Assessing the inter-method reliability and correlational validity of the Body Type Dictionary

Abstract

The political negotiation, erection and fall of national and cultural borders represents an issue that frequently occupies the media. Given the historical importance of boundaries as a marker of cultural identity, as well as their function to separate and unite people, the Body Type (BTD) (Wilson 2006) Dictionary represents a suitable computerized content analysis measure to analyse vocabulary qualified to measure body boundaries and their penetrability. Out of this context, this study aimed to assess the inter-method reliability of the Body Type Dictionary (BTD) (Wilson 2006) in relation to Fisher and Cleveland's (1956, 1958) manual scoring system for high and low barrier personalities. The results indicated that Fisher and Cleveland's manually coded barrier and penetration imagery scores showed an acceptable positive correlation with the computerised frequency counts of the BTD's coded barrier and penetration imagery scores, thereby indicating an inter-method reliability. In addition, barrier and penetration imagery correlated positively with primordial thought language in the picture response test, and narratives of everyday and dream memories, thereby indicating correlational validity. Barrier imagery Examples of semantic items Clothing items Dress, robe, costume Animals with distinctive or unusual skins, including shelled creatures Alligator, badger, peacock, snails, shrimp Enclosed openings in the earth Valley, ravine, canal Unusual animal containers Bloated, kangaroo, pregnant Overhanging or protective surfaces Umbrella, dome, shield Armoured objects or objects dependent on their own walls Armour, battleship, ship Things being covered, surrounded or concealed Covered, hidden, behind Buildings Bungalow, cathedral, tower (except buildings that relate to social institutions, e.g. church, hospital, school. Enclosed vehicles Car, ship, truck Things with unusual container-like shapes or properties Bagpipes, chair, throne Unique structures Tent, fort, hut Miscellaneous barrier words Basket, bubble, cage Penetration imagery Reference to the mouth being opened or used for intake or expulsion Eating, tongue, yawning Reference to evading, bypassing or penetrating through the exterior of an object Autopsy, fluoroscope, x-ray References to the body wall being broken, fractured, injured or damaged, including degeneration of surfaces Bleeding, stabbed, wounded, withered

Lexical Tendencies of High and Low Barrier Personalities in Narratives of Everyday and Dream Memories

“…Empirical research has also identified a relationship between body boundary awareness and primordial thought by measuring body boundary imagery and regressive language in personal memories, thus providing some supporting evidence for the Freudian theory that assumes that the body, unconscious thought and language represent interrelated concepts (Cariola, 2014).…”

Body boundary changes in person-centred psychotherapy

“…The Body Type Dictionary (BTD) (Wilson, 2006;Cariola, 2014aCariola, , 2014b) is a reliable and valid computerised dictionary that calculates the frequency of semantic items categorised as barrier imagery or penetration imagery, based on Fisher and Cleveland's (1958) scoring system. The BTD contains 551 words for barrier imagery, 231 words for penetration imagery, and 70 exception words that prevent the erroneous matching of ambiguous word stems that are assigned to 12 semantic categories.…”

“…This reduction in barrier imagery in High Barrier patients might be indicative of the empathic and nonjudgmental therapeutic alliance enabling patients to explore and reflect upon their emotions and thoughts, such as anxieties and traumatic experiences. This exploration and reflection may have resulted in a lower encapsulating body boundary and muscular sensitivity associated with a conditioned punishment-reward response (Cariola, 2014a). A reduced body boundary enables a functional self-other differentiation, facilitating patients' ability to acknowledge their feelings and to be reliant on their own value judgments, concurrent with a greater capacity to trust others.…”

Assessing the Alternate-Form Reliability of Interview-Based and Web-Based Rorschach Responses Measuring Body Boundary Imagery and Regressive Imagery

“…The Body Type Dictionary (Wilson, 2006) represents a valid and reliable computerised scoring system that measures the lexical frequencies of barrier and penetration imagery as outlined by Fisher and Cleveland's manual body boundary scoring system (Cariola, 2013). The BTD contains 599 barrier imagery words, 252 penetration imagery words, and 70 exception words, which prevent the erroneous matching of ambiguous word stems assigned to 12 semantic categories.…”

“…Empirical research has demonstrated that both penetration and barrier imagery increase with the level of regressive cognition, which indicates that barrier and penetration imagery reflect the different psychological functions of phenomena related to regressive cognition (Cariola, 2013). Primordial thought language has been measured using the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) (Martindale, 1975(Martindale, , 1990), which gauges the frequency of lexical items classified as primordial thought language and conceptual thought language.…”