Heuristische Grundlagen der Fallanalyse

Within the German police behavioural case analysis is considered to be a further development of profiling as established in the 1980s by the American FBI. In principle behavioural case analysis is a process of systematically and analytically researching criminal cases with the aim of generating supporting leads in the search for the unknown offender. It is predominantly characterized by a critical and comprehensive reflection of methodological and criminological background knowledge and its application to the specifics of a given case. As part of a continued process of quality management the fundamental principles of North American profiling were assessed. Aspects of the logic of reconstruction and hermeneutic processes were integrated and relevant criminological research was considered or carried out where required. Also, a set of heuristic meta-rules was established. In this way a methodologically and heuristically well-founded framework was created which reduces the conflicting effects of existing habits of interpretation to a minimum and enhances the critical and creative work with hypotheses.     

Cognitive-processing bias in chronic pain: a review and integration

Do patients with chronic pain selectively process pain- and illness-related stimuli? The evidence with regard to attention, interpretation, and recall biases is critically reviewed. A model is proposed to account for the findings in which it is suggested that biases in information processing in chronic pain are the result of overlap between 3 schemas: pain, illness, and self. With frequent repeated or continued experience of pain, the pain schema becomes enmeshed with illness and self-schemas. The extent of the enmeshment and the salient content of the schema determine the bias. A fundamental assumption is that all patients with pain selectively process sensory-intensity information. A clinical implication of the results is that processing biases that extend beyond this healthy and adaptive process to enmesh the self-schema with pain and illness schemas could maintain and exacerbate distress and illness behavior in patients with chronic pain.     

Das Traumgenerierungsmodell von Ulrich Moser und die Codierung von Traumprozessen

Under the conditions of sleeping, mental activity creates a psychic microworld “dream” experienced as the present, running predominantly in a pictorial and sensual way in a sequence of situations and sometimes containing verbal relations and cognitive processes. Together with Ilka von Zeppelin, Ulrich Moser has developed a model of the emergence of sleep dreams with the aim to reconstruct the dreaming process, which is normally concealed under the verbal structure of the dream report and to explain this sequence as the result of a cognitive affective regulatory process. In accordance with the theory of French, dreaming is seen as an attempt to cope in a simulative mode with unresolved neurotic conflicts and traumatic experiences. To make this process visible, the authors developed a very differentiated model-guided coding system, a form of operationalization of the “dream work” that records and describes all cognitive elements and all interactive behavior in the dream. This analysis provides the formal and structural characteristics of the dream that precede every interpretation of content or biographical meaning. In this way, dream series in a single person, as well as dreams in different groups, can be objectively studied and compared. A presentation of the dream model is followed by an introduction into the basic principles of the coding system. This dream process coding and the interpretation based on it are demonstrated on a specimen dream. This dream is Freud’s “Dream of Irma’s injection”, which he selected himself to demonstrate his method of dream interpretation in Die Traumdeutung and which was also used by Erikson to illustrate his “configurational analysis”.     

Anerkennung als interaktionelles Moment der Psychoanalyse*

After having developed a theory of appreciation in more detail in an earlier article (Daser 2003), the author examines now the phenomenon of appreciation in the practice of therapy. First, appreciation is presented as a value-ascribing act, strengthening the self-confidence of the patient and lowering his relationship-anxiety, thereby allowing him to reduce his defence and to get involved into the analytic process. Appreciation seems to be on the one hand an effect of the analytic method, but on the other hand it may be connected to interventions which seem to contradict this method. Such interventions assume therefore a fostering quality for the self-experience of the patient and, consequently, for the analytic process. This effect will be demonstrated here on several examples. Further, the importance of appreciation for empathy is elaborated on an example of “play” between analyst and patient as an element allowing the transition from re-enactments to new forms of enactment. At last, the concept of appreciation is related to concepts of Stern as well as of Weiss and Sampson. Appreciation turns out to be an element of that “something more”, Stern requires in his analytic therapy beyond the interpretation. But this “something more” is not only adjuvant for emotionally paving the way to interpretation. Existential appreciation is, in contrast to pedagogic praise, rather a result of triangulation and, therefore, processually correlated with interpretation. Appreciation and interpretation appear as complementarily interconnected moments in the process of self-experience, the formation of the relationship and the moment of insight being inseparably intertwined.     

Beitrag der Neurowissenschaften zur forensischen Psychiatrie

Forensic psychiatry is a subspecialty dedicated to the interface between psychiatry and law. It uses paradigms and knowledge from general psychiatry for diagnostics, assessment, therapy and research under consideration of the special requirements of legal aspects and framework conditions; therefore, scientific development in forensic psychiatry is substantially dependent on scientific progress in psychiatry and thus nowadays also in neurosciences. Neurobiological hypotheses on the neuronal foundations of psychiatric diseases have been established, for example the dopamine hypothesis for schizophrenia, in a manner that led to important therapeutic advances in the treatment and long-term quality of life for affected persons. Analogous advances should not be withheld from forensic psychiatric patients, who are doubly affected by the disease and the accompanying limitations in their rights to freedom, which is why research in this field must be driven forwards. Clear advances in knowledge of the neurobiological foundations of forensic psychiatric illnesses have, for example, already been made in the field of pedophilia and psychopathy. Based on studies of investigation populations, such neuroscientific knowledge on the neurobiological principles of forensic psychiatric diseases, however, requires a carefully concerted communication with respect to dissemination in the media as well as in the interpretation of individual cases, for example in court. This is of great importance in order to prevent simplifying misconceptions and to avoid a subsequent loss of trust in the scientific process. Therefore, training of the new generation of forensic psychiatrists in the understanding and communication of scientific methods of modern forensic psychiatric neuroscience is of great importance for the societal impact and further advancement of the discipline.     

Methodological issues in event-related brain potential research

Event-related brain potential (ERP) measures have become increasingly popular in experimental psychology and are often employed by researchers who are not formally trained in electrophysiology. A proper application of these measures requires knowledge about the methodological principles and practical issues that are relevant to ERP measurement, analysis, and interpretation. A brief introductory survey of different aspects of ERP methodology (recording, data processing and signal extraction, statistical analysis and interpretation of ERP effects) is presented, and the contributions collected in this special issue on ERP methodology are introduced.     

Internalization: a metaphor we can live without

Shepard has supposed that the mind is stocked with innate knowledge of the world and that this knowledge figures prominently in the way we see the world. According to him, this internal knowledge is the legacy of a process of internalization; a process of natural selection over the evolutionary history of the species. Shepard has developed his proposal most fully in his analysis of the relation between kinematic geometry and the shape of the motion path in apparent motion displays. We argue that Shepard has made a case for applying the principles of kinematic geometry to the perception of motion, but that he has not made the case for injecting these principles into the mind of the percipient. We offer a more modest interpretation of his important findings: that kinematic geometry may be a model of apparent motion. Inasmuch as our recommended interpretation does not lodge geometry in the mind of the percipient, the motivation of positing internalization, a process that moves kinematic geometry into the mind, is obviated. In our conclusion, we suggest that cognitive psychologists, in their embrace of internal mental universals and internalization may have been seduced by the siren call of metaphor.     

Psychosoziale Herausforderungen der Arbeitswelt in der postmodernen Gesellschaft

In this article the cohesion between the working conditions and the psychosocial health state of employees is discussed. At first the conditions of healthy work and in a next step the special psychosocial risks for the health of employees in the modern world of work are described, which are characterized by scientific and technological characteristics on the one hand and by the increase of services on the other hand. A special problem for psychosocial wellbeing is the loss of work. Especially the soft psychosocial characteristics of work, such as processes of communication, the organizational atmosphere and culture, principles of leadership and decision-making have a relevant influence on the psychosocial health of the employees. Finally the socio-cultural and ethical context of the postmodern society is discussed in its implications for the field of work as well as for the health of workers. Strategies of prevention are described and the author argues that psychotherapeutic reflections and interventions should play an important role in the process of developing a necessary debate about ethical standards.     

The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children

A great deal of psycholinguistic research has focused on the question of how adults interpret language in real time. This work has revealed a complex and interactive language processing system capable of rapidly coordinating linguistic properties of the message with information from the context or situation (e.g. Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Britt, 1994; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1991). In the study of language acquisition, however, surprisingly little is known about how children process language in real time and whether they coordinate multiple sources of information during interpretation. The lack of child research is due in part to the fact that most existing techniques for studying language processing have relied upon the skill of reading, an ability that young children do not have or are only beginning to acquire. We present here results from a new method for studying children's moment-by-moment language processing abilities, in which a head-mounted eye-tracking system was used to monitor eye movements as participants responded to spoken instructions. The results revealed systematic differences in how children and adults process spoken language: Five Year Olds did not take into account relevant discourse/pragmatic principles when resolving temporary syntactic ambiguities, and showed little or no ability to revise initial parsing commitments. Adults showed sensitivity to these discourse constraints at the earliest possible stages of processing, and were capable of revising incorrect parsing commitments. Implications for current models of sentence processing are discussed.     

Bohm,Spin, and the Bell Inequalities

In this paper I discuss how Bohm's interpretation models spin measurements and how the two ways in which spin is a contextual property pertains to the Kochen-Specker theorem. I then present locality principles from which a Bell Inequality can be derived, and I identify which of the locality principles Bohm's interpretation violates at which times. I also present reasons why the spin vector should not be attributed to the Bohmian particles.     

Stereotypic biases in social decision making and memory: testing process models of stereotype use

Two information-processing mechanisms that could potentially contribute to judgmental discrimination against the members of stereotyped social groups were examined in two experiments, using a mock juror decision-making task. Both postulated mechanisms involve biased processing of judgment-relevant evidence. The interpretation hypothesis asserts that the activation of stereotypic concepts influences the perceived probative implications of other evidence. The selective processing hypothesis asserts that stereotype-consistent evidence is processed more extensively than is inconsistent evidence. Judgment and memory data from the first experiment supported the general notion that stereotype-based discrimination emerges from biased evidence processing. The specific pattern of results supported selective processing rather than interpretation biases as the critical process underlying observed judgmental discrimination. The second experiment corroborated this conclusion by showing that a manipulation that prevents selective processing of the evidence effectively eliminated biases in judgments and recall pertaining to stereotyped targets. Implications for a general understanding of stereotyping and discrimination are discussed.     

A multinomial modeling approach to dissociate different components of the truth effect

The subjective impression that statements are true increases when statements are presented repeatedly. There are two sources for this truth effect: An increase in validity based on recollection (a controlled process) and increase in processing fluency due to repeated exposure (an automatic process). Using multinomial processing trees (MPT), we present a comprehensive model of the truth effect. Furthermore, we show that whilst the increase in processing fluency is indeed automatic, the interpretation and use of that experience is not. Experiment 1 demonstrates the standard use of the fluency experience and Experiment 2 demonstrates that people can change the interpretation of the experience according to its ecological validity. By implication, the truth effect represents the adaptive usage of feedback received from internal processes.     

A cognitive model of pathological worry

We present an evidence-based model of pathological worry in which worry arises from an interaction between involuntary (bottom-up) processes, such as habitual biases in attention and interpretation favouring threat content, and voluntary (top-down) processes, such as attentional control. At a pre-conscious level, these processes influence the competition between mental representations when some correspond to the intended focus of attention and others to threat distracters. Processing biases influence the probability of threat representations initially intruding into awareness as negative thoughts. Worry in predominantly verbal form then develops, influenced by conscious processes such as attempts to resolve the perceived threat and the redirection of attentional control resources to worry content, as well as the continuing influence of habitual processing biases. After describing this model, we present evidence for each component process and for their causal role in pathological worry, together with implications for new directions in the treatment of pathological worry.     

A new look at the syntax-discourse interface: the use of binding principles in sentence processing

Within Generative Grammar, binding constraints on co-reference are usually defined in syntactic terms. However, some researchers have pointed out examples in which syntactically defined binding constraints do not seem to apply, proposing instead that a complete account of linguistic co-reference needs to consider notions of discourse structure. There have been several proposals in the literature for the division of labor between syntax and discourse in the definition of binding constraints. In this paper, we review these proposals in the context of recent work that applies on-line techniques to explore the roles of syntactic and discourse preferences in terms of the time course with which they become active during sentence comprehension. Some of this research suggests that (syntactic) binding principles may be momentarily applied during processing, even in cases in which the final interpretation suggests otherwise. We end the paper by considering the theoretical and methodological implications of this view.     

On data-limited and resource-limited processes

This paper analyzes the effect on performance when several active processes compete for limited processing resources. The principles discussed show that conclusions about the interactions among psychological processes must be made with caution, and some existing assumptions may be unwarranted. When two (or more) processes use the same resources at the same time, they may both interfere with one another, neither may interfere with the other, or one may interfere with a second without any interference from the second process to the first. The important principles are that a process can be limited in its performance either by limits in the amount of available processing resources (such as memory or processing effort) or by limits in the quality of the data available to it. Competition among processes can affect a resource-limited process, but not a data-limited one. If a process continually makes preliminary results available even before it has completed all its operations, then it is possible to compute performance-resource operating characteristics that show how processes interact. A number of experiments from the psychological literature are examined according to these processing principles, resulting in some new interpretations of interactions among competing psychological processes.     

Genes and the parsing of cognitive processes

Now that the human genome has been sequenced there exists the possibility of identifying specific genes that affect human cognition. In this article, recent studies that have found associations between common gene variants and specific cognitive processes are reviewed. Several principles for evaluating this new field are also discussed. The interpretation of results is far from simple because a single gene can affect multiple processes, multiple genes can impact on a single process, and multiple cognitive processes are intercorrelated. In general, functional neuroimaging has been a more sensitive assay of cognitive processing than behavioral measures used alone, although there are important caveats regarding its use. Replicated findings so far involve associations between a COMT polymorphism and prefrontally-based executive functions and neurophysiology, and a BDNF polymorphism and medial-temporal-cortex based declarative memory processes. Implicit in this review is a concern that many of the cognitive paradigms used evolved for purposes well outside those described here. As such it may be necessary to view cognition in novel ways, based on constraints imposed by genomics and neurobiology, in order to increase the effect size of genotypic influences on cognition.     

Drawing attention to meaning.

The engineering of displays that adapt to particular tasks, users, and/or contexts depends on insight into how display content is processed and understood. There are different levels at which content carries meaning, and this paper sets out a model of how these levels of meaning are integrated within human information processing. Such a model is important in establishing a principled basis for adaptation; in particular, it identifies the critical role of a highly schematic level of representation in mediating interpretation of content. The role of this level in effecting forms of adaptation is discussed, and used to argue why recent work at the overlap between graphics and semantic web technologies may now provide a suitable foundation for delivering adaptive and minimal graphics in practice.     

KENOSIS AND EMERGENCE: A THEOLOGICAL SYNTHESIS

Emergence, a hot topic of discussion for the last several years, has implications not only for the study of science but also for theology. I survey Philip Clayton's book Mind & Emergence , drawing from it and applying some of its philosophical principles to a theological interpretation of emergence. This theological interpretation is supplemented by a brief examination of relevant biblical usages of the term kenosis. From this exploration of kenosis, I assert that the Spirit is kenotically poured into creation, which onsets the long and laborious process of prebiotic evolution, leading to biological evolution toward increasing complexity. The complexification of matter, then, has its ontological origin in and through the agency of the Spirit of God. As such, the concept of creatio continua , continuing creation, is defended. The Spirit enables emergence by endowing creation and creatures with the ability to unfold by apparent natural processes according to their own inherent potentialities and possibilities. This essay contributes to a systematic theology of creation by constructing a theological synthesis between kenosis and emergence.     

Adherence to Wraparound Principles and Association with Outcomes

Maintaining fidelity to the principles of the Wraparound process in serving children with emotional and behavioral disorders is a high priority. However, the assumption that greater adherence to the model will yield superior outcomes has not been tested. The current study investigated associations between adherence to Wraparound principles, as assessed by the Wraparound Fidelity Index, second version (WFI), and child and family outcomes in one federally funded system-of-care site. Results demonstrated that higher fidelity was associated with better behavioral, functioning, restrictiveness of living, and satisfaction outcomes. No associations were found for several additional outcomes making interpretation difficult. Our study provides initial support for the hypothesis that maintaining fidelity to the philosophical principles of Wraparound is important to achieving outcomes. The study also provides support for the construct validity of the WFI as a service process measure.