On the renaissance of personality assessment and personality theory

Both personality assessment and personality theory have experienced a significant decline in the past two or three decades, giving way to alternate professional interests by some, and being attacked as both empirically unsupportable and devoid of conceptual merit by others. Several tangible signs suggest that a resurrection is underway owing to position reversals by former critics, the changing character of patient populations, refinements in personality-oriented psychometric techniques, the refurbishing of analytic, interpersonal, and learning theories of personality, and the central role assigned personality disorders in the multiaxial format of the DSM-III. Looking toward the future, the paper proposes a series of comprehensive and parallel diagnostic criteria for the personality disorders to be included in either DSM-IIIR or DSM-IV.     

Counselor Signals

A humorous comparison of athletic and counselor signals is made, and the authors note unique aspects of counseling that make it more than a sport.     

Understanding and Counseling Narcissistic Clients

This article is intended to provide counselors with an overview of narcissism and its treatment. In the first section, dysfunctional narcissism is described, drawing on the diagnostic indicators presented in the DSM-III and the contemporary object relations theories of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg. The second section focuses on counseling narcissistic clients.     

Assertiveness and cognitive processing in interpersonal situations

This study examined social skills components that precede the delivery of a skilled overt interpersonal response. Using a cognitive-behavioral systems approach to assertiveness, a task analysis of how women receive and process information in interpersonal situations requiring an assertive response to men was performed. Forty women were assigned to high- or low-assertive groups based on their Rathus Assertiveness Schedule scores. In small group sessions, each woman viewed four videotaped problem situations requiring an assertive response to both pleasant and angry males. After viewing each scene, each woman completed three questionnaires: (a) receiving information, (b) processing-generation of alternatives and decision making, and (c) processing-generation of consequences. High- and low-assertive participants were found to differ in their evaluation of consequences, for response options, particularly how a male would likely to behave to them. High-assertive participants were judged to evaluate more correctly than low-assertive participants the likely behavior of males if response options were implemented. All participants generated more complex alternatives and more assertive responses to situations involving an angry male as compared to a pleasant male. No differences were found between groups in their ability to receive information accurately. Correlational results were supportive of a cognitive-behavioral systems approach of assertion, that is, the emission of a skilled response depends on a chain of preceding responses.Thanks are due to Vida Dyson and Lenard Jason for their comments on an early draft of this paper.     

The effects of verbal reinforcement of intrinsic motivation for sex-linked tasks

Recent studies have demonstrated that positive verbal feedback enhances males' intrinsic motivation for a task, while decreasing that of females. This result has been attributed to differential socialization forces which make the controlling aspects of rewards more salient for females as opposed to males, for whom the informational aspects are prepotent. A weakness in this conclusion stems from the use of a masculine sex-linked task in prior experiments, producing a result which may be due to gender congruence/incongruence rather than to socialization differences. Two laboratory experiments were performed to examine the effects of verbal praise on intrinsic motivation, controlling for sex-typing of the experimental activity. Experiment I found that verbal praise increased females' and males' intrinsic motivation on both a feminine and masculine task, and intrinsic motivation was higher for sex-appropriate than sex-inappropriate tasks. The sexes did not show a differential pattern of response to praise. In Experiment 2, verbal praise also enhanced sex-role traditional females' intrinsic motivation on the same activity used in prior research. These results suggest that socialization content has changed sufficiently to make concerns about competence and self-determination equally salient for females and males.     

Variables related to reported learning in brief experiential groups held at professional meetings

Reports of learning from 119 participants of 18 general psychodynamic groups from the 1981 and 1982 annual meetings of the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association were investigated. Two main learning factors emerged from a factor analysis of participant ratings, learning about oneself in a small group (factor one) and learning how to be an effective leader with professional skills (factor two). Participants reported moderate to considerable learning for both factors even though the stated task of the groups did not emphasize the learning of professional skills. Relationships between several classes of variables (group, leader, demographic) and reported learning were studied. Results that were consistent with several previous investigations were found. The discovery of a participant, sex-difference finding, i.e., greater reported learning by the women, generated a number of questions that may be addressed in future investigations.This article was derived from a paper presented at the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association, October 27, 1983, Banff, Canada.     

Social science involvement in voir dire: Preliminary data on the effectiveness of “scientific jury selection”

The validity of what has been termed “scientific” or “systematic” jury selection (SJS) techniques is addressed using data from two actual cases; one criminal and one civil. Data from the highly publicized Joan Little trial indicated that where validity data were available for the survey approach and in-court rating of authoritarianism, these techniques measured what they purported to measure. Validation data were not available for a third technique—in-court rating of nonverbal communication. Data from the civil case indicated that the survey approach could successfully predict verdicts of mock jurors. It is concluded that while these data are suggestive of the validity of two of the techniques used in SJS, more rigorous tests are essential before conclusions can be drawn.     

Perceived variability and symbol use: a common language-cognition interface in children and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Analysis of two chimpanzees' conversations with their teacher during a tool-use training task demonstrated that chimps use lexigrams, a humanly devised visual symbol system, selectively to encode perceived variability; that is, they generally used their symbols to differentiate alternative possibilities or to represent change or novelty in a situation. In contrast, they tended to leave unsaid what was unchanging, repetitive, or the unique possibility in a situation. Perceived variability influenced not only which symbols were selected but also utterance length: A single dimension of variability in a situation leads to single-lexigram utterances; multiple dimensions are associated with multi-lexigram utterances. This pattern of results indicates that the absence of formal grammatical structure in chimp language does not imply that utterances beyond one word in length are either rote strings or imitations. The chimps' tendency to mention the variable while leaving the constant or redundant unsaid is, moreover, strong support for the position that their use of a humanly devised symbol system is more than a series of conditioned responses.