Ego Function Assessment and Internet Addiction.

This study examined the relationship between trauma, ego functioning, and internet addiction. We recruited 323 participants via Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform that can be used for survey research. We gave participants the Internet Addiction Test, the Life Events Checklist, the Ego Function Assessment questionnaire, and a demographic questionnaire.

Supportive-Expressive Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for the Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder.

The United States is in the midst of an opioid epidemic with over 200,000 deaths per year due to opioid overdoses. There are numerous psychotherapeutic and medication-assisted approaches to treating opioid use disorder, but psychodynamic approaches remain underappreciated and underused. The self-medication hypothesis of substance use disorders is a psychodynamic model, which argues that all substance use disorders serve to defend against intolerable affects.

Relationship between defense mechanisms and psychopathic traits in an Internet sample.

The authors compared the defense mechanisms used by a community sample of people with and without self-reported psychopathic traits. Defense mechanisms were assessed using the Defense Style Questionnaire-60 and psychopathy was assessed using the Levinson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale in a sample of 225 adults recruited on the Internet. Results found that people with self-reported psychopathy traits used significantly more immature and neurotic defense mechanisms than people without a psychopathic personality profile.

The relationship between defense mechanisms and religious coping using a new two-factor solution for the Defense Style Questionnaire-40.

This study examined the factor structure of the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ-40) and explored the relationships between defense mechanisms and religious coping in a diverse sample of 380 college students. In contrast with the three-factor model of defenses proposed by the developers of the DSQ-40, principal axis factoring yielded two internally consistent components: adaptive and maladaptive defense styles. Endorsement of adaptive defenses was positively correlated with the use of positive religious coping strategies and negatively correlated with negative religious coping.

Further evidence of self-medication: personality factors influencing drug choice in substance use disorders.

According to Khantzian's (2003) self-medication hypothesis (SMH), substance dependence is a compensatory means to modulate affects and self-soothe in response to distressing psychological states. Khantzian asserts: (1) Drugs become addicting because they have the power to alleviate, remove, or change human psychological suffering, and (2) There is a considerable degree of specificity in a person's choice of drugs because of unique psychological and physiological effects. The SMH has received criticism for its variable empirical support, particularly in terms of the drug-specificity aspect of Khantzian's hypothesis.

Biogenetic explanations and stigma: a meta-analytic review of associations among laypeople.

The stigma and social rejection faced by people with a mental disorder constitute a major barrier to their well-being and recovery. Medicalization has been welcomed as a strategy to reduce blame and stigma, although critics have cautioned that attributing mental disorders to biogenetic causes may have unintended side effects that could exacerbate prejudice and rejection. The present study presents a quantitative synthesis of the literature on relationships between biogenetic explanations for mental disorders and three key elements of stigma, namely blame, perceptions of dangerousness, and social distance.

The 'side effects' of medicalization: a meta-analytic review of how biogenetic explanations affect stigma.

Reducing stigma is crucial for facilitating recovery from psychological problems. Viewing these problems biomedically may reduce the tendency to blame affected persons, but critics have cautioned that it could also increase other facets of stigma. We report on the first meta-analytic review of the effects of biogenetic explanations on stigma.

Expanding the single-case study: a proposed psychoanalytic research program.

This paper offers a proposed program of research using single-case time-series methods that can be used by practicing clinicians. The paper is written for psychodynamically oriented clinicians who want to get involved in psychotherapy research and make contributions to the scientific literature. How to measure treatment outcomes and psychodynamic constructs are discussed.

Microprocess examination of therapeutic immediacy during a dynamic research interview.

This study examines the interviewer's use of immediacy during a dynamic interview to enhance the patient's ability to process affective material and deepen personal exploration. Using a microprocess design, immediacy events were identified and rated using the Consensual Qualitative Rating method. Moment-to-moment in-session activity was rated by trained observers with a focus on measuring patient process using the Therapist-Patient Interaction Rating Scale and interviewer process using the Therapeutic Environment Scale.

Improving the relationship between the randomized clinical trial and real-world clinical practice.

I comment on the article by Krause (see record 2011-19228-002), which discusses a number of ways for clinical psychotherapy outcome researchers to make the results of randomized controlled trials (RCT) more useful to practicing psychotherapists primarily by making the distributions of raw data from those studies available to the public. In this way, it would be possible for psychotherapists to determine which treatment of an RCT (experimental or control) would be best for a specific patient. Problems with this proposal are discussed and an alternative model that integrates psychotherapy outcome data from group means and clinical case studies is offered.

A critique of the methods and conclusions in the patient outcome research team (PORT) report on psychological treatments for schizophrenia.

The schizophrenia Patient Outcome Research Team (PORT; Lehman and Steinwachs, 1998), a policy paper on the treatment of schizophrenia sponsored by the United States government Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, has minimized the efficacy and utility of psychological treatments for schizophrenia and concluded that some treatments like psychoanalytic psychotherapy are contraindicated and harmful. A critical review of Recommendations 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26 (those addressing the efficacy of psychological treatments) was undertaken. The purpose of this critique was to describe the threats to validity inherent in the PORT report's design and to demonstrate how those threats make the relevant recommendations specious.