Research into the phenomenon of compulsive hoarding has only been conducted during the last twenty years. To date, no studies have been done that examine the impacts of compulsive hoarding on young and grown children. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore what the positive and negative impacts on children or adult children are. Twelve women, each identifying themselves as an adult child of a compulsive hoarder completed a qualitative questionnaire via email. Participants were recruited through membership in the internet support group, “children of hoarders”. All participants identified their mother as the compulsive hoarder. Three distinct themes emerged over three distinct time periods. The first time period begins with early childhood and continues through adolescence. The second begins with the time they first moved away from home. The third starts with the end of the second and continues through to whatever age they are today. The first theme's focus was the participants' feelings as associated with their mother's hoarding. The second theme dealt with a need to understand what “normal” is. The third theme was the means they use/used to cope with the situation. Clinical implications include support for using systems theory, ambiguous loss and attachment frameworks. This study also provides valuable information relevant to participants need to normalize their experiences. / Master of Science

Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 30-37).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Compulsive hoarding is a serious disorder that causes significant impairment in the home. While compulsive hoarding has been traditionally associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), standard OCD treatments have been mostly ineffective for hoarding. Recent research has provided evidence that hoarding has a distinct profile that could indicate a separate disorder. Further understanding of hoarding may advance classification and treatment. One understudied aspect of hoarding is excessive acquisition. Acquisition behaviors in hoarding appear to share similarities with impulse control disorders. While preliminary research has suggested elevated impulsivity in those who hoard, prior studies have been inconsistent in their measurement of impulsivity. Also, the relationship between impulsivity and excessive acquisition behaviors remains unexplored. This study assessed impulsivity in hoarding (n = 32) and anxiety disorder (n = 32) participants using a multi-dimensional model of impulsivity. Participants underwent a diagnostic assessment and completed self-report forms and neuropsychological tasks measuring impulsivity. Participants also completed an experimental task to assess acquiring behaviors after a mood induction. Participants completed measures of affect and state impulsivity, before and after a negative or neutral mood induction. There were no significant differences between diagnostic groups on self-reported impulsivity levels. Significant between-group differences were found on several neuropsychological tasks. Those with hoarding had significantly poorer response inhibition and lowered levels of adaptive and maladaptive risk-taking than participants with anxiety disorders. A diagnosis of hoarding predicted these outcomes independent of social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, and major depressive disorder. In the acquisition task, the hoarding group acquired significantly more items than the anxiety disorder group but there was not a significant interaction effect with mood induction condition. The hoarding group had a significantly greater increase in state impulsivity across time but there was also not an interaction effect with mood induction condition. An analysis designed to assess whether state impulsivity mediated the relationship between negative affect and acquisition behaviors failed to find a significant indirect effect. Overall, study findings suggest differences in impulsivity for those who hoard as compared to those with an anxiety disorder. A continued emphasis on understanding impulsivity in hoarding could further diagnostic classification and treatment development. / 2031-01-02

Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 33-41).

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to determine the relationships between social media, fashion interest and fast fashion involvement and whether these psychographic variables affect propensity for compulsive clothing buying and (2) to determine whether a relationship exists between compulsive buying and propensity toward hoarding. Data was collected through consumer panel from Qualtrix. Screener questions ensured that all respondents were adult females with an interest in fashion. Responses yielded 232 usable surveys, which were analyzed using SPSS software. Social media was found to be positively related to fashion interest, fast fashion involvement, and compulsive clothing buying. Compulsive clothing buying was found to be positively related to all three compulsive clothes hoarding symptoms: clothing clutter disorganization, clothing acquisition, and difficulty discarding clothing.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Thesis advisor: Andrew Von Hendy / By representing the relationship between a subject and a particular object, key modernist writers offered paradigms for conceiving their literary aesthetics more explicitly. <italic>A World of Objects</italic> presents three interconnected narratives about literary making in the twentieth century by pairing James Joyce with the hoarded object, Elizabeth Bowen with the toy, and Samuel Beckett with the forsaken thing. The over-arching aim of this study is to prove the logic of these pairings by contextualizing the object within each writer's work. In addition to offering detailed analyses of specific texts by Joyce, Bowen, and Beckett, I explore the ways that their work participated in larger aesthetic movements made up of fellow writers, visual artists, cultural theorists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers. Focused on the objects that dangerously clutter Shem's inkbottle house in <italic>Finnegans Wake</italic>, my first chapter reopens critical questions about modernism's stylistic engagement with waste, obsessive cataloguing, and projects of indefinite scope. By integrating recent case histories and psychological discourse on compulsive hoarding, I probe both Joyce's increasing interest in the excesses of the object world and its effects upon his readers. Hoarders and critics of the Wake are alike prone to anxieties concerning the potential value of acquired items. These anxieties lead to an extreme tendency that psychological researchers and clinicians refer to as "elaborative processing." Whether encountering a piece of trash, like a pack of used matches, or an obscure signifier, like "fallen lucifers," (an item in Shem's house) both the hoarder and the Joycean create cognitively rich associative networks for accumulated material or linguistic objects. Through an understanding of the phenomenon of hoarding, I offer an analysis of Joycean objects that assumes their potential value within a range of deferrable symbolic registers. Such a reading calls for a reconsideration of Joyce's later aesthetics and a critique of the critico-stylistic techniques peculiar to <italic>Wake</italic> scholarship. I go on to argue that the consequences of Joyce's equation of litter with literature extend well beyond <italic>Finnegans Wake</italic>; and that a large number of modernist texts exhibit the same potential for the discovery of value in the seemingly valueless. Bowen's theories on toys and character--presented in a series of essays, memoirs, radio broadcasts, and novels, particularly <italic>The House in Paris</italic>--provide a rich resource for considering the object of play in twentieth-century literary aesthetics. Bowen had a life-long obsession with toys ranging from Edwardian toy-theaters to Japanese dolls to Czechoslovakian marionettes. In the unpublished essay "Toys," she argues that the highest form of play involves resourceful manipulation, or the faculty to turn a found object into something else. Bowen's resourceful toy, like the hoarded object, relies upon an individual's heightened creative tendency to invent infinite uses (or misuses) for things. This chapter employs Bowen's theory by reemphasizing trope's etymological meaning of "to alter or to turn one thing into another." This method of encountering the phenomenal world can be discovered in a strain of twentieth-century writers who share Bowen's preoccupation with the effects of troping subjects with objects. Bowen was attracted to the toy because of its abilities to create tensions between subject and object distinctions; its mimetic potential to contest, invert, or reflect established ontological assumptions; and its capability to underscore the inter-construction of interiority and exteriority. My project's culminating chapter appropriates the phrase "forsaken things" from <italic>Malone Dies</italic> as a term to signify the recurrent, infraordinary objects that litter Beckett's texts and the daunting critical trajectories necessary to understand his aesthetic projects. Predominantly critics have abandoned Beckett's objects as either bereft of symbolic value or confoundedly too symbolic. My approach counters these readings by accepting the object's status as purposely forsaken, or liberated from confining ideological and aesthetic frames of judgment. Beckett uses objects to bait his audience into accepting tempting, cogent interpretations (whether allegorical, existential, psychoanalytic, autobiographical, or another); however, his technique is to undercut any stable reading by endowing the object with a paradoxically determined indeterminacy. I develop this argument by tracing the ways that a series of objects (spent matches, pebbles, "pointless" pencils) purposely fail to exhibit or contribute to a consistent syntax of meaning across Beckett's novels and short stories. I conclude my chapter by looking at Beckett's first completed play, <italic>Eleutheria</italic>, and a series of short stories that he wrote between 1946-47. Though one associates Beckett with the absence of objects, analysis of these texts proves that like his contemporaries, he, too, was dependent upon them. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Compulsive hoarding is characterized by difficulty discarding unneeded items and the accumulation of items within living spaces and is associated with significant functional impairment and distress. Along with the negative impact on the individual, previous reports have indicated that compulsive hoarding is not only impairing and substantially burdensome for family members, but also linked to disruptions in family functioning. The present study utilized a path model analysis to examine the associations between an array of hoarding variables hypothesized to impact family functioning and parent-adult child relationships in 199 adult children of hoarders. Results revealed that family functioning mediated the relationship between hoarding severity and parent-adult child relationship. Decreased insight into hoarding symptoms was directly associated with decreased quality of parent-adult child relationships, which was mediated by family functioning. Increased family accommodation was significantly associated with increased impairment (work, social, family domains) in adult children of hoarders. Clinical implications and future directions in research are discussed.

Den här kvalitativa studien syftar till att undersöka socialarbetares erfarenheter av att arbeta med patologiska samlare, med fokus på vilka socialpsykologiska faktorer som kan tänkas ha betydelse för att främja samarbete. Fjorton intervjuer har genomförts med socialarbetare som arbetar inom socialpsykiatrin inom olika stadsdelsförvaltningar inom Stockholms län. Resultatet har analyserats med hjälp av attributionsteori, samspelsinriktad teori och strukturell teori. Resultatet visar på att det finns flera faktorer som påverkar samarbetet med patologiska samlare. Samarbete upplevs vara avgörande för att den patologiska samlaren ska göra framsteg och det är också viktigt att yrkesverksamma är eniga kring hur man ska angripa problemet. Socialarbetarna betonar olika strategier för att bygga relation med klienten, som i många fall går utöver den konventionella handläggarrollen. Socialarbetarna är överens om att det är viktigt att gå försiktigt fram samt att låta processen ta tid. Socialarbetarna understryker betydelsen av att vara finkänslig men samtidigt tydlig med klienten. De framhåller att balansen mellan att vara finkänslig och tydlig är svår eftersom det har hänt att klienterna blivit kränkta när socialarbetarna reagerat vid möten. Socialarbetarna framhåller svårigheten att kunna hjälpa klienter som inte vill, varav den fria viljan kan sätta stopp för att kunna hjälpa klienterna. Samtidigt framhåller de att frivilligheten inte alltid ter sig frivillig när det föreligger underliggande vräkningshot. / This qualitative study aims to examine social workers experiences of working with hoarders, focusing on what social psychological factors may be thought to play a role in promoting collaboration. Fourteen interviews have been conducted with social workers in social psychiatry units in various districts of Stockholm county. The results have been analyzed using attribution theory, interaction theory and structural theory. The results show that there are several factors that affect the collaboration with the hoarder. Collaboration is considered vital for the hoarder to make progress and it is also important that there is consensus among professionals about how to approach the problem. Social workers experience a strong resistance in working with clients, which places high demands on the professional role to be persistent and patient. The social workers in this study emphasize different strategies for building relationships with the client, which in many cases go beyond the conventional role of the social worker. The social workers agree that it is important to proceed cautiously and allow the process to take time. The social workers in this study emphasize that it is important to think about being sensitive and at the same time direct with the client. They believe that the balance between being sensitive and direct is difficult as they have experienced that the clients has been offended by them showing strong reactions. The social workers emphasize the difficulty of being able to help clients that do not want to, of which the free will can create problems to be able to help the clients. At the same time, they point out that voluntary is not always voluntary when there are underlying eviction threats.

I denna uppsats har jag undersökt arbetsprocessen bakom filmklippning med Donald A. Schöns teorier om praktisk reflexiv analys som utgångspunkt. Analysen tog stöd i teorier kopplade till filmklippning och filmteori. Anteckningar som gjorts under arbetsprocessen utgör forskningsunderlaget i uppsatsen. Scenen som jag har arbetat med är öppningsscenen från min dokumentärfilm Samlardjävulen. Filmen i sin helhet var även min medieproduktion och presentationen av den finns bifogad efter uppsatsen. Arbetsprocessen undersöktes genom att utgå från Schöns begrepp och formuleringar vilket synliggjorde viktiga och komplexa delar av arbetet med att redigera film. Resultatet visade att Schöns teorier kan användas för att beskriva arbetsprocessen bakom filmklippning på ett ingående sätt, men teorierna har också visat sig ha svagheter gällande möjligheten att beskriva vissa typer av praktiska handlingar. Uppsatsen avslutas med en diskussion och förslag på vidare forskning. / In this essay, I have examined the process of film editing using Donald A. Schön's theories of practical reflective analysis. The analysis drew on theories related to film editing and film theory, and the research data consisted of notes taken during the editing process. The scene that I have been working on is the opening scene from my documentary film Samlardjävulen. This film was also the project that I completed during my final semester. The presentation of the film can be found in this file, after the essay. By applying Schön's theories on the work process, the study revealed important and complex aspects of editing film. The results showed that Schön's theories can be used to describe the process of film editing in detail, however, I concluded that the theories have certain weaknesses when it comes to describing some types of practical actions. The essay concludes with a discussion and possible options for further research.

L’objectif principal de cette recherche est de comprendre la signification de l’accumulation d’objets pour la personne présentant des comportements de hoarding. Dans une perspective constructiviste, nous utilisons la construction empirique de la théorie afin d’analyser 8 entrevues. Les théories d’Erving Goffman et d’Howard Becker sur la stigmatisation et la culture d’exclusion nous permettent de comprendre et d’analyser la construction des liens sociaux chez les personnes présentant des comportements de hoarding. De même, l’application de l’approche d’Elkaïm à cette problématique nous permet de comprendre un des principaux défis de l’intervention auprès de cette population, la double contrainte. L’analyse nous permet de distinguer 3 profils de hoarder. Ce travail s’inscrit sous un paradigme encore jamais utilisé pour comprendre la problématique du hoarding et propose une compréhension propre au travail social, différente du modèle médical qui prédomine actuellement dans l’intervention et la littérature scientifique. / The main objective of this research is to understand the meaning of the accumulation of objects for the person presenting hoarding behaviours. Based on a constructivist framework, we used the empirical construction of theory to analyse 8 interviews. Stigma and the culture of exclusion of Erving Goffman and Howard Becker theories allowed us to understand and to analyze the construction of social ties among people with hoarding behaviours. The application of the theory of Elkaïm to this problem allowed us to understand one of the great challenges of the intervention with this population, the negative feedback. The analysis allowed us to distinguish 3 profiles of hoarder. This research work proposes a different perspective to hoarding, based on a paradigm that was never used before in the comprehension of that problematic and that is proper to social work, in contrast with the prevailing medical model that dominates the literature.