The Value of Hate in the Countertransference

The author looks at the experience of hate in the countertransference and develops the idea that hate can be of particular value to the treatment process. He begins with an exploration of the therapist’s needs and discusses how unmet self-regulatory needs sometimes lead to feelings of frustration and rage toward the patient. The author explores these ideas as they are connected to Winnicott’s (1949, 1971) work on aggression and Jessica Benjamin’s (1992) work on recognition and destruction. The author espouses a difference between rage and hate, where rage is seen as indicative of unmet needs, and hate is seen as a force that can emancipate the therapist from the encumbrance of unmet needs. Case examples are provided to show the utility of this perspective. Laurence Green, M.S.W., Psy.D. is on the faculty and a member of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He is Co-chair of the History Committee of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Education. He is in private practice in Los Angeles, California working with children, adolescents and adults.     

Attitudes Toward Control in Uncontrollable Situations: The Multidimensional Impact of Health Locus of Control on the Well-Being of Mothers of Children with Disabilities

This study examines the additive and interactive impact of four dimensions of health locus of control (internality, desire for information, powerful others, and chance) on two measures of well-being (perceived social support and subjective caregiver burden) among 81 mothers of children with disabilities. Narrative accounts and interactive interviews with such mothers are used to interpret and contextualize the quantitative results. Findings clearly support the multidimensionality of health locus of control. Among these mothers, internality is uncorrelated with both of the dimensions of externality often treated as its polar opposite. It is also uncorrelated with desire for information—often used as its indicator. Complex individual, additive and interactive affects on the measures of well-being were found for dimensions of health locus of control. Desire for information is negatively correlated with subjective burden. Mothers who do not want information about health feel greater burden of care. Internality and chance interact in their relationships to both aspects of well-being. Mothers who believe that both their own actions and chance affect health outcomes report the highest levels of social support. Where internality is low, the belief in chance increases perceived social support. Conversely, where chance is low, internality increases support. For highly internal mothers, belief in chance serves to reduce perceived subjective burden. Mothers high in chance but low in internality, on the other hand, feel more burdened by their parenting task. Implications for research and policy are discussed.     

Boundary detection through dynamic polygons

A method for the Bayesian restoration of noisy binary images portraying an object with constant grey level on a background is presented. The restoration, performed by fitting a polygon with any number of sides to the object's outline, is driven by a new probabilistic model for the generation of polygons in a compact subset of R² , which is used as a prior distribution for the polygon. Some measurability issues raised by the correct specification of the model are addressed. The simulation from the prior and the calculation of the a posteriori mean of grey levels are carried out through reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo computation, whose implementation and convergence properties are also discussed. One example of restoration of a synthetic image is presented and compared with existing pixel-based methods.     

SOCIAL ISOLATION OF THE URBAN POOR:

We focus on the effects of race, class, and neighborhood on social isolation. Using data from households in Atlanta, Georgia, we compare poor and nonpoor African Americans to nonpoor whites on two types of social ties and the social resources inherent in those ties. We find that poverty has an important influence on the social resources available to African Americans in and outside of their household. Poor blacks are less likely than other blacks and nonpoor whites to live with another adult, to have even one person outside the household with whom they discuss important matters (a discussion partner), or to have a college-educated person in their discussion network. Higher neighborhood poverty reduces the size of the discussion network for whites and blacks and affects the probabilities of having any kind of social contacts. Important for the social isolation thesis is our finding that among African Americans, living in a very poor neighborhood increases social isolation and reduces access to social resources via one's network of close ties.     

The Judge Specificity of Evaluations of Youth Social Behavior: The Case of Peer Provocation

Increasingly, theorists have suggested that social competence is an evaluative construct that will vary as a function of who is judging behavior. This study examined how two key groups in children's social environments—peers (N = 663, age range = 10.83–15.25 years) and teachers (N = 49)—rated the effectiveness of different behaviors generated by youth in response to physical, verbal, and relational provocation by peers. Results indicated that youth evaluated aggressive responses as more effective than teachers whereas teachers evaluated seeking an explanation as more effective than youth. Both groups judged responses combining assertive and aggressive elements to be more effective than ‘pure’ aggression. Implications for measurement and intervention models of social competence are discussed.     

Marrying,Unmarrying, and Poverty Dynamics among Mothers with Children Living at Home

Using the two-way transitions model and a sample of mothers with children living at home who experienced poverty, we examined how the changes in mothers’ marital status relate to the odds of exiting and reentering poverty. The data came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort (1979–1998). This study found an asymmetric association between poverty dynamics and becoming unmarried. Becoming unmarried was associated with increased odds of both getting out of poverty and reentering poverty, where the magnitude of the latter is greater than that of the former, when family background, family characteristics, and human capital and employment factors are controlled.     

Self‐control and Resistance to School*

Dans cet article, on examine la relation entre l'autocontrôle, le contrôle social et la résistance au système scolaire. Les données d'étude sont tirées d'un sondage réalisé auprès d'étudiants des premier et deuxième cycles du secondaire en Alberta. Les résultats de ce sondage penchent fortement en faveur de la General Theory of Crime (Gottfredson et Hirschi, 1990), selon laquelle la perte d'autocontrôle est le prédicteur le plus sûr de tous les types de résistance. Les résultats soutiennent l'hypothèse voulant que, si le lien entre classe sociale (ou bien genre ou appartenance ethnique) et résistance est ténu (au Canada du moins), c'est peut‐être parce que les mécanismes d'autocontrôle qui suscitent ou rejettent le phénomène de résistance ne sont pas intimement liés à la classe sociale (ou bien au genre ou à l'appartenance ethnique). Toutefois, le sexe, l'âge, la classe sociale et l'appartenance ethnique restent étroitement liés à certains ou à l'ensemble des aspects de la résistance au système scolaire même en présence d'autocontrôle. Les conclusions de la General Theory of Crime et leurs répercussions sont également abordées ici. This paper tests the relationship between self‐control, social control and resistance to school. The data source is a survey of senior and junior high‐school students in Alberta, Canada. Results offer strong support for the General Theory of Crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990) in that lack of self‐control is the strongest predictor of all types of resistance. The results support the hypothesis that if the link between social class (or gender and ethnicity) and resistance is low (at least in Canada), it may be because self‐control mechanisms that produce or repudiate resistance are not strongly linked to social class (or gender and ethnicity). Nevertheless, gender, age, class and ethnicity maintain a significant relationship with some or all aspects of resistance to school even after controlling for self‐control. Implications of the findings for the General Theory of Crime are discussed.     

Perceptions of Academic Health Science Research Center Personnel Regarding Informed Consent Processes and Therapeutic Misconception

Introduction: Instrumentation exists to measure voluntariness and misunderstanding in informed consent processes. However, research personnel’s perspectives about using instrumentation to measure therapeutic misconceptions in research participants has not been reported. We designed a workshop to promote research personnel knowledge of emerging instrumentation and to study the perceptions of research personnel regarding such instruments.

Methods and Findings: Two nationally recognized experts who have developed psychometric instruments to measure aspects of informed consent presented their recent findings to research personnel of the Medical University of South Carolina at a one-day workshop. Following the presentations, workshop attendees divided into two focus groups and shared their perceptions regarding the presentation content. Inductive thematic analysis detected themes related to informed consent processes including: investigator/provider role clarity; investigator transparency; therapeutic misconception; and screening subjects for understanding.

Conclusion: Our findings suggest future directions in applied, proactive empirical research to better understand investigator perceptions and practices related to transparency in research, and to develop instrumentation to detect risks to the integrity of informed consent in order to promote voluntariness and autonomy and minimize therapeutic misconception in research practices.