Abstracts of the Annual Poster Session of the American Psychoanalytic Association: Initial Validity of a Computerized Text Analysis Measure of Reflective Function

At its January meetings earlier this year, the American Psycho-analytic Association held the second of its annual peer-reviewed poster sessions highlighting the many research studies being conducted by analytic investigators here and abroad.Linda Goodman, Linda Mayes, and I, as a subcommittee of the association's Committee on Scientific Activities, continue to serve as organizers of the sessions. The nineteen poster abstracts presented here reflect a new emphasis in our field on systematic empirical studies addressing a rich spectrum of research topics conceptually relevant to psychoanalytic theory, current clinical practice, and outcomes. Many of the posters are reports of new and ongoing investigations intended to draw the reader into dialogue with the investigators. As the poster sessions are designed to generate interest and discussion around these endeavors, readers are encouraged to e-mail or otherwise contact the posters' authors.

Reflective Function (RF) is psychological capacity that “involves both a self-reflective and an interpersonal component that ideally provides the individual with a well-developed capacity to distinguish