Metaphorical Mapping: The Arts in Graduate Theological Education

Doctoral students in Bible, theology, ethics, history, preaching, worship, pastoral care, and Christian education come together for a required seminar in teaching. Assignments include reading and discussion, student‐led teaching demonstrations, and the ‘metaphorical mapping’ of each student's field of study. In developing their ‘metaphorical maps’ students use artistic and expressive media to demonstrate their understanding of their field. The assignment has been successful in establishing an open and mutually respectful climate in the classroom, in fostering a pattern of critical reflection on teaching, and in demonstrating appropriate inclusion of personal experience in the academic classroom.     

Jealousy as a manifold of divergent understandings: a Q methodological investigation

By regarding jealousy as a discursively constituted manifold of understandings it becomes germane to explore that multiplex through pattern analysis. In the reported Q methodological study 10 orthogonal, alternative constructions of self-generated jealousy scenarios are reported and interpreted. Implications for jealousy research and the study of accounts of experience in general are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An overview of malingering and deception in neuropsychiatric cases

Forensic practitioners must shoulder special responsibilities when evaluating over-stated pathology (e.g., malingering) as well as simulated adjustment. Such determinations may modify or even override other clinical findings. As a result, practitioners must be alert to their own misassumptions that may unintentionally bias their conclusions about response styles. Detection strategies for malingering—based on unlikely or markedly amplified presentations—are highlighted in this article. Given page constraints, assessment methods for feigning are succinctly presented with their applications to administrative, civil, and criminal referrals.     

Children's reasoning about responses to peer aggression: Victim's and witness's expected and prescribed behaviors

This research examined children's reasoning about expected (i.e., what a peer would do) and prescribed (i.e., what a peer should do) responses to unprovoked, intentional aggressive actions in two contexts: as a victim of such a transgression and as a witness to the incident. Physical harm and property damage items were used in a structured interview format. There were 90 subjects drawn from three elementary school grades (2nd, 4th, and 6th). Children differentiated between the expected and prescribed responses of peers and significant developmental differences in children's evaluations were found. Although the majority of the subjects in all grades denounced retaliation on the basis of concerns about others' welfare, older children stated that peers were likely to retaliate against the perpetrator nonetheless. Across different contexts, older children's responses appeared to reveal a greater independence from authority in negotiating peer interactions. In evaluating the witness's responses to aggressive acts, younger children's expected and prescribed responses were less disparate than that of the older children. The utility of including different vantage points of the child in examining children's social reasoning about aggression and the application of the present findings to social information-processing models are discussed. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Faking Good: An Investigation of Social Desirability and Defensiveness in an Inpatient Sample With Personality Disorder Traits

Accurate interpretations of psychological assessments rely heavily on forthright reporting. However, researchers and practitioners recognize that examinees can easily invalidate their test results by underreporting symptoms or overstating positive attributes. Rogers (2008) delineated two distinct but related forms of positive impression management (PIM): defensiveness (denying symptoms and psychological impairment) and social desirability (putting forth an exaggeratedly positive image). Although these two have often been combined in past research, this study sought to investigate each separately via a mixed within- and between-subjects simulation design. Simulation scenarios included a special rehabilitation program for the defensiveness (DF) condition and a competitive job for social desirability (SD). The study used the Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (PID–5; Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, & Skodol, 2012) and recruited 106 inpatients from a psychiatric hospital. As expected, inpatients with prominent personality traits substantially suppressed them under both PIM conditions. Having shown the susceptibility of the PID–5 to intentional distortion, two empirically derived and conceptually based validity scales were next developed to address this important concern. Pending further validation, they might contribute to screening PIM presentations, thus promoting the PID–5's clinical utility. Continued research is needed across multiscale inventories for differentiating PIM presentations.     

Socially Valued Roles,Self‐Determination,and Community Participation among Individuals Living with Serious Mental Illnesses

Decades after deinstitutionalization, individuals living with serious mental illnesses remain isolated, socially disengaged, and devalued members of communities. Burgeoning research and services need conceptual clarity to improve such social conditions. This qualitative inquiry used grounded theory and participatory approaches to conduct an in‐depth exploration of community participation for individuals living with serious mental illnesses based on key stakeholder perspectives (n = 45). Results revealed that community participation is a multifaceted construct with layers of meaning for individuals living with serious mental illnesses. Overarching themes are contextualized in Self‐Determination Theory and presented with deidentified illustrations. Implications for services, research, and policy are discussed.     

The Effectiveness of the MMPI-2-RF in Detecting Feigned Mental Disorders and Cognitive Deficits: a Meta-Analysis

A cornerstone of forensic assessments involves the assessment of response styles, including feigning and malingering. As a forensic relevant instrument (FRI), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF) contains embedded overreporting scales that cover the three major domains: feigned mental disorders (i.e., F-r and Fp-r), feigned cognitive impairment (RBS and FBS-r), and feigned medical complaints (Fs). This meta-analytic review of 30 studies examined the effectiveness of various detection strategies and cut scores for the MMPI-2-RF. As an important clinical concern, several feigning scales (F-r, FBS-r, and RBS) exhibited marked elevations (Ms > 80 T) for genuine responders diagnosed with major depressive or somatoform disorders. However, the Fp-r—a true rare-symptoms detection strategy—proved highly effective for discriminating feigned from genuine psychopathology (ds > .90). For feigned cognitive impairment, the FBS-r produced very large effect sizes with feigned TBI (M d = 1.41); however, its cut scores were more indicative of general feigning than feigned cognitive impairment. Finally, Fs yielded a large effect size (d = 1.23) for feigned medical complaints, but its cut scores were more likely to identify examinees feigning mental disorders (M sensitivity = .74) than medical complaints (M sensitivity = .43). These findings are discussed within the context of clinical forensic evaluations.     

“One Size Fits All”: An Existential-Constructivist Perspective on the Crisis Intervention Approach with Suicidal Individuals

The empirical data on the relationship between suicide and suicide attempts are interpreted as suggesting that the contemporary assessment and intervention approaches to suicidal individuals are, by and large, ineffective. In support of our argument, we focus on the crisis intervention model as one example and suggest that the crisis intervention approach to responding to suicidal individuals is at best, ineffective and, at worst, can be viewed as exacerbating suicidal risk through its distancing, marginalizing, and stigmatizing effects. Additionally, we hypothesize that the mechanics of the crisis intervention model contribute to the societal message that a meaning and contextual-based discussion of suicidality is taboo and that this message tends to continue into more long-term psychotherapeutic approaches. Along these lines, we present an alternative to the crisis intervention model grounded in an existential-constructivist theory of suicidal behavior and the principles of therapeutic and feminist assessment philosophies as an heuristic intended to stimulate the development of new and innovative approaches to working with suicidal individuals.     

Person perception in the heat of conflict: Negative trait attributions affect procedural preferences and account for situational and cultural differences

Disputes by their nature involve contentious behavior. If one attributes such behavior to underlying personality traits, these attributions can be quite damning. The current research investigated negative trait attributions and their impact on dispute resolution decisions. We hypothesized that judging one's opponent to be low in agreeableness and high in emotionality (e.g. stubborn and volatile) shifts one's preference towards more formal procedures – formal in the sense that a third party judge controls the process and outcome. Drawing on the attribution literature, we hypothesized that two antecedents of these judgments (and consequent preferences) are the perceiver's level of prior information and the perceiver's cultural proclivity to explaining behavior in terms of personal dispositions. Results of an experiment measuring reactions to a hypothetical dispute found that prior information and culture (USA vs Hong Kong) increased trait attributions and preferences for formal procedures. Additionally, expectancy measures showed interaction effects suggesting that disputants dynamically construct expectancies in light of their personality impressions.