Hypnosis, suggestion, and placebo in the reduction of experimental pain

Two experiments compared placebo and hypnotic analgesia in high and low hypnotizable subjects. Experiment 1 demonstrated that hypnotic and placebo analgesia were equally ineffective in low hypnotizables, but that hypnotic analgesia was much more effective than placebo analgesia in high hypnotizables. Experiment 2 replicated these results, but also included low and high hypnotizables who were given a nonhypnotic suggestion for analgesia. Both the low and high hypnotizables in this group reported greater suggested than placebo analgesia and as much suggested analgesia as high hypnotizable hypnotic subjects. Both experiments found substantial discrepancies between the amount of pain reduction subjects expected from the various treatments and the amount of pain reduction they actually reported following exposure to those treatments. In Experiment 2, subjects in all treatments who reduced reported pain engaged in more cognitive coping and less catastrophizing than those who did not reduce pain. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

The effects of depression on structural aspects of the recall of prose

Investigated depressed patients' memory for stories. This indicated that although normal Ss showed particularly good recall for units central to the structure of the story, this did not hold for depressed Ss. In contrast, effects of centrality were comparable in high- and low-IQ Ss and effects of imageability of story units were comparable in both depressed and normal Ss. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that depressed patients do not use structure to organize stories when encoding them. A failure to identify central aspects of material and selectively recall them is likely to be a handicap to everyday functioning.     

Comparing Idiothetic, Ipsative, and Normative Indices of Consistency

ABSTRACT Lamiell's (1981) “idiothetic” index has been praised for raising significant conceptual and methodological issues, but Paunonen and Jackson (1986a) indicated that it might not provide any unique information The current study demonstrates that the unique value of the idiothetic index relative to the ipsative, normative, and normative-ipsative indices is dependent in part upon what information is collected and how it is analyzed Subjects completed inventories on three occasions that assessed seven dispositional variables Interindividual analyses indicated a high correlation between the idiothetic method and two of the other models, whereas intra-individual analyses indicated a much lower degree of correlation Intra-individual analyses indicated that the idiothetic method produced higher temporal stability coefficients The idiothetic index provides information not contained in a normative index and it may be more useful to personality researchers for the assessment of temporal stability and for the assessment of traits with extreme base rates     

Effects of daily stress on negative mood

This article examines the influence of daily stressors on mental health in a community sample. Ss were 166 married couples who completed diaries each day for 6 weeks. In pooled within-person analyses, daily stressors explained up to 20% of the variance in mood. Interpersonal conflicts were by far the most distressing events. Furthermore, when stressors occurred on a series of days, emotional habituation occurred by the second day for almost all events except interpersonal conflicts. Contrary to certain theoretical accounts, multiple stressors on the same day did not exacerbate one another's effects: rather an emotional plateau occurred. Finally on days following a stressful event, mood was better than it would have been if the stressor had not happened. These results reveal the complex emotional effects of daily stressors, and in particular they suggest that future investigations should focus primarily on interpersonal conflicts.     

The development of structural complexity in the child's concept of family: the effect of cognitive stage, sex, and intactness of family

Twenty-eight boys and 28 girls at each of the Piagetian preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational cognitive stages were given an interview focusing on their concepts of family. Half of each group were from intact families, and half were from divorced families. Interviews were scored for two structural aspects of the concept of family: conceptual level, and use of dimensions that structure the concept. The complexity of children's concepts was strongly related to cognitive stage and, to a lesser degree, to sex. Frequency of use of concept dimensions was strongly affected by general developmental level, though not specifically cognitive stage, and by intactness of family, but to a lesser degree by sex. Specific information is provided on the effect of these factors on perceptions of family composition, parental roles, and breadth of family activities.     

Ask and You Shall be Given: Request Size and Donations to a Good Cause1

In an attempt to replicate the findings reported in this Journal by Weyant and Smith (1987), members or recent donors to a Canadian civil liberties organization were asked to donate money under one of three conditions: (a) In the control condition, they were simply asked for a donation; (b) in the “smaller request” condition, they were asked to make a donation, but amounts of Canadian $30 to $100 were suggested; and (c) in the “larger request” condition, amounts of $50 to $250 were suggested. Unlike the Weyant and Smith studies, we found no difference in the proportion of respondents making a donation, but significant differences in the size of the donations made by those making donations. In our study, the most effective way of getting large donations was to ask for a large amount. It was suggested that the most likely explanations for the differences in the results of the two studies were the following: First, our target population were previous donors to the organization, whereas those in the Weyant and Smith studies were not likely to have been. Previous research suggests that those who had been donors previously are influenced, positively, by requests for a specific large donation, whereas those not previously approached are, if anything, negatively influenced. Second, our “larger request” appears to be within a plausible range for donations, whereas the larger request in the Weyant and Smith study may have been seen as being outside of the plausible range. In any case, however, we would recommend caution in drawing a conclusion about the most effective request size to encourage people to donate money to charity.     

Critics and dissenters: reflections on "anti-psychiatry" in the United States

During the 1970s various professionals and social activists adopted an explicitly anti-psychiatry position which was perceived by many as a new phenomenon. Hostility to psychiatry actually predates the establishment of psychiatry as a profession in 1844, and organized opposition to psychiatric practices appeared in the late nineteenth century. The deinstitutionalization of the 1970s, which was aided by development within psychiatry, had a strong anti-psychiatry component, but the novel aspect was the organization of ex-mental patients themselves. By the 1980s the decline of psychiatric power, dissension among ex-patients, and new social trends vitiated the anti-psychiatry movement.     

Teaching students to model neural circuits and neural networks using an electronic spreadsheet simulator

An electronic spreadsheet simulator can be used to enable students to conduct simulated microelectrode recording experiments. In addition, it can be used both to let students explore the operation of models of hypothetical neural networks and to let them design and develop their own neural models.