Nicholas Papouchis

Achievement orientation and fear of success in Asian American college students

One hundred eighty-five Asian American undergraduates participated in a study designed to examine the relationships among gender, acculturation, achievement orientation, and fear of academic success. Acculturation was modestly correlated with achievement orientation. Endorsement of Asian and Anglo values were significantly related to individual-oriented achievement. Marginal significance, however, was obtained for endorsement of Asian values and beliefs to social-oriented achievement. These findings suggest that persons with a bicultural identity tend to adopt a multifaceted achievement style. Achievement orientation, in turn, predicted fear of academic success, with gender and perceived discrepancies from parental achievement values contributing minimal additional variance. Social-oriented achievement was related to high fear of academic success, whereas an individualistic orientation buffered against such conflicts.

Yoga and emotion regulation in high school students: a randomized controlled trial

Middle adolescents (15–17 years old) are prone to increased risk taking and emotional instability. Emotion dysregulation contributes to a variety of psychosocial difficulties in this population. A discipline such as yoga offered during school may increase emotion regulation, but research in this area is lacking. This study was designed to evaluate the impact of a yoga intervention on the emotion regulation of high school students as compared to physical education (PE). In addition, the potential mediating effects of mindful attention, self-compassion, and body awareness on the relationship between yoga and emotion regulation were examined. High school students were randomized to participate in a 16-week yoga intervention (n = 19) or regular PE (n = 18). Pre-post data analyses revealed that emotion regulation increased significantly in the yoga group as compared to the PE group (F (1,32) = 7.50, p = .01, and eta2 = .19). No significant relationship was discovered between the changes in emotion regulation and the proposed mediating variables. Preliminary results suggest that yoga increases emotion regulation capacities of middle adolescents and provides benefits beyond that of PE alone.

Mental state identification, borderline pathology, and the neglected role of childhood trauma.

Research evaluating mental state identification in individuals with borderline pathology has yielded inconsistent results; contradictory findings were hypothesized to be driven by moderating effects of childhood trauma. Participants were 105 ethnically diverse men and women who exhibited a range of borderline pathology measured by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV) criteria for borderline personality disorder. Mental state identification accuracy was measured using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). Greater childhood abuse, but not childhood neglect, was associated with enhanced mental state identification accuracy on negative stimuli, when controlling for dissociation (ps < .05); these findings could not be explained by reaction time (RT) or response bias. Childhood abuse and childhood neglect were not related to mental state identification accuracy on neutral or positive stimuli, and they did not moderate the relationship between borderline pathology and mental state identification accuracy on negative, neutral, or positive stimuli. Borderline pathology was not independently related to mental state identification accuracy on negative, neutral, or positive stimuli. Greater childhood neglect, but not childhood abuse, was related to slower RTs on negative, neutral, and positive stimuli (ps < .05). Results underline the importance of separately assessing childhood abuse and childhood neglect and of controlling for dissociation, and they suggest borderline pathology may not universally hinder complex mental state identification.

Rorschach Assessment of Annihilation Anxiety and Ego Functioning

Long Island UniversityThis work illustrates the development, validation, and applica-tion of the Rorschach Content Scale (RCS; Hurvich, Benveniste,Howard, & Coonerty, 1993) for annihilation anxiety. Annihilationanxiety is denned here as the fear of ones impending psychic orphysical destruction. Results reflected adequate RCS interraterreliability, content validity, construct validity, criterion validity, anddivergent validity. Patient groups scored significantly higher onannihilation anxiety measures than did controls. Findings alsodemonstrated that certain aspects of RCS annihilation anxietyappeared more frequently than did others and may be morecentral to the construct. Results supported the contention thatannihilation anxiety is associated with compromised egofunctioning, when both are measured on the Rorschach.The causes and effects of anxiety have held a central place in psychoana-Paul S. Benveniste, PhD, Director of Clinical Operations, Warren-Washington Associa-tion for Mental Health, Hudson Falls, New York; Nicholas Papouchis, PhD, RhiannonAllen, PhD, and Marvin Hurvich, PhD, Department of Psychology, Long Island University.This article is based on the doctoral dissertation of Paul S. Benveniste.Acknowledgment is made to the Release Time Awards Committee, Long IslandUniversity, Brooklyn Center, for several faculty time grants.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paul S. Ben-veniste, 526 Maple Avenue, Saratoga Springs, New York 12866. Electronic mail may besent to psbnvniste@aol.com.

Self-Disclosure and Psychotherapy with Children and Adolescents

The focus of this chapter is a discussion of the concept of self-disclosure as it applies to therapeutic work with adolescents and children. This begins with a brief discussion of the relevance of self-disclosure in psychotherapeutic work with adults, in order to demonstrate the importance of using a developmental perspective in understanding this phenomenon in work with a younger population. It will also briefly review the positions taken by different analytic schools of thought regarding the therapist’s self-disclosure in work with adult patients.

Intimacy and the Psychotherapy of Adolescents

The concept of “intimacy” is a little-used one in the analytic literature. The Standard Edition (Freud, 1974) does not contain a single reference to the subject. There are only two citations to the subject in Grinstein’s (1960, 1966, 1975) “Index of Psychoanalytic Writings,” this in spite of the fact that clinicians regularly describe their patients as having problems with intimacy. The major references to the subject are to be found in Erikson (1968), who defines it as a “normative crisis” in the process of the development of identity, and in Sullivan (1953), who defines it in motivational terms as the “need for interpersonal intimacy.” It should be noted that these two major theoreticians place the special significance of this concept during that stage of life we call adolescence.

An Integrative Approach to the Psychotherapy of the Elderly

The focus of this chapter will be to present an integrative approach to individual psychotherapy with the elderly patient. The theoretical basis for this approach is best understood from an object relational position which emphasizes the individual’s relationships with significant figures in one’s life as the basis for psychopathology. The approach relies heavily on attachment theory derived from John Bowlby’s three volume work on Attachment and Loss (1973, 1980, 1982), and Mary Ainsworth’s (1978) empirical strategies to studying this phenomena. From Bowlby’s perspective, loss is a central factor in determining psychopathology. To the extent that aging involves the experience of loss in a number of arenas of psychic life, whether personal (physical), interpersonal (loss of spouse or family and friends), or social (occupational or financial), it is a crucial determinant of how the aging process is experienced.

Adolescent Female Aggression: Functions and Etiology

ABSTRACT Despite the narrowing gap between male and female use of aggressive behavior, much of the extant aggression research has centered on males. Various internal, or psychological factors, including attachment, emotion regulation, and impulsivity, are typically examined independently from external, or social, factors, such as the quality of the family environment and exposure to community violence. Additionally, the studies rarely distinguish among forms and functions of aggression. The current study was the first to simultaneously examine these factors and their relationships to the distinct functions of aggression in a low-income urban community sample of adolescent females. Participants (N = 214) were recruited from grades 8 through 12 at a diverse all-girls public school in a city in the northeastern United States. Results indicated that greater attachment security and emotion regulation reduced the impact of a more negative family environment upon the use of reactive and proactive aggression. The results also demonstrated that impulsivity and the family environment mediated the relationships between exposure to community violence and the presence of reactive aggression. With higher levels of impulsivity, an increased use of reactive aggression was demonstrated. Lastly, in the context of greater exposure to community violence, a positive family environment decreased the use of reactive aggression. Overall, the results from this study suggested the role of these internal and external factors in the development of aggressive behavior in female adolescents. Further empirical experimental investigation may shed light on the most optimal interventions to prevent the development of aggression.