Comment: ABEPP "Neurosis."

Letter comments that the author, as someone who has recently completed the examinations for the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology (ABEPP), would like to discuss what he calls the "ABEPP Neurosis" with the view to delineating some of the facts and fictions of the ABEPP situation. The author hopes his experience will help to minimize the paranoia that a future candidate may encounter if he too, in his innocence, asks what ABEPP is all about. The advice he would give to such a person is this: Ask someone who has taken the examination; stay away from those who are afraid of ghosts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A factorial study of dogmatism and related concepts.

Using scales of 10 personality variables, 3 hypotheses were tested: (1) dogmatism is factorially discriminable from authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, and rigidity; (2) dogmatism, paranoia, and self-rejection are factorially similar; and (3) dogmatism, paranoia, and self-rejection would emerge, together with anxiety, on a single factor. Ss were 207 New York college students. The data permit the conclusion that these 3 hypotheses are confirmed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Cognitive-behavioral therapy for bipolar disorder and Cognitive therapy for delusions, voices, and paranoia.

Reviews the books, Cognitive-behavioral therapy for bipolar disorder by Monica Ramirez Basco and A. John Russo (see record 1996-98072-000) and Cognitive therapy for delusions, voices, and paranoia by Paul Chadwick, Max Birchwood, and Peter Trower (see record 1996-97983-000). The mental health service system is largely based on the oft encountered, often implicit, belief among professionals that, since Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, and other severe forms of mental illnesses have been shown to have a biological basis, there is no point in providing psychotherapy for individuals afflicted with these disorders. These two books represent a welcome exception to this situation. While different in many ways, including their treatment goals and many of their theoretical underpinnings, both books represent an attempt to allow the severely mentally ill to benefit from techniques which have been demonstrated to be effective for less severely disturbed populations. Both approaches illustrate ways that the severely mentally ill may be able to be helped through psychosocial intervention, and both acknowledge the importance of client collaboration in treatment, a consideration easy to overlook when the client has a severe mental illness. The books are also similar in that neither one offers sufficient empirical data to support the effectiveness of its approach. The two books reviewed here represent, in the reviewer's opinion, significant contributions to the field of psychotherapy. Even if the clinician takes issue with the techniques presented or with the theoretical assumptions underlying the approaches, he/she should come away with a renewed appreciation of the importance of including the client in treatment planning, even if the client has a severe mental illness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

To Integrate of Not to Integrate?

Turkish architecture over the last 150 years has been plagued by its preoccupation with its integration with the West. Should it be embracing or reflecting Western cultural, technical and professional standards? Uğur Tanyeli provides the background to this pessimistic context and describes how a new generation of architects over the last 10 years have transcended this predicament by producing work that turns away from this obsession with identity. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Response to cognitive therapy in depression: The role of maladaptive beliefs and personality disorders.

This study examined whether personality disorder status and beliefs that characterize personality disorders affect response to cognitive therapy. In a naturalistic study, 162 depressed outpatients with and without a personality disorder were followed over the course of cognitive therapy. As would be hypothesized by cognitive theory (A. T. Beck & A. Freeman, 1990), it was not personality disorder status but rather maladaptive avoidant and paranoid beliefs that predicted variance in outcome. However, pre- to posttherapy comparisons suggested that although patients with or without comorbidity respond comparably to "real-world" cognitive therapy, they report more severe depressive symptomatology at intake and more residual symptoms at termination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Testing the continuum of delusional beliefs: An experimental study using virtual reality.

A key problem in studying a hypothesized spectrum of severity of delusional ideation is determining that ideas are unfounded. The first objective was to use virtual reality to validate groups of individuals with low, moderate, and high levels of unfounded persecutory ideation. The second objective was to investigate, drawing upon a cognitive model of persecutory delusions, whether clinical and nonclinical paranoia are associated with similar causal factors. Three groups (low paranoia, high nonclinical paranoia, persecutory delusions) of 30 participants were recruited. Levels of paranoia were tested using virtual reality. The groups were compared on assessments of anxiety, worry, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anomalous perceptual experiences, reasoning, and history of traumatic events. Virtual reality was found to cause no side effects. Persecutory ideation in virtual reality significantly differed across the groups. For the clear majority of the theoretical factors there were dose–response relationships with levels of paranoia. This is consistent with the idea of a spectrum of paranoia in the general population. Persecutory ideation is clearly present outside of clinical groups and there is consistency across the paranoia spectrum in associations with important theoretical variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fluctuations in self-esteem and paranoia in the context of daily life.

Studies investigating the relationship between self-esteem and paranoia have specifically focused on self-esteem level, but have neglected the dynamic aspects of self-esteem. In the present article, the authors investigated the relationship between self-esteem and paranoia in two different ways. First, 154 individuals ranging across the continuum in level of paranoia were studied with the Experience Sampling Method (a structured self-assessment diary technique) to assess the association between trait paranoia and level and fluctuation of self-esteem in daily life. Results showed that trait paranoia was associated with both lower levels and higher instability of self-esteem. Second, the temporal relationship between momentary (state) paranoia and self-esteem was investigated in the daily life of these individuals. Results showed that a decrease in self-esteem was associated with an immediate increase in paranoia. The findings indicate that paranoid individuals are not only characterized by a lower level of self-esteem but also by more fluctuations in their self-esteem and that fluctuations in self-esteem predict the degree of subsequent paranoia. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that paranoia is associated with dysfunctional strategies of self-esteem regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Can I trust you? Negative affective priming influences social judgments in schizophrenia.

Successful social interactions rely on the ability to make accurate judgments based on social cues as well as the ability to control the influence of internal or external affective information on those judgments. Prior research suggests that individuals with schizophrenia misinterpret social stimuli and this misinterpretation contributes to impaired social functioning. We tested the hypothesis that for people with schizophrenia, social judgments are abnormally influenced by affective information. Twenty-three patients with schizophrenia and 35 healthy control participants rated the trustworthiness of faces following the presentation of neutral, negative (threat-related), or positive affective primes. Results showed that all participants rated faces following negative affective primes as less trustworthy than faces following neutral or positive primes. Importantly, this effect was significantly more pronounced for participants with schizophrenia, suggesting that schizophrenia may be characterized by an exaggerated influence of negative affective information on social judgment. Furthermore, the extent that the negative affective prime influenced trustworthiness judgments was significantly associated with patients' severity of positive symptoms, particularly feelings of persecution. These findings suggest that for people with schizophrenia, negative affective information contributes to an interpretive bias, consistent with paranoid ideation, when judging the trustworthiness of others. This bias may contribute to social impairments in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit and explicit self-esteem discrepancies in paranoia and depression.

The main purpose of the present study was to examine implicit and explicit self-esteem (SE) in patients with persecutory delusions. In samples of paranoid patients, depressed patients, and healthy controls, implicit SE was assessed using the experimental go/no-go association task, whereas explicit SE was measured using 2 self-reporting questionnaires: the self-worth subscale of the World Assumption Scale (Janoff-Bulman, 1989) and the self-acceptance subscale of the Scales of Psychological Well-Being (Ryff & Keyes, 1995). Our analysis revealed that depressed patients showed lower explicit SE than did paranoid and healthy control participants. However, participants with persecutory delusions had significantly lower implicit SE scores than did healthy controls. We interpret the discrepancies observed between overt and covert measures in the paranoid group as psychological defense mechanisms. The present study stresses the clinical and theoretical importance of the use of implicit measures in psychopathology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)