psychology – Page 4 – Andi Fugard (∧⇒)

Punched card equipment and questionnaires

“It can be said that some of the questionnaires used in these surveys contain everything but the proverbial kitchen sink, and once such a questionnaire has been filled in by a sizable group its author has the ‘basic’ data at hand for a half dozen articles. If he is fortunate enough to have punched card equipment, it becomes the misfortune of his professional contemporaries to find the literature being filled with results of cross tabulations which are so lacking in rationale as to be nonsensical. The ‘hypothesis’ step in scientific reasoning and research seems to be all too frequently ignored by the users of these techniques.”

– Quinn McNemar (1946, p. 293) [Opinion-attitude methodology. Psychological Bulletin, 43(4), 289–374].

Mental testing

“The unfortunate habit in the mental testing field of devising a new test, administering it to some arbitrarily chosen group of subjects, calling these ‘the standardization population’, and then leaving it at that, does not seem to call for comment.” (Ehrenberg, 1955, p. 26, footnote 1)

Ehrenberg, A. S. C. (1955). Measurement and mathematics in psychology. British Journal of Psychology, 46(1), 20–9.

Everyone is a genius at something

“Every normal man, woman, and child is, then, a genius at something as well as an idiot at something.

“It remains to discover what – at any rate in respect of the genius. This must be a most difficult matter, owing to the very fact that it occurs in only a minute proportion out of all possible abilities. It certainly cannot be detected by any of the testing procedures at present in current usage, but these procedures are capable, I believe, of vast improvement.

“The preceding considerations have often appealed to me on looking at a procession of the unemployed, and hearing some one whisper that they are mostly the unemployable. That they are so actually I cannot help concurring. But need they be so necessarily ? Remember that every one of these, too, is a genius at something – if we could only discover what. I cherish no illusion, indeed, that among them may be marching some ‘mute inglorious Milton, some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.’ For these are walks in life that appear to involve a large amount of g. But I am quite confident that every one of them could do something that would make him a treasure in some great industrial concern; and I see no reason why some should not have even become famous, in such occupations, for example, as those of dancers, jockeys, or players of popular games.”

Spearman, C. (1925). Some Issues in the Theory of`”g”‘(including the Law of Diminishing Returns). Nature, 116, 436-439.

“I abandoned psychoanalysis. But I am a psychoanalyst”

“I am in a certain way a psychoanalyst – I am still a psychoanalyst from a certain point of view. From another point of view, I am not a psychoanalyst, because I refuse in my work with the family to use the psychoanalytic model. The psychoanalytic model was developed by Freud in the last century and Freud could not know the systemic way of thinking. Also, in my opinion, it is not true that the psychoanalytic model is only intrapsychic. A certain part of psychoanalysis is intrapsychic. For example, what Freud calls the parts of the psyche-the ego, superego, and id-are intrapsychic because they describe the way in which the psyche, the mind of a person, functions. But in therapy, the psychoanalytic model is not intrapsychic; rather, it is dyadic when it is correct, because it is in analysis that the relationship between the therapist and the patient, the transference, is analyzed. So Freud‘s ego, superego and id and so on are intrapsychic. Freud’s transference is dyadic.

“[…] Dyadic thinking is not enough, because the family is at least a triad. It is necessary to remember that a system is not the sum of dyads or the sum of individuals-mother and father, son and mother, father and son, son and daughter, daughter and mother. It is necessary to observe all systems functioning at the same moment. So psychoanalysis continues in the Aristotelian way of thinking and has no way of looking at other concepts, such as coalition of two people against a third person and so on; it remains an intrapsychic or dyadic model. It is necessary to go beyond even the triad.”

“[…] according to the model, I abandoned psychoanalysis. But I am a psychoanalyst according to the rigorous study of continuity which my psychoanalytic mentors taught me.”

References

Barrows, S. E. (1982). Interview with Mara Selvini Palazzoli and Giuliana Prata. American Journal of Family Therapy, 10(3), 60-69.

Computing number needed to treat from control group recovery rates and Cohen’s d

Furukawa and Leucht (2011) give a formula for calculating the number needed to treat (NNT), i.e., (p. 1)

“the number of patients one would need to treat with the intervention in question in order to have one more success (or one less failure) than if treated in the control intervention”

based on the control group event rate (CER; for instance proportion of cases showing recovery) and Cohen’s d – an effect size in standard deviation units.

R code below:

NNT = function(d, CER) {
1 / ( pnorm( d - qnorm(1-CER) ) - CER )
}

Reference

Furukawa, T. A., & Leucht, S. (2011). How to obtain NNT from Cohen’s d: comparison of two methods. PloS one, 6(4), e19070.

Psychotherapy techniques – beyond the brands

The therapeutic brands are misleading as there’s a lot of overlap in techniques.

I like this simple table from Mick Power (2010, p. 49) of the different techniques, expressed in a cross-brand way.

Power argues that

“… therapy heightens access to cognitive–emotional structures and processes that relate to past and present significant objects and significant others including the therapist. In the context of this heightened access, there is the common therapeutic goal that patients will relearn, cope more successfully with, view more realistically, reinterpret or reconstruct; that is, in some way view more constructively the object, person or situation that has been the source of their distress or conflict.”

Fonagy and Bateman (2006, p. 425) go somewhere similar with the interrelationship part of this:

“It is possible that psychotherapy in general is effective because it arouses the attachment system at the same time it applies interpersonal demands (psychotherapy technique), which require the patient to mentalize, to confront and experience negative affect, and to confront and review issues of morality (superego). Why might this be helpful? We speculate that thinking about feelings, thoughts, and beliefs in the context of attachment is helpful because in this “paradoxical” brain state there may be more access to modifying preset ways of conceptualizing the contents of one’s own and other’s minds, as well as issues of morality and social judgment. Activating the attachment system harnesses brain biological processes partially to remove the dominance of constraints on the present from the past (long-term memory) and creates the possibility of rethinking, reconfiguring intersubjective relationship networks.”

Both are jargon heavy, though.

References

Fonagy, P., & Bateman, A. W. (2006). Mechanisms of change in mentalization‐based treatment of BPD. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62, 411-430.

Power, M. (2010). Emotion-focused cognitive therapy. London: Wiley

Consensual non-monogamy

Interesting paper by Terri Conley and colleagues on consensual non-monogamy. Hope there are many studies to come to begin to fill in the gaps in data.

“Is participation in consensual non-monogamy [CNM] stigmatized? […] participants rated either monogamous or CNM relationships on a variety of dimensions. The responses to CNM relationships (relative to monogamous relationships) were overwhelmingly negative […]. Across three experimental studies, we demonstrated that high degrees of bias were expressed toward CNM relationships and individuals within them. Moreover, no legal protections surround consensual non-monogamy, meaning that a person could be, for example, fired explicitly for engaging in this behavior.”

“… we currently have no evidence that sexual exclusivity invariably leads to greater intimacy and relationship satisfaction than CNM. Instead, some evidence suggests that consensual non-monogamy can be satisfying and functional for couples.”

“Although only a few studies have examined jealousy in CNM relationships, their results indicate that jealousy is more manageable in these relationships than in monogamous relationships (Bringle & Buunk, 1991; de Visser & McDonald, 2007) and is experienced less noxiously (Ritchie & Barker, 2006).”

“… large numbers of people who are in ostensibly monogamous relationships have been cheated on at some point, and moreover, cheated on in ways that put them at risk for STIs.”

“A quick glance at cultures around the world demonstrates that monogamous practices are actually non-normative rather than pervasive […]. Departures from monogamy are often perceived to be sinful, yet the Bible clearly condones non-monogamy in multiple instances…”

Reference

Conley, T. D., Ziegler, A., Moors, A. C., Matsick, J. L., & Valentine, B. (2012). A Critical Examination of Popular Assumptions About the Benefits and Outcomes of Monogamous Relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Review.

Each investigation is an original research project

“There have been many studies of social factors in relation to schizophrenia. These include attempts to discover whether schizophrenia occurs more or less frequently in one or other ethnic groups, social class, sex, ordinal position in the family, and so on. The conclusion from such studies has often been that social factors do not play a significant role in the ‘aetiology of schizophrenia’. This begs the question, and moreover such studies do not get close enough to the relevant situation. If the police wish to determine whether a man has died of natural causes or has committed suicide, or been murdered, they do not look up prevalence or incidence figures. They investigate the circumstances attendant upon each single case in turn. Each investigation is an original research project, and it comes to an end when enough evidence has been gathered to answer the relevant questions.” (Laing, 1967, Politics of Experience.)

words, words, words

[…] there is no end to it, words, words, words. At best and most they are perhaps in memoriam, evocations, conjurations, incantations, emanations, shimmering, iridescent flares in the sky of darkness, a just still feasible tact, indiscretions, perhaps forgiveable….

City lights at night, from the air, receding, like these words, atoms each containing its own world and every other world. Each a fuse to set you off….

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, If I could tell you I would let you know.

– R. D. Laing (1967). The Bird of Paradise.

If I could tell you

If I could tell you
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

– W. H. Auden (1907 – 73)

Haverstock Hill

“Paul Zeal told me of how, one day, he and Laing had spotted me careering down Haverstock Hill on my bike: bobble-hat on the hawk-head, a Dr Who oversized overcoat flapping in the breeze, with my “Unfit to Plead” badge attached to the lapel, no doubt heading for another night at the Vortex, or the consoling disillusions of the White Heart Lane terraces. This sight(ing) had provoked Laing to casually share with Paul, “What a strange bunch we are!” And the strangeness, the incipient unreality, of the psychotic world is what Laing had a considerable capacity to acknowledge, whilst neither rejecting, nor reinforcing it.”

Chris Oakley (2012), Where did it all go wrong? In R.D. Laing 50 Years since The Divided Self, edited by Theodor Itten and Courtenay Young.