28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

drug abuse, etc. Lead to severe psychosocial injuries in this population. Therefore they should be
treated and recognized as psychosocialy handicapped. Promotion of new legislations with global
impact is needed (UNICEF) in developing countries.
4084 STATE-OF-THE-ART
Chair: Cigdem Kagitcibasi, Turkey
The relational self, Susan M. Andersen, Department of Psychology, New York University, USA
Our model of the relational self (Andersen & Chen, 2002) assumes that mental representations of
significant others are linked in memory with the self. Each significant other is bound up with a
relational self, and overall, the self consists of one's repertoire of relational selves. An IF-THEN,
contextually based theory, the relational self model is grounded in experimental research on the
social-cognitive process of ransference in everyday social relations. When transference is triggered,
people respond to new others as they respond to the significant other and the relevant relational
self is evoked as well, along with emotions, motivations, and self-regulation.
4085 STATE-OF-THE-ART
Chair: Ramadhar Singh, Singapore
Individual differences as predictors of psychological costs resulting from disaster, Jan Strelau,
Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Poland
It has been documented in several studies that personality may be regarded as a predictor of
behavior disorders when individuals are confronted with extreme stressors. Such variables as, e.g.,
neuroticism, sensation seeking, extraversion-introversion, and coping styles were mostly applied
in these projects. The aim of a series our studies was to examine whether temperament expressed
in energetic and temporal characteristics of behavior allows for predicting posttraumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) in individuals who experienced disaster. Data collected from several samples of
flood victims composed of families (parents and children) have documented that: (a) temperament
traits and trauma share a similar proportion when regarded as predictors of PTSD; (b) the role of
temperament as predictor of consequences of experienced trauma is age and gender specific; (c)
the variance of the relationship between temperament and PTSD recorded two years after disaster
is to a given extent genetically determined.
4086 STATE-OF-THE-ART
Chair: John Adair, Canada
Understanding, identifying, and treating pathological gamblers, Robert Ladouceur, Ecole de
Psychologie, Universite Laval, Canada
This presentation will present the State of art of our knowledge concerning gambling behaviors
and gambling related problems. The social and political situation concerning the increase
availability of gambling opportunities, the prevalence of pathological gambling and the
identification of problem gamblers will first be discussed. We will then cover the main
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