Categories

Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

validity’

Strange Situation #2

Part 2 Further validity issues Gavin Bremner (1994) has questioned the validity of the measures used in the Strange Situation. Earlier Jude Cassidy (1986) postulated that secure infants will not feel the need to maintain continual proximity. If this point were to be validated, it would undermine a key characteristic of the secure attachment style. John Bates, Christine Maslin & Karen Frankel (1985) cast doubt on the validity of the Strange Situation studies when they found that attachment style at 12 months did not predict the presence of behaviour problems at 3 years of age – it being expected that securely-attached infants would be better adjusted socially and emotionally at later ages than insecurely-attached children. However, Alan Sroufe (1983) reported that infants rated as secure in their second year have been found later to be more popular, having more initiative, higher self-esteem, less aggression and demonstrating social leadership. (This suggests that a healthy PURPLE vMEME facilitates the development of healthy RED.) Correspondingly Inge Bretherton & Everett Waters (1985) suggested that insecurely attached children are more likely to be hostile and socially inadequate. The notion that early attachment type influences behaviour in later relationships – via the internal working model – receives support from Cindy Hazan… Read More

The Prison Studies #2

PART 2 Evaluation of the Stanford Prison Experiment Most criticisms of Zimbardo’s study are on ethical issues:- Zimbardo deceived the ‘prisoner’ participants, with their arrest at the beginning of the experiment. They were not told partly because final approval from the police wasn’t given until minutes before the arrests were due to begin and partly because the researchers wanted the arrests to come as a surprise. However this was a breach of the ethics of Zimbardo’s own contract that all of the participants had signed It was not ethically acceptable to expose people to such degradation and hostility even with their fully-informed consent Zimbardo being both ‘superintendent’ and chief researcher produced a conflict of roles whereby he lost sight of the harm being done to the participants – in effect he undermined his own competence to conduct the study,  competence of the researcher being somewhat  belatedly recognised as a key ethical issue by the British Psychological Society in 2006 Those who had been guards had to face up to the disconcerting fact that they had been willing to mistreat their prisoners. Guard ‘A’ said in debrief: “I was surprised at myself – I made them call each other names and clean the toilets out with… Read More

Vulnerability to Stress #2

ART 2 Life events and stress For most people life can be very challenging at times. Everybody experiences major ‘life events’ or ‘life changes’ which can prove acutely stressful and bring about illness – eg: marriage, divorce, death of a close friend or family member, etc, etc. Even Christmas can be acutely stressful! And stress-related illness can contribute to further illness. The idea of ‘life events’ causing stress to the point of illness had begun in 1919 with the ‘life chart’ work of Adolph Meyer. His work became the foundation for the Schedule of Recent Events developed by N G Hawkins, R Davies & Thomas Holmes in 1957; this looked at the cumulative effect of life events in causing stress. (Amusingly Holmes’ interest in the relationship between stress and illness came from finding his mother-in-law’s visits so stressful that he developed a cold every time she came to stay!) In 1967 Thomas Holmes & Richard Rahe added the idea of the magnitude of different life events – measured in ‘life change units’ (LCUs) – to get a more precise understanding of the cumulative effect. They examined the medical records of over 5,000 medical patients as a way to determine whether stressful events might… Read More

Can vMEMES cause Clinical Depression..?

Updated: 24 January 2019 The Gravesian approach lies at the core of Integrated SocioPsychology. The following is a plea to psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, mental health workers and those involved in research into various areas of psychopathology to examine rigorously Clare W Graves research with a view to its implications for mental health conditions. There are literally millions of people whose suffering could be alleviated if we understood more of the psychological processes underlying it. There are a multiplicity of reasons why the work of Clare W Graves (1970, 1971b/2002, 1978/2005) needs to be taken up much more comprehensively by the academic communities and investigated rigorously for its validity. (Which will result in a much higher profile and wider acceptance of his theory.) One of these reasons, I propose, is the applicability to mental health of the Gravesian approach. Strangely enough, for all the many champions of Graves’ work and the Spiral Dynamics ‘build’ developed by Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996), little has been said about the relationship between Graves’ Spiral of motivational systems (vMEMES) and psychological disorders. Although my plea is for research into the Gravesian approach related to all forms of mental illness, in this piece I will be focusing primarily on… Read More

BACP Complaint

May 2010: Keith Rice, Reference No: 588301, Harrogate On 19 March 2010 I was the subject of a Professional Conduct Hearing of the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP) of which I was a member. I went into the hearing acknowledging and apologising for certain wrongdoings and having caused hurt and offence to the complainant and his wife. However, I was convinced I could clear my good name of the more spurious allegations of the complainant. Due to the manner in which the hearing was conducted, I found it a harrowing and traumatic experience. On 20 March I wrote to Professor Cary Cooper, President of the BACP, complaining of procedural irregularities, clear bias to the complainant and unethical treatment of myself amounting to a breach of my Human Rights. I also queried the competence of the hearing committee. At least one member is supposed be of the same theoretical orientation as myself but no member showed any understanding of either the Gravesian approach (vMEMES) or NLP. The committee members also displayed an alarming degree of ignorance with regard to Hans J Eysenck’s Dimensions of Temperament. Professor Cooper did not respond to my letter but Laurie Clarke, Chief Executive, did (29… Read More

Suicide? #2

  PART 2 The social construction of suicide Scientific and quantitative methods are completely rejected by some Phenomenologists. J Maxwell Atkinson (1978) does not accept that a ‘real’ rate of suicide exists as an objective reality waiting to be discovered. According to Atkinson, behavioural scientists who proceed with this assumption will end up producing ‘facts’ on suicide that have nothing to do with the social reality they seek to understand. By constructing a set of criteria to categorise and measure suicide – in scientific language, by operationalising the concept of suicide – they will merely be imposing their ‘reality’ on the social world. This will inevitably distort that world. As Michael Phillipson (1972) observes, the positivistic methodology employed by Durkheim and other researchers “rides roughshod over the very social reality they are trying to comprehend”. Suicide is a construct of social actors, an aspect of social reality. Official statistics on suicide, therefore, are not ‘wrong’, ‘mistaken’, ‘inaccurate’ or ‘in error’. They are part of the social world. They are the interpretations, made by officials, of what is seen to be unnatural death. Since, Phillipson argues, the object of Sociology is to comprehend the social world, that world can only be understood… Read More

Strange Situation

Updated: 31 March 2021 Over 60 years after its prototype was first deployed and in spite of a welter of criticisms – especially from cross-cultural research – the Strange Situation remains the most popular and most used measure of children’s attachment. Just exactly what the procedure measures and how successful it actually is have been contested by several prominent researchers and theoreticians and a number of limitations have been acknowledged over the years. Ironically, considering the issues raised by some cross-cultural research, the idea for the procedure came from work in Uganda  by Mary Ainsworth. She had worked for a period with John Bowlby in the UK and been much influenced by Bowlby researcher John Robertson’s meticulous attention to detail in recording naturalistic observations, particularly to do with separation. In 1954 Ainsworth went to Uganda, as a result of her husband getting a research position there. She studied mother-child relationships in 6 villages of the Ganda people in Kampala, visiting 26 mothers and their infants, every 2 weeks for 2 hours per visit over a period of up to 9 months. Visits (with an interpreter) took place in the family living room, where Ganda women generally entertain in the afternoon. She was particularly interested in determining… Read More

Value Systems as Foresight Frameworks

by Marcus P Barber Summer 2005 Marcus Barber, CEO of Looking Up Feeling Good Pty Ltd, is a leading Strategic Futurist in Australia. His work straddles academic, commercial and governmental operations. This article, in which he hypothesises about vMEMETIC (value system) perceptions of time, was first published in ‘Futures Research Quarterly’ (Summer 2005) and is republished here with the kind permission of the author. Contact Marcus by e-mail to learn more about his work. The hypothesis of this paper proposes that value systems, as initially identified by Clare W Graves (1970) and subsequently developed by Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) into the Spiral Dynamics model, provide clues as to how people approach the subject of time. By identifying someone’s central values system (VS), we are able to anticipate their likely approach to time, their orientation toward the future (and, therein, foresight) and their potential expectations of the outcomes of planning. We are also made cognoscente of the fact that varying life conditions demand alternative methods of resolution. As such, the ability to consider the future for each of the value systems is influenced by differing factors of importance; and foresight practitioners and strategic planners will benefit greatly from being aware… Read More

Glossary T

Nos   A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H    I    J    K    L    M    N    O    P-Q    R    S     T     U    V    W    X-Y-Z Temperament: an individual’s characteristic modes of emotional response, mood shifts and levels of sensitivity to stimulation – all of which are sub-cognitive. There are several models of ‘personality‘ which attempt to describe temperament. Carl Gustav Jung (1921) produced a model of psychological types which served as the foundation of the Myers–Briggs Typing Inventory (Isabel Myers & Katherine Briggs, 1956). This version – see left – has 4 dimensions which produce 16 types of personality, based on the 4 dimensions of:- Introversion – Extraversion  iNtuitive – Sensing Thinking – Feeling  Judging -Perceiving Another 16-type model is Raymond Cattell’s (1957)much-lauded 16 PF (aka 16 Personality Factors). However, this has proved unwieldy and attempts have been made to whittle the 16 down to a more manageable 5 by the likes of Warren T Norman (1963), and Paul Costa & Robert McCrae (1985). While the so-called ‘Big 5’ is a very popular conception for designers of ‘personality psychometrics, there is a notable degree of variance amongst the different versions of the Big 5, thereby undermining both its reliability as the basis of… Read More

Glossary E

  Nos   A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H    I    J    K    L    M    N    O    P-Q    R    S     T     U    V    W    X-Y-Z Eclectic Approach: where a psychologist or therapist will use the most appropriate models and techniques from whatever school or field, regardless of academic boundaries, to meet their clients’ needs. Ecological Validity: aka external validity. See validity Economic Determinism: the thesis, as advanced by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848) – though they did not explicitly use the term – that economic factors underlie all of society’s decisions. Thus, the social relations specific to a particular mode of production are said to structure social relations between classes and are held to be the base underpinning the legal and political systems. This implies that all political, cultural, and social life can be predicted from the prevailing relations of production. Economic Imperialism: Egalitarianism: Ego: generally, an individual’s sense of self – though there are numerous connotations/sub-meanings related to the term. Sigmund Freud (1923b) applied something of a different, quite specific meaning to ‘ego’ – it is a part of the Id-Ego-Superego tripartite mind. The Ego has the role of restraining the unacceptable desires of the Id… Read More