Psychological Types of Male Evangelical Missionary Personnel Training in England: A Role for Thinking Type Men?

A sample of 92 male evangelical missionary personnel completed Form G (Anglicised) of the MBTI. The two predominant types among this group were ESTJ (24%) and ISTJ (15%). In the group as a whole there were clear preferences for extraversion over introversion, for sensing over intuition, for thinking over feeling, and for judging over perceiving.     

Substance or style? An investigation of the NEO-PI-R validity scales

The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992b) has been criticized for the absence of validity scales designed to detect response distortion. Recently, validity scales were developed from the items of the NEO-PI-R (Schinka, Kinder, & Kremer, 1997) and several studies have used a variety of methods to test their use. However, it is controversial whether these scales are measuring something that is substantive (such as psychopathology or its absence) or stylistic (which might be effortful distortion or less conscious processes such as lack of insight). In this study, we used a multimethod-multitrait approach to examine the validity of these scales in a clinical sample of 668 participants diagnosed with personality disorders or major depression. Using various indicators of both stylistic and substantive variance, confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) suggested that these validity scales measure something that may be conceptually distinct from, yet highly related to, substantive variance in responding.     

The academic achievement of African American students during early adolescence: an examination of multiple risk,promotive, and protective factors

This study examined the effects of multiple risk, promotive, and protective factors on three achievement-related measures (i.e., grade point average, number of absences, and math achievement test scores) for African American 7th-grade students (n = 837). There were 3 main findings. First, adolescents had lower grade point averages, more absences, and lower achievement test scores as their exposure to risk factors increased. Second, different promotive and protective factors emerged as significant contributors depending on the nature of the achievement-related outcome that was being assessed. Third, protective factors were identified whose effects were magnified in the presence of multiple risks. Results were discussed in light of the developmental tasks facing adolescents and the contexts in which youth exposed to multiple risks and their families live.     

Cultural Lens on Mental Illness: Four Clients Share Their Perspectives

People served by mental health providers represent diverse cultural groups. In-depth qualitative interviews were used to collect data to examine: “How do people, diagnosed with a mental illness, perceive their experience in a partial care mental health program from the perspective of their cultural context?” Four participants described cultural identities that included ethnic, health status, and sexual orientation identities. The participants' way of participating in the world was often in conflict with cultural values and expectations of the family and counselors. Cultural competence must include understanding how complex, multiple cultural contexts interact and influence a person's participation in the therapeutic process.     

Redecision family therapy: Its use with intensive multiple family groups

Abstract

Intensive multiple family group therapy combines the advantages of group therapy with those of time-limited, goal-oriented approaches. Using the Redecision Family Therapy model further refines the technique by integrating the seemingly disparate methods of intrapsychic and systemic therapy. In this paper we describe our 10-year experience with this model, elaborate on the model itself and discuss the results of an outcome survey.     

An innovative group experience for couples expecting their first child

Abstract

This paper presents a pilot project that was developed to work with small groups of couples in which the women were pregnant with their first child. The primary purpose was to stimulate couples to become aware of their communications and support systems as the necessary building blocks for healthy family emotional development. Pregnancy can be seen as a transitional period leading to another life stage in the growth of an individual. The format, topics, evaluation and summary are presented with the hope that other mental health professionals will be motivated to develop similar groups.     

There's more to emotion than meets the eye: A processing bias for neutral content in the domain of emotional prosody

Research on emotion processing in the visual modality suggests a processing advantage for emotionally salient stimuli, even at early sensory stages; however, results concerning the auditory correlates are inconsistent. We present two experiments that employed a gating paradigm to investigate emotional prosody. In Experiment 1, participants heard successively building segments of Jabberwocky “sentences” spoken with happy, angry, or neutral intonation. After each segment, participants indicated the emotion conveyed and rated their confidence in their decision. Participants in Experiment 2 also heard Jabberwocky “sentences” in successive increments, with half discriminating happy from neutral prosody, and half discriminating angry from neutral prosody. Participants in both experiments identified neutral prosody more rapidly and accurately than happy or angry prosody. Confidence ratings were greater for neutral sentences, and error patterns also indicated a bias for recognising neutral prosody. Taken together, results suggest that enhanced processing of emotional content may be constrained by stimulus modality.     

Contextual interference processing during fast categorisations of facial expressions

We examined interference effects of emotionally associated background colours during fast valence categorisations of negative, neutral and positive expressions. According to implicitly learned colour–emotion associations, facial expressions were presented with colours that either matched the valence of these expressions or not. Experiment 1 included infrequent non-matching trials and Experiment 2 a balanced ratio of matching and non-matching trials. Besides general modulatory effects of contextual features on the processing of facial expressions, we found differential effects depending on the valance of target facial expressions. Whereas performance accuracy was mainly affected for neutral expressions, performance speed was specifically modulated by emotional expressions indicating some susceptibility of emotional expressions to contextual features. Experiment 3 used two further colour–emotion combinations, but revealed only marginal interference effects most likely due to missing colour–emotion associations. The results are discussed with respect to inherent processing demands of emotional and neutral expressions and their susceptibility to contextual interference.     

Essentialist Beliefs About Bodily Transplants in the United States and India

Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a pig's heart would act more pig‐like but denying that the recipient would become a pig). This finding runs counter to predictions from the strongest version of the “minimalist” position (Strevens,2000), an alternative to essentialism. Finally, studies asking about a broader range of donor‐to‐recipient transfers indicated that Indians essentialized more types of transfers than Americans, but neither sample essentialized monetary transfer. This suggests that results from bodily transplant conditions reflect genuine essentialism rather than broader magical thinking.