Of “sleep and dream: A psychoanalytic essay' by Joyce McDougall (discussion)

Abstract

The author describes experiences gathered during several years of teaching psychodynamic psychotherapy with psychologists and psychiatrists within a 2-year-training programme in Shanghai, China. Questions and problems of the reception of psychoanalysis – shame, sexuality, harmony, abstinence – as well as the possibilities and limitations of exporting psychoanalysis are discussed. The possible future development of psychoanalysis in China is also outlined.     

A response to Nordstrom and pilgrim's critique of Alan watts’ mysticism

Abstract

Experiencing the sacred is a paradigmatic spiritual phenomenon, revered across diverse eras and cultures. This empirical research is a human scientific inquiry into the sacred in everyday life. In‐depth interviews are interpreted via a rigorous phenomenological method. A dialogue involving transpersonal psychology, existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and the world's spiritual traditions is presented, including an appreciation and critique of Freud's interpretation of religion. Revelation and awareness of an essential, interpermeating communion between self and world constitutes the core of experiencing the sacred. This involves a metamorphosis from an egoic to transpersonal self‐sense and way of being.     

The Relationship Between Arousal and the Remembered Duration of Positive Events

The relation between affect and retrospective duration estimation has hardly been examined. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by studying the influence of arousal on the remembered duration of positive events. On the basis of the contextual change model, we expected that high‐arousal positive events would be remembered as longer compared with low‐arousal positive events. To test this hypothesis, we set up a naturalistic study in which participants were asked at the end of a pleasant amusement park ride at the local fair to rate how pleasant and aroused they felt during the ride as well as to estimate the ride's duration. Feeling more aroused during a ride was associated with longer estimates of the ride's duration. Results are discussed within the framework of retrospective time estimation models. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Child Personality as Moderator of Outcome in a School‐based Intervention for Preventing Externalising Behaviour

Studying moderators of intervention effects is essential to elucidate what works for whom. The present study investigated whether child personality moderates short‐term and follow‐up effects of an individualised preventive school‐based intervention for children with externalising behaviour. The sample consisted of 48 schools, with 264 fourth‐grade children displaying externalising behaviour (M_age = 10.2 years), randomly assigned to the intervention (n = 191) or no intervention control (n = 73) condition. Teachers and children reported at pretest, posttest and follow‐up test about reactive and proactive aggression. Child personality was assessed by teachers at pretest. Child conscientiousness moderated short‐term intervention effects, indicating that more organised and planful children benefited more from the intervention. Child extraversion moderated both short‐term and follow‐up intervention effects, with low extraverted children showing larger effects. These results affirm the importance of including personality as moderator of intervention effects in future studies, as interventions adapted to specific child traits might yield larger effects. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Factors influencing two types of congruence in multirater judgments

In two studies of 360° judgments, it was shown that congruence measured in terms of intercorrelations between ratings by different people (congruence‐r) and in terms of the discrepancy between those ratings (congruence‐d) were empirically independent of each other. Congruence‐r was greatest, and congruence‐d was smallest, between judgments made by a target person and his or her supervisor, rather than by subordinates or peers; the differential observability of rated behaviors predicted congruence‐r but not congruence‐d. Variations in both forms of congruence were found to arise from the source of a judgment, and from a target person's age, gender, cognitive ability, and certain personality attributes. Over‐ and under‐rating associated with a personality or another third factor was shown to derive from substantially different correlations between such a factor and the two separate judgments under consideration.     

Target Detection,Identification, and Marksmanship During Battlefield Noise in a Synthetic Environment

This study was conducted to determine the impact of noise on target detection, identification, and marksmanship (TDI&M) and to examine the effectiveness of a monetary reward to improve performance. Twenty active duty male soldiers participated in a non-reward and reward trial, each comprising three time blocks of two alternating 20-minute sessions, one with 87-dBA battlefield noise and the other relatively quiet. Each session involved 15 minutes of TDI&M testing followed by 5 minutes of rest. Neither noise, time on task, nor reward caused any noteworthy changes in TDI&M performance, except for foe target engagement time (ET). It appears that subjects purposely increased ET over the duration of the task to improve their hit accuracy but did not succeed in doing so. The monetary incentive to improve performance was also ineffective, because the subjects applied a similar “best” effort during the no-reward trial prior to this manipulation.     

The Role of Effort–Reward Imbalance for Reservists on a Military Deployment

The present study extended the effort–reward imbalance (ERI) model (Siegrist, 1996b Siegrist, J. 1996b. “Soziale Krisen und Gesundheit [Social crises and health]”. In Gesundheitspsychologie [Health psychology] Edited by: Krohne, H. W., Schmidt, L., Netter, P. and Schwarzer, R. Vol. 5, Göttingen, , Germany: Hogrefe.  [Google Scholar]), first by differentiating between separate reward components, second by including intrinsic reward, and third by additionally predicting a non-health outcome (i.e., turnover intention) in a military context. Regression analyses of 789 reservists found financial and esteem reward to moderate the impact of extrinsic effort on depressive symptoms, whereas only financial reward moderated the effort turnover intentions relationship. Results supported the usefulness of the extended ERI model in the military context. Relevant areas for future research on the military effort–reward perspective are discussed.     

A New Model for Acquiescence at the Interface of Psychometrics and Cognitive Psychology

ABSTRACT

When measuring psychological traits, one has to consider that respondents often show content-unrelated response behavior in answering questionnaires. To disentangle the target trait and two such response styles, extreme responding and midpoint responding, Böckenholt (2012a Böckenholt, U. (2012a). Modeling multiple response processes in judgment and choice. Psychological Methods, 17, 665–678. doi:10.1037/a0028111[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) developed an item response model based on a latent processing tree structure. We propose a theoretically motivated extension of this model to also measure acquiescence, the tendency to agree with both regular and reversed items. Substantively, our approach builds on multinomial processing tree (MPT) models that are used in cognitive psychology to disentangle qualitatively distinct processes. Accordingly, the new model for response styles assumes a mixture distribution of affirmative responses, which are either determined by the underlying target trait or by acquiescence. In order to estimate the model parameters, we rely on Bayesian hierarchical estimation of MPT models. In simulations, we show that the model provides unbiased estimates of response styles and the target trait, and we compare the new model and Böckenholt’s model in a recovery study. An empirical example from personality psychology is used for illustrative purposes.     

How Bias Reduction Is Affected by Covariate Choice,Unreliability, and Mode of Data Analysis: Results From Two Types of Within-Study Comparisons

This study uses within-study comparisons to assess the relative importance of covariate choice, unreliability in the measurement of these covariates, and whether regression or various forms of propensity score analysis are used to analyze the outcome data. Two of the within-study comparisons are of the four-arm type, and many more are of the three-arm type. To examine unreliability, simulations of differences in reliability are deliberately introduced into the 2 four-arm studies. Results are similar across the samples of studies reviewed with their wide range of non-experimental designs and topic areas. Covariate choice counts most, unreliability next most, and the mode of data analysis hardly matters at all. Unreliability has larger effects the more important a covariate is for bias reduction, but even so the very best covariates measured with a reliability of only .60 still do better than substantively poor covariates that are measured perfectly. Why regression methods do as well as propensity score methods used in several different ways is a mystery still because, in theory, propensity scores would seem to have a distinct advantage in many practical applications, especially those where functional forms are in doubt.