The personal myth: A re‐evaluation

This paper presents a re‐evaluation of Kris's personal myth. The notion has been used rather sparingly despite the Delphi Symposium in 1984 on the question of its clinical usefulness. After framing the notion of myth, some difficulties related to the question are identified. A clinical vignette exemplifies some of the ambiguities in its definition but stresses its clinical relevance. A discussion expands on these situations so as to propose three various aspects of personal myths to account for the two variants identified by Kris. The actualization of the underlying fantasy in the character organization is a third form and the technical aspect associated with it is reviewed from a new perspective. The family romance is revisited to reassess its role as the basis of the personal myth in the face of studies favouring an earlier development of the myth.     

Analytic process and dreaming about analysis

Dreams about the analytic session feature a manifest content in which the analytic setting is subject to distortion while the analyst appears undisguised. Such dreams are a consistent yet infrequent occurrence in most analyses. Their specificity consists in never reproducing the material conditions of the analysis as such. This paper puts forward the following hypothesis: dreams about the session relate to some aspects of the analyst's activity. In this sense, such dreams are indicative of the transference neurosis, prefiguring transference resistances to the analytic elaboration of key conflicts. The parts taken by the patient and by the analyst are discussed in terms of their ability to signal a deepening of the analysis.     

Trait procrastination undermines outcome and efficacy expectancies for achieving health-related possible selves

Current Psychology - People often fail at following through with their health behaviour goals. How health goals are cognitively represented holds promise for understanding successful health...     

"If only I had done better": Perfectionism and the functionality of counterfactual thinking

Although a recent update on the functional theory of counterfactual thinking suggests that counterfactuals are important for behavior regulation, there is some evidence that counterfactuals may not be functional for everyone. Two studies found differences between maladaptive and high personal standards perfectionism in the functionality of counterfactuals and variables relevant to behavior regulation. Maladaptive but not personal standards perfectionism predicted making more upward counterfactuals after recalling a negative event and was linked to a variety of negative markers of achievement. Maladaptive perfectionism was associated with making controllable, subtractive, and less specific counterfactuals. High personal standards perfectionism moderated the effects of maladaptive perfectionism on counterfactual controllability. Generating counterfactuals increased motivation for personal standards perfectionists relative to a noncounterfactual control group but had no effect on motivation for maladaptive perfectionists. The findings suggest a continuum of counterfactual functionality for perfectionists and highlight the importance of considering counterfactual specificity and structure.     

Infant cognition: going full factorial with pupil dilation

The violation‐of‐expectation (VOE) paradigm and related methods are the main tools used to study high‐level cognition in preverbal infants. Infants’ differential looking to conceptually implausible/impossible events has been used as an index of early cognitive competence in many areas, including object knowledge, physics, language, and number. However, an event's plausibility is commonly confounded with its perceptual novelty or familiarity, leading to a variety of interpretations for looking time data ( Bogartz, Shinskey & Speaker, 1997 ). This illustrative study demonstrates the value of factorial designs, in which perceptual (novelty–familiarity) and conceptual (possible–impossible) variables are independently and jointly explored. It also introduces pupil dilation as a viable and complementary dependent measure to study infant cognition. We show that pupil data can assist in the interpretation of otherwise equivocal looking time data. The discussion focuses on methodological considerations in infancy research.     

Social Support and Subjective Health in Fibromyalgia: Self-Compassion as a Mediator

Individuals with fibromyalgia report lower levels of health-related quality of life (HRQL) compared to other chronically ill populations and interpersonal factors (i.e., social support) may influence risk. What is less understood is how intrapersonal factors (i.e., self-compassion) may impact the social support-HRQL linkage. We examined the association between social support and HRQL in a sample of persons with fibromyalgia and tested the potential mediating role of self-compassion. Self-identified adults in the United States with fibromyalgia (N?=?508) were recruited from state, regional, and national organizations and support groups and completed an online battery of self-report questionnaires including: Multidimensional Health Profile—Psychosocial Functioning Index, Short-Form 36 Health Survey, and Self-Compassion Scale-Short Form. Individuals with greater subjective social support reported higher levels of self-compassion and, in turn, higher mental HRQL. These findings provide greater information about psychosocial constructs and HRQL and extend our understanding of self-compassion among individuals living with fibromyalgia.

     

Less Adaptive or More Maladaptive? A Meta‐analytic Investigation of Procrastination and Coping

Despite the theoretical and empirical accounts of trait procrastination as reflecting avoidance of aversive tasks as a means of mood repair, research documenting its links to coping is scarce and inconsistent. There is also little if any research to date examining whether coping strategies might explain the procrastination–stress relationship. The current research aimed to address these issues by integrating current research on procrastination and coping with our own data into a first meta‐analysis of the associations of procrastination with adaptive and maladaptive coping and then testing the potential role of coping for understanding the procrastination–stress relationship. In Study 1, a literature search yielded five published papers and three theses, which were supplemented by seven unpublished data sets comprising 15 samples (N = 4357). Meta‐analyses revealed that procrastination was positively associated with maladaptive coping (average r = .31) and negatively associated with adaptive coping (average r = ?.24). In Study 2, a meta‐analysis of the indirect effects through coping across four samples revealed that the average indirect effects for maladaptive but not adaptive coping explained the link between procrastination and stress. These findings expand the nomological network of procrastination and highlight the role of maladaptive coping for understanding procrastinators' stress. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Models of habituation in infancy

Research on infant cognition using habituation methods has sparked considerable controversy in recent years. At the core of the debates is the issue of whether infants have early (and possibly innate) conceptual understandings. This article reviews a range of computational models of habituation that might provide insights into such discussions. The models are assessed against key behavioral and neural features of habituation: temporal unfolding, exponential decrease, familiarity-to-novelty shift, habituation to repeated testing, discriminability of habitual items, selective inhibition and cortical-subcortical interactions. The review suggests that current models fail to offer comprehensive explanations of the behavioral phenomena.     

Transference symptom

Transference symptom is a hazy notion in Freud's writings. The notion is presented here as a particular moment in the crystallization of the transference neurosis. It results from a double cathexis of the analytic frame and the analyst resulting in a symbolic distortion that is represented plastically within the session, as occurs in dreams. The transference symptom proceeds from two different preconscious cathexes, one attached to the reality of the frame, the other to the drive linked to the analyst. A psychic space is thereby opened up for interpreting both the resistance and the unconscious derivatives of infantile conflict. The transference symptom is a compromise formation that includes the analyst and questions the countertransference stance. Three different analytic situations give rise to transference symptoms according to the relative balance between frame and process in the analytic encounter. The concept is compared with enactment.