodies of work are noted.     

Extratest Validity of Selected Personality Assessment Inventory Scales and Indicators in an Inpatient Substance Abuse Setting

Sixty college students were selected on the basis of their performance on an unstructured personality measure, Rokeach's Interrelations Task. Interrelatedness of ideas was significantly related to resistance to the influence of peer norms and to performance on a comprehensive, college-level examination. These findings extend the construct validity of interrelatedness and join other studies to demonstrate the importance and scope of this personality variable. A test construction strategy is discussed which would change the assessment of interrelatedness from a dichotomous classification to a continuum.     

Colour fluctuations in grapheme‐colour synaesthesia: The effect of clinical and non‐clinical mood changes

Synaesthesia is a condition that gives rise to unusual secondary sensations (e.g., colours are perceived when listening to music). These unusual sensations tend to be reported as being stable throughout adulthood (e.g., Simner & Logie, 2007, Neurocase, 13, 358) and the consistency of these experiences over time is taken as the behavioural hallmark of genuineness. Our study looked at the influence of mood states on synaesthetic colours. In Experiment 1, we recruited grapheme‐colour synaesthetes (who experience colours from letters/digits) and elicited their synaesthetic colours, as well as their mood and depression states, in two different testing sessions. In each session, participants completed the PANAS‐X (Watson & Clark, 1999) and the BDI‐II (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996, Manual for Beck Depression Inventory‐II), and chose their synaesthetic colours for letters A‐Z from an interactive colour palette. We found that negative mood significantly decreased the luminance of synaesthetic colours. In Experiment 2, we showed that synaesthetic colours were also less luminant for synaesthetes with anxiety disorder, versus those without. Additional evidence suggests that colour saturation, too, may inversely correlate with depressive symptoms. These results show that fluctuations in mood within both a normal and clinical range influence synaesthetic colours over time. This has implications for our understanding about the longitudinal stability of synaesthetic experiences, and of how mood may interact with the visual (imagery) systems.     

Developmental surface dyslexia and dysgraphia: An orthographic processing impairment

This study presents a detailed investigation of a young man in his early twenties who has suffered from a severe spelling impairment since childhood, and currently has a spelling age of only 9 years and 2 months. In contrast with the developmental phonological dyslexics reported by Campbell and Butterworth (1985) and Funnell and Davison (1989), his performance on tests of phonological awareness is good. In addition, he can read and spell non-words competently and, unlike normal 9-year-old children, virtually all of his spelling errors are phonologically appropriate. Further analysis of these errors reveals that he has knowledge of many of the different ways in which a given phoneme can be written, and that he uses phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences at the end of a word that are different from those he uses earlier in a word. However, he finds it difficult to spell words that contain uncommon phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, which is compatible with the view that he has not developed an orthographic spelling lexicon. Although his oral reading of words is prompt and generally accurate, analysis of his lexical decision performance and the way that he defines homophones indicate that he does not have fully specified lexical entries available for reading either. We suggest that he suffers from a general orthographic processing deficit, and relies instead upon the combination of sub-lexical phonology and a lexicon that contains only partial information about way in which words are spelt. This leads to reasonably competent reading, even of many irregular words, but produces very poor spelling. It is argued that qualitatively different types of developmental dyslexia do genuinely exist, but that reading impairments are likely to be much more pronounced in children who have a phonological rather than an orthographic processing deficit.     

Self-Destructive Consequences of Sex-Role Socialization

Suicide proneness and self-destruction scales, together with measures of self-favorability and self-confidence, were administered to two samples (n = 106 and n = 213). The affective responses of the second sample (134 women and 79 men) were measured by asking respondents to circle adjectives classified for activity-passivity, positive-negativeness, and extroversion-introversion that expressed their feelings toward eight situations. Women scored lower than men on suicide proneness, higher on self-destruction, and lower on self-favorability and self-confidence. Women reacted more passively to the situations than men and more negatively to the public challenge situation. Women tend to extrovert (turn outward on others) their positive feelings in pleasant situations and to introvert (turn blame on themselves) their negative reactions to unpleasant situations. Men do the reverse. It is suggested that women are self-destructive in passive ways, reflecting their lack of self-favorability and confidence and manifested by failure to react to everyday situations in ego-building ways.     

Young adult romantic relationships: the role of parents' marital problems and relationship efficacy

This study examined the link between parental divorce and marital conflict and young adult romantic relationships, and it tested whether offspring efficacy beliefs and conflict mediate this association. Young adults (N=358) provided data at three time points each separated by 7-week intervals. Results from structural equation modeling demonstrated that (a) parents' marital conflict, rather than parental divorce, was associated with offspring conflict behavior; (b) relationship efficacy mediated this association; and (c) conflict behavior, in turn, mediated the association between efficacy beliefs and the quality of offspring romantic relationships. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the impact of parents' marital problems on romantic relationships in young adulthood. Their implications for preventive interventions and future research are also outlined.