The mitigation of interpersonal behavior

Theorists since D. Bakan (1966) have advocated the importance of mitigation for successful adaptation within the interpersonal domain. Although mitigation has previously been conceptualized as a balance between agency and communion (interdimensional mitigation), the circumplex framework suggests that mitigation may also be conceptualized as a balance within agency and a balance within communion (intradimensional mitigation). In the two present studies, participants collected records of their interpersonal behavior and affect subsequent to their social interactions for a period of 20 days. Random coefficient procedures were then used to examine these two contrasting models of mitigation in the prediction of affect. No empirical evidence of interdimensional mitigation was found. The findings suggest that agency and communion were each mitigated intradimensionally through moderate levels of behavioral expression.     

Further ironies of suppression: Stereotype and counterstereotype accessibility

Three experiments explored the accessibility of stereotypes and counterstereotypes following stereotype suppression. Using a lexical decision task, experiment 1 demonstrated that the counterstereotype showed greater accessibility following stereotype suppression compared to stereotype expressers and no prime control participants. Using a person perception task, experiment 2 revealed that suppression can make both the stereotype and the counterstereotype more accessible. Experiment 3 manipulated cognitive load and found evidence that the stereotype and counterstereotype are made accessible through two different processes associated with suppression: The stereotype is made accessible through the more automatic monitoring system, whereas the counterstereotype is made accessible through the resource-dependent operating system. The three experiments demonstrate a novel lack of inhibition of the counterstereotype by the stereotype, provide a clear demonstration of hyperaccessibility of suppressed stereotypes by comparing stereotype suppression to a stereotype expression condition, and contribute to the priming literature by demonstrating the interactive effects of accessibility, applicability, and judgment order on person perception evaluations.     

Resilience to loss in bereaved spouses, bereaved parents, and bereaved gay men

Recent research has indicated that many people faced with highly aversive events suffer only minor, transient disruptions in functioning and retain a capacity for positive affect and experiences. This article reports 2 studies that replicate and extend these findings among bereaved parents, spouses, and caregivers of a chronically ill life partner using a range of self-report and objective measures of adjustment. Resilience was evidenced in half of each bereaved sample when compared with matched, nonbereaved counterparts and 36% of the caregiver sample in a more conservative, repeated-measures ipsative comparison. Resilient individuals were not distinguished by the quality of their relationship with spouse/partner or caregiver burden but were rated more positively and as better adjusted by close friends.     

Our Moral Universe

The application of psychoanalysis to social issues began with Freud's late writing. Understanding of racial and religious prejudice offers a social science application of psychoanalysis, but also has important implications for clinical practice. This paper supports and illustrates Dorothy Holmes' contention that examination of race and ethnicity in clinical work are important even when these issues are not apparent in patients' manifest content. It describes resistance to these factors in psychoanalysis and society.     

Social relationships and intraindividual variability in interpersonal behavior: correlates of interpersonal spin

Personality constructs are typically conceptualized as central tendencies of the individual. We explore whether dynamic personality constructs that quantify the within-individual variability of behavior across situations and over time predict the closeness of social relationships. We focused on interpersonal spin, defined as the degree of dispersion in a person's interpersonal behaviors around the interpersonal circumplex across situations and over time. We predicted that individuals with high spin would have social relationships that are less close than individuals with low spin. In 3 studies with different measures of relationship closeness, we found that (a) higher spinners reported that a larger proportion of their contacts in their workplace social networks were distant (Study 1); (b) co-workers were less satisfied and less often engaged in pleasant activities with higher spinners (Study 2); and (c) co-workers avoided higher spinners with whom they were well acquainted (Study 3). Moderated mediation analyses in Study 3 revealed that co-workers avoided well-acquainted higher spinners because they felt more negative affect when interacting with these individuals. The findings suggest the potential of dynamic personality constructs for improving our understanding of the characteristics of individuals' social relationships.     

Playing dead: an unconscious fantasy, bodily focused defenses, and their roots in infancy

A patient's unconscious fantasy of being her mother's dead baby emerged during the course of a long analysis, and was understood as her expression and explanation, constructed and elaborated throughout her development, of a fundamental and formative early infant state and experience. This patient's identification with a baby who had died before she was born was connected to her major complaint, a pervasive feeling that she could not act with intention, and to her obsessive ruminations, compulsive actions, and masochistic attacks on her body. The bodily based aspects and focus of these defenses were autistic-like, self-directed activities that can be understood as having their roots in what was experienced as catastrophic loss in the earliest weeks and months of life. Infant research, particularly on contingency detection, is especially useful in clarifying the ways in which these defenses may form, and in reconstructing and tracing the trajectories and intricate transformations of body ego, self- and other representations, and defenses from their earliest beginnings to their current manifestations in patients' fantasies and symptoms.