Franz Epting

In his own somewhat sly and sardonic way, George Kelly always insisted that personal construct theory could not be assimilated into any other kind of psychology. We believe this was not an example of Kelly being difficult or protecting his turf, but that he resisted such efforts at categorization because he formulated personal construct psychology...

The stability of the amount of cognitive differentiation involved in construing social issues was investigated. Using a common set of construct dimensions, three cognitive complexity instruments were built, each containing a different set of social issues. The three instruments were readministered one week later. The stability indices obtained here...

The opposite method (OM) and the difference method (DM) for eliciting personal constructs were evaluated with regard to the number of bipolar constructs produced. This evaluation is an investigation of how the constructs were used in a grid procedure and how they were reported in a structured interview. Comparing the two methods, using the grid pro...

Building on G. A. Kelly's (1991a, 1991b) personal construct theory, this study introduced concepts of threat and guilt as different manifestations of internalized antilesbian and gay prejudice. Results with 102 lesbian and gay participants indicated that internalized threat and guilt each accounted for unique variance in global internalized antiles...

In spite of the proliferation of clinical and empirical work in the psychology of death and dying over the last two decades, this literature still lacks a unifying psychological theory that could help integrate disparate observations. George Kelly's theory of personal constructs is well situated to provide this much-needed conceptual grounding. The...

Several of the foregoing papers have used versions of the Threat Index (1) as a means of exploring the personal meanings that individuals attribute to their own mortality. For the convenience of the interested clinician and researcher, the procedures for administering and scoring the most commonly used forms of the instrument are presented here. A...

The role of the homosexual–heterosexual dimension in the inhibition of diversity of sexual experience is well-established (Burr & Butt, 1992, Epting, Raskin & Burke, 19946. Epting , F. R. , Raskin , J. D. and Burke , T. B. 1994. Who is a Homosexual? A critique of the Heterosexual-Homosexual Dimension. The Humanist Psychologist, 22(3): 353–370. [...

Presented here is a careful examination of George Kelly's contributions to and differences from humanistic psychology and some of his more radical challenges to mainstream psychology in general. We begin by looking at the word constructive and how various definitions help us to understand what Kelly meant by a constructive understanding of the pers...

This study extended research on prejudice against lesbian and gay (LG) persons by examining theoretically grounded links between intrapersonal and interpersonal manifestations of such prejudice. On the basis of G. A. Kelly's (1955/1991a, 1955/1991b) conceptualization of threat, the authors operationalized intrapersonal homophobia, or LG threat, as...

Consideration of Other ApproachesThe Therapeutic EnterpriseIn a Nutshell

Fifty‐nine client cases were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Two core categories regarding counselors' perceptions of their clients emerged: (a) counselors' attempts to describe their clients' overall functioning and (b) counselors' descriptions of what counseling and the counseling relationship are like. For female clients, themes of “v...

Transitive diagnosis, a constructivist approach to psychological assessment, is presented.

The heterosexual‐homosexual distinction as a construction inhibits appreciation of the diversity of sexual experience by encouraging use of static labels to classify people's continually evolving sexual histories. Distinguishing sexual preference may expedite comprehension of sexual acts, but is counterproductive when considering whole persons. We...

An attempt is made to integrate Thomas Szasz's 0974) theory of personal conduct and George Kelly's (1955) theory of personal constructs (PCT). It is argued that PCT provides an alternative to the void left behind by Szasz's negation of mental illness. Because PCT is concerned with psychological, rather than physiological, constructions of problems...

In order to provide an overview and evaluation of the ways in which constructs might be elicited, a number of procedures are reviewed including: the original triad procedure, dyadic and monadic procedures, ordinal elicitation procedures, and self-characterization procedures. In addition, two recently developed procedures are presented: 1) a focusin...

This article highlights the diversity with which the Threat Index (TI) has been used in the last ten years to explore death-related topics in the empirical literature. Following a brief introduction of TI methodology and theoretical foundation, the following focal areas will be reviewed: 1) historical research questions; 2) multidimensional assessm...

This article describes the strong bond which exists between humanistic psychology and George Kelly's personal construct psychology. First, it examines humanistic concepts found in personal construct psychology such as constructive alternativism, the credulous approach, role relationships, the invitational mood, transitive diagnosis and the anti‐red...

This exploration into the composition of the first factor was nested within a 3 (grid type) × 2 (administration session) mixed factorial design exploring differences in construct differentiation, assessed by three measures: the explanatory power of the first factor (EPFF), intensity (INT), and functionally independent construction (TIC). The main i...

Recent research in the area of children and death is reviewed in this article, focusing on the two broad domains of childrens' death concept development and children and bereavement. The kinds of psychometric instrumentation used in current projects within these areas is then reviewed. These instruments can be broadly classified as structured inter...

Hospice patients were compared with cancer patients in remission and patients with a temporary illness on death threat, hopelessness, and depression. The hospice group was found to be extremely low on death threat and revealed no more hopelessness or depression than the group with a temporary illness. The remission group was shown to be the least d...

In a personal construct approach to children, two aspects of the theory are highlighted. First, the theory is written on a number of levels that include the more formal structural theory as well as an implicit theory of experience. It is on the experiential level that the concerns with children are most clearly revealed. Second, there is a profound...

An investigation of 48 therapists, who were classified as either experiential or analytical in their theoretical orientation, revealed that the two therapist groups were different in the way they described a healthy client using the California &sort. As predicted, experiential therapists scored significantly higher on expressive items than did the...

Personal construct psychology and existential philosophy suggest that a positive resolution of the issue of personal mortality enables a person to live a more intense, meaningful life. The present study tested this hypothesis by inviting participation in selected death education experiences designed to produce more positive death orientation and hi...

Dimensions of meaning elicited from Ss were used to test the "golden section" hypothesis, which predicts that when people use bipolar dimensions to make judgments about their personal acquaintances, they will use the evaluatively positive pole an average of 62% of the time. 44 undergraduates completed the Role Construct Repertory Test with 21 acqua...

An alternative analysis of data reported by Durlak and Kass [1] indicates that, contrary to their conclusion, four of the fifteen death-attitude scales in their study are not complex, but can be considered, to a large extent, measures of a general response to death.

Conducted two 8-week behavioral self-control weight reduction groups to investigate the relationship between locus of control and success at weight reduction (N = 49 female Ss). Mean weight losses were significant at post-treatment and after a 3-month and 18-month follow-up. There was no significant difference in weight loss between internals and e...

The Threat Index (TI), theoretically based on George Kelly's personal construct theory (1), was developed in 1972 as a measure of death orientation. Since its appearance, 12 studies have examined the reliability of the TI and the validity of interpreting TI scores as a measure of death threat. As the research progressed, the instrument underwent so...

Sixty students were administered the Threat Index (an instrument derived from personal construct theory) and Feifel's measures of the conscious level, the fantasy level, and the nonconscious level of fear of death in order to investigate both the relationship of the Threat Index to the various death-fear levels and to assess the extent of interrela...

A self-administered form of the Threat Index (TI) was introduced and compared to the original interview form along dimensions of validity, reliability, internal consistency, and independence from social desirability response set. The assumption that a split between self and death is indicative of threat was empirically tested by means of an expande...

A pair of related experiments examined the psychometric properties on the Threat Index (TI), a theoretically based scale for the assessment of threat of death. An extremity scoring revealed that both structured interview and paper-and-pencil versions of the TI were more meaningful to respondents than was a similar instrument utilizing semantic diff...

Two experiments were conducted as tests of the validity of the provided-construct Threat Index, a theoretically based death orientation instrument. The first study compared changes in death threat of students in two death education courses to threat scores of control classes. Although a hypothesized decline in mean threat scores from pre- to post-t...

The current crisis in personality research, with large-scale, objective, reductionistic, vs. individual, subjective, holistic paradigms, is seen as a real issue that reflects the prevailing schism between academic and professional, applied psychology. Each approach is seen as uniquely useful, but limited in its conception of man. A clinician-person...

Investigated the relationship between 2 aspects of cognitive structure (intensity and consistency assessed by a personal construct grid method) and performance on classroom material using a behavior modification technique. A class of 156 undergraduates, 96 of whom completed all the testing material, served as Ss. As predicted, the low consistency S...

The study introduced a personal construct approach to the assessment of threat of death. Two experiments were reported in which the relationship of this measure, referred to as the Threat Index, to a number of self report variables, the Lester Fear of Death Scale, and the Templer Death Anxiety Scale was investigated. A total of 112 college students...

in this chapter, we will be exploring some of the issues involved in designing and implementing a fixed role therapy of the therapeutic techniques developed within personal construct theory, fixed role therapy is by far the best known and most frequently described / for this reason we will present only a brief description of the basic technique,...