The lure of hypocrisy

Why are we susceptible to hypocrisy? Four preconditions for falling prey to hypocrisy are delineated. The reasons for our complex attitude to hypocrisy, both condoning and condemning it, are also explored. Hypocrisy is the false claim to virtue. It always refers to consciously intended deception by a person in a position of trust. Making use of literary examples, the investigation starts with the delineation of three readily apparent preconditions for falling prey to hypocrisy. Idealization of the hypocrite is seen as a defense against a dread of uncertainty on the part of the person who succumbs to hypocrisy. The addition of a third precondition, the force of powerful desire, completes the introduction. A selective review of historical and philosophical studies of hypocrisy over the past twenty-five hundred years situates the problem of the susceptibility to hypocrisy. Application of psychoanalytic formulations and clinical data, principally from the study of patients whose psychoanalysts committed ethical violations, produces a fourth precondition for succumbing to hypocrisy: transference, with a regression from mature trust to a condition of unmodified basic trust.     

Trauma and autobiographical memory specificity in depressed inpatients

Research on autobiographical memory has shown that clinical depression is associated with a difficulty in retrieving specific autobiographical memories in response to cue words. This study examined the relation between lack of autobiographical memory specificity and self-reported trauma in a group of depressed adults (N = 23). In addition to the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986) participants completed a number of questionnaires assessing the presence of traumatic experiences in the past, level of depression and neuroticism. The number of specific responses was not related to depression severity, but was significantly associated with the presence and severity of reported physical abuse. Participants who had been victim of physical abuse were less specific than participants who had not been confronted with such physical adversities. The results are discussed in the context of a functional hypothesis about the developmental relations between memory specificity, trauma and depression.     

Habitual Prospective Memory and Aging: Remembering Intentions and Forgetting Actions

Routine or habitual prospective memory tasks (e.g., taking medication) have the potential for creating confusions regarding whether or not an action has already been performed. We developed a laboratory paradigm for examining the kinds of processes thought to be operating in these kinds of tasks. Younger and older participants were asked to perform an action once and only once on each of 11 trials. The results showed that age and divided attention contributed to both omission and repetition errors. This new paradigm reveals memory failures in a habitual prospective memory task, and the results demonstrate that older adults are particularly susceptible to these memory problems.     

Within-family reproductive technologies as a solution to childlessness due to infertility: Psychological issues and interventions

Patients choosing new reproductive technologies benefit from psychological consultation as they face unforeseen emotional and interpersonal sequalae from these procedures. This paper focuses on those patients who choose family members or close friends (i.e., known donors) to donate sperm or eggs or uteri in order to conceive and produce their babies. Medical family therapy offers these patients and families a framework from which to examine the biological, psychological, and interpersonal issues involved in these within-family solutions to childlessness due to infertility.This paper is a revision of a talk, Medical Family Therapy, Infertility, and the New Reproductive Technologies, given at the 1994 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association on August 4 in Los Angeles, CA, as part of the Mini-convention on Families panel on Clinical Issues in Families and Health.     

Syntactic complexity and elaborative processing

Memory for sentences as a function of the syntactic complexity of the sentences was examined. Sentence complexity was varied through a manipulation that involved presenting sentences in either self-embedded forms or more standard forms. Subjects performed an incidental semantic orienting task on a set of sentences varying in complexity and were subsequently tested for their recognition memory of the sentences. In Experiment 1, subjects were tested for their memory of both surface characteristics and meaning of the sentences. There were no differences caused by sentence complexity for memory for meaning. Memory for surface structure, however, was a function of sentence complexity such that there was better memory for the more complex sentences. Experiment 2 replicated the finding that the more complex sentences produced better recognition memory for surface structure. The results are interpreted within a framework that suggests that increased syntactic complexity produces more elaboration, which in turn produces better memory.     

Examining the Social Context of Bullying Behaviors in Early Adolescence

Familial and adult influences, peer relations, and distal contextual factors were tested as correlates of a continuous measure of bullying behavior within a sample of 558 middle school students. Only 19.5% of the sample reported exhibiting no bullying behavior in the past 30 days. Parental physical discipline, time spent without adult supervision, negative peer influences, and neighborhood safety concerns were each positively associated with bullying behavior. In contrast, positive adult role models were associated with less bullying behavior. Results suggest that counselors should focus prevention and intervention efforts on the risk factors within the larger social context of an adolescent's life.     

Juggling Multiple Roles and the Act of Resistance

This article addresses some ways mothers cope with the multiple stresses associated with their dual roles as workers and primary family caregivers. During the often stressful family life-cycle when adolescent children are individuating, a mother's active resistance can call attention to her need for support and validation of her efforts. While both parents are in the process of negotiating the intricate balance between letting go and forming new collaborative relationships with their soon to be adult children, heavy responsibilities associated with the maternal role can be especially challenging. In addition to gender-sensitive family interventions, mutual support groups for women who parent can help explore ways to effectively respond to cross-generational conflicts and problem solving.     

Bridging the idiographic-nomothetic divide: a follow-up study

In a replication and extension of Grice (2004), participants in the current study rated themselves and other known individuals on scales constructed from their own personal constructs and on marker items for the Big Five model personality traits. Confirmatory components analyses revealed excellent fit for the Big Five Model when applied to aggregate trait ratings but highly variable fit when applied to participants' individual ratings. Comparisons of the personal construct and trait ratings indicated an approximate average overlap of only 51%, and additional analyses revealed several factors that contributed to the uniqueness of the personal constructs. These findings were discussed in the context of the idiographic-nomothetic distinction drawn in personality psychology.     

Effects of word frequency on individual-item and serial order retention: Tests of the order-encoding view

The order-encoding view of the word frequency effect proposes that low-frequency (LF) items attract more attention to the encoding of individual-item information than do high-frequency (HF) items, but at the expense of order encoding (DeLosh & McDaniel, 1996). When combined with the assumption that free recall of unrelated words is organized according to their original order of presentation, this view explains the finding that HF words are better recalled than LF words in pure lists but that, in mixed lists, recall is better for LF words. The present study confirmed that in mixed lists, order memory becomes equivalent for HF and LF words and that the predicted pattern of order memory and recall holds fo r incidental order-encoding conditions, for longerlists than those used inprevious experiments, and for lists with minimal interitem associativity. Moreover, recall from HF lists declined, but recall from LF lists improved, in related-word lists, relative to unrelated-word lists, reversing the usual pure-list free recall advantage for HF words. These results were uniquely predicted by the order-encoding account and favor this view over accessibility, interitem association, and cuing effectiveness explanations of the word frequency effect.