Deleterious early experiences, wrought by childhood abuse, parental dysfunction, and inconsistent relationships with parents, have been repeatedly associated with suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in adolescence and young adulthood. Both depression and aggression have been correlated with suicidality as well. The precise relationships among these variables remain largely unspecified, however, and contradictory findings portend our imperfect understanding of youth suicide. Psychoanalytic object relations theory suggests a mechanism by which early experiences influence later functioning, providing a link between disrupted caretaking in childhood and suicidal ideation in early adulthood. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), this study examined the extent to which experiences of loss, trauma, and deprivation in early life induced an object world that left one vulnerable to suicidal ideation in young adulthood. The dual aim of the study was to obtain confirmation for the mediating role of object relations in the development of suicidal ideation, and to explore the specific relationships among early experiences, object relations, depression, aggression, and suicidal ideation. Two hundred and fifty college undergraduates participated in group administrations of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and completed the Adult Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire, Beck Depression Inventory, Hopelessness Scale, Aggression Questionnaire, Early Experiences Questionnaire, and Suicide Attempts Questionnaire. The Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale (Western, 1990a) was used to assess four dimensions of object relations from TAT stories. SEM supported the hypothesis that object relations play a crucial role in mediating between deleterious early experiences and suicidal ideation in young adulthood. Traumatic early experiences, particularly physical, sexual, and emotional abuse perpetrated by trusted adults, left an inedible mark on object relations. An object world marked by expectations of unpredictability, rejection, and potential malevolence from others in the context of earnest investment in interpersonal relationships led to elevated levels of both depression and aggression in these college students. Depression, but not aggression, precipitated thoughts of suicide, lending support for the psychoanalytic postulate that depression ensues when aggression is turned toward the self. Some intriguing results and their relation to the literature, limitations of the study, and directions for future research are discussed.

This dissertation constitutes an initial inquiry into the experience of psychological epiphany. In this investigation, the epiphanic experience is conceptualized as one of sudden, discontinuous change, leading to profound, positive, and enduring transformation through the reconfiguration of an individual's most deeply held beliefs about self and world. To explore the nature of the epiphanic experience, a qualitative, empirical inquiry was undertaken to determine its fundamental features. Though the generalizability of the findings is limited by the small sample size (five individuals were interviewed indepth), the study revealed a number of characteristic features. The experience was found to be affectively intense, egosyntonic, and profoundly liberating. The experience of epiphany among the participants studied occurred primarily during adolescence or early adulthood, was preceded by a period of internal conflict during which feelings of alienation, anxiety and depression were common, and followed by a period of productive activity and heightened energy. Given the lack of a theoretical framework within which such experiences of discontinuous psychological change could be investigated, two theoretical perspectives originating outside psychology were explored for their applicability. The first, general systems theory, provided a distinction between changes that occur within a system, versus changes to the system as a whole. Systems theory was therefore found to be useful in addressing the impact of epiphanic experiences as experiences which seem to effect changes to an individual's system of world assumptions. However chaos theory, because it offers a way of distinguishing between different kinds of discontinuous change, was found to provide an even more comprehensive metatheoretical framework within which epiphanies could be conceptualized. Chaos theory holds that significant structural changes to a system which are highly adaptive, often follow from periods of turbulence and seemingly random behavior. Though clinical psychology generally encourages the view that chaos is negative, the findings of the present study suggest that a period of seeming psychological chaos must be carefully evaluated by the clinician as it may be a prelude to important and enduring positive change in an individual's most basic world assumptions.

This study explored, from a phenomenological perspective, the experiences people in therapy had with autobiographical writing, including the descriptions of their experiences and what occurred during and after writing, and their evaluations of this form of writing. It describes some ways in which this form of writing can help facilitate therapeutic change. Three women and one man in therapy engaged in a period of autobiographical writing focused on a problematic event in their family-of-origin that served as a quasi presenting problem for this study. Data was gathered through an in-depth interview with participants at the end of the period of writing, the journals that participants were requested to keep, and the observations of their therapists gathered by in-depth interviews. It was found that writing autobiography facilitated the expression of feelings, a shift in a personal paradigm, a beginning sense of self as agent, and changes in relationships. It was determined that this process of writing, regardless of the content of that writing, had the potential to provide therapeutic benefit to the writer. Participants found the writing partially responsible for their experiences and helpful in bringing forward the realization that there was a problem that needed to be addressed. It also made issues tangible and facilitated their ability to work with them, process and let go of them. Participants advocated the use of autobiographical writing as a tool in therapy because it brought up issues being worked on in a different format, it revealed things about the writer, even to that person, it loosened up things attached to the story, it made one's experiences real to oneself, and it was useful in reviewing one's life and honoring one's witnessing of one's life. Therapists found some benefits in this tool. For example, it facilitated deep focused work, accelerated the writer's process, fostered self-reflective work outside of therapy, and brought a particular experience to the surface and allowed it to be worked on.

The intent of this research project was to achieve greater understanding of the developmental and psychological processes of tennis champions. Phenomenological research design, employing the qualitative in-depth interview was used. Constant comparative analysis, as applied to grounded theory, was used to guide data collection and analysis. Champions were asked to describe their processes toward championship achievement, and what facilitated their athletic and psychological development. Of particular interest was how they traced their development, which included the following themes: The roles of parents, teachers, coaches and mentors, conceptualizations of mental toughness, process versus outcome orientations to competition, the zone, triumphing when not in the zone, sportsmanship, regulation of emotion, self-talk, self-knowledge, self-complexity, motivation, confidence, dreams and childhood imaging, goal setting, acting skills when competing, humor, independent thinking, discipline, the history of their personal competitiveness, and their achievement of successfully contending with the psychological pressures of competition. Common to nearly all the participants was an enduring love of the game of tennis, the joy of competing, and a strong desire to do supremely well and work hard in whatever endeavor the champions pursued. Correlations with existent literature and previous research were present in the domains of family and social factors, most of the experiential characteristics of peak performance, and the importance attributed to having a coach or mentor who had the ability to relate well personally and professionally. In contrast to some previous research about champions and high achievers, most of these champions had not met an abundance of pain and trauma in their personal lives. How champions define champion was an area of this research new to the literature. Emergent from the interviews were three styles of definition: External, reflecting accomplishment; External--Internal, meaning accomplishment and exemplary self-conduct; and Internal, reflecting both model self-conduct--and the value that a champion is one who fully actualizes innate potential. Potential seeking is how most of the champions described their drive for championship development and their orientation to life.

This dissertation is a first look at English-speaking children’s acquisition of the syntax of the partitive. It presents four experiments that contrast three types of structures and examines how they interact with adjectival modification: the partitive, the pseudopartitive and complex nouns with prepositional adjuncts. The experimentation investigates whether children recognize that the Determiner Phrase (DP) in the partitive is a barrier to adjectival modification. The partitive is contrasted with the pseudopartitive –a minimal pair structure that lacks an internal DP. The data shows that children under the age of six do not distinguish between the partitive and the pseudopartitive. They allow adjectives preceding the partitive to modify the second noun; this is standardly considered licit for the pseudopartitive structure, but not the partitive. This result is evidence that children are under-representing the syntax of the partitive and of DP. Syntactic representations of minimal DP and minimal partitive structures are suggested and it is argued that these structures may persist as an option in the adult grammar.

This dissertation addresses the general question of how children's phonological categories in perception differ from adults' phonological categories. A well-known characteristic of adults' phonological categories is the existence of trading relations and integration among cues to a phonological category. In trading relations, less evidence from one cue to a phonological category can be offset by more evidence from another cue. When cues are integrated by the listener, the cues are not used independently; instead the perceptual value of one cue depends on the value of another. Little research has previously been carried out into the development of trading relations and integration in children's speech perception. This dissertation tests two possible factors affecting the development of adultlike trading relations: the distribution of cues in the dialect or language variety being learned, and the development of integration. The results of identification experiments with adult and four- to six-year-old child listeners from different dialects (Standard American English, African American English, and Australian English) suggest that children's trading relations develop to approximate those of the adults in their dialect group. Children's trading relations differ, however, in that children make relatively heavier use of one cue to a contrast. The results of a discrimination experiment suggest that integration of vowel duration and first formant (F1) cues to final stop voicing in Australian English develop gradually in childhood. The implications of this finding are discussed with respect to gesturalist, auditorist, and associative views of trading relations. The finding suggests that whether or not integration for some trading relations results from the recovery of a gesture or the experience of an auditory property, integration for some subtypes of trading relations, such as context effects, may develop as a result of learning from experience with patterns of acoustic covariation among cues to phonological categories.

Five caregiver-related variables were examined to assess their predictive power relative to several academic and behavioral outcome measures in an intervention study designed to prevent academic failure and behavioral problems in an at-risk population. Subjects included 117 children and their primary caregivers from four child-me centers in a medium-sized metropolitan area in western Massachusetts. Subjects came largely from low-income families and were primarily from minority ethnic backgrounds. The predictor variables included perceived caregiver social support caregiver life-stress, caregiver relationship satisfaction, caregiver depression, and caregiver's ratings of general psychiatric distress. An assumption was made that these variables are related to the level of psychological resources that caregivers would be able to devote to intervention participation. It was hypothesized, therefore, that predictive relationships between these caregiver-related and outcome variables would be mediated by caregiver compliance with the intervention. An unexpected finding emerging from this study was that higher levels of caregiver depression predict increased compliance with the behavioral portion of the intervention which, in twin, predicts fewer Home AD/HD symptoms at post-test. This was the only predictive relationship in which a mediating role for compliance was supported at a level approaching statistical significance. However, several direct predictive relationships between caregiver-related variables and outcome measures were supported by the data at a statistically significant level. Results are discussed and directions for future research are suggested. Several methodological issues pertinent to this study are also considered.

No description available.

To achieve multiple learning objectives, the ideal preschool activity center should promote development across all domains, from adaptive to social-communicative. Though early childhood practitioners describe the sensory table as capable of doing so, empirical accounts stand in stark contrast and suggest that it is a non-social functional activity. The intent of the present investigation was to reconcile this distinct dichotomy through the systematic manipulation of four sensory table substances (sand, soil, rocks, and water) and provision sets that differed in realism to determine their effect on preschoolers’ free play behavior. Preschoolers’ play forms and social participation were observed at the sensory table as they used a novel surface, which was introduced weekly without repetition, and either a set of minimally structured objects or realistic toys. Preschoolers’ play and social participation were indeed influenced by the arrangement of the table. The sand, water, and provision sets yielded the most salient effects. Sand pulled for more sophisticated cognitive and social play forms while water pulled for more rudimentary ones. Regarding provision sets, the highly structured toys pulled for the most mature cognitive play form while the minimally structured toys pulled for the most sophisticated social context. The highly structured toys, with realism that lent to specific themes, appear to have functioned as a thematic anchor and cultivated a greater occurrence of dramatic play as compared to the minimally structured objects, which pulled for more functional play. Conversely, the minimally structured toy set, containing objects that loosely represented realistic objects and/or were capable of multiple functions, fostered a greater amount of socialization through parallel, social, and social-constructive play. Aside from its motoric and adaptive value, findings from this investigation suggest that under certain ecological conditions the sensory table fosters the development of cognitive and social skills. Suggestions for early childhood education practitioners are provided.

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969) maintains that children's early experiences with primary caregivers evolve into internal working models which shape beliefs about the availability and responsiveness of others and worthiness of the self. These models, also called attachment styles, guide individuals' emotional and relational behaviors, particularly in times of stress. Research with adolescents and adults has demonstrated that individuals with different attachment styles cope with and adapt to stressful situations in different ways. The present study investigated the role of attachment in the coping and distress levels of 196 adolescents whose parents are living with or have died from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Attachment style was measured as both a continuous variable on the dimensions of anxiety and avoidance and as a categorical variable of four discrete styles—secure, preoccupied, dismissing and fearful When baseline perceptions of parental care and protection, disruption in maternal caregiving, gender, and ethnicity were controlled for, adolescents who had high levels of attachment anxiety were more likely to use all types of coping strategies and have higher levels of mental distress than those with high levels of avoidance or those low on both avoidance and anxiety. Females who displayed a fearful style of attachment (ie., high on both anxiety and avoidance) were less likely to use adaptive coping strategies. Contrary to expectations, securely attached adolescents did not report more adaptive coping strategies than insecures. The use of ruminative and distancing coping strategies partially mediated the relationship between attachment and the level of distress. There was no differential effect of bereavement on attachment styles. Among bereaved adolescents, those who were living independently evidenced more attachment avoidance than those who had a caregiver and those who perceived their caregiver as warm and caring reported less grief than those who did not. Implications, suggestions for future research and limitations are discussed.