Pursuing and distancing: the construct and its measurement

Although the concept of interpersonal pursuing and distancing has been introduced and used clinically, the lack of a reliable and valid measure has deterred its more formal investigation and relevance to personality theory. The Pursuing-Distancing (P-D) Scale, a 92-item measure of the behavioral expression of these characteristics, was developed. Evidence for internal consistency as well as internal support of construct validity is presented and discussed. An 80-item revised scale is available from the authors and is currently being evaluated in a variety of external validation settings.     

Rorschach content interpretation in post-traumatic stress disorders: a reply to Carr

In traumatized patients, Rorschach responses draw from a variety of sources, including the traumatic event itself, past and current experiences, and internal fantasy. As complex and highly condensed mental constructions, these responses often serve to reveal the meaning of the trauma in terms of the patient's prevailing personality conflicts. In many cases, this meaning may be hidden in the response's distortion of or elaboration on images drawn from the actual event.     

Components of reward in social dilemmas

A social dilemma (Dawes, 1980) may be defined as a situation in which a collection of individuals is faced with a conflict between maximizing selfish interests and maximizing collective interests. The dilemma is based on the fact that if all choose to maximize selfish interests, all are worse off than if all choose to maximize collective interests. In a decomposed social dilemma (Pruitt, 1967), the outcomes are divided into two components: one component is based on one's own choice and the second component is based on the choices made by the others. Using 3-person decomposed games, two types of incentives were contrasted: a positive incentive (bonus) for cooperative choices and a negative incentive (penalty) for noncooperative choices. Two experiments were conducted using male college students. The results of both experiments showed that the positive incentive evoked a higher level of cooperation than the negative incentive. The results are discussed in terms of nonadditive utility components, Pruitt's motivational interpretation, and Kelley and Thibaut's (1978) theory of interdependence.     

Learned helplessness and judgments of control

One of the central hypotheses of learned helplessness theory is that exposure to noncontingency produces a reduced ability to perceive response-outcome relations (the postulated "cognitive deficit"). To test this hypothesis, subjects were exposed to a typical helplessness induction task and then asked to make judgments of the amount of control their responses exerted over a designated outcome (the onset of a light). Support for the postulated cognitive deficit would be found if subjects who experienced the induction underestimated the relation between their responses and outcomes. The results, however, demonstrated that induction subjects (n = 30) made higher and more accurate judgments of control than subjects in a no-treatment control group (n = 30). This finding clearly fails to support the postulated cognitive deficit and highlights the need for other direct tests of the basic hypotheses of helplessness theory.     

Distinguishing child diagnostic types with early memories

The present study attempts to correct design weaknesses in earlier studies which assessed the use of early memories (EMs) in identifying psychopathology in children. A new EM scoring system, the CEMSS, was developed to provide an objective, comprehensive analysis of the reported EMs. Subjects were 64 boys, SES IV and V, 8 through 12 years old from four diagnostic groups--Delinquent, Hyperactive, Somatic Complaints, and Schizoid. Overall, the CEMSS provided an effective means to distinguish the diagnostic groups, p less than or equal to .01. The results suggest that content variables best distinguished the type of presenting psychopathology, whereas an earlier study found that structural EM variables most reliably identified the degree of psychopathology.     

A developmental study of reactions to frustration among Scheduled Caste Indians

Administered the Indian adaptation of the Rosenzweig P-F Study to 144 Scheduled Caste (SC) adolescent and 158 young adult male Indians. The results show that SC adolescents scored significantly higher on ego-defensive (ED) and extragressive (EA) and lower on need-persistive (NP), introgressive (IA) and imgressive (MA) reactions as compared to the Non-Scheduled caste (Non-SC) adolescents while there was no significant difference on any reaction among SC and Non-SC young adults. SC adolescents scored higher on NP and lower on obstacle-dominance (OD) reaction as compared to the SC young adults. Non-SC young adults were higher on EA, ED, and OD and lower on IA and NP as compared to those of adolescents. The pattern of reactions was ED-EA-NP-IA-MA-OD among adolescents and ED-EA-IA-NP-MA-OD among young adults of both the castes.     

The Egocentricity Index and Self-Esteem in court ordered psychiatric evaluations

An attempt was made to test the hypothesis that the Egocentricity Index (Exner, 1974), a ratio which incorporates pair and reflection responses, is related to self-esteem. Sixty criminal defendants referred for psychiatric evaluation were routinely administered the Rorschach. After all other testing was completed the subjects were asked to complete the Coopersmith Self-esteem Inventory. Results found no significant relationships between the Egocentricity Index and self-esteem as measured by the Coopersmith. It was recommended that the Egocentricity Index not be used as a measure of self-esteem until research evidence to support its use in this manner is provided.     

If it changes it must be a process: study of emotion and coping during three stages of a college examination

This natural experiment provides substantial evidence for the following major themes, which are based on a cognitively oriented, process-centered theory of stress and coping: First, a stressful encounter should be viewed as a dynamic, unfolding process, not as a static, unitary event. Emotion and coping (including the use of social support) were assessed at three stages of a midterm examination: the anticipation stage before the exam, the waiting stage after the exam and before grades were announced, and after grades were posted. For the group as a whole there were significant changes in emotions and coping (including the use of social support) across the three stages. Second, people experience seemingly contradictory emotions and states of mind during every stage of an encounter. In this study, for example, subjects experienced both threat emotions and challege emotions. The complexity of emotions and their cognitive appraisals reflects ambiguity regarding the multifaceted nature of the exam and its meanings, especially during the anticipation stage. Third, coping is a complex process. On the average, subjects used combinations of most of the available forms of problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping at every stage of the exam. Different forms of coping were salient during the anticipation and waiting stages. Problem-focused coping and emphasizing the positive were more prominent during the former, and distancing more prominent during the latter. Finally, despite normatively shared emotional reactions at each stage, substantial individual differences remained. Using selected appraisal and coping variables, and taking grade point averages (GPA) into account, approximately 48% of the variances in threat and challenge emotions at the anticipation stage was explained. Controlling for variance due to the grade received, appraisal, and coping variables accounted for 28% of the variance in positive and negative emotions at the outcome stage. Including grade, 57% of the variance in positive emotions at outcome and 61% of the negative emotions at outcome were explained.     

Alcohol and social behavior II: the helpful drunkard

Can alcohol make people more helpful, and if so, how? We hypothesized that alcohol would increase helping when, if the person were sober, the helping response would be under high inhibitory conflict--that is, when it would be affected by strong instigating and inhibiting pressures. Alcohol's damage to inhibitory processing should then allow instigating pressures to have more influence on the response, increasing helping. We expected that under low inhibitory conflict, when either or both of these response pressures would be weak under sobriety, alcohol would have little effect on helping. In two experiments we examined this reasoning. In Study 1, a mild dose of alcohol increased helping among high-conflict subjects pressured to help with a task they did not like, but did not increase helping among low-conflict subjects who either liked the task or were weakly pressured to help. In Study 2, a somewhat stronger dose of alcohol increased helping among all high-conflict subjects pressured to help with an undesirable task, yet again had no effect among low-conflict subjects weakly pressured to help. These studies provided an experimental demonstration of the role of inhibitory response conflict in mediating alcohol's social effects, and show that this process generalizes to prosocial behavior. Additional evidence from both experiments helped to rule out alternative explanations concerning drinking expectancies, alcohol's ability to enhance mood, and its ability to make the task more bearable.