Military Influence Tactics: Lessons Learned in Iraq and Afghanistan

When deployed U.S. soldiers attempt to influence the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors of civilians, success can save lives and failure can be deadly. Survey data from 228 military personnel with deployment experience to Iraq and Afghanistan revealed that in a challenging wartime environment, empathy, respect, prior relationships, and familiarity with influence targets predicted success in cross-cultural influence attempts. Influence techniques involving resources and positive feelings were used more commonly in relatively successful influence attempts; negative tactics were used more commonly in unsuccessful attempts.     

Neuropsychological impairments on the NEPSY-II among children with FASD

Background: We examined the pattern of neuropsychological impairments of children with FASD (compared to controls) on NEPSY-II measures of attention and executive functioning, language, memory, visuospatial processing, and social perception.

Methods: Participants included 32 children with FASD and 30 typically developing control children, ranging in age from 6 to 16 years. Children were tested on the following subtests of the NEPSY-II: Attention and Executive Functioning (animal sorting, auditory attention/response set, and inhibition), Language (comprehension of instructions and speeded naming), Memory (memory for names/delayed memory for names), Visual-Spatial Processing (arrows), and Social Perception (theory of mind). Groups were compared using MANOVA.

Results: Children with FASD were impaired relative to controls on the following subtests: animal sorting, response set, inhibition (naming and switching conditions), comprehension of instructions, speeded naming, and memory for names total and delayed, but group differences were not significant on auditory attention, inhibition (inhibition condition), arrows, and theory of mind. Among the FASD group, IQ scores were not correlated with performance on the NEPSY-II subtests, and there were no significant differences between those with and without comorbid ADHD.

Conclusions: The NEPSY-II is an effective and useful tool for measuring a variety of neuropsychological impairments among children with FASD. Children with FASD displayed a pattern of results with impairments (relative to controls) on measures of executive functioning (set shifting, concept formation, and inhibition), language, and memory, and relative strengths on measures of basic attention, visual spatial processing, and social perception.     

A New Model for Acquiescence at the Interface of Psychometrics and Cognitive Psychology

ABSTRACT

When measuring psychological traits, one has to consider that respondents often show content-unrelated response behavior in answering questionnaires. To disentangle the target trait and two such response styles, extreme responding and midpoint responding, Böckenholt (2012a Böckenholt, U. (2012a). Modeling multiple response processes in judgment and choice. Psychological Methods, 17, 665–678. doi:10.1037/a0028111[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) developed an item response model based on a latent processing tree structure. We propose a theoretically motivated extension of this model to also measure acquiescence, the tendency to agree with both regular and reversed items. Substantively, our approach builds on multinomial processing tree (MPT) models that are used in cognitive psychology to disentangle qualitatively distinct processes. Accordingly, the new model for response styles assumes a mixture distribution of affirmative responses, which are either determined by the underlying target trait or by acquiescence. In order to estimate the model parameters, we rely on Bayesian hierarchical estimation of MPT models. In simulations, we show that the model provides unbiased estimates of response styles and the target trait, and we compare the new model and Böckenholt’s model in a recovery study. An empirical example from personality psychology is used for illustrative purposes.     

Mithraic iconography and ideology

L. Ron Hubbard created in Scientology an immense landscape of alternative worlds, realities, and possibilities. Scientology cosmology, mythology, and eschatology are inescapably linked to galactic events and Hubbard's retelling of human history is replete with science-fiction tropes – many of which found popularity in the early science-fiction tradition to which he belonged. In his therapeutic and religious teachings, Hubbard proposed a complex narrative that re-defined the essence of self and society in relation to the cosmos. For Scientologists, the fantastic becomes mundane as they position themselves within a vast and heavy quest to reshape themselves, the rest of humanity, and, for some, the entire universe. Understood within the science-fiction context from which Scientology emerged, one can better understand the grand nature of Hubbard's proposals as belonging to a specific tradition within the genre – namely, space opera. Consequently, this article analyses Hubbard's propositions using space-opera concepts, and argues that Hubbard re-defined a unique tradition in the course of creating a new reality.     

Visions as ‘Good to Think’: A Cognitive Approach to Visionary Experience in Islamic Sufi Thought

This article explores one type of visionary experience described and interpreted by mystics within certain traditions, which may be termed a ‘cognitive’ or ‘gnostic’ vision. Such visions provide information or offer solutions to problems of theology or religious interpretation.

A close textual analysis of a selection from the writings of an eighteenth century Indian Sufi, Shāh Wal? Allāh of Delhi, demonstrates this process of intensive thinking through superimposed grids which combine elements of religious symbol systems. This type of thinking triggers a mystical experience which is subsequently interpreted in a problem solving or divinatory mode.     

Revisiting ‘What works for whom?’: A qualitative framework for evaluating clinical effectiveness in child psychotherapy

This paper describes a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of child psychotherapy used by child psychotherapists in an inner city Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS). The Hopes and Expectations for Treatment Approach (HETA) involves using the assessment for psychotherapy that normally precedes treatment to derive a baseline from which to generate a set of hopes/expectations as regards the effects of the treatment on the part of parents and the psychotherapist, to be revisited one year after the start of the psychotherapy and/or at its completion. The Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire, for parents and schools, was also administered before and after the treatment. The characteristics of the first 30 children referred for psychotherapy over a particular time period are described. Of the first 15 children in this group to complete one year of individual psychotherapy, all showed change or significant change in the areas concerning parents' and therapists' hopes at the end-of-year review, as rated by parents and psychotherapists. A case of a child with conduct disorder is used to describe how the assessment generated a psychoanalytic formulation, how the therapist's understanding was fed back to the parents, and how the parents' and therapist's hopes and expectations were derived and recorded. This case illustrates powerfully the impact of trauma in the parents' backgrounds on the internal world of the child, and how the method provides a useful bridge between parent and child work. Feedback from the psychotherapists, the parents and the referrers using the framework is reviewed, and in conclusion the paper argues for the framework's value in promoting good practice in the treatment and management of complex cases and in enhancing awareness of the nature and scope of the psychotherapy process.     

Killing the dead: evolution of melancholic identifications underlying suicide attempts in adolescence

Psychic processes underlying suicidal behaviours during adolescence and their evolution are explored. A longitudinal study was conducted of thirty adolescent patients hospitalised following a suicide attempt. Clinical interviews were used combined with the Rorschach Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) a few days after the suicide attempt and one year later. Results initially showed common forms of psychic adjustment: melancholic identifications were linked to an excessive dependence on objects. One year later, these forms of psychic adjustment changed: for many adolescents, the melancholic identifications shifted and self-image improved. The emergence of representations of murder fantasies immediately after the suicidal behaviour allowed a possible transformation of violence into symbolisation. A case study illustrates these psychic changes.     

Two boys—one event

The background of this paper is an investigation of child survivors from the Holocaust; in a study of interviews of these survivors, it could be concluded that past traumatic experiences are recovered not as memories (in the usual sense of the word), but as affects invading the present. Accordingly, affects seem to tell the story of the past traumatic experiences. In this paper, the author investigates two accounts (separately told by two survivors) of the same event in the Kielce ghetto. The two accounts present similarities, but also differences, and the author discusses these in relation to the concepts of historical and narrative truth, as well as in relation to construction and reconstruction, concluding that the interviews give a sketch of how the experiences have become idiosyncratically registered in the minds of the interviewees.     

Sick? Or slow? On the origins of intelligence as a psychological object

This paper examines the first moments of the emergence of “psychometrics” as a discipline, using a history of the Binet–Simon test (precursor to the Stanford–Binet) to engage the question of how intelligence became a “psychological object.” To begin to answer this, we used a previously-unexamined set of French texts to highlight the negotiations and collaborations that led Alfred Binet (1857–1911) to identify “mental testing” as a research area worth pursuing. This included a long-standing rivalry with Désiré-Magloire Bourneville (1840–1909), who argued for decades that psychiatrists ought to be the professional arbiters of which children would be removed from the standard curriculum and referred to special education classes in asylums. In contrast, Binet sought to keep children in schools and conceived of a way for psychologists to do this. Supported by the Société libre de l'étude psychologique de l'enfant [Free society for the psychological study of the child], and by a number of collaborators and friends, he thus undertook to create a “metric” scale of intelligence—and the associated testing apparatus—to legitimize the role of psychologists in a to-that-point psychiatric domain: identifying and treating “the abnormal”. The result was a change in the earlier law requiring all healthy French children to attend school, between the ages of 6 and 13, to recognize instead that otherwise normal children sometimes need special help: they are “slow” (arriéré), but not “sick.” This conceptualization of intelligence was then carried forward, through the test's influence on Lewis Terman (1877–1956) and Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), to shape virtually all subsequent thinking about intelligence testing and its role in society.