Economic Stress: Notes on the Psychology of Inflation

This research examines economic inflation as a "psychological stressor." Economic behavior in response to inflation is hypothesized to be a function of subjective cognitive appraisal of threat as well as objective economic indices such as actual income. A survey of 504 American college alumni compared the contribution of perceived threat and family income to self-reported changes in buying practices and leisure activities. These changes, as well as the reported degree of stress experienced, were better accounted for by perceived threat than by actual income. Further, threat and income did not interact in affecting economic behavior. Finally, none of the demographic and economic variables differentiated between groups of more versus less threatened individuals. A replication study was conducted on a sample of 112 Israeli college alumni. The rate of inflation in Israel is 10 times higher than the American rate, but income is protected by continuous indexing. The findings for the Israeli sample replicated with a high degree of accuracy the American findings, thereby providing unique cross-cultural validity to the conception of economic inflation as a psychological stressor.     

Left of centre: asymmetries for the horizontal vertical line illusion

This study explored the mechanisms that underlie asymmetries for the horizontal vertical illusion (HVI), which deceives length perception, so that a vertical line is perceived as longer than a horizontal line of equivalent length. In Experiment 1, university students (n = 14) made length judgements for vertical and horizontal lines. The vertical line was shifted in eight steps from the far left of the horizontal line (⌊) to the far right (⌋). An HVI was observed for the medial positions (⊥), which diminished towards the lateral positions. The HVI was also stronger when the vertical line was on the left. Because the left/right asymmetry changed as a function of lateral/medial position, the asymmetry within the HVI stimulus is most likely the result of pseudoneglect, which affects judgements of horizontal length. In Experiment 2, participants (n = 15) made judgements for HVI stimuli presented to the left- and right-hemispace and the midline. The HVI was stronger in the left hemispace. Because the asymmetry between the left- and right-hemispaces did not interact with the asymmetry within the stimuli, it was concluded that the asymmetry between hemispatial positions was the result of right hemisphere susceptibility to illusory geometrical effects whereas the asymmetry within the stimulus is related to an object-centred attentional asymmetry. The HVI is affected by asymmetries in length judgements and susceptibility to illusions and may provide interesting insights into attentional disorders in clinical populations, such as neglect.     

Marshaling administrative data to study the prevalence of mental illness in assault on law enforcement cases

A substantial body of literature has investigated many issues surrounding police encounters with persons with mental illness. This paper focuses on a specific type of encounter – individuals with mental illness charged with assaulting officers because of their behavior during a psychiatric crisis – and uses administrative data to examine its prevalence in one state. Results suggest that individuals with mental health histories comprise a small but meaningful percentage (c. 9%) of assault on law enforcement charges, and c. 10% of these charges have an offense date within 14 days of an emergency mental health custody order, increasing the likelihood that psychiatric symptoms influenced their behavior at the time of the offense. Further results describe different categories of relevant charges, charge classifications, final dispositions, and sentences. Results are discussed in the context of outcomes for persons with mental illness and law enforcement as well as the role and limitations of forensic mental health assessment in these cases. The paper concludes with a call for similar data collection across jurisdictions.     

Prediction of Students' Evaluations from Brief Instances of Professors' Nonverbal Behavior in Defined Instructional Situations

This study examined the power of judges' ratings of professors' nonverbal (NV) classroom behavior in content-free brief instances (nine seconds) to predict actual end-of-course students' ratings of teaching (SRT). Professors in 67 courses were videotaped in 4 instructional situations: First class session; Lecturing; Interacting with students; and Talking about the course. The overall finding was that thin slices of professors' content-free NV behavior could indeed predict SRT, but different patterns were found for defined instructional situations. Positive judgments of brief instances of NV lecturing behavior predicted positive post-course SRT components pertaining to the instructor. Positive judgments of NV behavior while interacting with students were negatively related to favorable SRTs. This counter-intuitive finding was tentatively explained by the fact that SRTs were negatively related to course difficulty, and professors presumably might have made greater efforts in their interaction with students in difficult courses, but these courses received lower ratings anyway. Micro-analyses of 44 molecular variables illuminated the NV profile of effective lecturing, and showed distinctions between NV profiles of effective professors and effective TV interviewers from a previous study. Social-educational implications of the findings for the SRT literature and for the NV literature were discussed. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Effectiveness of social reinforcement as a function of contingent and noncontingent satiation

The social satiation effect is the inverse relation between the availability of a social stimulus and its subsequent efficacy in a reinforcing role. According to a suggested cognitive-interactive theory, the satiation effect is mediated by children's attributions of contingency between their own behavior and the experimenter's actions in the satiation treatments. Perceived contingencies depend, at least to an extent, on actual contingencies, and it was therefore predicted that a satiation effect would be observed only for groups presented in the satiation treatment with noncontingent social stimuli but not for groups presented with contingent stimuli. Middle-class 5- and 7-year-old children were subjected to a 10-min waiting period in which the stimulus word “Yafeh” (“good” in English) was presented 2 or 20 times, contingently or noncontingently. They were then given a 75-trial binary discrimination test: correct responses were reinforced with “Yafeh”. The hypothesis was confirmed in the analysis of variance. However, the predicted difference between the slopes of the contingency and noncontingency conditions was found clearly only in the older sample, while the younger children were more influenced by the number of social stimuli presented in the treatment (satiation) and less influenced by the method of stimulus presentation.     

A little help from my friends: Lack of social interaction predicts greater boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic

Were people bored during the pandemic, and if so why? One possibility is lack of social interaction due to restrictions on social activity intended to slow the spread of communicable disease. In a 3-week daily diary study (n = 438; international community sample) social interaction predicted boredom and its consequences. People felt more bored on days when they engaged in less social interaction than usual (in-person or virtually), largely driven by a lack of meaning. In turn, boredom predicted lower well-being concurrently, and more virtual interaction the next day; people dispositionally higher in trait boredom also reported more solitary (but not partnered) sexual activity. In conclusion, this study suggests that maintaining social connections, even during a pandemic, may be important to mitigate boredom and improve overall well-being.     

To whom does the unconscious belong? The interface between the private and the social dimension in psychotherapy practice

This paper explores how ‘the social unconscious’, namely the influence of society and politics, impacts upon clinical thinking and practice. The author argues that insufficient attention is paid to the influence of the psychosocial dimension and there is a methodological awkwardness in knowing how to conceptualize it. Furthermore it is argued that psychodynamic practice, with its emphasis on the exploration of the individual psyche, tends to disregard social engagement as a criterion of mental health.

Three clinical examples are cited to demonstrate how the influence of politics and society can enter the psychotherapeutic dialogue. A methodology is then proposed using Bion's formulations about binocular vision, to examine the patient-therapist pair from the perspective of a small work group in society.     

The effects of repeatedly recalling a traumatic event on eyewitness memory and suggestibility

ABSTRACT

The aims of this study were to examine the effects of repeatedly recalling a traumatic event on recall performance and eyewitness suggestibility. We also investigated whether these effects were moderated by the type of details recalled and the completeness of retrieval. Participants watched a video depicting a fatal car accident and were randomly allocated to one of four conditions in which they: (1) repeatedly recalled the traumatic (central) details of the event only (trauma-focused); (2) repeatedly recalled the non-traumatic (peripheral) details of the event only (non-trauma focused); (3) repeatedly recalled the entire video (complete); or (4) did not recall the video at all (no-recall control). Results indicated that repeated complete recall was beneficial for memory retention of the entire traumatic event and that, in general, trauma-related (central) post-event information (PEI) was less likely to be reported than trauma-unrelated (peripheral) PEI. It was also found that repeated trauma-focused recall increased trauma-related confabulations. These results not only illustrate the value of repeated complete recall to best preserve the integrity of eyewitness memory, but, perhaps more critically, warn of the dangers of repeatedly questioning witnesses specifically about the central or traumatic details of an event.     

COMMUNISM AND THE TRAUMA OF ITS COLLAPSE REVISITED

This paper focuses on the intertwinement of society and the psyche as a consequence of 70 years of Communist rule and the trauma of its collapse in the 90’s. The trauma had profound effects on the psyche. An empirical study that was carried out in 1996/1997, which compared the personality structure of adolescents from Russia and Austria, and a research dialogue in 1999, has been re-evaluated in the light of current political events. One aim that we had was to find out whether we could discover characteristic personality features, resulting from the Communist totalitarian society in Russia, as well as from the trauma of its collapse. This led to the development of the concepts of the “impersonal self” and the “denial mode”. The Russians seemed to be frozen in a protective shell with “flat” affects. They were anxious, conflict avoidant, and somewhat lost. Ideas about missing adolescence and the importance of privacy are discussed. Society was shown to not only have intruded into the individual psyche, but also into the members of the intercultural research team in the form of projective identification. The importance of the interaction between society and the individual as a basic psychoanalytic concept dating back to Freud is elaborated. Finally, considerations pertaining to mental health and democracy are presented.