Type A behavior and processing of social conflict information

Mitigation of Interpersonal Conflicts: Politeness and Time Pressure

The prediction that behavioral politeness would evoke mitigating responses and compliance by the other participants was examined in a role-playing experiment. Seventy-three male japanese students verbally interacted with a confederate opponent, who expressed her unreasonable requests politely or impolitely. Participants were pressed to respond to the request either immediately or after a 30-s delay. The effects of politeness were observed on compliance and on tactical dimensions; that is, participants more frequently complied with and gave more integrative and appeasing responses to the polite confederate than the impolite one. Time pressure was found to limit the effects of politeness only regarding the hostile appeasing dimension of response.

Impaired self-reflection in psychiatric disorders among adults: a proposal for the existence of a network of semi independent functions

Self-reflection plays a key role in healthy human adaptation. Self-reflection might involve different capacities which may be impaired to different degrees relatively independently of one another. Variation in abilities for different forms of self-reflection are commonly seen as key aspects of many adult mental disorders. Yet little has been written about whether there are different kinds of deficits in self-reflection found in mental illness, how those deficits should be distinguished from one another and how to characterize the extent to which they are interrelated. We review clinical and experimental literature and suggest four different forms of deficits in self-reflection: (a) sense of ownership of one's own thoughts and actions, (b) emotional awareness, (c) distinction between fantasy and reality and (d) the integration of a range of different views of oneself and others. We propose how these different impairments in self-reflection are linked with one another.

An integrative complexity analysis of cognitive behaviour therapy sessions for borderline personality disorder

OBJECTIVES

Integrative complexity (IC), a measure of cognitive style, was used to analyse discourse in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) sessions from patients with borderline personality disorder treated in the BOSCOT trial. It was predicted that patients' level of integrative complexity would be positively associated with the outcome of therapy. That is, an increase in patients' level of integrative complexity would be associated with good outcome. We also predicted that therapists would also show an increase in the level of complexity associated with their patient's increase in integrative complexity and good outcome.

DESIGN

Ten patients who received CBT were categorized according to the outcome, good (N=5) and poor (N=5), using an algorithm that incorporated the number of suicide attempts and magnitude of change in severity of depression during therapy.

METHOD

For each patient and their therapist, an early and a late therapy session were transcribed and coded for integrative complexity (IC) (N=20 sessions transcribed). IC scores for patients and therapists were compared across early and late therapy sessions and for good and poor outcomes of therapy.

RESULTS

The majority of discourse was at the lower levels of IC. Higher levels of IC at baseline were related to depression and anxiety. Good outcome was not associated with a change in the level of IC between earlier and later CBT sessions. Therapists, however, showed an increase in IC when patient's outcome was poor. In addition, an increase in patient's IC was associated with improvement in social functioning.

CONCLUSIONS

Therapists may overcompensate for patient's poor outcome by giving more complex explanations to patients. Higher complexity does not necessarily lead to better outcomes.