Personality disorders and personality dimensions in anorexia nervosa

Information on the relationship between anorexia nervosa (AN) and personality disorders (PDs) and dimensions of temperament and character (measured by the Temperament and Character Inventory [TCI; Cloninger, Przybeck Svrakic, & Wetzel, 1994]) is limited. This study examines the predictive validity of the TCI for PD diagnoses assessed by the International Personality Disorder Examination-ICD-10 (IPDE-ICD-10; Loranger, Janca, & Sartorius, 1997) interviews of 46 women with DSM-IV-defined AN. Patients with a PD reported higher levels of harm-avoidance and lower levels of self-directedness than those without a PD. Scores on the TCI were predictive of the number of PD features present, particularly for those PDs in the anankastic, anxious, and dependent groups accounting for 40% to 51% of the variance. Cluster analysis based on scores on the TCI identified a subgroup of patients characterized by low levels of novelty seeking, self-directedness, and cooperativeness and high levels of harm avoidance. This cluster included the majority of those with avoidant, anxious, or dependent PDs. Assessment of particular personality dimensions was able to predict PDs in an anorexic sample. Since normal personality dimensions have greater validity than the categorical PDs, a consideration of normal temperament and character may assist in clinical decisionmaking and considerations concerning treatment.     

G.I. Gurdjieff: Some references to love

New developments in the Gurdjieff. teaching (the Work) have raised questions about the authentic line of the teaching. James Moore in his article “Moveable Feasts: The Gurdjieff Work”; (Religion Today 9 (2), 1994: 11–16) argues that, in terms of the dialectic between personal endeavour and supernal grace, Gurdjieff's teaching is based on making effort rather than receiving grace, working rather than being worked upon. The article looks at some references to love made by Gurdjieff and by some of his pupils. It suggests that, although absent from Work teaching in the Gurdjieff Society in London from the 1950s to the 1980s, grace was an element of Gurdjieff s teaching, and that new practices may serve to restore grace.     

Regional variation of cloze probabilities for sentence contexts

In 1980, Bloom and Fischler published a paper describing a set of sentence contexts (SCs) and their cloze probabilities (CPs). This material has subsequently been employed in numerous studies of linguistic processing. We sought to define the completion words and their CPs for Bloom and Fischler’s sentences in an inner-city British population in order to establish reliable norms for subsequent studies in the U.K. One hundred and fifty incomplete SCs were presented to 73 volunteers. The CPs for each of the words used to complete the SCs were computed. We then compared the CPs from our sample with those from Bloom and Fischler. There were significant differences between CPs from each sample in 14% of the SCs analyzed (p < .01). Our data suggest that studies employing SCs and CPs may require locally defined norms if the test population differs substantially from the original one. The consequences of employing SCs and CPs to study linguistic processing without normalization are discussed.     

Multilevel and Latent Variable Modeling with Composite Links and Exploded Likelihoods

Composite links and exploded likelihoods are powerful yet simple tools for specifying a wide range of latent variable models. Applications considered include survival or duration models, models for rankings, small area estimation with census information, models for ordinal responses, item response models with guessing, randomized response models, unfolding models, latent class models with random effects, multilevel latent class models, models with log-normal latent variables, and zero-inflated Poisson models with random effects. Some of the ideas are illustrated by estimating an unfolding model for attitudes to female work participation. We wish to thank The Research Council of Norway for a grant supporting our collaboration.     

Validation of a Tibetan translation of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist 25 and the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire

This study sought to translate and validate the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25 (HSCL) and the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) in a Tibetan population. Translated questionnaires were administered to 57 Tibetan survivors of torture/human rights abuses living in the United States and receiving services in a torture treatment program. Participants were evaluated to determine if they met criteria for major depressive episode, generalized anxiety disorder, or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Coefficient alpha for the HSCL Anxiety subscale (.89), Depression subscale (.92), and the HTQ (.89) were high. Diagnostic accuracy using receiver operating characteristic curve analysis generated good classification accuracy for anxiety (.89), depression (.92), and PTSD (.83). However, although sensitivity and specificity for HSCL subscales were quite high, the HTQ generated low sensitivity (.33), partly because of a low rate of PTSD. Results support the reliability and validity of the HSCL but suggest further study of the HTQ with this population is required.     

Using a Two-Tier Test to Examine Taiwanese Graduate Students’ Misunderstanding of Responsible Conduct of Research

The present study investigates Taiwanese graduate students’ general understanding and misunderstanding of Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). A total of 580 graduate students responded to the self-developed Responsible Conduct of Research Reasoning Test. The results reveal that, first, students did not have sufficient knowledge to reason why a particular instance of research (mis)conduct was doable or not. Second, the statistical results show that female students, students majoring in the humanities or the social sciences, doctoral-level students, and students with RCR-related training outperformed others. In addition, the misbehaviors that students judged relatively uncritically comprise the following nine categories: (a) seeing authorship as a property or power, (b) misinterpreting research coauthors’ responsibilities, (c) inaccurately conducting the informed-consent process, (d) fabricating and falsifying research data, (e) misinterpreting the correct citation of research sources, (f) holding vague concepts of self-plagiarism, (g) misinterpreting the Taiwan Copyright Act, (h) accepting duplicate-publication practices, and (i) accepting piecemeal publication practices. The present study discusses participative students’ major misunderstandings of actual RCR-related practices. The study also presents further implications and suggestions based on the findings.     

Nonverbal signals speak up: Association between perceptual nonverbal dominance and emotional intelligence

Emotional communication uses verbal and nonverbal means. In case of conflicting signals, nonverbal information is assumed to have a stronger impact. It is unclear, however, whether perceptual nonverbal dominance varies between individuals and whether it is linked to emotional intelligence. Using audiovisual stimulus material comprising verbal and nonverbal emotional cues that were varied independently, perceptual nonverbal dominance profiles and their relations to emotional intelligence were examined. Nonverbal dominance was found in every participant, ranging from 55 to 100%. Moreover, emotional intelligence, particularly the ability to understand emotions, correlated positively with nonverbal dominance. Furthermore, higher overall emotional intelligence as well as a higher ability to understand emotions were linked to smaller reaction time differences between emotionally incongruent and congruent stimuli. The association between perceptual nonverbal dominance and emotional intelligence, and more specifically the ability to understand emotions, might reflect an adaptive process driven by the experience of higher authenticity in nonverbal cues.     

A Case Study of Teaching Social Responsibility to Doctoral Students in the Climate Sciences

The need to make young scientists aware of their social responsibilities is widely acknowledged, although the question of how to actually do it has so far gained limited attention. A 2-day workshop entitled “Prepared for social responsibility?” attended by doctoral students from multiple disciplines in climate science, was targeted at the perceived needs of the participants and employed a format that took them through three stages of ethics education: sensitization, information and empowerment. The workshop aimed at preparing doctoral students to manage ethical dilemmas that emerge when climate science meets the public sphere (e.g., to identify and balance legitimate perspectives on particular types of geo-engineering), and is an example of how to include social responsibility in doctoral education. The paper describes the workshop from the three different perspectives of the authors: the course teacher, the head of the graduate school, and a graduate student. The elements that contributed to the success of the workshop, and thus make it an example to follow, are (1) the involvement of participating students, (2) the introduction of external expertise and role models in climate science, and (3) a workshop design that focused on ethical analyses of examples from the climate sciences.     

Guided Visualization and Suggestibility: Effect of Perceived Authority on Recall of Autobiographical Memories

The purpose of this study was to investigate a possible component process in the formation of childhood pseudomemories in adults. Participants recounted a childhood event, the details of which came from hearing others tell it (a know event) rather than from their personal experience (a remember event). Then participants were placed in 1 of 4 possible conditions: They completed a guided visualization task led by an expert, a guided visualization task led by a nonexpert, a visual search task, or a verbal list-learning task. For the guided visualization task, participants listened to a middle-aged man on audiotape, who asked them to imagine details about their know event. Half believed the person on the tape was a well-known and esteemed psychologist (an expert), and half were led to believe that he was someone who had gone back to school to study communications (a nonexpert). As predicted, guided visualization led participants to rate their know event closer to a remember event. Planned comparisons demonstrated that the effect was significantly greater for the expert versus nonexpert conditions. Results were applied to the process of false memory formation and the use of visualization procedures in psychotherapy.     

Kierkegaard's accounts of faith: Their relative centrality

This article is an attempt to clarify the concept of apatheia as it appears in the Praktikos of Evagrius of Pontus. The condition (katastasis) of apatheia is central to the Evagrian understanding of the goal of monastic life, and the Praktikos is the treatise in the writings of Evagrius which deals most thoroughly with apatheia. The thesis of the article is that apatheia should be understood in terms of the Platonic distinction between stability and movement, and apatheia, thus, appears to be two different kinds of conditions, namely imperfect apatheia, related to the daily ascetic struggle of the monks against the demons and the thoughts, and perfect apatheia, related to the peaceful condition of undisturbed prayer, in which the mind contemplates the holy Trinity.