The state-trait distinction and insular mothers : a new look at maternal responding

The state versus trait issue has been argued by almost every psychological researcher, directly or indirectly, since the beginning of recorded psychology. Early researchers in this century stud.ied groups of individuals with some diagnosable psychopathology and based their trait definitions on the observation of behavior. The primary research approach to this problem in the latter part of this century has been with college sophomores and used self-report, paper and pencil tasks. The basic process consisted of theoretically generating a set of behaviors that "defined" a trait label already chosen. This approach created systematic biases in judgments, constructs, and semantics which often accounted for more of the variance found than an actual clustering of the variables. This research was proposed to develop a methodology suitable for a series of research projects studying the possible trait like behavior in insular mothers as they interact with their children. This would return to a behaviorally based approach to the study of traits and the use of a subjects with some diagnosable psychopathology. The insular mother is generally described as single, of low income, and has at least one oppositional child. She is isolated from social contact; what contact she does have, she reports as negative, and family life is generally described by others as mutually coercive. She also tends to exhibit most of the signs of clinical depression. Subjects were the archival records of 10 families who had been treated or were being treated at the Child Behavior Institute for conducting problems with their children. Data were gathered using the Systematic Observation Codes - Revision Illb (SOC-IIIb) in eight one hour sessions for each mother. Data were reduced using autocorrelation and factor analysis. Results suggested this is a plausible methodology with the addition of some additional variable selection techniques. There was also some evidence from the exploration of a mother from each group that the two groups may differ as to who seemed to be driving the patterned interaction suggested by the factor analysis.