Disability and the family: Current status and future developments

Recent years have witnessed increased interest in the effects a disability or chronic illness has on both the nuclear and the extended family. Personal accounts by family members and landmark legislation has stimulated interest in this area of endeavour. Reports of marital and family disharmony has fuelled research investigating the sources of stress and coping in families with a member who has a disability (Seligman, 1991).     

Social Comparison in the Setting of Goals for Own and Others' Performance

This research examines social factors implicated by social comparison theory to be involved in the setting of task performance goals. Participants conducted an error-checking task and selected performance goals for themselves, their roommates, and unknown others. In addition, participants made judgments regarding their relative ability on the task as well as stating their confidence in attaining the goals. Consistent with predictions, participants rated themselves as above average in ability, had more confidence in their own abilities, and set lower goals for others than for themselves. In addition, individuals had more confidence in the abilities of their roommates than unknown others, and consequently chose goals for their roommates that were more similar to their own goals. The results and implications of this study are discussed within the context of social comparison theory and the better-than-average effect.     

Solving the puzzle of deliberate self-harm: the experiential avoidance model

Despite increasing attention to the phenomenon of deliberate self-harm (DSH), the literature currently lacks a unifying, evidence-based, theoretical framework within which to understand the factors that control this behavior. The purpose of the present paper is to outline such a framework-the Experiential Avoidance Model (EAM) of DSH. The EAM poses that DSH is primarily maintained by negative reinforcement in the form of escape from, or avoidance of, unwanted emotional experiences. Literature on factors that may lead to experiential avoidance is reviewed, along with the mounting empirical evidence that DSH functions to help the individual escape from unwanted emotional experiences. The EAM integrates a variety of research on emotions, experiential avoidance, and DSH within a clinically useful framework that sparks novel research directions.     

Countertransference issues in psychotherapy with lesbian and gay clients

This article briefly reviews literature on responses towards same-sex (lesbian and gay) sexualities from psychoanalytic and ‘lesbian and gay affirmative’ psychotherapeutic perspectives. An analysis is presented of reports of countertransferential reactions to lesbian and gay clients, obtained from interviews with fourteen psychotherapists who work in a lesbian and gay affirmative manner and eighteen clients who had received affirmative psychotherapy. Data were subjected to grounded analysis. Participants consistently attended to the thoughts, feelings and values that therapists held in relation to lesbian and gay clients and how these affected the meanings and practices available to them. These were linked with the therapist's sexual identity among other factors. Negative countertransferential reactions were regarded as potentially occurring among heterosexual and lesbian and gay therapists and were seen as arising from therapists’ conscious and unconscious fears about same-sex sexualities. These findings indicate a need to continue debating these issues more widely in the professional arena.     

The Strobophotograph: A Device for Measuring Pitch

(Pennington, L. A., &; Berg., I. A., Eds. An Introduction to Clinical Psychology. New York: Ronald Press, 1948. Pp. 595.) Reviewed by Jane Dorroch.     

The Induction of Color Blindness by a Technique of Hypnotic Suggestion

The relative efficacy of auditory feedback, varying in the amount of information contained in the feedback signal, for the self-control of heart rate (HR) was determined by comparing groups of 10 Ss who received either: (a) continuous proportional feedback, (b) discontinuous proportional feedback, (c) binary feedback, (d) heart sounds, or (e) no feedback. At each of two sessions Ss were given eight trials in each direction on which they were to raise or lower their HR.

Without regard to the amount of information contained in the signal, presentation of auditory feedback aided Ss in raising HR relative to Ss who received no feedback; however, feedback did not yield an advantage in lowering it. These results suggest that perhaps the informing quality of feedback is multidimensional and also that perhaps the mechanisms involved in acceleration and deceleration of HR may be different.     

The Ecological Veracity of the Self-Report

Sixty-five fourth- and fifth-grade boys were run in a two-choice discrimination learning task for punishment, high or low value reinforcement, or the combination of punishment with high or low value reinforcement. A significant main effect of reinforcement revealed that only Ss in the punishment group showed significant evidence of learning. The results were discussed as possibly being due to the distraction caused by tangible reinforcement; although, an alternative explanation was offered on the basis of previous findings that males perform better for punishment than for reward.     

Biased-Interaction Theory of Psychosexual Development: “How Does One Know if One is Male or Female?”

Eighty-nine black women’s racial and gender identities were examined within an intersectional framework that emphasized their unique integration of these identities. Quantitative analyses indicated that the intersected black-woman identity was more important than the individual identities of woman and black person. Further, interference in the black identity (but not interference in the woman identity) was related to lower self-esteem and depression. Qualitative analyses of rewards and difficulties experienced as black women identified four themes: stereotyping and discrimination, personal esteem, isolation from others, and opportunities and resources. Black women who mentioned any reward reported higher self-esteem than those who did not. The value of an intersectional framework for thinking about black women’s identities is discussed.     

Processes of overall similarity sorting in free classification

The processes of overall similarity sorting were investigated in 5 free classification experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that increasing time pressure can reduce the likelihood of overall similarity categorization. Experiment 3 showed that a concurrent load also reduced overall similarity sorting. These findings suggest that overall similarity sorting can be a time-consuming analytic process. Such results appear contrary to the idea that overall similarity is a nonanalytic process (e.g., T. B. Ward, 1983) but are in line with F. N. Milton and A. J. Wills's (2004) dimensional summation hypothesis and with the stochastic sampling assumptions of the extended generalized context model (K. Lamberts, 2000). Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that the relationship between stimulus presentation time and overall similarity sorting is nonmonotonic, and the shape of the function is consistent with the idea that the three aforementioned processes operate over different parts of the time course.