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.     

Unresolved Childhood Sexual Abuse: Are Older Adults Affected?

This article presents case studies and discussions regarding three observed characteristics of unresolved childhood sexual abuse in adult survivors over 65 years of age. Specifically, chronic depression, elder abuse, and the misdiagnoses of residual abuse trauma as dementia or mental illness are compared to parallel issues identified by researchers in younger adult survivors. A brief overview of the childhood abuse literature and recommendations regarding professional training, the development of new services, and additional research are included.     

The perceptual analysis of structure from motion for rotating objects undergoing affine stretching transformations

In two experiments, we evaluated the ability of human observers to make use of second-order temporal relations across three or more views of an apparent motion sequence for the perceptual analysis of three-dimensional form. Ratings of perceived rigidity were obtained in Experiment 1 for objects rotating in depth that were simultaneously subjected to sinusoidal affine stretching transformations along the line of sight or in a direction parallel to the image plane. Such transformations are theoretically interesting because they cannot be detected by analyses that are restricted to first-order temporal relations (i.e., two views), but they can be detected by more conventional analyses of structure from motion in which second-order temporal relations over three or more views are used. The current results show that human observers can perceive stretching transformations of a rotating 3-D object in a direction parallel to the image plane but that they fail to perceive stretching transformations along the line of sight. This result suggests that human observers can make use of some limited second-order temporal information. This finding was confirmed in Experiment 2, in which we investigated the effects of several specific optical consequences of sinusoidal stretching transformations applied in different directions. The results indicate that observers may be sensitive to the sign of acceleration, but that. they cannot make use of the precise magnitude of second-order relations necessary to recover euclidean metric structure.     

The Influence of Retention Interval on the US Preexposure Effect: Changes in Contextual Blocking over Time

A number of studies manipulating the length of the interval between conditioning and testing indicate spontaneous recovery from overshadowing, suggesting that certain instances of overshadowing represent a deficit in memory retrieval rather than a failure of animals to form an association between the overshadowed stimulus and the US. The present series of experiments examined the influence of lengthening the retention interval on blocking, another stimulus selection phenomenon that is typically interpreted as an acquisition deficit. The results indicated that when subjects were tested shortly (3 days) after training conditioning to a taste blocked subsequent conditioning to an odor conditioned in compound with that taste (Experiment 1), whereas prior conditioning to an odor did not block subsequent conditioning to a taste conditioned in compound with that odor (Experiment 2). This pattern of results was essentially unchanged when testing occurred at a longer (21-day) retention interval. However, there was evidence of a US preexposure effect in Experiment 2 when subjects in the US ONLY control condition were tested at the 3-day retention interval, but not when testing occurred 21 days after conditioning. Experiments 3 and 4 examined whether this loss of the US preexposure effect over time might actually represent a change in the degree of contextual blocking as the retention interval is lengthened. Exposure to the conditioning context either during the interval between Phase 1 and Phase 2 of conditioning (Experiment 3) or prior to Phase 1 of conditioning (Experiment 4) alleviated this US preexposure effect suggesting that the loss of the US preexposure effect as the retention interval is lengthened observed in Experiment 2 is due to changes in the degree of blocking by contextual stimuli over time. The results are discussed in terms of differential susceptibility of forgetting of two functional roles played by a contextual stimuli in the current situation-context as a CS and context as a retrieval cue for other CS-US associations.     

Correlates of academic procrastination

Concurrent correlates of academic procrastination were investigated in Israeli college preparatory students (N = 113). Procrastination in one course of study was found to be moderately correlated with procrastination in another, but not to procrastination in the routine tasks of daily living. Evidence for the validity of self-report procrastination scales was the moderate correlation with instructors' ratings. Procrastination was weakly related to emotional upset about it and moderately related to the endorsement of reasons for it—students high in procrastination and emotional upset gave higher reason endorsements (i.e., cited suggested reasons as more reflective of the causes of their procrastination) than the others. Reasons that were judged a priori as less threatening to one's self-esteem received higher endorsements than threatening ones. Contrary to prediction, reasons considered nonthreatening to one's self-esteem were as strongly related to emotional upset and to procrastination as threatening reasons. That students vary in emotional upset about procrastination and in the reasons they give for it highlights the need for comprehensive assessment of students in planning and implementing treatment programs.     

A text-stimuli presentation manager for the IBM PC with ipsatization correction for response sets and reaction times

IPSAPRO, an ipsative scoring program written for the IBM PC, aids in the detection and transformation of response sets that often contaminate rating scale and reaction time experiments. Response sets such as the tendency to use only extreme points of a rating scale or to work for speed over accuracy in reaction time experiments are removed in IPSAPRO by standardizing each subject’s ratings or times against their own means and standard deviations. Ipsatization can be applied to existing data sets or take place automatically at the data collection stage in a text-stimuli presentation manager that is provided with the program.     

Equality, Priority and Social Justice

The moral principle of giving greater priority to benefiting people, the less well off they are, has been thought by some to share the plausibility of egalitarianism whilst avoiding the less plausible implications of the latter. This paper argues that the 'priority' principle does have an authentic place in our moral thinking, and that it is distinct from the idea of 'equality', but that the latter also has an indispensible role to play. The idea of 'priority'has its place as the expression of the moral standpoint of benevolent and sympathetic concern. 'Equality', in contrast, functions as a conception of social justice, from which it cannot be displaced by the idea of 'priority'.     

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.