Interactionism revisited: Reflections on the continuing crisis in the personality area

The current status of the personality area is critically examined with the view that problems in the discipline voiced two decades ago are still prevalent. Recurring problems in the personality area have important ramifications for much of contemporary theoretical and applied psychology. The interactional approach to personality came to the fore in the 1970s and early 1980s as an explicit attempt to resolve a number of perceived weaknesses in the personality area. While it has become common for researchers to publicly advocate an interactional position, in practice little interactional research has been conducted recently. The historical developments of the trait and situationism models of personality research and relevant assessment issues are outlined. This history is of interest because it helps to illuminate why and how many current personality researchers continue to perpetuate problems in the personality area. The interactional model of personality is also examined. Finally, the development of an interactional model for the study of anxiety is examined as a specific example of the theoretical, research, and practical benefits of this approach.     

Coping with coping assessment: A critical review

The recent literature on self-report measures of coping reactions and strategies is reviewed and critically evaluated. Most of the coping research has focused on assessing several basic coping behaviours or reactions. These include dimensions such as task-oriented coping, emotion-oriented coping, and avoidance-oriented coping. In general, most of the coping scales that have been developed have a variety of psychometric inadequacies. This state of affairs has created at least two major problems in the coping literature: (1) The proliferation of problematic coping scales, sometimes measuring different constructs, makes it difficult to generalize from one population and/or one health problem to another. (2) Since psychometrically sound instruments are a precondition for studying the relationships among coping, personality, and health, scales with psychometric problems preclude obtaining valid and generalizable information about coping behaviour. Methodological problems in the area have seriously restricted the development of a systematic body of theory and empirical knowledge about coping.     

Regress and the Doctrine of Epistemic Original Sin

Existing solutions to the epistemic regress problem, and the theories of justification built upon them, are inadequate, for they fail to diagnose the root source of the problem. The problem is rooted in our attachment to a pernicious dogma of modern epistemology: the idea that a judgement must be supported by some kind of reason or evidence to be justified. The epistemic analogue of the doctrine of original sin, this idea renders every judgement in need of redemption – guilty until shown to be innocent – distorting our understanding of reason at a very deep level, and preventing us from conceptualizing a satisfactory solution to the problem. If we opt for a more context–sensitive mechanism for assigning default epistemic status, however, we get a more plausible picture of justification, an epistemology more in tune with epistemic practice, and an elegant solution to the regress problem.     

Improving clinical outcomes in REBT/CBT: The therapeutic uses of tape-recording

This paper outlines the numerous ways in which clinical outcomes in REBT/CBT can be enhanced and therapeutic impasses overcome through the regular and creative use of audiotherapy as a treatment adjunct. In particular therapy dosage intensity can be enhanced significantly and homework compliance improved. Audiotherapy also has a key role to play with clients who are isolated or are unsupported in their living environments. Such clients can be encouraged to use audio-taping as therapist-assisted interventions, so increasing the likelihood of their initiating therapeutic tasks such as graded activity assignments and disputing cognitive distortions and dysfunctional beliefs in vivo. The paper finally recommends that audio-taping of therapy sessions has sufficient major benefits to suggest its routine incorporation into therapeutic practice.     

Personality differentiation and prediction of persistence in physical science and engineering

Discriminant analyses techniques were applied to freshmen California Psychological Inventory (CPI) and Holland Vocational Interest Inventory (VPI) data for 914 male students and were used to predict curricular membership after two years of university education. The results suggest that those who persist in physical science, engineering or other curriculum are significantly discriminable from one another on the basis of freshman personality data, and that these personality variables show reasonable predictive stability when applied to a cross validation sample. Physical scientists appear to be markedly differentiated from engineers or others along an introspection-intellectual versus social conventional dimension. The predictive power of CPI and VPI personality variables while statistically exceeding chance is considerably less than that previously reported for ability or interest measures.     

On data-limited and resource-limited processes

This paper analyzes the effect on performance when several active processes compete for limited processing resources. The principles discussed show that conclusions about the interactions among psychological processes must be made with caution, and some existing assumptions may be unwarranted. When two (or more) processes use the same resources at the same time, they may both interfere with one another, neither may interfere with the other, or one may interfere with a second without any interference from the second process to the first. The important principles are that a process can be limited in its performance either by limits in the amount of available processing resources (such as memory or processing effort) or by limits in the quality of the data available to it. Competition among processes can affect a resource-limited process, but not a data-limited one. If a process continually makes preliminary results available even before it has completed all its operations, then it is possible to compute performance-resource operating characteristics that show how processes interact. A number of experiments from the psychological literature are examined according to these processing principles, resulting in some new interpretations of interactions among competing psychological processes.     

Generalization of relative competence mediating conformity across differing tasks

Subject correctness and group agreement were initially varied for college subjects performing a multiple-choice informational task (Canadian Knowledge Inventory). On a subsequent perceptual task (Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices), the dependent variable of conformity was assessed to examine generalization of relative competence formed on the informational task. It was seen that: (1) Those who perceived themselves to be less competent than the group on the first task exhibited the greatest level of conformity on the second task, thus replicating previous research on perceived relative competence as a determinant of conformity; (2) suspicion reduced conformity.