Shallow Gratitude: Public and Private Acknowledgement of External Help in Accounts of Success

Subjects furnished public or private accounts of major recent success experiences. Public accounts contained many references to receiving help from other people, whereas private accounts were relatively devoid of such acknowledgements. Thus, expressions of gratitude and other references to external help may often be a superficial concession to self-presentational norms, expectations, and other interpersonal factors' that restrict the typical operation of self-serving biases.     

Autobiographical memory specificity in adults reporting repressed,recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse

Some psychotherapists believe that adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) are characterised by memory deficits for their childhood. Using the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT), we asked nonabused control participants and participants who reported either continuous, recovered, or repressed memories of CSA to retrieve a specific personal memory in response to either positive or negative cue words from either childhood or adolescence/adulthood. The results indicated that participants who believed they harboured repressed memories of abuse tended to exhibit the greatest difficulty retrieving specific memories from their childhood. Neither posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nor major depression was related to diminished memory specificity.     

the relationship between pain and coping styles among hiv-positive men and women

Abstract

Pain in HIV/AIDS patients is associated with compromised quality of life and emotional adjustment. Although previous findings support a relationship between coping styles and subjective pain for various groups of chronically-ill persons, little research has examined the associations between coping and pain in HIV-positive or AIDS patients. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between pain and coping styles among 105 HIV-positive participants (32 women and 73 men) in a randomized clinical trial designed to examine the effect of group psychotherapy on quality of life and health behavior. Participants completed the Brief COPE, the pain scale from the Medical Outcomes Study-HIV, and a demographic and medical questionnaire. Multiple regression analysis, with pain as the dependent variable, showed that participants who reported coping through denial reported greater pain severity (p < 0.0001). These results suggest that denial as a coping strategy appears to be signficantly associated with pain for persons with HIV/AIDS. However, further research is necessary to determine the causal relationship between pain and coping through denial. These findings also point to the possibility of psychological intervention in order to modify maladaptive coping styles and to ameliorate pain in this population.     

PROFESSIONALIZING SURVIVAL: THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MEMORY AMONG HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR-EDUCATORS IN MONTREAL

The majority of Holocaust survivors never speak publicly about their experiences, but those who do tend to find themselves at the centre of commemorative work in their communities. As Holocaust scholars, Holocaust education institutions, and members of the general public become increasingly interested in how to ethically universalize the lessons of the Holocaust, the public Holocaust survivor's role has broadened. It is no longer enough to recount one's own experience; survivors are expected to speak to current human rights abuses and genocides.In Montreal, Canada, a city which once claimed the third largest survivor population in the world, public survivors do a great deal of work. They give testimony in schools and at commemorative events, organize book clubs, write plays, direct films, teach, act as museum docents, and assume roles as community spokespeople. Given their dedication to this work, and a push to get them to speak beyond their personal experiences, we argue that there is a major shift taking place: the act of giving public Holocaust testimony is being professionalized. This professionalization raises unique questions about how people who lived through the Holocaust conceptualize themselves and their identities as survivors. By treating testimony as professional work, survivors contemplate, on a daily basis and in an applied manner, their stances on big questions regarding hierarchies of suffering, comparability, the connection between the personal and the political, blame and forgiveness, as well as many other relevant themes that are central to Holocaust and memory scholarship. All of this plays out in their testimonies.     

Rosalia H.: with Freud in a prelude to psychoanalysis

Abstract

The case of Fräulein Rosalia H. is discussed quite briefly by Freud in one of his contributions to Studies on hysteria. This case of ‘retention hysteria’ was included in another much longer case study, and it is designed to illustrate how a ‘mnemic symbol’, which operates to condense a group of memories, may be formed during the course of an analysis. A new symptom thus appears which may throw more light on the circumstances which gave rise to the presenting symptom. Despite the richness of this case, Freud does not refer to it again in his writing and there has been very little discussion of it in psychoanalytic commentaries. This paper explores how the case serves as a transition point from pre-psychoanalytic conceptions of symptomatology and clinical practice, and how it can be read as a prelude to psychoanalysis proper.     

The Catholic Church,moral doctrine,and HIV prevention in Recife,Brazil: Negotiating the contradictions between religious belief and the realities of everyday life

Religious beliefs have had a key role in shaping local responses to HIV and AIDS. As the world's largest Catholic country, Brazil is no exception. Yet little research has been conducted to document how religious doctrine is enacted in practice among its lay leaders and followers. In this article, we present ethnographic research from Recife, Brazil, conducted to understand the way in which religious doctrines are interpreted at a local level. Contextualised within the sociology of contemporary Brazilian Catholicism, we draw on interviews with clergy members, lay leaders, and parishioners to discuss how the Catholic Church's vision of sexuality translates into everyday lives of its followers. We explore the disjuncture between the Catholic ideals of fidelity and delaying sex until marriage with the everyday reality of the Church's followers, highlighting the role that gender plays in defining sexual roles and expectations. We conclude by posing questions for future research and HIV prevention strategies considering the formal institutional response of the Brazilian Catholic Church to AIDS on the one hand, and the social and cultural contexts in which Catholics live their daily lives on the other.     

Aggression in the Laboratory: Problems with the Validity of the Modified Taylor Competitive Reaction Time Test as a Measure of Aggression in Media Violence Studies

Many laboratory studies of aggression use a measure known as the modified Taylor Competitive Reaction Time Test (TCRTT), for which validation studies are lacking. Using sound blasts administered by the participant against a fictional human opponent, the TCRTT also allows for multiple methods of measuring aggression. The validity of the TCRTT was tested in 53 college student participants. Participants took a self-report measure of aggressiveness as well as neuropsychological measures of frontal lobe functioning predictive of aggression. Results were not supportive of the TCRTT's validity and indicated concerns regarding the use of the TCRTT as a measure of aggression. Results suggest that labaratory studies of media violence using the TCRTT are of questionable validity.     

Resilience to Childhood Abuse and Neglect in College Students

This study examined the prevalence of a history of childhood maltreatment in a college sample and identified the relationship between being maltreated as a child and later college adjustment in men and women. Results indicate that men who had been maltreated in childhood had more resilient outcomes in college than women who had been maltreated in childhood. Negative life events and protective factors acted as mediators in the relationship between childhood maltreatment and college adjustment for women, and protective factors acted as a moderator in the relationship between childhood maltreatment and college adjustment for men.     

Universities are not a good place for psychotherapy and counselling training

This paper outlines eight aspects of institutional practice in university teaching that are at odds with the ethos of therapy: the linearity of university training has consequences for conceptual and cultural issues that may be antithetical to genuine therapeutic practice; certain notions about what reality is and what counts as truth may be reinforced by university trainings; academic knowledge in universities is standardized so as to sabotage therapeutic work; the university privileges a cognitive account; the university trains therapists in ways that are antithetical to the ethos of therapy; universities keep alive hierarchies that sit uneasily with the project of therapy; university training encourages the therapist to develop an identity that is anathema to many traditions in therapy; and compartmentalization of ethics in university-based trainings would run against the ethics of therapy.