This study examined multiple predictors of relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction and sexual frequency among lesbian couples. In addition, the relevance of the study's findings to theories regarding fusion, sexual infrequency and the primacy of gender role socialization in shaping sexual expression in lesbian couples was explored. A survey research design was used. Eighty-seven couples were recruited through a sample of convenience. Couples were eligible for the study if they were 18 years or older, had been partners for a year or more, and lived together at the time of enrollment. The study employed both descriptive and inferential statistics. Data was gathered using the California Instrument of Family Assessment (CIFA), Spanier's Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS), the Hudson Index of Sexual Satisfaction (ISS), a modified Brief Index of Sexual Functioning for Women (BISF-W), and the Bern Sex Role Inventory-Short Form (BSRI-S). In addition demographic information and information regarding health status was collected on a background information form. Overall, the results of the study support a view of healthy dyadic functioning and sexual functioning in most lesbian couples. High levels of fusion or enmeshment were not supported by the study's findings. Instead, high levels of closeness/caregiving predicted greater total dyadic adjustment and less sexual dissatisfaction. Furthermore, findings did not support the hypothesis that lesbians who are more conforming to traditional female gender roles are more prone to negative forms of closeness (as measured by The California Instrument for Family Assessment intrusiveness scale) than lesbians who are less conforming to traditional female gender roles. High femininity scores on the BEM Sex Role Inventory Short Form were also found to be significantly related to couple dyadic adjustment, less sexual dissatisfaction and greater sexual frequency. Findings did not support popular notions of greater sexual infrequency among lesbians as compared to heterosexual women when multi-dimensional measures of sexual behavior were used. The inclusion of descriptive data for individual respondents also provides readers with information regarding sexual behavior and sexual desire that can be used as a point of reference for lesbian couple functioning. Clinical implications of the findings are discussed and directions for future research offered.

This study investigated, as a primary focus, trainees and supervisors' perspectives on writing clinical reports in a training environment for beginning therapists. Secondary foci included an exploration of trainees' experiences of text measures used to score their reports, and an examination of the possible influence of a previous immersion in literary studies on some trainees' report writing. Three supervisors and nine trainees, four of whom had literary backgrounds, participated in 60 to 90 minute, tape recorded, unstructured interviews in which they described in detail, their thoughts on clinical report writing. Additionally, the same nine trainees were asked to review four of their own reports and to explore the scores they received using the following five text measures: (1) Computerized Referential Activity; (2) Type Token Ratio; (3) Emotion Tone; (4) Abstraction; and (5) Word Count. A qualitative analysis of verbatim interview transcripts suggested that there are educative benefits and frustrations inherent in the task of report writing, as well as conflicts and dilemmas resulting from the dynamic nature of the relationships between trainees, supervisors, the immediate environment of the training clinic itself, and the culture of the field of academic psychology as a whole.

Until an effective vaccine becomes available, AIDS will continue to be an ongoing threat to public health in the United States and across the globe. With the public's eye turned toward prevention, promoting condom use as means of reducing new HIV infections has been the focus of much discussion and research. But the availability of condoms as a risk reduction strategy is of little value without widespread adoption, a trend that still demonstrates considerable inconsistency among sexually active individuals. The present research explores how knowledge about HIV, behavioral self-efficacy for condom use, and communication skills are related to condom use and intensions to use condoms in both main and casual sexual partnerships. This research also explores how these variables are related to condom use across characteristics such as race and gender, and potentially inconsistent factors such as relationship status. The findings suggest that the ability to communicate about sexual matters with one's casual partners may be highly influential in an individual's condom use in both main and casual partnerships. The implications of these findings on the further development of HIV/AIDS prevention programs are discussed.

The clinical uses of hypnosis with children have been well documented in increasing numbers in the scientific literature. Past research have suggested a link between the capacity for absorption in fantasy and imaginative involvement, and the capacity to respond to hypnotic suggestions in adulthood. In the case of the uses of hypnotherapy with children, imaginative involvement has played a central role in attempting to predict which children would benefit from hypnosis as part of a therapeutic intervention. Recent research on hypnotic responding with adults have shown that expectancy about hypnotic responding does have an effect on responses to hypnotic suggestions. Expectancy has been proved to be an important situational factor that affects the subject's response to hypnotic suggestions. There were two purposes for this study; one was to assess various correlates of imaginative suggestibility in children while controlling for waking suggestibility. This replicated the study of Poulsen (2000) in which he investigated selected correlates of imaginative suggestibility in a sample of children from a clinical population, and determined to what extent children's responsiveness was due to waking suggestibility and how much was due to hypnotic suggestibility. The second purpose was to explore if there is a relationship between parents' expectancies of their children's responses to suggestibility and the actual responses of their children. The correlates chosen for this investigation were dissociative behavior, fantasy behavior, imaginative involvement, and parental expectancies. All have been critical in better understanding of what personality, behavioral and attitudinal characteristics predict hypnotic suggestibility in children. As predicted, vividness was significantly associated with both nonhypnotic and hypnotic suggestibility. Contrary to what was predicted, absorption did not correlate significantly with nonhypnotic suggestibility but did evidence a strong correlation with hypnotic suggestibility. Also contrary to what had been predicted, neither fantasy nor dissociation showed significant correlations with nonhypnotic or hypnotic suggestibility. As expected, parental expectancies did increase with hypnotic suggestibility, but they were not significantly associated with imaginative suggestibility (with and without induction) of the children. Nonhypnotic suggestibility accounted for most of the variance in hypnotizability. A significant correlation was found between nonhypnotic and hypnotic suggestibility, but none of the imaginative suggestibility variables were found to predict unique variance in hypnotizability when nonhypnotic suggestibility was controlled. Absorption and vividness accounted for 27% of the variance in hypnotizability, but did not obtained statistical significance. Similar to previous research, results of this study support the view of hypnotic responsiveness as reflecting a continuum of suggestibility. Finally, the implications of context and cultural differences when assessing nonhypnotic and hypnotic suggestibility in native Spanish-speaking children are discussed.

As relational theory (set out by Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell, 1988) challenges psychoanalytic psychotherapists to reconsider mutual influences in therapeutic interaction (Aron, 1996), this research explores those effects using methods consistent with new psychoanalytic technique. The midphase was studied from patient's and therapist's perspectives, emphasizing (1) the patient's perceptions of the therapist's contribution, (2) the patient's experience of technique and the therapist's authenticity, (3) the conditions in which the pair involve a third in the treatment, (4) attitudes of psychotherapists in private practice to the study, and (5) the effects of research intervention on treatments underway. Unstructured interviews were conducted with volunteer pairs from a psychoanalytically oriented mental health clinic and, following ethnographic interviews of therapists in private practice, with two therapists in private practice and five of their patients. Most psychotherapists who participated in interviews with patients identified themselves as Control-Mastery practitioners (viz., Weiss, Sampson, and the Mount Zion Psychotherapy Research Group, 1986), a phenomenon possibly related in part to theoretical emphasis on the patient's autonomy and the theory's empirical roots (making therapists more likely than others to create an environment in which patients would volunteer). Patients at the transference threshold (briefly, when patients acknowledge emotional complication in the relationship) were anxious about upcoming problems in the therapy relationship and were relatively ignorant of the therapeutic utility of the transference. The patient who volunteered in a transference muddle feared his treatment had reached an impasse after much work in the transference. Most patients used interviews to evaluate the appropriateness of their and their therapist's emotions in the treatment, to compare their therapists with another therapist, and as an opportunity for trial disclosures. Many were much closer to termination than their therapists knew. Patients preferred authentic interaction with therapists and had much to say about them, leading the researcher to question the proportion of repression to discretion in patients' conduct in treatment. It was felt that research interviewing of this kind could be very productive empirically and clinically when including open exploration among all participants regarding the potential and function of the encounters.

Dreams about the patient, sometimes called countertransference dreams, have received little attention in the literature and have rarely been discussed in the context of psychotherapy as opposed to psychoanalysis. This study explored the experience of dreaming about the patient in two groups of psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews with 11 psychotherapists, with follow-up approximately one year later, and through a survey of a larger group of 79 psychotherapists. The experience of dreaming about the patient was quite common and varied in these samples. Approximately 80 to 90% of therapists could recall dreaming about a patient at least once over the course of their careers. Typically, therapists recalled having such dreams at least once or twice per year, although many reported dreaming of patients as frequently as once per month. The settings and themes of dreams were observed to vary widely. Therapists described a range of emotional reactions to dreaming about the patient, including positive and welcoming feelings as well as discomfort tinged with a sense of the forbidden. In contrast to the emphasis in the literature, therapists observed such dreams to arise in a variety of treatment environments, not only those characterized by subjective distress in the clinician. Therapists made use of the dreams as tools for discovery, drawing insight or discerning "news" from them. The news played the role of clarifying, affirming, or newly identifying dynamics in the treatment. Most therapists incorporated dreams into the treatment indirectly, through affective shifts or changes in their listening stance or behavior, rather than telling patients directly of their dreams. Some therapists noted that their fears concerning the propriety of dreaming about the patient could interfere with their ability to have, remember, and examine such dreams, as well as with their ability to share the dreams in wider professional forums. Given the gains associated with exploring dreams about the patient, the study concludes that it is important to shape environments to further encourage the examination of such dreams, in part through representing their role not as indicators of deficient practice but of an ongoing search for understanding.

This study was designed to determine the differential effects of the inductions of depressive, worrisome, somatic anxiety, and neutral moods on pessimism and certainty about future events. The central idea was that worry may act as a bridge between anxiety and depression by contributing to the development of a negative future event schema which would be manifested as increasing pessimism and depressive predictive certainty from somatic anxiety to worry to depression. Conceptualizing depressive predictive certainty in terms of automatic future event predictions, the study was designed to determine whether subjects who were induced to feel depressed mood make more negative and automatic predictions about future events than subjects induced to feel worrisome mood, and those induced to feel worrisome mood make more pessimismtic and automatic predictions than subjects induced to feel somatically anxious mood. The design of this study was a 4 (Mood Condition) x 2 (Attentional Load versus No Attentional Load) x 2 (Valence of Event) x 2 (Response Type), with the first variable a between subjects factor and the latter three repeated measures variables. Two hundred subjects were randomly assigned to one of the four mood induction conditions and were asked to rate, as quickly as possible, positive and negative future events. Results of the mood inductions showed that while the mood inductions were successful, the effects were global. That is, whether the subjects were induced to feel somatic anxiety, worry, or depression, their ratings on all three mood-adjectives increased, whereas subjects in the neutral condition did not report increases in mood-adjective ratings. Results of pessimism revealed that, overall, subjects responded more positively than negatively. Subjects in the Depression Condition responded less positively and more negatively than the subjects in the other three conditions, though the only significant difference was between Depression and the Neutral Condition. Subjects in the Somatic Anxiety Condition followed the Depression Condition in that they endorsed fewer positive and more negative future events than both the Worry and the Neutral Conditions, though only the difference between the Neutral Condition was significant. The Worry Condition subjects endorsed more positive items and fewer negative items than the Somatic Anxiety and Depression subjects, but this was not significant. Response latency data (i.e., automaticity as certainty) showed that the trends of the means were not in the hypothesized direction. That is, the smallest difference between attentional load and no-load was in the Depressed Condition, followed by the Neutral Condition, the Somatic Anxiety Condition, and the Worry Condition. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the relationship between somatic anxiety, worry, and depression.

Historically, research on the construct of body image has focused on its stability. Many researchers are beginning to reexamine whether the body image construct is stable, and they have shown that the construct is subject to change after experimentally induced situations and after major life events. This study attempted to determine whether minor life events and mood had a significant relationship to body image ratings and whether a change in minor life events and mood over the course of one month would predict body image ratings. For men, it was found that minor life events were not significantly related to body image ratings, though higher mood scores were significantly related to lower ratings of physical appearance. For women, a greater number of positive minor life events was significantly related to engaging in more behaviors to keep oneself physically attractive, and higher mood scores were significantly related to lower ratings of physical appearance. For men, changes in minor life events or mood over the course of one month did not predict change in body image ratings. For women, an increase in positive minor life events predicted an increase in behaviors associated with keeping oneself physically attractive. A post-hoc analysis was conducted to determine whether individuals whose mood worsened over the course of one month would show greater changes in body image ratings. However, this post-hoc hypothesis was not supported. The main hypotheses were reanalyzed with the subsample stratified into younger and older adult men and women. Though the sample size was small, there appeared to be differences between older and younger adults, with younger adults more susceptible to body image fluctuations than older adults. In the overall sample, body image ratings changed little over the course of one month, though this discovery fits well within an overall personality contruct model proposed by Mischel (1968). Effect sizes for this study were small, and the sample size was too small to confidently find significant relationships or make predictions. Other limitations of this study as well as future directions in research are discussed.

Despite the recognition of dementia as a major public health concern, the differential diagnosis of dementia subtypes remains problematic. Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VAD) are the two most common subtypes of dementia, and clinicopathologic studies suggest that accuracy rates for the differential diagnosis of AD and VAD range from 60–95%. Higher rates of accuracy are achieved for AD than for VAD, but several questions remain unanswered regarding the differential diagnosis of dementia. Studies have not examined the accuracy with which neuropsychologists in particular make diagnoses of AD and VAD, nor have they examined the decision-making processes employed when neuropsychologists make diagnoses of dementia. The purpose of the present study was to develop and implement a new technology designed to investigate diagnostic accuracy and decision-making processes used in the differential diagnosis of AD, VAD, and normative age-related cognitive decline. Sixteen practicing neuropsychologists from Massachusetts and Rhode Island participated in this study, and all subjects rendered diagnoses for each of the three cases. Results revealed a high rate of accuracy with the diagnosis of AD, but suboptimal rates for VAD and no-impairment. Diagnostic accuracy correlated significantly with neuropsychologists' confidence ratings, but not with measures of training and experience. A qualitative analysis of information search and review strategies used by neuropsychologists indicated that systematic, comprehensive data reviews, and early attention to neuroimaging findings were associated with optimal diagnostic outcomes. The results of the present study also suggest that internet-based assessment programs may represent a viable and useful method of studying decision-making.

A number of studies have demonstrated that writing about a personal traumatic experience leads to improved psychological and physical health. Findings from one study (Greenberg, Wortman and Stone, 1996) suggest that writing about a trauma that one has not personally experienced has similar benefits. One explanation is that writing about another's trauma is emotionally relevant to one's own history, and allows one to express personal feelings in an indirect manner. This study examined whether writing in other less direct methods would also enhance functioning. Participants were 117 college women who had previously experienced a trauma. They were randomly assigned to one of five conditions: to write about their own trauma in a realistic way; to write about another person's trauma in a realistic way; to transform their own trauma into a piece of fiction; to transform another person's trauma into a piece of fiction; or to a control group in which they wrote descriptively about a campus scene. Participants who wrote about another's trauma were yoked to participants who wrote about their own trauma. There were 3 writing sessions. All 4 experimental groups reported increased distress, and increased negative mood, and decreased energy, self-esteem, and happy mood after each writing session. Mean changes in these mood measures decreased from the first to the third session in all groups, suggesting that participants habituated to the negative aspects of the trauma. Compared with the control group and other experimental groups, those who wrote about their own trauma in a realistic way made fewer illness visits at a 1-month follow-up compared to the month before the study. Unlike past studies, no psychological improvements were noted in any group. In contrast to the Wortman et al. (1996) study, the group writing about another person's trauma did not exhibit improved health. In the present study, participants had higher levels of initial psychological and physical functioning compared to those in other studies, with the result that this sample might have had less room for improvement. This could account for failure to replicate past research.