&lllaos;Mother-Child Videotaped Assessment&lllaos; /narcissistic mothers/ reply

• Mother-Child Videotaped Assessment by Rick Holigrocki, Ph.D., 12/4/96
  
  

Dear Rick Holigrocki,

I was surprised and highly pleased to read that you are doing research into the field I am mostly interested and involved in. As part of my PhD work I give mother-child dyads a (semi)-structured task /to build a simple tower from wooden cubes/ and I video-record the dyads completing the task.The task itself is moderately important in the process, since my real goal is to figure out communication styles and features of narcissistic mothers. /All mothers fill in an inventory revealing narcissism before the construction. The measure is the Narcissistic Personality Inventory./In the instruction it is firmly stated that the "tower" should be built by the child; the mother is only allowed to help. How "helping" is interpreted and done is the main point, about which I have a number of hypotheses regarding narcissism. I have some rudimentary methods /or, better said, a set of criteria/to select information from video-recordings which seem to be informative searching narcissistic pathology and it's effects on the child. The children are all between 7 and 8.

I think that exchanging our thoughts on the matter might be useful, since my experience also make me say that there is hardly any reliable measure to follow dyads. Please send an e-mail or a letter to learn which part of assessment you are interested in. I would also be pleased to read something about your work.

Best wishes:

Nora Mailáth

Debrecen, 13.04.1999.

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