The internal family and the facts of life

Primitive defensive mechanisms innvolving splitting and projections are an essential process in the development of the infant. However, if these persist into adult life unmitigated by more depressive processes involving introjection and awareness of secure good objects they are shown to be inadequate to the task of coping with life crises, based as they are on the denial and distortion of reality. In this paper, I describe two patients who were seen in very different treatment settings and in whom such mechanisms were predominant. These began to fail when the patients were faced with difficult external events. These caused feelings of panic about impending mental disintegration. I then show how these patients sought to re-establish their primitive defensive structures.     

Stakeholders’ Perspectives on Community-Based Participatory Research to Enhance Mental Health Services

Historically, consumers of mental health services have not been given meaningful roles in research and change efforts related to the services they use. This is quickly changing as scholars and a growing number of funding bodies now call for greater consumer involvement in mental health services research and improvement. Amidst these calls, community‐based participatory research (CBPR) has emerged as an approach which holds unique promise for capitalizing on consumer involvement in mental health services research and change. Yet, there have been few discussions of the value added by this approach above and beyond that of traditional means of inquiry and enhancement in adult mental health services. The purpose of this paper is to add to this discussion an understanding of potential multilevel and multifaceted benefits associated with consumer‐involved CBPR. This is accomplished through presenting the first‐person accounts of four stakeholder groups who were part of a consumer‐involved CBPR project purposed to improve the services of a local community mental health center. We present these accounts with the hope that by illustrating the unique outcomes associated with CBPR, there will be invigorated interest in CBPR as a vehicle for consumer involvement in adult mental health services research and enhancement.     

A randomized experiment comparing random and cutoff-based assignment

In this article, we review past studies comparing randomized experiments to regression discontinuity designs, mostly finding similar results, but with significant exceptions. The latter might be due to potential confounds of study characteristics with assignment method or with failure to estimate the same parameter over methods. In this study, we correct the problems by randomly assigning 588 participants to be in a randomized experiment or a regression discontinuity design in which they are otherwise treated identically, comparing results estimating both the same and different parameters. Analysis includes parametric, semiparametric, and nonparametric methods of modeling nonlinearities. Results suggest that estimates from regression discontinuity designs approximate the results of randomized experiments reasonably well but also raise the issue of what constitutes agreement between the 2 estimates.     

Three brief assessments of math achievement

Because of wide disparities in college students?? math knowledge??that is, their math achievement??studies of cognitive processing in math tasks also need to assess their individual level of math achievement. For many research settings, however, using existing math achievement tests is either too costly or too time consuming. To solve this dilemma, we present three brief tests of math achievement here, two drawn from the Wide Range Achievement Test and one composed of noncopyrighted items. All three correlated substantially with the full achievement test and with math anxiety, our original focus, and all show acceptable to excellent reliability. When lengthy testing is not feasible, one of these brief tests can be substituted.     

Remember the Children,Honey! Spouses' Gender-Role Attitudes and Working Mothers' Work-to-Family Conflict

Work-to-family conflict (WFC) is a pressing issue for many working parents, in particular for working mothers, and hence, understanding the factors that contribute to WFC is important. We examined gender-role attitudes as antecedents of working mothers' WFC, focusing on both working mothers' own and their husbands' gender-role attitudes. Building on cognitive dissonance theory and crossover research, we assumed that working mothers who hold more traditional gender-role attitudes or who live with a husband who holds more traditional gender-role attitudes experience more WFC. Additionally, we assumed that the strength of these effects further depends on mothers' workload and the age of their children. We tested our hypotheses with several waves of recent data of 222 dual-earner couples, drawn from a representative sample of the Swiss Household Panel. Results showed that working mothers experienced more WFC if they held more traditional gender-role attitudes, but only if they had a high workload. Working mothers also experienced more WFC if their husbands held more traditional gender-role attitudes, however, independently of mothers' workload or age of the children. These results suggest that both spouses' gender-role attitudes influence working mothers' WFC, albeit in somewhat different ways.© 2018 International Association of Applied Psychology.