The Narrative Arc of TATs: Introduction to the JPA Special Section on Thematic Apperceptive Techniques

The past decade has seen important developments in thematic apperceptive techniques (TATs), with the creation of new card sets having alternate pictures representing different cultures, new scoring systems becoming available, and increasing international communication of these achievements. However, continuing impediments to the development of a validational literature include lingering mistaken assumptions about the nature of story data, ongoing debates about appropriate psychometric evaluation, and continuing questions about how stimuli and scoring systems should be conceptualized and interpreted. Negotiating the publication system can impede some potential authors. Excellent work on TATs with children is not well known in the adult-focused journals. The labor burden of meeting increasingly sophisticated publication standards might be a barrier to assessors focused on clinical practice. Accumulating a focused evidence base is challenging given the diversity of criterion variables for which TATs have been used. Research on TATs by clinicians can span the science–practice gap, but the narrative arc can be a dramatic one. The articles in this special section on TATs represent important conceptual, methodological, and substantive innovations.     

Adorno: Cultural Education and Resistance

In recent years, culture has become significantly politicized, or conspicuously de-politicized, in different parts of the UK, making its appearance in education policy of pivotal interest and ripe for critical attention. From the vantage point of Theodor Adorno’s work on the culture industry and his writings on the work of the teacher, I argue that cultural education is a site where something crucial and distinctive takes place. Within the Enlightenment tradition, critical self-reflection and resistance to heteronymous ways of thinking are core aims of education. Adorno’s contribution to an understanding of these aims leads us to consider the importance of ‘live contact with the warmth of things’ as essential to ethical and intellectual life. The kindly tolerance of the pluralist ideal is now being teased and goaded by acts of terror and widespread concern about personal and social security. At such an unstable juncture, an understanding of cultural education as an experience of ‘incorrigible plurality’ enriches and informs the beleaguered ideal of pluralism and points a way forward in troubled times.     

Strategy and Misdirection in Forced Choice Memory Performance Testing in Deception Detection

We examined forced choice memory performance testing in deception detection from a theoretical perspective. Evidence suggests that participants form different strategies to defeat this test. We attempted to describe these strategies within the framework of Cognitive Hierarchy Theory, a theory that distinguishes strategies based on their degree of anticipation of opponents' strategies. Additionally, we explored whether the strategy selection process is malleable. Truth tellers and liars were subjected to a forced choice memory test about a mock crime. Additionally, half of the sample was subjected to a misdirection changing the appearance of the test to that of a polygraph examination. We found detection accuracies and strategies similar to previous experiments and our misdirection manipulation elicited new strategies and behaviour. Theoretical and practical applications are discussed.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Differential Impact of Video-Stimulated Recall and Concurrent Questioning Methods on Beginning Readers' Verbalization About Self-Monitoring During Oral Reading

This pilot study explored two methods of eliciting beginning readers' verbalizations of their thinking when self-monitoring oral reading: video-stimulated recall and concurrent questioning. First and second graders (N = 11) were asked to explain their thinking about repetitions, attempts to self-correct, and successful self-corrects, in order to determine affordances and constraints of these two methods. Data analysis revealed the concurrent questioning method enabled students to recall their thinking and did not hinder comprehension. Video-stimulated recall method elicited fewer explanations due to a higher cognitive load from successive questioning and from an extended time interval between the oral reading and discussion.     

Becoming a Telepathic Tuning Fork: Anomalous Experience and the Relational Mind

Although we tend to regard telepathic communication as anomalous or uncanny, outside the range of scientific explanation, many paranormal experiences can be understood scientifically as the type of unconscious affective communication about which there is a growing body of scientific research and evidence. An information-processing model illuminates how a patient’s dissociated attempts to communicate through sensory experiences may be converted to the verbal symbolic via the analyst’s use of evoked images in the dissociative process. Understanding projective identification as a dissociative process of communication by which the patient projected his own unacceptable emotions into the analyst, who could then know experientially what the patient was feeling, can be understood scientifically as telepathic communication. When a patient experiences the effects of severe trauma and is very dissociative, as in the case presented, it is difficult to track and reflect upon these processes as they occur, making it virtually impossible to become and remain empathically attuned to his many self states. In the dissociative attunement deconstructed here, the therapist–patient dyad resonated increasingly in a telepathic attunement, despite much discord and confusion.     

Putting It on the Line: Telephone Counseling for Adolescent Smokers

Adolescent smokers need cessation help, but the question of how best to intervene remains unanswered. This article describes the empirically validated protocol of an established, well‐utilized adolescent telephone counseling program for smoking cessation, tailored to adolescent developmental needs and shown to increase clients' 6‐month prolonged abstinence rate significantly. Clinical issues addressed include client assessment, motivation, self‐efficacy, familial and social support, planning, coping, relapse‐sensitive call scheduling, and self‐image. Counselor training considerations are also discussed.