Role-play validation of a sociocultural theory of symbolism.

As a form of role-play, 344 freshmen college students were asked to name inkblot responses likely to be reported by a perceiver who was under various mood conditions, such as love, anger, etc. The Ss were told that this was a study in aesthetics. The Es had prematched 16 well-known Rorschach symbols with their typical mood interpretation, and then examined the responses of Ss under role play to see if these hypothesized connections in fact occurred. 10 of the 16 mood-symbol pairs were validated, and it was concluded that Rychlak's theory of symbolism, which generated this study, was supported. The Ss were relying upon, in an unsophisticated manner, the same cultural experience which Rorschach or dream analysts rely upon in making their hypotheses about personality. (21 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The manifest dream and its use in therapy.

Reviews the book, The manifest dream and its use in therapy by Roy M. Mendelsohn (see record 1990-98422-000). Dr. Mendelsohn is interested in determining the unconscious thoughts and desires of the dreamer and claims that he can discover these by a kind of direct interpretation of the dream text as related by the dreamer, without resorting to the latter's associations. He does so by employing the context in which the dream occurred and his own understanding of symbolism. Is the author's technique of value? It depends on what is asked of the dream and its interpretation. If one is analyzing a patient, the answer must be no; such abstractly conveyed interpretations favor the resistance, if anything, and may lead to the persistence of intellectualization and personal myths, now expressed in metapsychological terms. If, on the other hand, we are treating patients who are regarded as unsuitable for analysis, it is conceivable that such statements, aided by the authority of the therapist, may give the patient a sense of order and thus relieve anxiety for a time. The author's ambitious claim that his interpretations are useful in so many other ways is inadequately documented, however, resting as it does on complex and often confusing abstract statements. In failing to convey how he derives his conclusions from his observational data, he makes it very difficult to accept the validity of his method. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does perceived race affect discrimination and recognition of ambiguous-race faces? A test of the sociocognitive hypothesis.

Discrimination and recognition are often poorer for other-race than own-race faces. These other-race effects (OREs) have traditionally been attributed to reduced perceptual expertise, resulting from more limited experience, with other-race faces. However, recent findings suggest that sociocognitive factors, such as reduced motivation to individuate other-race faces, may also contribute. If the sociocognitive hypothesis is correct, then it should be possible to alter discrimination and memory performance for identical faces by altering their perceived race. We made identical ambiguous-race morphed faces look either Asian or Caucasian by presenting them in Caucasian or Asian face contexts, respectively. However, this perceived-race manipulation had no effect on either discrimination (Experiment 1) or memory (Experiment 2) for the ambiguous-race faces, despite the presence of the usual OREs in discrimination and recognition of unambiguous Asian and Caucasian faces in our participant population. These results provide no support for the sociocognitive hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mulholland Dr.

This article provides an interpretation of David Lynch's (2001) film Mulholland Dr. as the dreamscape of Diane Selwyn, played by Naomi Watts. Viewers are caught in a story of murder, mystery, and lesbian love, only to realize that what they have witnessed is merely a dream. As Diane wakes up, memory flashbacks and hallucinations unveil the real events leading to the dream. The viewers are able to trace back the elements of the dream to their real-life sources and decipher the dream's secret agenda. Diane's dream is understood as an attempt to fulfill her deepest wishes and to alleviate her guilt for arranging the murder of her ex-lover. The dream is a failed attempt to escape reality, as well as a preparation for death. Whether or not one views Mulholland Dr. as inspired by psychoanalysis, Lynch's film is a masterful exploration of the unconscious workings of the human mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dream interpretation sessions: Who volunteers, who benefits, and what volunteer clients view as most and least helpful.

Undergraduate students (N ?=?336) completed measures of personality, cognitive functioning, and attitudes toward dreams; reported average hours of sleep and estimated dream recall; and kept a 2-week dream diary. A subset of 109 students volunteered to participate in and 65 students actually participated in, a dream interpretation session. The students who volunteered for dream interpretation had more positive attitudes toward dreams, recalled dreams more frequently, were more open and higher in absorption (capacity for restructuring one's phenomenal field), and were more often female than nonvolunteers. The volunteer clients who gained the most from dream interpretation reported fewer dreams in a 2-week dream diary. Clients reported that the most helpful aspects of dream interpretation were insight, links to waking life, and receiving another person's input. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The processing of metonymy: Evidence from eye movements.

The authors investigated the time course of the processing of metonymic expressions in comparison with literal ones in 2 eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 considered the processing of sentences containing place-for-institution metonymies such as the convent in That blasphemous woman had to answer to the convent; it was found that such expressions were of similar difficulty to sentences containing literal interpretations of the same expressions. In contrast, expressions without a relevant metonymic interpretation caused immediate difficulty. Experiment 2 found similar results for place-for-event metonymies such as A lot of Americans protested during Vietnam, except that the difficulty with expressions without a relevant metonymic interpretation was somewhat delayed. The authors argue that these findings are incompatible with models of figurative language processing in which either the literal sense is accessed first or the figurative sense is accessed first. Instead, they support an account in which both senses can be accessed immediately, perhaps through a single under specified representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dream interpretation can change beliefs about the past.

Forty-six nonclinical subjects reported on their childhood experiences on two occasions, separated by 3–4 weeks. between these sessions, some subjects were exposed to a 30-min therapy simulation in which their dream material was analyzed by a clinical psychologist. He suggested to subjects that their dreams were indicative of having experienced, before the age of three, certain critical experiences (e.g., being lost in a public place or feeling abandoned by parents). Subjects previously reported that these critical events had not occurred. The brief therapy simulation led them to dramatic shifts in belief that the experiences had occurred. These results show that brief therapy-like interactions can change people's beliefs about the past, and have implications for the power of clinical intervention. Dream interpretation, commonly practiced in psychotherapy to guide patient's understanding of themselves, may have unexpected side effects if it leads to beliefs about the past that may in fact be false. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparison of dream interpretation, event, interpretation, and unstructured sessions in brief therapy.

Twenty-five distressed adult clients received 2 sessions each of dream and event interpretation using the Hill model during 12 sessions of successful therapy. No differences were found in depth, insight, and working alliance among dream interpretation, event interpretation, and unstructured sessions, suggesting that dream interpretation is as effective as other therapist strategies. Dream and event interpretation may be equally effective because both lead back to relevant waking concerns and past memories. Pretreatment measures of client psychological mindedness, openness, and insight were generally unrelated to each other, to evaluations of insight within sessions, to therapist evaluations of client insight, and to pre- and posttherapy changes in insight. Cognitive complexity of client dialogue was related to the process and outcome of dream interpretation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of training in dream recall and dream interpretation skills on dream recall, attitudes, and dream interpretation outcome.

Forty-two volunteer clients with below-average dream recall and attitudes toward dreams participated in training sessions focusing on either improving dream recall and attitudes toward dreams, building dream interpretation skills, or educating about counseling. After training, individual dream interpretation sessions were conducted. No significant differences were found among the 3 conditions in regard to dream recall, attitudes toward dreams, or client- or therapist-reported session outcome, but effect sizes suggested that participants in the skills condition gained more from sessions than did participants in the dream recall–attitudes condition. Session outcome for all volunteer clients was equivalent to those in previous studies of volunteer clients with no training, suggesting that training was not necessary and that these participants were able to benefit from single-session dream interpretation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bias in psychotherapist ratings of client transference and insight.

The psychology literature at large considers rater bias to be a substantial source of error in observer ratings. Yet, it is typically ignored by psychotherapy researchers using participant (psychotherapist/client) ratings. In particular, interrater variability, or differences between raters' overall tendency to rate others favorably or unfavorably, has been a largely ignored source of error in studies that use psychotherapists and/or clients as raters. Ignoring rater bias can have serious consequences for statistical power and for interpretation of research findings. Rater bias may be a particular problem in psychotherapy research, as psychotherapists are often asked to rate subjective variables that require much rater inference. Consequently, we examined the extent to which rater bias is a factor in psychotherapist ratings of client transference and insight, by comparing psychotherapist variance from these ratings to psychotherapist variance in ratings of client-perceived emotional intelligence, using Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Results suggest that bias may be a substantial source of error in psychotherapist process and relationship ratings, accounting for, on average, 38% of the total variance in scores, and 30% after accounting for perceived emotional intelligence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of including the action stage in dream interpretation.

Forty-three volunteer clients were randomly assigned to single sessions of dream interpretation using the Hill (1996) dream interpretation model with or without the action stage. As expected, no differences were found between conditions on client-perceived session quality or on client-reported insight. Volunteer clients who went through the action stage, however, rated sessions higher on problem solving and had higher quality ideas for action than did clients who did not go through the action stage. Therapists using the action stage attributed easy sessions to client involvement, client psychological mindedness, recency of the dream, therapist comfort facilitating the action stage, thorough exploration of the dream and client insight into the dream. Limitations and implications of the results are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The illusion of external agency.

People typically underestimate their capacity to generate satisfaction with future outcomes. When people experience such self-generated satisfaction, they may mistakenly conclude that it was caused by an influential, insightful, and benevolent external agent. In three laboratory experiments, participants who were allowed to generate satisfaction with their outcomes were especially likely to conclude that an external agent had subliminally influenced their choice of partners (Study 1), had insight into their musical preferences (Study 2), and had benevolent intentions when giving them a stuffed animal (Study 3). These results suggest that belief in omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent external agents, such as God, may derive in part from people's failure to recognize that they have generated their own satisfaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Physical motion in dreams: One measure of three theories.

As a normal psychological event, dreaming is an object of fascination and of conflicting explanation. In biopsychological terms, this article compares 3 explanations of 1 salient feature of dream cognition. Physical movement can be measured in dream reports, can be understood in physiologic terms, and can provide a focus for comparing dream theories. In addition, dreamed motion may have functional importance. The authors discuss dream motor data that conflict with Freud's explanation of dream movement and with a distributed activation explanation but coincide with an activation synthesis hypothesis. Because physiologic models of sleep intersect with physiologic models of psychopathology, this approach may be relevant to psychopathological dreaming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"A ubiquitous sex difference in dreams" revisited.

Tested earlier findings by the author and B. Domhoff (see record 1963-08107-001) that indicate that male dreamers dream more often of males than do female dreamers by presenting all the findings on this topic. The characters who appeared or were mentioned in dream reports of children, adolescents, college students, adults, and patients in therapy (35 groups of various nationalities and ethnic groups) were classified by sex regardless of age, relationship to the dreamer, occupation, or nationality. The dreamer was not counted as a character; characters were counted only once no matter how often they appeared in the dream; a one-sex group was counted as 1 male or 1 female and a character differentiated from the same-sex group was counted as one character and the group as another. Results show that the sex difference occurred in 29 of the groups on every continent, in all age groups, and in dreams collected in the laboratory, in the classroom, and in the field by different investigators over a 30-yr period. It is suggested that this widespread confirmation of the sex difference in dreams increases the confidence that may be placed in the existence of a universal sex difference. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Use of experimenter-given manual and facial cues by gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) in an object-choice task.

Captive lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) were tested for their ability to use experimenter-given manual and facial cues in an object-choice task. Performance levels were high when the experimenter tapped on or pointed at an object that contained a reward. Performance remained good when the experimenter withheld manual gestures and instead gazed with eyes and head oriented toward the correct object. In contrast, when only the experimenter's eye orientation served as the cue, the gorillas did not appropriately complete the task. Repeated attempts to establish prolonged mutual eye contact with 1 gorilla failed. The gorillas' failure to use eye signals as a cue may be due to an aversion to direct eye contact and contrasts with findings in other great apes. The results may indicate a difference among great ape species in detection of intentionality, but an alternative interpretation is that performance in such tests is influenced by factors such as rearing experience and temperament. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

OCMAP-PLUS: a program for the comprehensive analysis of occupational cohort data

Previous research indicated that high-hypnotizable participants reported more primary-process mentation in hypnotic dreams than low-hypnotizable participants instructed to simulate hypnosis. Differences in primary process were not evidenced in response to instructions for a "hidden part" of the participant to report on the hypnotic dream. This research replicated and extended these findings by showing that high-hypnotizable participants (n = 20) passing the dream suggestion reported more primary process in their dreams than high-hypnotizable participants instructed to remain alert and think and imagine along with suggestions (n = 20). Differences in primary process were not evidenced in response to hidden-observer suggestions, and the frequency of dream (87% hypnosis vs. 96% imagining) and hidden-observer responses (100% in both groups) was equivalent across hypnotic and nonhypnotic groups. The results provided qualified support for a psychoanalytic model of hypnosis: Differences in primary process were apparent in response to the dream but not the hidden-observer suggestion.     

Les valeurs de travail et le style de gestion du personnel.

Investigated the relationship between certain aspects of a superior's personality and his or her behavioral style with regard to personnel management, using 86 female employees without any managerial responsibility. Results show that work values were related to the personnel management style Ss would have advocated if they had been in a management position. While the relationships were not very strong, it is suggested that a single personality aspect (work values) may explain up to 27% of the variance. It is argued that it is essential for researchers to consider the various aspects of the superior input microsystem (experience, personality, skills) concurrently with the other subordinate and situation input microsystems. Results suggest the possibility of using work values to partially predict the eventual personnel management style of candidates for management jobs. It is contended that training should be based on and work to improve the cognitive interpretation of realities and should be concerned, if necessary, with changing basic attitudes. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reactance as a function of actual versus projected autonomy.

Tested the impression management interpretation of psychological reactance. Contrary to the traditional effectance motivation interpretation, the impression management interpretation asserts that people are less concerned with the actual loss of a specific behavioral freedom than they are with maintaining the outward appearance of being free. 122 undergraduates read a communication that threatened their freedom to hold a particular attitude. Prior to the threat, some Ss were able either publicly or privately to exercise their freedom. Other Ss were not given the opportunity to exercise their freedom prior to its being threatened. Ss expressed their postcommunication attitude in a public or private manner. Consistent with the impression management hypothesis, attitude change did not occur when postcommunication attitudes were private. Further, public postcommunication attitudes were primarily used to convey the impression that the participant was autonomous; reactancelike attitude change occurred only when participants had not publicly exercised their freedom before it was threatened. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)