Showing papers in "Genetic Social and General Psychology Monographs in 1987"

Ethnic identity, self-esteem, and occupational aspirations of Indian and Anglo-Saxon British adolescents.

Abstract: A questionnaire monitoring occupational aspiration, ethnic identification, adolescent experience, and self-esteem was administered to a large sample of Indian and Anglo-Saxon British male and female adolescents attending school in the West Midlands. The relationship between these variables and differences between the four groups were consistent with predictions derived from the social identity approach to intergroup relations and group behaviour (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Indian males were found to possess a social mobility belief structure that mediates high occupational aspirations and keeness to marry out of their ethnic group. In contrast, Indian females were found to possess a social change belief structure associated with acceptance of the status quo and lower aspirations. Males and Anglo-Saxons reported higher self-esteem than females or Indians. The adolescent experience findings were less clear, but were consistent with the general interpretation of the data that the differences in intersex relations and gender-related experiences are contingent on ethnicity.

The differential importance of weight and body image among college men and women.

Abstract: Among a sample of American college students, body image and the degree of desired weight change were associated with academic self-rankings, with social and psychological well-being, and with the development of eating difficulties. The effects of body image and desired weight change on eating disorders were generally found to be greater for women than for men, and their effects on student self-rankings of academic ability, social, and psychological traits were more pervasive for women than for men. The less attractive a woman perceived herself to be and the more weight she wanted to lose, the greater was her overall sense of academic, social, and psychological impairment. Women who had poor body images and who desired to lose weight were more likely to report eating difficulties.

Forgotten warriors: an evaluation of the emotional well-being of presently incarcerated Vietnam veterans.

Abstract: The emotional well-being of a group of incarcerated Vietnam veterans within the maximum security section of a state prison was assessed along with comparison groups of veterans and nonveterans. The Multiple Affect Adjective Check List (MAACL) (Zuckerman & Lubin, 1965), the Adjective Check List (ACL) (Gough & Heilbrun, 1983), and the Military Life Questionnaire (MLQ) (Panzarella, Mantell, & Bridenbaugh, 1978) were administered. Both the factors of incarceration and Vietnam experience proved significant on a number of MAACL, ACL, and MLQ measures, including depression, anxiety, hostility, and personal adjustment. The MLQ results also indicated that, compared to their nonincarcerated counterparts, the incarcerated veterans were more likely to be black, to have come from a less supportive family background, to have been assigned to an Army infantry combat unit, to have been injured in combat, and to have witnessed or been involved in the killing of enemy soldiers, prisoners, and civilians while in Vietnam. Many incarcerated veterans apparently began as poor prospects in terms of their social, economic, and interpersonal well-being. They went to Vietnam, bore the brunt of these experiences, and emerged as even poorer prospects, all the more at risk and prone to incarceration.

On the politics of madness: a preliminary analysis of the relationship between social roles and psychotherapy.

Abstract: This study presents a brief account of a theory that argues that diagnostic categories of madness and their prototypes are equivalent to the fulfillment of the roles and role stereotypes of the status groups that tend to receive the diagnoses most often. Two studies provided tentative support for the theory. The results of the first study revealed that clinicians attributed to the stereotypes of various status groups precisely those diagnoses that the groups tend to receive. The second study revealed that undergraduates who were given diagnostic prototypes from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition (1980) (DSM-III) and were asked to predict the status characteristics of the persons described therein correctly reproduced well known epidemiological data. These results imply an intimate relationship between social and psychiatric taxonomies, and thus raise questions about the meaning of madness in our society.

Sally Beauchamp's career: a psychoarchaeological key to Morton Prince's classic case of multiple personality.

Abstract: By the methods of psychoarchaeology, the identity of Sally Beauchamp, Morton Prince's classic case of multiple personality, has been established. The reconstructed life history has for the first time revealed the roots of the dissociative process. This goal was actually obscured by the tangled web of Prince's rambling 1906 book and his other publications on the case. The determinative events included two instances of sudden infant death during the childhood period of the patient, the earlier of which was apparently never even known to Dr. Prince. Though not mentioned in the patient's autobiography, it probably induced the initial dissociation to defend the integration of the personality. The relevance of the new concept of SIDS (since 1969) is considered. Other disturbing influences were the constant rejection of the patient by her mother, who died at an early age, and probable severe abuse by the widowed father which led her to run away from home (permanently) at age 16. Nine years afterward, therapy with Dr. Prince began and lasted seven years. It is suggested that this case and the parallel one of Breuer and Freud (Anna O.) be comparatively reexamined from the standpoint of modern feminism. The role of the conventional 19th-century woman was not acceptable to either of them, and both probably had an unusually large innate, bisexual endowment. Endogenous conflict, intensified by social demands, produced dissociation as a pseudo-solution until, through opportune therapy and other environmental opportunities, each was able to achieve a productive modus vivendi. The relation of bisexuality to the etiology of personality dissociation in general is considered. An incidental but instructive discovery made in the course of the Prince research was an unknown letter from William James to Morton Prince about The Dissociation of a Personality. This find points up the fact that James's final metaphysic was a form of pluralistic panpsychism derived from both psychical research and the contemporary knowledge about dissociated personality. James postulated a cosmic multiple personality.

Three accounts of the learned helplessness effect

Abstract: Two experiments tested predictions drawn from test anxiety theory, learned helplessness theory, and Wortman and Brehm's (1975) integration of helplessness and reactance theories. Experiment 1 demonstrated that performance deficits predicted by learned helplessness do not rely on experimenter-induced failure. It also showed such deficits to be unrelated either to negative affect following exposure to pretreatment or to causal attributions about pretreatment task performance. Experiment 2 showed that experience of uncontrollability need not result in impaired performance, because failure on an unimportant task did not produce the deficits predicted by learned helplessness theory. This result provides qualified support for the integrative model. Finally, because the subjective measures used in Experiment 2 were not consistent with performance measures, the reliability of self-reports is questioned.