The conscious control of thematic projection.

Conducted 2 experiments with undergraduate Ss (N = 118). In Session 1 of Exp I, one group was instructed to be honest in responding to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), while another group was instructed to fake high need for achievement. In Session 2, instructions for the 2 groups were reversed. Results indicate that Ss could successfully fake the possession of need for achievement. In Session 1 of Exp II, all Ss were instructed to respond honestly to the TAT. In Session 2, Ss were instructed either to be honest again or to inhibit projections revealing their personalities. Test-retest reliability was lower for Ss who had faked responses in the 2nd session than for Ss who had been honest. In neither experiment were judges able to identify Ss who were faking. The findings that Ss can consciously introduce false projections and inhibit true projections have implications for the theory of projection (i.e., persons unconsciously project unconscious traits) and for the use of projective techniques for personality assessment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Achievement fantasy as a function of probability of success.

Thematic measures of n Achievement were obtained from 3 groups of 30 Ss. The 1st learned that the 50% writing the most creative stories would receive $2.00; the 2nd that the top 10% would collect. The 3rd was instructed to write the stories with no mention of reward. It was hyypothesized from Atkinson's theory that the .50 group would project more a Achievement then the others. A significant difference existed between the .50 group and controls, but not between any of the others. The study is interpreted as at least in part supporting the theory. The use of the TAT as a practical measure of n Achievement, however, is questioned. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivational induction and the behavior correlates of the achievement and affiliation motives.

The present study derives from previous work in this area with which the author was involved (see 33: 7674). Herein, the effects of picture cues, picture order, individual vs. group administration, measures of performance on certain tasks, and varying kinds of instructions on TAT stories were investigated. "Motivating" instructions and high ACE Q scores were significantly correlated with high performance on the problems; predictions in regard to characteristics of motive and performance were made but not supported by the data of the TAT stories. The study is related to others in this area. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of intentional forgetting in reducing children's retroactive interference.

Preschool and kindergarten children's retention of stories was examined in the presence of interfering information and instructions to forget. Children learned 2 stories and, 24 hr later, were asked to recall the 1st or 2nd story learned. Some of the children were instructed, either following acquisition or just prior to the retention test to forget the 2nd, or interfering, story. A model was used to isolate storage and retrieval effects, and the results showed that (a) retroactive interference affected both storage- and retrieval-based forgetting rates for the younger children but only storage-based forgetting rates for the older children, (b) intentional forgetting reduced retroactive interference primarily by attenuating storage-based forgetting regardless of age, (c) intentional forgetting instructions were effective only at acquisition for preschoolers but at both acquisition and retention for kindergarteners, and (d) all children recalled the to-be-forgotten story as well as they recalled the to-be-remembered story. These results are interpreted in terms of reorganization and distinctiveness effects in storage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Further Examination of the Exposure Model Underlying the Efficacy of Written Emotional Disclosure.

In the current study, the authors examined the effects of systematically varying the writing instructions for the written emotional disclosure procedure. College undergraduates with a trauma history and at least moderate posttraumatic stress symptoms were asked to write about (a) the same traumatic experience, (b) different traumatic experiences, or (c) nontraumatic everyday events across 3 written disclosure sessions. Results show that participants who wrote about the same traumatic experience reported significant reductions in psychological and physical symptoms at follow-up assessments compared with other participants. These findings suggest that written emotional disclosure may be most effective when individuals are instructed to write about the same traumatic or stressful event at each writing session, a finding consistent with exposure-based treatments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Thematic Apperception Test and attitudes toward achievement in women: A new look at the motive to avoid success and a new method of measurement.

Asked 163 male and 165 female students to write stories to 1 of 3 versions of M. S. Horner's Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) verbal cue used to measure women's "motive to avoid success": a successful medical student who was a single female, a single male, or a married female. Ss then answered an objective questionnaire about the cue figure. Story protocols, classified as positive, mixed, or negative on the basis of success-related content, were significantly (p     

Parental communication deviance and schizophrenia: A cross-cultural comparison of Mexican- and Anglo-Americans.

Levels of parental communication deviance (CD), as measured on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), were compared among families of schizophrenic patients in two culturally distinct groups. Spanish-speaking Mexican-American parents of schizophrenics completed the TAT in their native language, and CD was coded from their stories by a Spanish-speaking rater. Mexican-American parents had levels of CD that were nearly identical to those of a carefully matched sample of English-speaking Anglo-American parents. Factor scores that measure distinct subtypes of CD also did not differ across groups. The data suggest that levels of CD, despite discriminating between parents of schizophrenics and nonschizophrenics, do not vary across different languages and cultures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Prospective Span as a Cognitive Ability": Erratum.

Reports an error in the original article by Louis S. Dickstein (Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology, 1969, 33[6], 757-760. On page 758, column 1, paragraph 2, sentence 2, the reliability of .80 should refer to interjudge reliability rather than test-retest reliability. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1970-03616-001.) Hypothesized that prospective span (PS) in TAT stories, as a measure of cognitive capacity of anticipation, should be related to cognitive tasks involving the specific capacity of anticipation but not to more general measures of verbal intelligence. In 51 male undergraduates, PS was related to 2 cognitive tasks requiring anticipation, the Mazes Test and the Seeing Deficiencies Test, but unrelated to the Vocabulary and Information subtests of the WAIS. Contrary to previous studies, PS was negatively related to academic grades. Large differences were obtained between PS scores for the different TAT cards. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Just stop thinking about it": Effects of emotional disengagement on children's memory for educational material.

Children regulate negative emotions in a variety of ways. Emotion education programs typically discourage emotional disengagement and encourage emotional engagement or "working through" negative emotions. The authors examined the effects of emotional disengagement and engagement on children's memory for educational material. Children averaging 7 or 10 years of age (N=200) watched either a sad or an emotionally neutral film and were then instructed to emotionally disengage, instructed to engage in problem solving concerning their emotion, or received no emotion regulation instructions. All children then watched and were asked to recall the details of an emotionally neutral educational film. Children instructed to disengage remembered the educational film better than children instructed to work through their feelings or children who received no emotion regulation instructions. Although past research has indicated that specific forms of emotional disengagement can impair memory for emotionally relevant events, the current findings suggest that disengagement is a useful short-term strategy for regulating mild negative emotion in educational settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Posthypnotic conflict, repression, and psychopathology.

12 hypnotized, male undergraduates were given posthypnotic conflicts involving sexual or aggressive impulses toward an older, attractive woman. The 2 conflicts were implanted on separate occasions and were activated posthypnotically by the presentation of conflict words presented randomly at each of 3 levels of impulse intensity. 5 susceptible Ss (male undergraduates) were given instructions to simulate hypnosis. The hypnotic group produced significantly more symptoms and GSRs than the simulating group, and poor repressors produced significantly more symptoms and GSRs than good repressors with respect to the posthypnotic activation of anger and a destructive impulse. The 2 conflicts did not differ from each other on the dependent variables, and poor repressors and good repressors for both conflicts did not differ on measures of drive representation to TAT stories. A particular order of symptoms was generated as repression weakened, and the degree of repression conceptually resolved the discrepancy between 2 theories of psychosomatic symptoms. (32 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is hostility linked with affiliation among males and with achievement among females? A critique of Pollak and Gilligan.

Attempted to replicate and to clarify methodologically an investigation by S. Pollak and C. Gilligan (see record 1982-23594-001). Those investigators reported sex differences in violence imagery to TAT pictures depicting affiliation and achievement situations. Pollak and Gilligan concluded that men perceive danger in situations of affiliation whereas women perceive danger in situations of achievement. The present study demonstrated that Pollak and Gilligan incorrectly classified TAT cards into motivational categories, which may have resulted in incorrect inferences. In addition, their findings could not be replicated when 4 different systems for classifying TAT cards into motivational categories were used with 204 undergraduates. Other potential sources of error in their research, including a restrictive scoring scheme for hostility, unusual instructions, and failure to control for sex role in the TAT pictures, did not influence the results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Life events and personal causation: Some relationships with satisfaction and distress.

Hypothesized that Ss who engaged in more positive origin activities would rate their lives as more satisfying than Ss who engaged in fewer such activities, and both would be more satisfied than control Ss. After completing a series of questionnaires including a life-event inventory, 3 groups of college students were selected from a pool of 141 and given instructions either to (a) engage in 12 activities from a self-selected list of pleasurable activities, (b) engage in 2 activities from that list, or (c) return after 1 mo for retesting only. Ss were then given a pleasantness-of-events test, an event-frequency test, the Perceived Quality of Life Scale, the Beck Depression Inventory, and a 54-item Symptom Check List. Covariance analyses revealed that Ss instructed to engage in either 2 or 12 pleasurable activities reported greater pleasantness and a higher quality of life than controls; there were no differences between groups on reports of psychiatric distress. Prior negative life change was treated as a factor in the design and was found to interact with the activity instructions: Ss reporting many prior negative changes exhibited less psychiatric distress along with greater pleasantness when instructed to engage in 12 activities rather than 2 or none. Results suggest that pleasant activities increase positive aspects of well-being in general, but may reduce distress only for people experiencing considerable life stress. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bothered by abstraction: The effect of expertise on knowledge transfer and subsequent novice performance.

Although experts should be well positioned to convey their superior knowledge and skill to novices, the organization of that knowledge, and particularly its level of abstraction, may make it difficult for them to do so. Using an electronic circuit-wiring task, the authors found that experts as compared with beginners used more abstract and advanced statements and fewer concrete statements when providing task instructions to novices. In a 2nd study, the authors found that beginner-instructed novices performed better than expert-instructed novices and reported fewer problems with the instructions when performing the same task. In Study 2, the authors found that although novices performed better on the target task when instructed by beginners, they did better on a different task within the same domain when instructed by experts. The evidence suggests that the abstract, advanced concepts conveyed by experts facilitated the transfer of learning between the different tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ipsative behavioral variability and the quality of thematic apperceptive measurement of the achievement motive.

Ipsative behavioral variability is defined as change in the behavior of an individual in a constant environment. Through computer simulation of the dynamics of action (J. W. Atkinson and D. Birch; 1970, 1978), one may deduce that increases in ipsative variability in the expression of motivational imagery written in response to equally cued TAT pictures will increase the construct validity of that imagery regardless of the internal consistency reliability that remains. Empirical support for this hypothesis is offered by the finding that TAT need for achievement (nAch), measured in 4 stories written in response to weakly cued pictures, showed improved construct validity for 61 male undergraduates who were high rather than low in ipsative variability. TAT nAch showed significant construct validity for the high-variability group even though the internal consistency of this group's motive measure was –2.229. Findings disconfirm the general applicability of classical reliability theory to thematic apperceptive measures. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of alcohol on memory.

Ss wrote TAT stories at 3 points during social drinking in an experimental condition (with alcoholic beverages = wet, N = 18), or in a control condition (dry, N = 17). On the next day Ss were asked to describe the TAT pictures and to reproduce the stories they had written before. Several measures of recall were developed. Results showed: (a) A linear decrease in memory as a function of alcohol consumption. (b) No decrease in memory for stories written immediately before drinking. (c) An improvement for the dry group in the recall of stories written late as compared with early. (d) An attenuation of stable individual differences in memory in the wet condition. (e) Selective forgetting due to the presence of "physical sex" in the original stories, when these were written after drinking; also, selective forgetting of pictures which elicited such stories. (f) Selective remembering of stories with "physical sex" from some dry administrations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of valence in attempted thought suppression

Thought control was investigated in participants (N = 72) who were shown either a violent, humorous or neutral film and then administered either suppression or nonsuppression instructions. Following the presentation of a three minute segment from one film, participants monitored their thoughts for two 3-minute periods. In Period 1, participants were administered suppression or nonsuppression instructions relating to thoughts of the film. In Period 2, participants were instructed to think about anything. During both periods participants were instructed to press a response button if they had a trauma-related thought. Participants who viewed the violent film gave higher ratings of distress and lower pleasantness ratings than those who viewed the humorous and neutral films. Participants who were given suppression instructions demonstrated a delayed increase in trauma-related thoughts in the period subsequent to suppression across the valence conditions.     

Hypnotic blindness and the relevance of cognitive style.

Real, hypnotized and simulating, unhypnotized subjects were instructed to use either a constructive or a concentrative cognitive style when attempting to respond to a suggestion for hypnotic blindness; also, some subjects were administered the suggestion without any instructions about cognitive style. More reals who received the constructive rather than the concentrative instructions reported complete blindness; a similar number of simulators who received the different instructions reported complete blindness. Moreover, reals who received the constructive instructions reported a more rapidly developed belief in their blindness. The findings are discussed in terms of the relevance of cognitive style to subjects' reports of hypnotic blindness, and the possibility is considered that both reports of and belief in hypnotic blindness are determined in part by cognitive style. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Detecting fake-good MMPI-A profiles in a correctional facility.

This study examined the extent to which the validity scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A; J. N. Butcher et al., 1992) could differentiate between correctional adolescents instructed to fake good and both correctional and noncorrectional adolescents who received standard instructions. The noncorrectional participants (n?=?137) were from settings not connected with treatment or correctional facilities. Correctional participants (n?=?140) were from a facility in Northeastern Ohio. Mean profiles resembled those previously reported for adults on the MMPI and MMPI-2 and for adolescents on the MMPI and MMPI-A. It was possible to differentiate between (a) correctional youth instructed to fake good and noncorrectional youth with standard instructions and (b) correctional youth who were faking and correctional youth with standard instructions. Slightly different cutoff scores were needed for these two discriminations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychological evaluation of clinical disturbance in children at risk for psychopathology.

Evaluated children of 1 schizophrenic or 1 manic-depressive parent for clinical disturbance in the St. Louis risk research project between 1967 and 1971. The investigation employed a psychological battery using the WISC or WAIS, figure drawings, the TAT, the Rorschach, and the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Form Sequence, plus blind clinical disturbance ratings from the test batteries. Tests were administered individually to 339 6–20 yr old children from intact families with 1 schizophrenic, manic-depressive, or physically ill parent, or 2 normal parents. Children of psychiatrically ill parents were found to be more disturbed than children of nonpsychotic parents. Children with a schizophrenic parent demonstrated peformance on psychometric evaluation that was in some ways continuous with that of adult schizophrenics. Children of schizophrenic and manic-depressive parents differed from one another and from controls on 2 measures. In the aggressive content of their TAT stories, children with a schizophrenic parent showed less aggression than normals, and children with a manic-depressive parent showed more aggression than normals. On the Rorschach, children of schizophrenics gave more primitive responses than children of manic-depressives, and the children of normal parents gave an intermediate number of such responses. (2 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The avoidance of threatening material in imaginative behavior.

"The S's in three different studies were asked to write or tell imaginative stories about series of ambiguous pictures under two conditions. The first condition provided no intentional suggestion (low cue) as to what the content of the stories should be. The second condition, for the same Ss, focused their attention on a particular event (high cue) which might be threatening to some of them. One of the studies presented war catastrophe as the potentially threatening event; the other two studies focused on competition with a standard of excellence." 21 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)