Client-therapist intimacy: responses of psychotherapy clients to a consumer-oriented brochure

Psychotherapy clients read two consumer-oriented brochures: a general brochure on psychology and a brochure on the topic of client-therapist intimacy. Half of the participants read the general brochure first and the brochure on client-therapist intimacy second, and half the participants did the reverse. Participants reported favorable reactions to the brochures, indicating they thought both should be made available to psychotherapy clients; that neither were too long, too sensitive, or too difficult to read; and that the brochures should be made available early during the therapeutic process. After reading the client-therapist intimacy brochure, participants also showed some changes in Likert-type scores measuring attitudes regarding intimate contact between clients and therapists. Although participants were more negative about issues of sexual misconduct after reading the client-therapist intimacy brochure, they did not indicate a decrease in trust of therapists, nor did they indicate a greater likelihood of filing a false complaint. We concluded that therapists' reservations about presenting clients with factual information regarding therapist sexual exploitation of clients are not empirically founded.     

Scientific Meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

The distribution of autobiographical memories across the lifespan

Words were used to cue autobiographical memories from 20- and 70-year-old subjects. Both groups showed a decrease in memories from the childhood years and a power-function retention function for their most recent 10 years. Older subjects also had an increase in the number of memories from the ages 10 to 30. These results held for individual subjects as well as grouped data and held when either 124 or 921 memories were cued. Reaction times to produce memories were constant across decades except for childhood where they were longer.     

More on EM for ML factor analysis

We address several issues that are raised by Bentler and Tanaka's [1983] discussion of Rubin and Thayer [1982]. Our conclusions are: standard methods do not completely monitor the possible existence of multiple local maxima; summarizing inferential precision by the standard output based on second derivatives of the log likelihood at a maximum can be inappropriate, even if there exists a unique local maximum; EM and LISREL can be viewed as complementary, albeit not entirely adequate, tools for factor analysis.This work was partially supported by the Program Statistics Research Project at Educational Testing Service.     

A Three-Factor Experimental Analysis of Promises and Threats

A questionnaire study was conducted to examine the extent to which variations in the language of promises and threats differentially affect compliance as well as perceptions of the transmitters of these influence attempts. Subjects were asked to imagine that they had been assigned a partner for collaborative work on a project, for which the topic had not yet been decided. In an attempt to persuade them of the value of his topic, the partner (experimenter) sent subjects one of eight promises and threats, which varied along three dimensions: orientation to the consequences of compliance (reward or nonpunishment) vs. noncompliance (punishment or nonreward); transmitter versus recipient orientation of the statement's premise; and transmitter versus recipient orientation of the statement's conclusion. The results indicate that recipient-oriented premise statements and statements of contingent reward or nonpunishment are seen as both more attractive and more likely to gain compliance than those that have a transmitter-oriented premise or that express contingent punishment or nonreward. In addition, compliance was found to be strongly related to a transmitter's attractiveness, but to neither his perceived power nor his activity. The implications of these findings for future research and the resolution of a variety of conflicts were discussed.     

Interrogative types in parental speech to language-learning children: A linguistic universal?

The present study investigated the frequency of occurrence of various interrogative types in the language of American mothers (English) and Israeli mothers (Hebrew) to their 24-month-old language-learning children. It was found that both groups of mothers produced a similar hierarchy of the various wh-questions. The relation between these specific wh-questions and concept development in the child is discussed. It was also found that American mothers produced significantly more questions that required the child to respond with a yes-no answer, while Israeli mothers produced significantly more wh-questions which placed the cognitive burden of the verbal interaction on the child.This research was supported by a grant to the University of Minnesota's Research, Development, and Demonstration Center in Education of Handicapped Children (OEG-09-332189-4533-032) from the U.S. Office of Education, Bureau of Education for the Handicapped.     

Frequency of occurrence as a psychophysical continuum: Weber’s fraction,Ekman’s fraction,range effects,and the phi-gamma hypothesis

Using the continuum of frequency of occurrence of words in English, it was found that: (1) errors in judgment are distributed lognormally rather than normally, and therefore the standard method of calculating Weber’s fraction underestimates its definition, (2) Weber’s fraction has an extremely large value of 3.3, (3)Ekman’s fraction equals 1.81, not .03 as with sensory continua, and (4)the logarithm of the dynamic range times Stevens’ law exponent equals 3.83, not 1.53 as with sensory continua. The last two results favor Teghtsoonian’s underlying sensory scale interpretation over Poulton’s range effects interpretation of the range-exponent relation.     

Psychophysical scales of apparent heaviness and the size-weight illusion

The apparent heaviness of a set of 40 cylindrical objects was scaled by the method of magnitude estimation. The objects varied in weight, volume. and density. There were three main conclusions: (1) For any constant volume, heaviness grows as a power function of weight; the larger the volume. the larger the exponent of the power function. The family of such power functions converge at a common point in the vicinity of the heaviest weight that can be lifted. (2) For any constant density (i:e., weight proportional to volume), heaviness does not grow as a power function of weight. (3) For any constant weight, heaviness decreases approximately as a logarithmic function of volume; the constants of the log function depend systematically on the weight of the object. The outcome furnishes a broad quantitative picture of apparent heaviness and of the size-weight illusion (Charpentier’s illusion).