TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE BASICS
Lecture 1: Corine Dijk ................................................................................................................................... 2
Shaver & Mikulincer (2011). An attachment-theory framework for conceptualizing
interpersonal behaviour ........................................................................................................................... 2
Pincus & Gurtman (2006). Interpersonal Theory and the Interpersonal Circumplex:
Evolving Perspectives on Normal and Abnormal Personality .............................................. 7
LONELINESS
Lecture 2: Corine Dijk ................................................................................................................................ 15
p.238 - 241 of Cacioppo, Grippo, London, Goossens, & Cacioppo (2015). Loneliness:
Clinical import and interventions ..................................................................................................... 15
DiTommaso, Brannen-McNulty, Ross, & Burgess (2003). Attachment styles, social
skills and loneliness in young adults ............................................................................................. 17
SOCIAL MEDIA
Lecture 3: Corine Dijk ................................................................................................................................ 19
Nadkarni & Hofmann (2012). Why do people use Facebook?................................................ 19
Forest & Wood (2012). When social networking is not working: Individuals with
low self-esteem recognize but do not reap the benefits of self-disclosure on
Facebook. ....................................................................................................................................................... 22
PTSD
DSM-5: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder -PTSD- ........................................................................ 23
Brewin, Lanius, Novac, Schnyder, & Galea (2009). Reformulating PTSD for DSM‐V: life
after criterion A .......................................................................................................................................... 28
Ozer, Best, Lipsey, & Weiss (2003). Predictors of posttraumatic stress disorder and
symptoms in adults: a meta-analysis. ............................................................................................ 32
Ehlers & Clark (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. .............. 33
Watkins, Sprang, & Rothbaum (2018). Treating PTSD: A review of evidence-based
psychotherapy interventions. ............................................................................................................. 40
Van den Hout & Engelhard (2012). How does EMDR work? .................................................... 41
Van Emmerik & Kamphuis (2015). Writing Therapies for Post-Traumatic Stress and
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Review of Procedures and Outcomes .................. 45
, THE BASICS
LECTURE 1: CORINE DIJK
- Social behavior functions to fulfill certain needs:
- Need to belong (communion);
- Need to be yourself (agency);
- Need to be anxiety free.
- Personality traits affect social behavior:
- The tendency to trust in the goodwill of others;
- Self-esteem.
- Behavior can be rated along two axes, agency (leader vs. follower) and
communion (warm vs. cold).
- Understand the circle, what behavior is exactly meant by all words?
- Personality affects behavior:
- Working models of self and others:
→
- Abnormal personality:
- Extremity of behavior;
- Rigidity of behavior.
SHAVER & MIKULINCER (2011). AN ATTACHMENT-THEORY
FRAMEWORK FOR CONCEPTUALIZING
INTERPERSONAL BEHAVIOUR
ATTACHMENT THEORY
The theory postulates core motivational, or behavioral, ‘‘systems’’ such as attachment,
exploration, caregiving, and sexuality, which humans share to some extent with
nonhuman primates. It characterizes these systems as having experientially modifiable
parameters, which (in addition to modest genetic influences), account for relatively
stable individual differences in what has come to be called ‘‘attachment style’’.
BASIC CONCEPTS IN ATTACHMENT THEORY AND RESEARCH
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,Human beings are born with a psychobiological system (the attachment behavioral
system) that motivates them to seek proximity to significant others (attachment figures)
in times of need. The goal of this system is to maintain adequate protection and support,
which is accompanied by a subjective sense of safety and security. This goal is made
salient when people encounter actual or symbolic threats and notice that an attachment
figure is not sufficiently near, interested, or responsive.
Bowlby (1988) assumed that although age and development increase a person’s ability
to gain comfort from internal, symbolic representations of attachment figures, no one at
any age is completely free from reliance on actual others. The attachment system
therefore remains active over the entire life span, as indicated by adults’ tendency to
seek proximity and support when threatened or distressed.
Bowlby (1973) devoted a great deal of attention to the individual differences in
attachment-system functioning that arise as a result of the availability,
responsiveness, and supportiveness of a person’s key attachment figures,
especially in times of need. Interactions with attachment figures who are available and
responsive facilitate optimal functioning of the attachment system and promote a
lasting, pervasive sense of attachment security—a sense that the world is interesting
and safe, that attachment figures are helpful when called upon, and that it is possible to
explore the environment curiously and engage effectively with other people. During
these interactions, a person learns that acknowledgment and display of distress elicit
supportive responses from others, and that turning to others when threatened is an
effective means of coping with problems and threats. These experiences generate
positive mental representations of self and others (attachment working models) that
increase both self-confidence and confidence in attachment figures’ willingness to
provide support. Bowlby (1988) viewed the sense of attachment security as crucial for
maintaining emotional stability, developing positive attitudes toward self and others,
and forming mature, mutually satisfying close relationships.
When attachment figures are not reliably available and supportive, a sense of security is
not attained, negative working models of self and others are formed, and secondary
strategies of affect regulation come into play. These secondary strategies are of two
kinds: hyperactivation and deactivation of the attachment system.
a. Hyperactivation is characterized by energetic, insistent attempts to induce a
relationship partner, viewed as insufficiently available or responsive, to pay more
attention and provide better care and support. Hyperactivating strategies include
clinging, controlling, and coercive responses, cognitive and behavioral efforts to
establish proximity, and overdependence on relationship partners as a source of
protection
b. Deactivation refers to suppression or inhibition of proximity-seeking
inclinations and actions, discounting of threats that might activate the attachment
system, and determination to handle undeniable stresses alone. These strategies
involve maintaining physical and emotional distance from others, being
uncomfortable with intimacy and interdependence, downplaying threat- and
attachment-related cues, and suppressing threat- and attachment-related
thoughts.
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,Attachment style: the chronic pattern of relational expectations, emotions, and
behaviors that results from a history of attachment experiences.
Researchers have found that individual differences in attachment style can be measured
along two dimensions, attachment-related avoidance and anxiety.
- A person’s position on the avoidant attachment dimension indicates the extent to
which he or she distrusts others’ good will and relies on deactivating strategies for
coping with attachment insecurities.
- A person’s position on the anxiety dimension indicates the degree to which he or
she worries that relationship partners will be unavailable or unhelpful in times of
need and relies on hyperactivating strategies.
- People who score low on both dimensions have a chronic sense of security and are
said to be secure or to have a secure attachment style.
ATTACHMENT-STYLE DIFFERENCES IN INTERPERSONAL BEHAVIOR
Individual differences in attachment anxiety and avoidance are important for
understanding characteristic differences in a wide variety of interpersonal reactions and
behaviors. Attachment insecurities are also related to more negative reactions to
interpersonal transgressions and offenses. Whereas relatively secure people tend to
react with functional, constructive expressions of anger (nonhostile protests), insecure
people (either anxious or avoidant) exhibit more destructive forms of anger, such as
animosity, hostility, vengeful criticism, or vicious retaliation. Attachment insecurities
also interfere with prosocial attitudes and behavior during interactions with people who
are distressed or in need.
A double-mediation model that involves:
(a) Cognitive-motivational predispositions
(interpersonal goals, beliefs about self
and others, and mental scripts) that
influence behavior during interpersonal
encounters
(b) Patterns of information processing
during such encounters.
According to this model, individual
differences in attachment-system
functioning shape cognitive-motivational predispositions (the first mediation path),
which in turn bias the way people attend, interpret, and respond to information that
arises during a social interaction (the second mediation path).
ATTACHMENT-RELATED COGNITIVE-MOTIVATIONAL
PREDISPOSITIONS
People enter social interactions with knowledge and attitudes that they acquired during
past interactions with the same relationship partner, or they transfer and apply
knowledge and attitudes based on previous relationships. These personal
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,predispositions are manifested in a person’s goal structure (the goals he or she
frequently seeks during social interactions), in declarative knowledge about self and
others (beliefs about one’s worth, skills, and efficacy; beliefs about a partner’s likely
motives and actions), and procedural knowledge about interpersonal exchanges (mental
scripts representing the ways in which interpersonal exchanges typically unfold). These
predispositions can bias the acquisition and use of social information during an
interaction via top-down, schematic processes that favor attention to and encoding of
information that reinforces expectations and encourages the ignoring or dismissal of
information that invalidates expectations. These predispositions are parts or
implications of a person’s attachment style, and they tend to be the main vehicles by
which individual differences in attachment system functioning are transferred to new
social interactions and relationships.
- Interpersonal goals:
Attachment-anxious people tend to select interpersonal goals compatible with their
intense need for closeness and to strongly fear rejection and separation. In contrast,
avoidant people tend to organize their interactions around desires for distance and
self-reliance and to perceive interdependence and intimacy as threatening or
aversive.
- Mental representations of the self:
Bowlby (1973) argued that children construct mental representations of
themselves while interacting with attachment figures in times of need. Whereas
episodes of attachment-figure availability can promote perceptions of the self as
valuable, lovable, and special, because one is actually valued, loved, and regarded as
special by a caring attachment figure, frustrating interactions with unsupportive
attachment figure can shatter these positive self-representations. More anxiously
attached individuals tend to report lower self-esteem, view themselves as less
competent and efficacious and possess less optimistic expectations about their
ability to cope with stress.
- Mental Representations of Others:
Whereas security-enhancing interactions with available and responsive attachment
figures promote a positive view of others, emotionally painful, frustrating
interactions with unavailable or rejecting attachment figures contribute to negative
views of others.
- Mental scripts:
According to Mikulincer and Shaver (2007b), interactions with warm, loving, and
supportive attachment figures are embodied in a relational if-then script, which
Waters et al. (1998) called a secure-base script.
Others claimed that anxiously attached individuals rely on a sentinel script—one
that includes high sensitivity to clues of impending danger and a tendency to warn
others about the danger while staying close to those others in the dangerous
situation. Avoidant people’s responses are organized around what they called a
rapid fight-flight script—one that includes rapid self-protective responses to
danger without consulting other people or seeking to receive help from them.
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, ATTACHMENT-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THE PROCESSING OF
SOCIAL INFORMATION
- Social information processing:
The initial steps of processing involve attention, perception, and interpretation of
information, and the later steps involve judgments and decisions about behavioral
alternatives in a given situation.
- The first step is attention to and perception of informational cues. Because multiple
cues appear simultaneously and the stimulus array is so large, selective attention
to some cues over others is inevitable.
- Closely following upon the perception of social cues is the assembly of a mental
representation of the current situation, the other person’s reactions, and the self in
relation to this person. This more complex and reflective process often initiates a
series of causal attributions regarding the other’s behavior, interpretations of the
other’s motives and intentions, expectations concerning what he or she will do
next, appraisal of the situation as a threat, a loss, a challenge, or a benefit (primary
appraisal), and appraisal of one’s coping capabilities and response alternatives.
- The third step in the process is goal selection.
- The subsequent decision phase of processing includes response generation,
response evaluation, and enactment.
- All these steps can be influenced by contextual factors, including the interpersonal
setting, the other person’s verbal and nonverbal behavior, and his or her responses
to one’s own behavior. However, they can also be influenced by factors that people
bring with them to the situation, such as the knowledge they have gathered about
the other person’s traits and motives during previous interactions as well as more
general cognitive-motivational predispositions. We suppose that social information
processing is shaped by complex person-by-situation interactions, in which
contextual factors exacerbate or mitigate the influences of cognitive-motivational
predispositions through bottom-up processes while the predispositions fuel or
reduce the effects of the contextual factors via top-down processes.
ATTACHMENT INSECURITIES AND PATTERNS OF SOCIAL
INFORMATION PROCESSING
There is considerable evidence linking attachment insecurities to biases in the
perception of others’ nonverbal messages. Studies have shown that people who differ in
attachment style also differ in the way they interpret and explain others’ aversive
behaviors.
ANTECEDENTS OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN ATTACHMENT
STYLE
Parental caregiving is the most important antecedent of an infant’s attachment pattern,
with more sensitive and responsive parents encouraging a more secure pattern of infant
attachment. Parents’ own attachment patterns can also affect infant attachment. High
rates of concordance (between 60% and 85%) have been found between mother’s
attachment security and her child’s degree of security or insecurity in her presence.
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