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A B Heilbrun

Publications and source records attributed to A B Heilbrun.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1986

Psychological vulnerability to alcoholism: studies in internal scanning deficit.

Three studies considered the predispositional role of impaired internal scanning in alcoholism. Scanning represents the person's sensitivity to internal stimulation and the extent to which the person utilizes internally generated information. The first study found that more acute alcoholic patients displayed poorer scanning than more chronic alcoholics. This finding contra-indicates deficit scanning as an effect of alcoholism and suggests that this impairment antecedes the alcoholic disorder. Two further studies tested the possible antecedent status of deficit scanning. Adolescent wards of the juvenile court, judged to be more at risk for alcoholism, were poorer scanners than their counterparts with fewer drinking-related problems. Male college students with a greater number of alcohol-related problems also proved to be poorer scanners. It is proposed that limited scanning contributes to alcoholic vulnerability by depriving the person of information vital to the control of drinking behaviour.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1986

Self-report measurement of type A behavior: toward refinement and improved prediction.

Self-report measures of Type A personality receive wide research usage despite mounting evidence that they are poor predictors of coronary heart disease. It was proposed that the limited prediction results in part from the failure to restrict measurement to only those Type A characteristics that are demonstrably related to excessive stress. The first study in this article reports a factor analysis of all items on the Jenkins Activity Survey (JAS), the most popular Type A questionnaire, along with 25 stress symptoms. Self-ratings were obtained from both male and female college students. Only one stress-related factor emerged including 12 JAS items out of 44. These were relevant to (a) hard-driving and competitive, (b) time-urgent, and (c) hostile/irritated characteristics. Study 2 reports correlations of +.50 and +.43 between the stress-relevant JAS items and stress for new samples of female and male college students. Study 3 considers the broader personality correlates of scores on the stress-relevant Type A items and reports markedly different patterns for male and female college students. Predicted correlations were found on new samples between these personality correlates, considered as scales, and stress-relevant Type A scores and stress.

Coronary Disease↗
PubMed1985

Defensive projection. An investigation of its role in paranoid conditions.

This paper reports two studies bearing upon the role of defensive projection in paranoid conditions. The first study considered a proposal explaining the mechanics of projection. People who use their social environment for standards of comparison in making self-evaluations may distort the social comparison process in the case of a threatening characteristic. False attribution or selective perception may allow a social standard to be shifted toward the negative attribute. Given the modified standard, the characteristic can be minimized or denied. Evidence supporting this hypothesis was found when high projectors (among normals) reported greater use of social comparison in reaching self-evaluation judgments concerning negative qualities. The second study considered the clinical implications of the proposition that defensive projection, defined this way, would be found among those who are more heavily invested in their social environment. It was predicted that reactive paranoid schizophrenics, identified by greater premorbid commitment to their social environment, would use projection; process paranoid schizophrenics, having a greater premorbid history of social withdrawal, would not. This prediction was confirmed. Process paranoids demonstrated the most idiosyncratic free associations to verbal cues, suggesting the autistic (self-preoccupied) quality of their thinking and delusions.

Adult↗
PubMed1985

Psychopathy and dangerousness: comparison, integration and extension of two psychopathic typologies.

Previous research has failed to relate psychopathy to an increased risk for violence, but several proposed psychopathic typologies have suggested the possibility of isolating more dangerous subtypes. One typology, based upon psychopathy and intelligence, has identified the low IQ psychopath as excessively violent judged by his history of violent crime. A second typology involving psychopathy and social withdrawal predicts greater dangerousness for both the outgoing and the withdrawn psychopath depending upon circumstance. The present study confirmed the dangerousness of the low IQ and withdrawn psychopaths in their prison behaviour and the low IQ psychopath on parole. The attempt to develop a more homogeneous type of dangerous psychopath by increasing the number of defining attributes was successful. The highest prison and parole dangerousness scores in the prisoner sample were obtained by those who shared four attributes. They were (1) psychopaths, who (2) had low IQs, (3) were socially withdrawn, and (4) had a history of prior violent crime.

Adult↗
PubMed1985

Awareness of cognitive defences and stress management.

There is considerable disagreement regarding whether defences operate unconsciously, represent deliberate styles of coping with problems, or fall somewhere between. The present study considered the role of awareness in mediating the relation between defence and stress by establishing whether the conscious or unconscious nature of a given defence was associated with a distinct level of stress. The results for projection and rationalization confirmed the classical Freudian version of defence as an unconscious mechanism that reduces the stress of painful thoughts. Unconscious projectors and rationalizers reported singularly low levels of stress over the previous year. Repression without awareness was associated with a distinctly high level of stress, whereas denial with awareness was related to lower stress. While these results provide some support for the view that defences must be unconscious to work effectively, they also suggest the diversity among defences in the role played by awareness in coping with stress.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

Cognitive vulnerability to auditory hallucination. Impaired perception of meaning.

Forty-four psychiatric patients were separated into four groups on the basis of presence/absence of hallucinations and reactive/process status. Reactive hallucinators were found to be singularly impaired in two aspects of cognitive processing: (1) tolerance of ambiguity; and (2) availability of alternative meanings. The perceptual errors produced by premature judgment and limited consideration of alternative meanings for misperceptions are discussed as factors predisposing to auditory hallucination.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

The adaptive-style theory of schizophrenic development: current research with schizophrenics.

This paper first reviews the adaptive-style theory of schizophrenia that was published in 1973 along with the evidence gathered from normal male Ss. The theory emphasized the importance of perceived maternal behaviors in the development of maladaptive social and cognitive styles for the son. The problems of interpreting data gathered from normals in terms of their implications for schizophrenic development are considered in the present paper, as well as the rules of evidence adopted for post-1973 research with mental patients bearing upon the adaptive-style theory. Theory relevance and support has required that cognitive behaviors distinguishing normal males displaying the two adaptive styles also differentiate process and reactive schizophrenics in specified ways. In addition, these differences should represent sources of vulnerability to major psychotic symptoms. Five studies into delusions and auditory hallucinations are discussed in terms of how well they support adaptive-style theory.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1983

Cognitive vulnerability to auditory hallucination. Preferred imagery mode and spatial location of sounds.

Goldstone and Sarbin proposed that auditory hallucinations occur because imagery in a non-preferred sensory mode is more easily misinterpreted as having an external origin. This led to the hypothesis that auditory hallucinators would show less preference for auditory than for visual imagery. Our results suggest that this is true. We also compared the vividness of internally-generated auditory imagery with that of visual imagery, independently of preference, to see whether vividness was impaired in the nonpreferred mode in hallucinators. The evidence suggested that this was not the case, but we did find a significantly deficient capacity for creating vivid images of either kind in process patients (i.e. those with poor premorbid status) compared with reactive (good premorbid) patients, regardless of any history of hallucinations. The withdrawal of external attention which characterizes process patients might also be expected to impair their ability to confirm or disconfirm the external origin of an auditory stimulus. We predicted therefore that process hallucinators would be particularly incompetent in spatial location of sounds: our experimental results confirmed this to be the case.

Adult↗
PubMed1982

Psychological scaling of defensive cognitive styles on the Adjective Check List.

This paper presents a cognitive (information-processing) model of ego defense and describes procedures that have been developed for sampling different types of defensive processing of threatening information. Since these laboratory paradigms are time consuming, three brief scales of defensive style have been derived for more ready use in personality research. These scales, scored from the Adjective Check List, include items discriminating between individuals demonstrating a particular defensive style in the laboratory and those who do not. The Projective Style Scale measures the tendency to deny threatening information and attribute it to others, the Repressive Style Scale identifies the tendency to avoid threatening information by selective forgetting, and the tendency to reduce threat by changing the meaning of information is reflected in the Rationalizing Style Scale. Psychometric properties and potential uses of the scales are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

Defensive style and performance on objective personality measures.

Two studies on the relations between various styles of defense and the power or validity of self-reports on objective personality questionnaires. The power of individual items on the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control scale to discriminate between subjects defined as internals or externals by a median-cut procedure using the total score was not affected by the presence Or absence of a projective defensive style. However, the presence of repressive tendencies did appear to restrict item power. Prediction from two achievement scales taken from Gough's California Psychological Inventory was not influenced by level of repression, was affected somewhat adversely by a projective style, and was most clearly contaminated by a rationalizing defense. It was proposed that the differential effects of defensive styles upon the validity of personality tests depended upon the convergence or divergence of the cognitive operations involved in the type of defense and in the type of personality measure.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1979

Cognitive structure and behavioral regulation in alcoholics.

Compared with nonalcoholics, alcoholics were less able to focus on relevant cues (i.e., they had weaker cognitive control) and less able to recall pertinent ideas or events and possible consequences (i.e., their internal scanning was narrower).

Adaptation, Psychological↗