Ego Development and Psychosocial Functioning in Young Adults With and Without Psychiatric History

Ego development has been associated with positive outcomes, namely, with a better psychosocial adjustment and establishment of satisfactory relationships. However, ego development and psychosocial functioning are independent domains and a developed ego does not guarantee successful adaptation. Moreover, it is not clear whether ego development differentially influences psychosocial functioning in clinical and normative samples. The present study investigated the impact of ego development on the psychosocial functioning of young adults with (high-risk) and without (normative) psychiatric history. Results show an association between those two variables, especially strong for the high-risk group. High-risk individuals with successful psychosocial functioning exhibited levels of ego development more similar to those of normative young adults than to those of the remaining high-risk individuals. Moreover, as predicted, ego development mediated the relationship between psychiatric history and psychosocial functioning. Further support was found for the protective role of ego development, especially for individuals with psychiatric history.     

Cultivating the Senses and Giving in to the Sacred: Notes on Body and Experience among Pentecostal Women in Salvador,Brazil

The article deals with the religious experience of poor Pentecostal women from the city of Salvador, Northeast Brazil. In centering the discussion of this experience on bodily engagement in place—and on the body's attunement to place—this article seeks to capture the social and existential dimensions of the sensibilities which women develop as members of the religious community and thus to address the question of how the sense experiences, which are awakened and cultivated in this religious setting, help shape embodied forms of attention to oneself, to others, and to context. We contend that concrete embodied experience of divine power fostered in ritual favors training attention to context in search of signs of divine presence and helps give shape to a disposition which extends, to other people and places, the power that flows from Pentecostal women's bodies.     

Rules and Self-Rules: Effects of Variation Upon Behavioral Sensitivity to Change

The Psychological Record - Four experiments compared the effects of self-rules and rules, and varied and specific schedules of reinforcement. Participants were first exposed to either several...     

Mood and fluency: The case of pronunciation ease,liking and trust

We explored the impact of mood on the judgemental consequences of word pronounceability in six Experiments (1 preregistered, total N = 1183). Positive and negative mood was induced via video clips (all but Experiment 4) and subliminal affective primes (Experiment 4). Additionally, participants were presented with easy- and difficult-to-pronounce letter strings. These were framed as target words to be judged for liking (Experiments 1–2), as names of eBay sellers to be judged for trustworthiness (Experiments 3–5), or as either seller names or passwords to provoke opposing interpretations of pronunciation fluency (Experiment 6). While pronounceability showed a robust effect across experiments, mood did not modulate the judgemental use of (Experiments 1–4), the correction for (Experiment 5) and the interpretation (Experiment 6) of word pronounceability. In conclusion, the judgemental effects of pronounceability persist despite the presence of more objective and task-pertinent cues, resist judgemental correction and remain unaffected by affective states.     

Interpretive sets, expectancy, fantasy proneness, and dissociation as predictors of hypnotic response.

College students with no prior experience of hypnosis were assessed for fantasy proneness and dissociation. In a totally separate context, they were subsequently tested for their interpretations of hypnotic suggestions, hypnotic response expectancies, and hypnotizability. Contrary to Spanos and Gorassini's (1984) hypothesis, strategic enactment of suggested responses was rarely reported, and its endorsement was not correlated with hypnotic responsiveness. Suggestibility was significantly predicted by fantasy proneness and response expectancy, but not by dissociation. A path analysis suggested that the relation between fantasy proneness and hypnotizability was partially mediated by expectancy.     

Sign- versus goal-tracking: effects of conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distance.

Three pigeons were exposed sequentially across experimental phases to five different distances between the conditioned stimulus and the site of the unconditioned stimulus in a sign-/goal-tracking procedure. A computer-controlled tracking system provided a continuous record of the bird's position by continuously monitoring the location of the bird's head in three-dimensional space. It was found that birds sign-tracked (i.e., approached the conditioned stimulus) when the conditioned stimulus was closest to the site of the unconditioned stimulus, goal-tracked (i.e., approached the site of the unconditioned stimulus in the presence of the conditioned stimulus) when the conditioned stimulus was farthest from the site of the unconditioned stimulus, and engaged in both sign- and goal-tracking (or something intermediate) at intermediate conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distances. When both sign- and goal-tracking occurred, the former tended to occur in the first half and the latter in the second half of the interval in which the conditioned stimulus was present. The results suggest (a) whether sign- or goal-tracking (or both) occurs is a function of the distance of the conditioned stimulus from the site of the unconditioned stimulus, (b) the fact that pigeons but not rats have been found to sign-track consistently throughout the duration of the conditioned stimulus may be due to quantitatively rather than qualitatively different effects of conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distance across species (i.e., a "short" conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distance for a pigeon may be a "long" one for a rat), and (c) sign- and goal-tracking may be competing behavioral tendencies that can (e.g., at intermediate conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distances) cancel each other out. The findings lend support to theories that specify an interaction between phylogenetic and reinforcement variables in determining whether sign- or goal-tracking will occur in any given experimental preparation.     

Is exposure a necessary condition for fear-reduction?

In most of the effective techniques for reducing fear, exposure to the fear-provoking stimulus is a prominent feature. It is argued that in many circumstances, engaged exposure to the fear stimuli is a sufficient condition for fear-reduction, but there is no good reason for supposing that such exposure is a necessary condition for fear-reduction. Seven examples of fear-reduction apparently taking place in the absence of exposure are used to illustrate the argument. Some theoretical and practical consequences of the argument are introduced.