One-person and two-person conceptions of attachment and their implications for psychoanalytic thought

There has been increasing interest among analysts in the possibilities of enriching psychoanalytic thought through fuller incorporation of attachment theory and research. This paper offers a clinical illustration of the ways in which attention to an attachment perspective can lead to novel and useful ways of addressing the patient’s issues. It also presents a number of cautions that it is necessary to be alert to if attachment thinking is to achieve its full potential in advancing psychoanalytic thought and practice. Conceptions of attachment and approaches to its study and clinical use actually vary quite substantially. Some are more one-person, static, and categorical. Others are more two-person, dynamic, and focused on the process whereby attachment patterns develop and are maintained over time. This paper explores the distinction between these two versions of attachment theory and research with two aims in mind – first, to refine our understanding of the potential role that attachment thinking can play in advancing the psychoanalytic paradigm; second, to utilize the insights achieved through examining the attachment paradigm to consider some broader issues in the construction of psychoanalytic theory more generally and its relational variant in particular.     

Mixing compatible and incompatible mappings: Elimination, reduction, and enhancement of spatial compatibility effects

In two-choice tasks, the compatible mapping of left stimulus to left response and right stimulus to right response typically yields better performance than does the incompatible mapping. Nonetheless, when compatible and incompatible mappings are mixed within a block of trials, the spatial compatibility effect is eliminated. Two experiments evaluated whether the elimination of compatibility effects by mixing compatible and incompatible mappings is a general or specific phenomenon. Left-right physical locations, arrow directions, and location words were mapped to keypress responses in Experiment 1 and vocal responses in Experiment 2. With keypresses, mixing compatible and incompatible mappings eliminated the compatibility effect for physical locations and arrow directions, but enhanced it for words. With vocal responses, mixing significantly reduced the compatibility effect only for words. Overall, the mixing effects suggest that elimination or reduction of compatibility effects occurs primarily when the stimulus-response sets have both conceptual and perceptual similarity. This elimination may be due to suppression of a direct response-selection route, but to account for the full pattern of mixing effects it is also necessary to consider changes in an indirect response-selection route and the temporal activation properties of different stimulus-response sets.     

Defining, Measuring, and Comparing Organisational Cultures

La littérature portant sur la culture des organisations souffre d'un manque manifeste d'enquêtes extensives débouchant sur des études comparatives. Afin de rendre plus comparables les cultures organisationnelles, nous proposons une définition et une série de dimensions. La culture organisationnelle renverrait aux perceptions communes des pratiques de travail dans le cadre des unités constitutives des organisations. A l'examen d'études empiriques, les cinq dimensions suivantes nous sont apparues: autonomie, orientation externe, coordination interdépartementale, orientation vers les ressources humaines et orientation vers le développement. L'utilisation de cette définition et de ces dimensions générales devrait faciliter la comparaison des cultures organisationnelles et l'accumulation de résultats.
Within the body of organisation culture literature, there is a conspicuous absence of large-scale studies reporting on comparative studies. In order to increase comparability of organisational cultures we propose a definition and a set of dimensions. Organisational culture is defined as shared perceptions of organisational work practices within organisational units. On the basis of empirical studies we discerned the following five dimensions: autonomy, external orientation, interdepartmental coordination, human resource orientation, and improvement orientation. Use of this definition and a set of such generic dimensions would facilitate the comparison of organisational cultures and the accumulation of research findings.     

The child verbal competence effect in court: a comparative study of field investigative interviews of children in child sexual abuse cases

The purpose of this study is to compare field investigative interviews of children (FIIC) with three different legal outcomes in child sexual abuse cases: (i) insufficient evidence to proceed (IEP); (ii) convictions; or (iii) acquittals by the court. One hundred FIIC were divided into one of the three outcome possibilities. Amongst the female interviewees older than 10 years, there were no cases of acquittals and the convicted cases were over-represented. The children's response to open questions was found to be the main difference between the three FIIC outcomes. The responses to these open questions were 1.9 and 2.3 times longer in the convicted cases compared to acquittals and IEP. Possible explanations for the result are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention decreases the prevalence of depression and enhances benefit finding among women under treatment for early-stage breast cancer.

The authors tested effects of a 10-week group cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention among 100 women newly treated for Stage 0-II breast cancer. The intervention reduced prevalence of moderate depression (which remained relatively stable in the control condition) but did not affect other measures of emotional distress. The intervention also increased participants' reports that having breast cancer had made positive contributions to their lives, and it increased generalized optimism. Both remained significantly elevated at a 3-month follow-up of the intervention. Further analysis revealed that the intervention had its greatest impact on these 2 variables among women who were lowest in optimism at baseline. Discussion centers on the importance of examining positive responses to traumatic events--growth, appreciation of life, shift in priorities, and positive affect-as well as negative responses.     

Relationships between Personality and Organization Switching: Implications for utility estimates

This study examined individuals' tendencies to migrate from one organization to another (i.e., the propensity to switch employers). Previous researchers have suggested that switching organizations throughout the career span may be partially heritable and therefore related to individual differences in personality traits. If personality traits are indeed related to a tendency to turnover from organizations, this suggests that current procedures for calculating utility may be inaccurate. Using a database of 1081 individuals who have been in the workforce for several years, results indicated that personality traits measured by the Occupational Personality Questionnaire (non‐ipsative; OPQn) were modestly related to organization switching (i.e., repeated moves from organization to organization). We found that higher scores on extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness‐related traits were modestly correlated with more frequent organization switching. However, we demonstrate that these modest relationships can produce large inaccuracies in utility estimates.