This is a Competing Continuation proposal to complete the analysis of data gathered in a study of the emotional reactions of psychiatric line staff to adolescent patients on four psychiatric hospital units.
The aim of the study is to yield understandings of the social and cultural determinants of the anger and hostility consciously experienced towards patients. It is proposed that a social/cultural approach to this destructive and little studied phenomenon will be a major contribution to the long term amelioration of the problem. It is also proposed that the study will make significant contributions to research on emotion both through its theory and through its field methodology, which involved observations of staff-patient interactions followed by systematic processing with the staff member of the meanings and emotions he/she experienced in the course of the observed interactions. The core theory guiding the study is that staff members experience negative feelings towards patients when the patients act in ways which the staff members experience as violating the staff members' idealized pictures of themselves as they want to think of themselves in their roles. Further, it is proposed that these idealized pictures, or """"""""Role Identities"""""""" tend to be similar within a psychiatric unit and to constitute an integral aspect of unit culture. By the end of the current grant period the data analysis process will have come half way to reaching its goal of exploring and testing these propositions. This is a proposal to extend the funding of the project for eighteen months in order to complete the analyses necessary to realize the aims of the study and produce written products that are theoretically and clinically significant.
