BLOTS AND ALL: A HISTORY OF THE RORSCHACH INK BLOT TEST IN BRITAIN

Despite the easily recognizable nature of the Rorschach ink blot test very little is known about the history of the test in Britain. We attend to the oft‐ignored history of the Rorschach test in Britain and compare it to its history in the US. Prior to the Second World War, Rorschach testing in Britain had attracted advocates and critiques. Afterward, the British Rorschach Forum, a network with a high proportion of women, developed around the Tavistock Institute in London and The Rorschach Newsletter. In 1968, the International Rorschach Congress was held in London but soon after the group became less exclusive, and fell into decline. A comparative account of the Rorschach in Britain demonstrates how different national institutions invested in the ‘projective hypothesis’ according to the influence of psychoanalysis, the adoption of a nationalized health system, and the social positioning of ‘others’ throughout the twentieth century. In comparing and contrasting the history of the Rorschach in Britain and the US, we decentralize and particularize the history of North American Psychology.     

Love styles,coping, and relationship satisfaction: A dyadic approach

Romantic partners have different attitudes on what love is and what it means to be in a romantic relationship. These attitudes are conceptualized as love styles that relate to relationship‐maintenance behaviors and relationship satisfaction. Specifically, love styles could be associated with how partners cope with stress (dyadic coping), which in turn may be associated with relationship satisfaction. Using self‐report data from 92 heterosexual couples, findings showed that: (a) eros and agape love styles have positive direct effects on dyadic coping and relationship satisfaction, whereas ludus has a negative direct effect on dyadic coping and relationship satisfaction and (b) dyadic coping partially mediated the association between love styles and relationship satisfaction. Overall, associations were stronger for women than for men.     

Decomposition,Interdependence and Precision in Multiattribute Utility Measurements

Traditionally, parameters of multiattribute utility models, representing a decision maker's preference judgements, are treated deterministically. This may be unrealistic, because assessment of such parameters is potentially fraught with imprecisions and errors. We thus treat such parameters as stochastic and investigate how their associated imprecision/errors are propagated in an additive multiattribute utility function in terms of the aggregate variance. Both a no information and a rank order case regarding the attribute weights are considered, assuming a uniform distribution over the feasible region of attribute weights constrained by the respective information assumption. In general, as the number of attributes increases, the variance of the aggregate utility in both cases decreases and approaches the same limit, which depends only on the variances as well as the correlations among the single-attribute utilities. However, the marginal change in aggregate utility variance decreases rather rapidly and hence decomposition as a variance reduction mechanism is generally useful but becomes relatively ineffective if the number of attributes exceed about 10. Moreover, it was found that utilities which are positively correlated increase the aggregate utility variance, hence every effort should be made to avoid positive correlations between the single-attribute utilities. We also provide guidelines for determining under what condition and to what extent a decision maker should decompose to obtain an aggregate utility variance that is smaller than that of holistic assessments. Extensions of the current model and empirical research to support some of our behavioural assumptions are discussed. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lay perspectives on the costs and risks of forgiving

In this study, we directly investigated, for the first time, lay perspectives on the costs and risks of forgiveness (N = 130). Participants described previously experienced situations where forgiveness was costly, from the perspective of a grantor, a recipient, and as a third‐party observer. They also identified occasions when they thought it would be risky to forgive. We employed complementary quantitative and thematic analysis strategies to examine prevailing themes. The vast majority of participants believed forgiveness was risky, with approximately two thirds reporting both actual and vicarious experiences of costly forgiveness. An overarching theme was that power relations are particularly relevant to laypeople when they consider the costs and risks of forgiving.     

Incorporating geographic distance into mate preference research: Necessities and luxuries, 2.0

This study (N = 370) examined mate preferences in men and women using the budget allocation paradigm across traits typically studied and the value placed on geographic proximity or propinquity. Importantly, traditionally studied preferences (i.e., physical attractiveness and social status) were seen as priorities, whereas the novel trait of distance was a luxury, suggesting that people were willing to travel to find a partner who satisfies their more important mate preferences. Men valued a short‐term mate who was close to them more than women did. Prior work on mate preferences was replicated in their context‐specific nature as per evolutionary models of mate choice.     

What IS Wrong with Foundationalism is that it Cannot Solve the Epistemic Regress Problem*

There are many things that could be wrong with foundationalism. For example, some have claimed that a so‐called basic belief cannot be both 1) a reason for non‐basic beliefs and 2) such that it cannot be provided with at least prima facie justification.1 If something is a reason, they say, then that something has to be a proposition (or sufficiently proposition‐like) and if it is a proposition (or sufficiently proposition‐like), then it is the kind of thing that requires a reason in order to be even prima facie justified.2 Another reason that some give for rejecting normative foundationalism is that it leads directly to skepticism.3 There is no way, they claim, to move from so‐called basic propositions (typically given as first person introspective reports) to “external world” propositions by employing normatively acceptable principles of reasoning.4 Still others have thought that the invention of a nonrea‐soned reason was as ad hoc as the invention of an unmoved mover.5     

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: The Old Principal Principle Reconciled with the New*

David Lewis (1980) proposed the Principal Principle (PP) and a “reformulation” which later on he called ‘OP’(Old Principle). Reacting to his belief that these principles run into trouble, Lewis (1994) concluded that they should be replaced with the New Principle (NP). This conclusion left Lewis uneasy, because he thought that an inverse form of NP is “quite messy”, whereas an inverse form of OP, namely the simple and intuitive PP, is “the key to our concept of chance”. I argue that, even if OP should be discarded, PP need not be. Moreover, far from being messy, an inverse form of NP is a simple and intuitive Conditional Principle (CP). Finally, both PP and CP are special cases of a General Principle (GP); it follows that so are PP and NP, which are thus compatible rather than competing.     

KEEN TO HELP? MANAGERS' IMPLICIT PERSON THEORIES AND THEIR SUBSEQUENT EMPLOYEE COACHING

Although coaching can facilitate employee development and performance, the stark reality is that managers often differ substantially in their inclination to coach their subordinates. To address this issue, we draw from and build upon a body of social psychology research that finds that implicit person theories (IPTs) about the malleability of personal attributes (e.g., personality and ability) affect one's willingness to help others. Specifically, individuals holding an "entity theory" that human attributes are innate and unalterable are disinclined to invest in helping others to develop and improve, relative to individuals who hold the "incremental theory" that personal attributes can be developed. Three studies examined how managers' IPTs influence the extent of their employee coaching. First, a longitudinal field study found that managers' IPTs predicted employee evaluations of their subsequent employee coaching. This finding was replicated in a second field study. Third, an experimental study found that using self-persuasion principles to induce incremental IPTs increased entity theorist managers' willingness to coach a poor performing employee, as well as the quantity and quality of their performance improvement suggestions.     

Researching psychotherapy integration: A heuristic approach

Moustakas argues that questions and methodology in heuristic research flow out of inner awareness, meaning and inspiration. The approach might arguably embrace a combination of qualitative research methods, and constitute a kind of bricolage. This paper describes a heuristic enquiry into psychotherapy integration that used such a combination of methods – an interpretative phenomenological approach, case studies, reflexive action, and writing. It demonstrates how each of these methods contributed to the six phases of heuristic enquiry, from the initial engagement with psychotherapy as a trainee to the creative synthesis of published works and a PhD thesis, together with some reflection on the enquiry's limitations and rigour. Published texts, training, clinical practice and reflexivity constituted the material from which a new organizing framework for understanding psychotherapy integration was formulated. The author reflects on how the research design allowed deep engagement with this material, and changed his perspective of psychotherapy integration. In conclusion, this paper suggests that both psychotherapy integration and heuristic enquiry can only be conducted on an individual and personal basis, and that it is the quality of the relationship, with the client, or the research material, that produces results.