Angry reactions to failure on a cooperative computer game: The effect of trait hostility,behavioural inhibition,and behavioural activation

This study describes the use of a “cooperative” computer game in which the subject has to follow directions, supposedly sent from a partner, and steer a tank to avoid invisible mines. The tank is lost if it hits a mine or does not reach base within a set time limit. The game was designed so that the majority of trials would be lost. Affective (mood self-ratings), cognitive (attribution of blame questionnaire), and behavioural (feedback sent to the “partner”) outcomes were assessed. The game significantly increased ratings of discontentedness and anger. Self-blame for task failure was correlated with the Guilt subscale of the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory (BDHI), and blaming the partner was correlated positively with the Motor Aggression subscale and negatively with the empathy scale of the I7, supporting the notion of hostile attributional bias in adults. The importance of individual differences in the strength of the behavioural inhibition system (BIS) and behavioural activation system (BAS) were explored using the BIS/BAS scales developed by Carver and White [1994]. Sending negative feedback to the partner was negatively correlated with scores on the BIS. Scores on BAS drive were positively correlated with increases in discontentedness and with sending negative feedback on trials when the tank was lost due to lack of time. These results are discussed in relation to Berkowitz's [1993] model of affective aggression. Aggr. Behav. 24:27–36, 1998. © 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Addicts to artists: The ‘good enough mother’ in the substance abuse clinic

Psychodynamic psychotherapy has had a bad reputation in substance abuse circles. Despite widespread use of behavioral interventions, outcomes remain relatively poor. The emerging trend is to incorporate relational and other psychodynamic approaches into addiction treatment. The article describes use of Winnicott's concepts of the ‘good enough mother’ and ‘play space’ in an outpatient ‘art group’.     

It’s Child’s Play: Contemplative Anthropocosmic Creativity

The implicate or quantum connectivity of the coevolving phenomena of the cosmos, the ontohermeneutic complementarity relations between ourselves and the vast and minute systems we coconstitutingly participate, observe, prolong, and contextualize, and the eco-reciprocities among all forms of life afford us an understanding of ourselves as fractal or microcosmic embodiments and performances of what is irreducibly nondual anthropo-cosmogenesis. And if cosmogenesis is a self-referential process having nothing external to itself from which to obtain gain or satisfaction, we may analogously interpret our noninstrumentalizing contemplative experiences in complete attentiveness without regard to external payoffs as the fractal play of its creatively emergent self-delighting anthropocosmic self-awareness in the human dimensionality. Our attentive, noninstrumentalizing, and nonobjectifying contemplativity aconceptually presences connectivity and reciprocity in an aperspectivally transparent enactment of anthropocosmic ongoing-wholing whose meaning is the being of its own self-delighting. The sustainability of cocreative anthropocosmogenesis on Earth flourishes where our conduct and intrinsically rewarding contemplativity are consonant with and recreate the spontaneous coevolutionary play of intrinsically rewarding creatio continua unreduced, unobstructed, unfragmented, and uneclipsed by partial, excessively dualizing perspectives and related efforts for extrinsic gain.