The Effects of Sad Mood on Reports of Parents’ Caregiving Behaviors

Two studies examined the hypothesis that recollections of parents’ child-rearing behaviors on the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI: Parker, Tupling, & Brown, 1979) are influenced by current mood. Study 1 investigated the effects of sad versus neutral mood induction on PBI scores in 50 college students. Participants rated their parents as less caring following the sad mood induction than following the neutral induction. Study 2 investigated the effects of naturally occurring changes in depressive symptoms on PBI scores over a two month period. Changes in depressive symptoms correlated with changes in father care scores and tended to correlate with changes in mother care scores. Findings from both studies suggest that retrospective reports of parenting are susceptible to mood bias and highlight the limits of using cross sectional designs to explore the relationship between parenting and depression.     

Interference with judgments of control and attentional shift as a result of prior exposure to controllable and uncontrollable feedback

The experiment was carried out to determine whether exposure to an uncontrollable relationship between an action and its outcome during a non-aversive pretreatment phase would affect subsequent ratings of perceived control emitted by human participants. Its other aim was to investigate the effect of such pre-exposure on the attentional focus of humans on internal and external cues. Participants were assigned to one of three groups; an uncontrollable pretreatment, a controllable pretreatment, and no pretreatment. Participants exposed to uncontrollable outcomes (unsolvable problems) gave lower ratings of control over a produced outcome than the other two groups, indicating the interference with subsequent judgments of control. The exposure to uncontrollable outcomes also increased levels of distraction produced by an external cue in a reaction time experiment. Such an effect was not found in the groups who had not been exposed to uncontrollable outcomes. These dual effects are similar to those noted in non-humans subjected to uncontrollable outcomes.     

A reanalysis of the CARIN theory of conceptual combination

The competition among relations in nominals (CARIN) theory of conceptual combination (C. L. Gagné & E. J. Shoben, 1997) proposes that people interpret nominal compounds by selecting a relation from a pool of competing alternatives and that relation availability is influenced by the frequency with which relations have been previously associated with the modifying concept. The current authors derived relation frequencies by using a sample of compounds occurring in the British National Corpus and compared them with those derived by Gagné and Shoben. The authors demonstrated that the original relation frequencies are unrepresentative and that Gagne' and Shoben's technique for dichotomizing them into high and low is unreliable. In addition, the authors revealed anomalies in the mathematical instantiation of the CARIN model and showed that it does not provide evidence for competition among relations.     

Effect of a signalled delay between an action and outcome on human judgement of causality

Three experiments examined the influence of a stimulus inserted between an action (pressing the space bar of a computer) and an associated delayed outcome (a triangle lighting up on the screen) on ratings of the causal effectiveness of that action. In Experiment 1, subjects rated an action that produced an outcome immediately as more causally effective than an action that produced a delayed outcome. The rating of the causal effectiveness of an action that produced a delayed outcome in which the delay was filled by a stimulus was higher than the rating of actions that produced the outcome after an unsignalled delay. In Experiment 2, the effect of a stimulus presented uncorrelated with the action or the outcome was examined and found not to enhance the rating of causal effectiveness of an action that produced a delayed outcome. In Experiment 3, the degree of correlation between the stimulus and the consequence was examined. Ratings of the causal effectiveness of the action were greater the higher percentage of delay intervals that were signalled.     

Different Perspectives Regarding Quality of Life in Chronically ill and Healthy Individuals

The areas that were suggested as most important with regard to Quality of Life (QoL) were examined in groups of individuals who were healthy, and those with a chronic condition. An electronic survey was completed by 892 participants (261 healthy and 631 with a chronic condition). They answered three questions relating to QoL: what is most important to you; what areas most impact your QoL; and an open question what does QoL mean to you. Across the three questions both groups highlighted physical functioning, independence and mobility as key areas for QoL. However, the group with a chronic condition tended to find issues of functioning such as pain, fatigue, and sleep as more important to their QoL than the healthy participants. In contrast, the healthy participants tended to note the importance of relationships and family as more important than the group with a chronic condition. That there were such differences between the groups might suggest that different aspects of QoL could be rated as more important when examining this issue with samples with a chronic condition and those without such a condition.     

Psychotherapie in Westdeutschland nach 1945

Protagonists during the formation of post-World War II medical psychotherapy (e.g. Ernst Speer, Berthold Kihn) had been involved in Nazi selection and ??hereditary health?? policies and continued to express related attitudes and views in the post-war period. To contextualize and analyze these findings, the broader institutional structures and dynamics in psychotherapy before and after 1945 are described. It is argued that for gaining attention, acceptance and resources, psychotherapy and psychiatry are much more dependent on the specific political and economic contexts than somatic medical disciplines, due to the focus on experiences and behavior of human beings. This is related to the fact that such political and economic contexts are themselves bound to anthropological conceptions and norms of behavior. In a further step three paradigms of dealing with the Nazi past are identified for post-World War II psychotherapy and psychiatry: the isolation paradigm, the continuity paradigm and the localizing-complex paradigm.     

Compensation in the Service of Individuation—Phenomenological Essentialism and Jungian Dream Interpretation: Commentary on Paper by Hazel Ipp

This reply elucidates the ideas originally presented in “Countertransference: Our New Royal Road to the Unconscious” (PD 9/3, 1999) in acknowledgment of Irwin Hirsch's commentary (this issue). It refutes Hirsch's erroneous conception that my paper suggested that the personality of the analyst could be extricated from the interactional matrix of the psychoanalytic relationship and that persons could be separated from their minds. By drawing these false dichotomies, Hirsch only polemicizes rather than clarifies the complex relationship existing between an analyst's subjectivity and his or her personality.