Interpersonal-relational psychoanalysis: An introduction and overview of contemporary implications and applications

Abstract

For half a century Interpersonal psychoanalysis has developed relatively independent of the tradition of Freud and his followers. The Interpersonal movement was founded by Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson and others who believed that the psyche could not be understood as an entity that evolves without input from the external environment. The Interpersonal view is that interactions between people influence every aspect of the individual's experience, and that no person can be studied without simultaneously noting the ongoing impact between the observer and the observed. This line of thought has led to conclusions concerning personality, psychopathology and clinical technique that depart from traditional psychoanalysis. The paper illustrates a number of these differences, emphasizing that the current emergence of the “two-person model” of the psychoanalytic situation offers a potential rapprochement between the Interpersonal and more classical views.     

Mapping emotion category boundaries using a visual expectation paradigm

Past research showing categorical perception of emotional facial expressions has relied on identification and discrimination tasks that require an explicit response via keypress. Here we report a new paradigm for investigating the category boundary of emotional facial expressions that, instead, relies on an implicit response--eye direction. Participants were trained to expect a target stimulus on a particular side of the monitor, predicted by an emotional expression on a face image. An eye-tracker then recorded eye movements of participants as they viewed novel intermediate facial-expression stimuli. Anticipatory eye movement was taken as evidence of categorisation. Results from two experiments suggest that this implicit method can be used to determine category boundaries, and that the boundaries found with this method are similar to those found with the keypress response.     

Issues in prenatal cocaine use research: Problems in identifying users and choosing an appropriate comparison group

Prenatal cocaine exposure has been identified in 11 %–44% of deliveries in this country, and researchers are working to answer many important questions about cocaine-exposed infants. However, the process of discovery takes time, thoughtful planning of studies, and careful interpretation of results. This paper will review recently published data considering the impact on study results of two methodological issues in cocaine use research: identifying a population of users versus nonusers and choosing an appropriate comparison group. Additionally, some thoughts will be presented on the criminalization and sensationalism of prenatal cocaine use and their effect on both researchers and subjects.     

Inappropriate capture by diversionary dynamic elements

Greater capture of attention by a diversionary element that appeared to move (a dynamic stimulus) than by one that was static was shown in six experiments. In Experiment 1, an irrelevant dynamic stimulus captured attention when there were either two, four, or eight elements on the screen, and was shown with irregularly spaced characters. In the subsequent experiments, a dynamic element captured attention even when the targets never appeared at that location. In Experiment 6, when the response was in error, that response was most likely to be the identity of the character near the location of the dynamic diversionary element. These data could not be accounted for by either an attentional control setting, or a singleton detection mode hypothesis. The targets were the same throughout each experiment and only the type of diversions differed. The data seem to reflect the greater strength of dynamic stimuli in capturing attention.     

Effects consistent with behavioral contrast during a multiple schedule for discrimination training on mands for attention

This study used a multiple schedule to assess the effects of an S+ or S- in the absence of rules on excessive mand rates with three school-aged children with disabilities and assessed possible contrast effects occurring in conjunction with the intervention. Each of the three participants was exposed to the presence or absence of an S- (black baseball cap). When it was worn, mand approach rates decreased for all three participants; conversely, mand rates increased to twice the baseline rates when the experimenter was not wearing the black baseball cap. Generalization probes conducted for one of the three caregivers showed similar changes when the caregiver wore the cap. Results suggest that effects consistent with positive behavioral contrast occurred with all participants.     

Inhibition of return: support for generality of the phenomenon.

Inhibition of return (IOR), first described in 1984, was considered to be a general phenomenon for ensuring that attention would be allocated to successive stimuli in the environment. In the present research, IOR was expressed in forced-choice identification tasks with either reaction time or accuracy as the dependent measure. Thus, the generality of IOR was supported, because response inhibition cannot explain IOR found with accuracy measures. Concepts from the variable and permeable filters metaphor are used to suggest how changes in attention can change expression of IOR by rapid variation in perceptual threshold.     

Attention in visual search: multiple search classes.

Data from visual-search tasks are typically interpreted to mean that searching for targets defined by feature differences does not require attention and thus can be performed in parallel, whereas searching for other targets requires serial allocation of attention. The question addressed here was whether a parallel-serial dichotomy would be obtained if data were collected using a variety of targets representing each of several kinds of defining features. Data analyses included several computations in addition to search rate: (1) target-absent to target-present slope ratios; (2) two separate data transformations to control for errors; (3) minimum reaction time; and (4) slopes of standard deviation as a function of set size. Some targets showed strongly parallel or strongly serial search, but there was evidence for several intermediate search classes. Sometimes, for a given target-distractor pair, the results depended strongly on which character was the target and which was the distractor. Implications from theories of visual search are discussed.     

Evaluating the effectiveness of counselling in primary care: Taking a fresh look

One criticism voiced by counsellors and psychotherapists is that research does not reflect either the culture or values of therapy. Researchers, on the other hand, accuse practitioners of not attending to their findings, and the implication is made that the latter engage in treatment processes that are ill‐informed. These polarised understandings give rise to the situation where the client — and his or her development — fall into the practice‐research gap. In more recent studies of counselling in primary care, an attempt has been made to offer new perspectives for interpreting and understanding findings, and the relative value — and limitations — of different research questions and methods. They provide just a few examples of how practitioner‐researchers in the future may ask more precise questions, yet reflect on their findings from a broader set of viewpoints.     

Attentional capture with various distractor and target types

Effects of nonpredictive distractors that involved changes in luminance, size, or shape were examined in three experiments. In Experiment 1, with two types of distractors (onsets and offsets), accuracy was better on trials when the distractor was near the location of either an offset or an onset target than on trials when the distractor was in a different location from that of the target, demonstrating attentional capture. Capture occurred both when the type of target (onset or offset) was blocked and therefore predictable and also when the type of target was mixed within blocks and therefore not predictable. Further experiments indicated that distractors captured attention even when the change to distractor did not create a new perceptual object. Neither a singleton-detection mode, nor a contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis, nor creation of a new object seems to explain all of these data adequately. Rather, capture may depend on a number of factors in the task.