POWER AND THE QUALITY OF SAME-SEX FRIENDSHIPS

Does the quality of same-sex friendship depend on the gender of the friends and the balance of power between friends? Fifty-four men and 60 women undergraduates evaluated two of their same-sex friendships, one equal in power and one unequal in power. The quality of each friendship was rated in terms of emotional closeness, satisfaction, liking, self-disclosure, and rewards. In general, most young adults evaluated their friendships positively. Mixed-model multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs) found significant main effects of gender and power on ratings of quality, but no interactions. Consistent with previous research, women generally evaluated their same-sex friendships more positively than did men. Gender differences were relatively small in magnitude and were not found for all indices of relationship quality, however. As predicted, participants rated equal-power friendships significantly higher than unequal-power friendships on all measures of quality. Power appears to be an important but largely neglected element of friendship.     

School Psychology: Training Individuals for One of the Best Kept Secrets in Professional Psychology

Abstract

School psychology training at the doctoral level is discussed. Given the increasing diversity in the schools as well as the varied education and mental health needs of the population, school psychology training is necessarily broad, involving traditional skills such as assessment, intervention, consultation, and counseling, all of which are taught within a context of a changing school population with changing needs. Because there is compulsory education, school psychologists’ interface with a broad cross-section of individual children, their parents, and their teachers. Moreover, school psychological practice is not limited to schools, as doctoral school psychologists are health service providers; many of these individuals work in other settings for which they are trained to provide services. The complexities and challenges of training school psychologists within this broad agenda effectively across domains are discussed.     

Learning the deictic meaning of third person pronouns

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Forty-two children (2;8–5;7) viewed video-taped “scenes” in which a SPEAKER addressed sentences containing a personal pronoun which refereed...     

Deduction from Uncertain Premises

We investigate how the perceived uncertainty of a conditional affects a person's choice of conclusion. We use a novel procedure to introduce uncertainty by manipulating the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. In Experiment 1, we show first that subjects reduce their choice of valid conclusions when a conditional is followed by an additional premise that makes the major premise uncertain. In this we replicate Byrne (1989). These subjects choose, instead, a qualified conclusion expressing uncertainty. If subjects are given a third statement that qualifies the likelihood of the additional premise, then the uncertainty of the conclusions they choose is systematically related to the suggested uncertainty. Experiment 2 confirms these observations in problems that omit the additional premise and qualify the first premise directly. Experiment 3 shows that the qualifying statement also affects the perceived probability of the consequent given the antecedent of the conditional. Experiment 4 investigates the effect of suggested uncertainty on the fallacies and shows that increases in uncertainty reduce the number of certain conclusions that are chosen while affirming the consequent but have no effect on denying the antecedent. We discuss our results in terms of rule theories and mental models and conclude that the latter give the most natural account of our results.     

A plea for a measure of opacity: Psychoanalysis in an age of transparency Annual Birkbeck Counselling Association Lecture December 2018

‘Whatever can be catalogued is an occasion for despair’. Gabriel Marcel (1964 Marcel, G. (1964). Creative Fidelity, trans. R. Rosthai (p. 70). New York: Noonday Press. [Google Scholar]).

Ever since the Enlightenment, knowledge has been linked to the metaphor of light. The idea that ‘to see is to know’ so firmly grounds our current way of being in and understanding the world it is hard to imagine otherwise. But our insistence on open government, freedom of information and the public’s right to know privileges not only the visibility of information but also the visibility of the self. In this paper, I consider how we might think about and respond to the ever-increasing demand for transparency in the consulting room. I draw on the ideas of Derrida, Laplanche and Glissant to argue for what has been called ‘the right to opacity’, suggesting that psychoanalytic practitioners are particularly well placed to offer a critical perspective on today’s culture of surveillance.