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1931- 1941 Kurt Lewin, Tamara Dembo: The Relationship Between Frustration and Regression.


Lewin and his student Tamara Dembo devise experiments to study the effects of inducing frustration in order to produce regression as it concerns stages of development in a subject. Regression being defined as opposite to development, and development seen as increase in variety of behavior,  increase in hierarchal organizations, and extension of area activities and interests.


Lewin used the term “action units” to identify how people learn and develop to interact with their environment. Exemplifying this are experiments in task development and interruption. One, in which a subject must perform a series of actions that eventually become habitual, identifies the growth in size of action units, the subject no longer needs to maintain consciousness of each individual step, thus with repetition the subject moves through the task with more continuity and the number of units of action become less until the entire task comprises a single action unit. Upon interrupting the task by altering the sequence of events (i.e. pull the lever instead of push) the subject finds they must consciously fight the urge to push the lever, and distraction of the subjects attention will lead to errors. This can be compared to unconscious motivation.

In a related experiment Lewin and Dembo interrupted children playing with “highly desireable toys” and substituted “less desireable toys”, moreover the desireable toys were kept in view of the children. The result was frustration, regression in the quality of the children’s play, or the action units diminish in size. This is was purportedly because the children were still “psychologically involved in the interrupted activity of playing with the desirable toys.”


Probably the most interesting experiment was conducted by Dembo (1931) in which she directs her subjects to solve a problem which is in fact impossible to solve. When they become thoroughly frustrated and request to leave the experimenter excercises authority and asserts they can solve the problem if they just try. (the relationship between experimenter and subject is compared with Milgram’s  obedience studies and Zimbardo’s prison experiment.)  Provided that a barrier prevent the subject from leaving the experiment, Dembo observed that the mounting tension destroys “the boundaries which ordinarily distinguish self from other, reality from unreality, and one intention system of activity from another.” In this situation a different kind of regression occurs which Dembo termed “primitization of the lifespace” leading subjects to “act in irrational ways, exploding in anger or performing behavior which does not really lead to the goal.” This was considered influential in realizing the power of arousing emotion to transform a person and their perception of the situation they are in, their “lifespace”, and would be reflected in Lewin’s other work on personality formation, group dynamics, and sensitivity training.

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/lewin.htm

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... KpxKDQ2b7g

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Kurt_Lewin.aspx

bamp

well done, informative flick.

Here is my first submission.

1918- 1921 Ivan Povlov and Artificially Induced Neurosis in Dogs. –

 Povlov discovered he could induce what he termed “artificial neurosis” in dogs by overstraining the “excitory” or “inhibitory” processes, or quickly alternating excitation and inhibition from which he drew an analogy with the human manifestations of catatonia and schizophrenia. A famous experiment in 1921 trained dogs to discern between a circle and an elipses for a food reward. Gradually the circles and elipses were changed to be more and more similar.  In time the dogs became confused and neurotic, and eventually lost the ability to determine between obvious elipses and circles. They exhibited excitation, and were no longer calm during experiments. The dogs become “agitated, barkes, salivates, bites at its harness, and generally goes beserk. When placed back in the kennel, it may remain "insane" for months or years.”

http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/pavlov.html
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography, Oxford Companion to the Mind.
http://www.answers.com/topic/ivan-pavlov

Apparently mr. Camping is out of salvation. I’m thinkin reeces pieces?

Cross-post from the thread discussing Maia Szalavitz's recent article on this bill:

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Quote from: "Maia Szalavitz"

The legislation would prohibit sexual, physical and emotional abuse and would ban the use of deprivation — of food, sleep, clothing and shelter, for example — as punishment or for any other reason. The use of physical restraint would be permitted only for safety, and all programs would be required to provide residents with "reasonable" access to a telephone. It would require staff to be educated about what specifically counts as child abuse and how to report it, and mandate programs to disclose staff qualifications to parents.

My main problem with with this bill, at least with how it is summarized by Maia, is that it omits psychological coercion from the list of prohibited abuses. Also, that it leaves a wide open loophole for TBSs and other programs of that ilk to market themselves as being basically "schools," and hence not subject to the constraints of this bill.

In programs utilizing substantial degrees of psychological coercion, students have been convinced that physical abuse and sexual abuse that they've been subjected to is actually their own fault. These students may not even think to complain or make use of something like an easily accessed phone, let alone call a hotline. By the time they wake up to this fact, they are long past their time in program. Some folks never quite wake up to it.

This is not to say that the net effect of such coercion is minimal. Far from it. In some cases, the damage has been life-long. To subject someone to coercion is to regress them, which is hardly beneficial to anyone, let alone an adolescent in the process of determining his/her self identity. Although this has been known for several decades, for some reason the APA has been loathe to take a stand on it, at least as to how it pertains to programs intended to modify behavior.

Ursus, I agree with what are pointing out. I am not very familiar with this bill, but if it avoids the topic of psychological coercion then it is not addressing the heart of the matter, I believe. Generally, people know that physical, verbal and sexual violence is wrong and it can be identified and addressed so long as it is out in the open. But psychological coercion is a kind of violence that most people are not aware of. To me this is the most important issue because it is abuse that goes hidden and unprovable and this kind of covert coercion, historically, is a pretty big subject of study. It should be given serious attention to preventing it from occurring. I don’t believe we can rely on a system that requires proof of someone’s intent to coerce or brainwash, not in the case of programs. It needs to specifically identify situations, structured environments etc. that CAN support undetectable, covert coercion, and try to eliminate those possibilities.   I imagine getting something passed that appropriately could protect against this threat would be enormously challenging, and require major changes in the TTI. But unless it happens it will be pretty hard to trust that any program is safe.

(also, I am curios how “emotional abuse” is defined in this sense, quite a variable imo).

where does a king keep his armies?

I think in the "Individual Rights and the Federal Role" COngressional report they talk about an adolescent program that used Guided Interaction Therapy in thier group therapy. "GIT"

I just got a Tavistock book Called "Reluctant Rebels; Re-education and Group Process in a Residential Community"  haven't read it yet but it's from 1959. They use McCorkle as a reference...got another about "reconditioned impulse, a direct approach to reshaping the persona"

I guess this is what they used to call brainwashing before the communist got into it...I don't know

Interesting piece of evidence. If you get a chance could you quote a brief reference of that.