Bullies and victims: Their ego picture, ideal ego picture and normative ego picture

The ego picture, ideal ego picture and normative ego picture of bullies and their victims in a school situation were measured with semantic differentials. The bullies considered themselves to be dominant, had high ideals concerning dominance and thought this was what the social norms require. They felt themselves to be impulsive and lacking in self-control. The victims considered themselves to be depressed, lacking in intelligence and personal attractiveness, and displayed in general feelings of inferiority. These characteristics can be partly a cause and partly an effect of the bullying situation. Girls scored in general lower than boys on socially valued characteristics and higher on socially undesirable ones.     

Note on detection of cue intercorrelation in multiple-cue probability learning

Abstract.— After completion of learning tasks with two different levels of cue intercorrelation (r _u=0.00 and 0.80) the detection of cue intercorrelation was tested with either a reproduction or a recognition method in a 2×2 factorial design. The reproduction method yielded an almost perfect matching between the reproduced intercorrelations and the intercorrelations of the tasks, while the recognition method resulted in systematically lower subjective intercorrelations. For the recognition method the subjective intercorrelation was found to vary with the criterion of recognition, so that the stricter the criterion, the higher the subjective intercorrelation.     

Linguistic characteristics of neurotic, borderline and psychotic personality organization

Thirty patients were subjected to a Structural Interview by means of which 10 of them received the diagnosis NPO (Neurotic Personality Organization), 10 BPO (Borderline Personality Organization) and 10 PPO (Psychotic Personality Organization). About 2500 words and groups of words were extracted from the patients' utterances for analysis. The word-frequencies thus found were analyzed by a PLS discriminant analysis which yielded two significant principal components (main dimensions) explaining 57% of the variance. This analysis showed that the three groups of patients are well separated from one another and that there is a definite correlation between personality organization and linguistic variables. The main features of the BPO-patients in this study seem to be that they refer to positions outside themselves and their language is impersonal; we see this as an exemple of a vacillating identity. The NPO-group is characterized by an intense and rich language, signs of a more advanced symbolizing ability, deixis and high level defenses. The language of the PPO-patients is poor and its predominant feature is a lack of words; in our interpretation this indicates foreclosure and a lack of identity.     

Reactions to DMT as related to psychotic and borderline personality organization

Thirty-one inpatients in a psychiatric clinic were assessed with DMT and the Structural Interview. In order to assemble every relevant reaction that an individual might have to a percept-genesis, 130 DMT variables were formed. The results were first subjected to a quality control of the DMT-scores and then subjected to partial least squares in latent variables (PLS) discriminant analysis. The analysis showed that it is possible to separate patients with psychotic PO (PPO) from those with borderline PO (BPO) by means of the 130 variables. The BPO group is characterized by aggressive manifestations, sensitivity to threat, identity lability and various transformations of the Hero gestalt. The PPO group, on the other hand, is characterized by high threshold values for perception, lack of identity, denial and repression of the peripheral person at a late-phase level. There are other perceptual reactions that are important predictors of PO than the defence categories of the manual. These perceptual reactions do not correspond to the traditional psychodynamic defence mechanisms. Our conclusion is that principal component analysis (PCA) and PLS are useful methods of finding discriminating patterns of perceptual reactions to the DMT for patients with different PO.     

Task predictability and performance as determinants of confidence in multiple-cue judgments

Two experiments were performed in order to study judges' confidence in their judgments. Experiment I showed that judges' confidence is a direct function of the cue intercorrelation. r_ij in a pure judgmental task. When judges recieved feedback, the effect of r_ij on confidence was, as predicted, reduced. Confidence was, however, systematically related to neither R ²_c nor performance in the feedback condition. Experiment II was a further study of the effect of feedback on confidence. In addition, the hypothesis that the lack of relation between performance and confidence is due to judges' poor knowledge of how they actually perform in probabilistic inference tasks was tested. The experiment showed that differences among judges' confidence is a direct function of task predictability and that judges' confidence is related to how they believe that they perform rather than to how they actually perform. The theoretical as well as the practical importance of studies of confidence in probabilistic inference tasks was discussed.     

Personality organization defined by DMT and the Structural Interview

The psychoanalytic concept of Personality Organization (PO) may be operationalized by means of a Structural Interview as well as by means of psychological tests. The present study utilized the Structural Interview and a projective test called the Defence Mechanism Test (DMT) to operationalize the PO concept on a sample of 50 psychiatric inpatients. The reliability of the PO judgements were found to be acceptable for both the Structural Interview and the DMT. The validity, which was estimated as the correlation between the two methods, was also found to be substantial. The conclusion is that the concept of PO may be reliably operationalized for psychiatric patients and seems to have concurrent validity. Both the DMT and the Structural Interview may be used for differential diagnosis of PO.