Hope for the Worst: Occasional Reinforced Extinction and Expectancy Violation in the Treatment of OCD

An inhibitory learning conceptualization of treatment mechanisms in exposure-based therapy appears to better account for durability of symptom reduction and index overall learning. Presented here is an overview of two core elements of inhibitory learning, expectancy violation and occasional reinforced extinction, as they are thought to function in exposure and response prevention (ERP) for OCD. The overview is then followed by case examples illustrating these processes at work in a naturalistic clinical setting. Implications for treatment are broadly discussed.     

Richelieu in Arabic: The Catholic Printed Message to the Orient in the Seventeenth Century1

Throughout most of the seventeenth century, the printer and publisher Antoine Vitré dominated the printing of Arabic in Paris. He produced mainly religious texts, intended for use by missionaries in the Orient. One of these books was the Arabic translation of Cardinal Richelieu's famous catechism Instruction du Chrétien. This article looks at the story behind the preparation of the Arabic edition, its printing, and its use by missionaries. It explores the role written texts played in conveying a religious message to an essentially illiterate society. In addition, it uses the story of Richelieu's text in Arabic to attempt to explain why Middle Eastern societies declined to adopt mass printing before the nineteenth century, even though there were apparently no interdictions against its implementation.     

AN ESSAY ON DREAMING,PSYCHICAL WORKING OUT AND WORKING THROUGH2

In this paper the author attempts to expand the idea put forward by Freud who considered dreams as a special form of unconscious thinking. It is the author's contention that the psychical working‐out function performed by dreams is a form of unconscious thinking, which transforms affects into memories and mental structures. He also attempts to clarify the way in which meaning is built and transformed in mental life. In that respect the unconscious internal world is seen as a form of unconscious thinking, a private theatre where meaning is generated and transformed. He focuses on what happens to feelings in dreams in connection with the meanings as a result of and an expression of the several stages of working through. The dream world is described as the setting where the mind gives expressive pictorial representation to the emotions involved in a conflict: a first step towards thinkability. The dreamwork also constitutes a process through which meaning is apprehended, built on and transformed at an expressive non‐discursive level, based on representation through figurative/pictorial images. The author draws on Meltzer's formulation to conjecture that the working‐through function of dreams, mainly in response to interpretations, is performed by a process of progression in formal qualities of the representations made available by dreaming in the form he has called affective pictograms. It is through progression in formal qualities of the representation that the thinking capabilities of the affective life develop and become part of the process of what is called metaphorically the metabolisation of emotional life. This process takes place through migration of meaning across various levels of mental process. In this perspective the analyst'sinterpretations of dreams effect what linguists call transmutation of the symbolic basis, a process that is necessary to help the mind to improve its capacity to think. Something expressed on the evocative plane and condensed into a pictographic image is then transformed into verbal language that expresses meaning. These conceptions are illustrated by a detailed clinical case.     

Capturing excellence in applied settings: A participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator role for community psychologists

Community psychology faces a crisis of personpower similar to that which Albee identified in the clinical field four decades ago. It is clear that there are not, and likely never will be, a sufficient number of community psychologists to be able to provide assessment, consultation, and planned change toward facilitating an inclusive psychological sense of community and sound health and prosocial development in all settings that could benefit from such assistance. To help resolve this crisis, an expanded role for community psychologists is proposed: that of participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator. A participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator has the role not only of working within settings to understand and help conceptualize change processes but also of reflecting on action processes that are a part of the setting, of reflecting on theory, and of generating products that share relevant learnings. How action research serves as the methodology that allows the flow and interplay of theory and action to take place also is discussed. Illustrations are drawn from the work of Leonard Bernstein, Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog, and the author's work in area of school-based social competence promotion. This article is based on much further reflection after my Distinguished Contribution to Practice in Community Psychology award address at APA in Toronto, August 1993. The latter was designed as a talk and featured musical excepts from Leonard Bernstein and Kermit the Frog, who also made an appearance at the talk and spoke briefly. A tape of the talk can be obtained from APA, for the curious. I think of my work as a public corporation, shares of which belong to many colleagues, friends, and mentors, far too numerous to mention. I give special thanks to Jim Kelly and Ed Trickett, to Irma Serrano-Garcia and Jim Dalton, to Emory Cowen and Roger Weissberg, to George Spivack and Myrna Shure, to Jack Chinsky and George Allen, to Tom Schuyler and to my parents, to those who generously shared selective truths about me that Jim Kelly compiled into marvelous and deeply appreciated introductory comments, and to my chief shareholders, my family, Ellen, Sara, and Samara, whose daily love, patience, and support I am honored to receive.     

The relationship of work stressors and emotional support to strain in police officers

This study tested whether quantity and quality of social support and two sources of work stress (organizational stressors and job risk) predicted work strain in police officers, a high-risk occupational group. The participants were 135 police officers from a large metropolitan law enforcement agency who responded to questionnaires for assessing work stress, social support, exhaustion, and other strain symptoms. Emotional support and work stressors accounted directly for significant variance in emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and symptom frequency. Conflicted relationships, which are a source of both work stress and support, also contributed to strain. In contrast to previous findings, a reverse buffering effect for social support did not contribute to predicting strain. Stress management programs for police and other high-stress occupations should target increasing emotional support from supervisors and peers, and reducing conflict in job and family relationships.     

Academic and nonacademic community psychologists: An analysis of divergence in settings,roles, and values

Differences between academic and nonacademic psychologists may be viewed as immutable, worthy of encouragement, or as a situation which the latter group must remedy by becoming “more scientific.” We contend that for community psychology, which perceives theory, application, and action as valid aspects of its broad paradigm, it would be most adaptive toexplicitly address the challenge of managing a balance between diversity and cohesion. There are signs that the present leadership of Division 27 recognizes aspects of this problem and is reconsidering the role and purpose of the Division as an organizing framework for the discipline (Trickett, Note 3). It is our view that engendering a commitment from various subgroups within the membership to addressing the disparities revealed by our respondents is required for resolving what we see as major obstacles to future development of the discipline. The conceptual and empirical approach presented in this study can be an important tool in forging constructive solutions to the challenges we have presented.     

Lightness of an object under two illumination levels

Anchoring theory (Gilchrist et al, 1999 Psychological Review 106 795-834) predicts a wide range of lightness errors, including failures of constancy in multi-illumination scenes and a long list of well-known lightness illusions seen under homogeneous illumination. Lightness values are computed both locally and globally and then averaged together. Local values are computed within a given region of homogeneous illumination. Thus, for an object that extends through two different illumination levels, anchoring theory produces two values, one for the patch in brighter illumination and one for the patch in dimmer illumination. Observers can give matches for these patches separately, but they can also give a single match for the whole object. Anchoring theory in its current form is unable to predict these object matches. We report eight experiments in which we studied the relationship between patch matches and object matches. The results show that the object match represents a compromise between the match for the patch in the field of highest illumination and the patch in the largest field of illumination. These two principles are parallel to the rules found for anchoring lightness: highest luminance rule and area rule.