Psychological mindedness refers to a person's ability to perceive relationships among thoughts, feelings, and action with the goal of learning the meanings and causes of his/her experiences and behavior. Psychological mindedness is clinically important because it influences the patient selection for and the efficacy of psychotherapy. Individuals who have difficulty symbolizing and resolving emotional conflict, and verbally expressing their emotions, are considered to lack psychological mindedness and are sometimes labelled "alexithymic." Culture also influences individual styles of emotional expression and the manner and extent to which feelings are labelled as such. Such cultural differences may be interpreted as differences in psychological mindedness. / The present study examined cultural differences in styles of emotional expression and psychological mindedness by comparing two groups: Euro-Canadians and Cree Amerindians--a group that has been characterized as less verbally expressive or taciturn. / In this study, 36 Cree and 36 Euro-Canadian subjects were given a verbal measure of alexithymia, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) and a pictorial measure, the Scored Archetypal Test-9 (SAT9), and measures of depressive and somatic symptomatology (the CES-D and SCL-90 Somatization Scale). Twelve subjects also received a standardized, qualitative art therapy measure, the Ulman Personality Assessment Procedure (UPAP). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.23887 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Ferrara, Nadia |
| Contributors | Kirmayer, Laurence (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Psychiatry.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001494883, proquestno: MM12193, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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