Glaubhaftigkeitsbegutachtung – mehr als Merkmalsorientierte Inhaltsanalyse

The diagnostic value of criteria-based content analyses (CBCA) for assessing statement credibility has been widely acknowledged. However, theoretical considerations and empirical results show that CBCA is basically appropriate for discrimination between fabricated and truthful accounts. CBCA does not differentiate between truthful and suggested statements and can therefore not help to decide upon a suggestion hypothesis. Moreover truthful accounts do not always contain many CBCA criteria. It is argued that CBCA is for these reasons not a method for substantiating a truthful statement, but a method for rejecting a fabrication hypothesis As a whole Statement validity analysis is the process of systematically generating and evaluating hypotheses about potential origins of the given statement. Only in a subgroup of cases CBCA constitutes the major part of this diagnostic procedure.     

Decision making and professional experience: an experimental study of generating, evaluating and modifying diagnostic hypotheses

Experimental investigations on generation, evaluation, and modification of diagnostic hypotheses in symptom pattern classification revealed in different domains (e.g. clinical decision making) that reasoning in non-experts and experts differ in the 'content' (e.g. issue-directed substance of concepts) rather than in the 'form' of reasoning (e.g. number, specificity of hypotheses). These results are essentially accounted for by the experts' upper-level flexibility in the interpretation of data. In a two-factorial design (competence x predictive value of data), patients' clinical data with varying predictive value were given singularly in succession to two groups (experts and novices; n = 20) of subjects. The task of the subjects was (a) to name their assumptions and (b) give a summarizing decision on the--probable--diagnostic category of hypothetical cases. Results: Between experts and novices no difference was found in the number and degree of specification of hypotheses; in summarizing decisions, experts considered more categories as plausible than novices; on patient data with low predictive value, experts considered more specific categories. The moment of hypothesis formation depends not on the competence level but on the predictive value of the patient's clinical data.     

Future orientation of institutionalized and noninstitutionalized delinquents and nondelinquents

The present study is an analysis of the relationship between delinquency, institutionalization and future orientation, based on a social-learning theoretical framework. Two hundred and forty male adolescents (institutionalized and noninstitutionalized delinquents and nondelinquents) answered open and structured questions concerning their anticipations and evaluations of the future. The data were analysed by analyses of variance and t-tests and partly confirm the hypotheses: Delinquents structure their future in a less differentiated, less extended, and more internal way than nondelinquents. This was especially true for the institutionalized delinquents. However, delinquents structured their fears concerning their personal development more extensively than nondelinquents. Future orientation varied according to the length of institutionalization in different domains of life. These results do not support the dominant assumption of the literature that delinquents have an unrealistic future orientation. Rather, it is shown here that institutionalized delinquents anticipate rather negative future events which they expect to occur shortly after the time of their release. However, the present results have to be cautiously interpreted on account of the special selection of the sample and the rather short duration of institutionalization. Also, the method of a differentiated measurement of future orientation used here is hardly practiced in the literature though such a conceptualization as a multidimensional construct seems to be theoretically fruitful.     

The relationship between expertise and evaluative extremity: the moderating role of experts' task characteristics

Past research has yielded contradictory results with regard to the relationship between expertise and evaluative extremity. The authors suggest that this apparent contradiction is due to the task characteristics of the expert activity. The primary task of certain experts is to formulate overall (configural) judgments and to generate clear, unambiguous answers. These experts tend to give relatively extreme evaluations. Other experts generally communicate the implications of the different choice alternatives and explain featural aspects of the stimuli. These experts are characterized by relatively moderate evaluations. The research reported in this article shows that experts whose expert activity involves configural judgments tend to make more extreme evaluations than experts who generally provide others with featural explanations. It also demonstrates that experts' task characteristics affect the way they store stimulus-relevant attributes in memory.     

Racial Athletic Stereotype Confirmation in College Football Recruiting

The present study tested real-world racial stereotype use in the context of college athletic recruiting. Stereotype confirmation suggests that observers use stereotypes as hypotheses and interpret relevant evidence in a biased way that confirms their stereotypes. Shifting standards suggest that the evaluative standard to which we hold a target changes as a function of their group membership. We examined whether stereotype confirmation and shifting standards effects would be seen in college football coaches during recruiting. College football coaches evaluated a Black or White player on several attributes and made both zero- and non-zero-sum allocations. Results suggested that coaches used the evidence presented to develop biased subjective evaluations of the players based on race while still maintaining equivalent objective evaluations. Coaches also allocated greater overall resources to the Black recruit than the White recruit.     

Nonexpert Evaluations on Architectural Design Creativity Across Cultures

This article examines the relationship between cultural differences and the nonexpert evaluations of architectural design creativity. In study I, Caucasian Americans (N = 126) and East Asians (N = 137), who did not major in architecture and urban design, evaluated the novelty and appropriateness of 5 unusual architectural shapes, selected by 5 experts in the field of architecture. In study II, the 2 cultural groups selected preferred alternatives from 3 pairs of silhouettes of architectural shapes that were distinctive and indistinctive from the adjacent environments. The data were collected by an online survey tool. Multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) and subsequent t-tests revealed that East Asians awarded lower scores as regards the novelty and appropriateness of unusual, novel architectural forms, and that they accepted unusual and distinctive architectural shapes less than the Caucasian Americans did. These results indicated that cultural differences between these 2 groups affected the nonexpert creativity evaluations, as introduced in previous cross-cultural studies. The East Asians’ creativity evaluations and preference tests were possibly influenced by their perceptions of contextual information and emphasis on the holistic and interdependent relationships amongst environmental elements, whereas the Caucasian Americans’ evaluations were related to their analytic tendency to be aware of focal objects and independent identity.     

Differentiating accounts of actual,suggested and fabricated childhood events using the judgment of memory characteristics questionnaire

Statement analysis procedures are used in forensic settings to classify reported events as experienced or non‐experienced. These procedures are typically validated using accounts of actual events and intentionally fabricated events. However, people can also unintentionally develop false memories. To examine whether inclusion of accounts of suggested events affects classification accuracy, we validated the judgment of memory characteristics questionnaire (JMCQ) statement analysis procedure using all three statement types. Participants attempted to recall two actual events and one suggested event from their childhood over two cognitive interviews, then intentionally fabricated an account of another childhood event. Fourteen of the 34 participants (41%) reported having experienced the suggested event. Independent raters then used the JMCQ to analyse and classify each type of statement from this participant subset. Inclusion of accounts of suggested events did not reduce classification accuracy. Raters tended to classify accounts of both fabricated and suggested events as non‐experienced. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Casuistic Reasoning in Expert Narratives on Healthy Eating

Individualisation of healthy eating is a broad tendency in Western culture and is becoming a popular ideal in nutrition science. Public perception of dietary knowledge is central to this individualisation and many experts now aim to present dietary knowledge in a way which relates to individual experience, as well as a casuistic style in which particular cases are discussed in relation to general, universal principles. Analysis of casuistic narrative styles in the public communication about healthy eating by experts makes explicit their flexible use of both particular cases and universal claims, in which clinical and personal cases are narratively employed by the experts to invite readers to personally consider dietary knowledge. Such casuistic narration by experts relates human agency and particular bodies to universal concepts in a way that has generative and critical functions with respect to dietary knowledge and understanding. The public articulation of clinical narratives by experts make salient the intersubjective emergence and accumulation of dietary knowledge between expert reasoning and lay understanding. Personal narratives have an essential role in presenting casuistic reasoning through experts’ personal lives and making their own bodies relevant to public communication about healthy eating. This emphasises the experts’ personal agency in relationship to common norms and general knowledge. Furthermore, both clinical and personal narratives are used by experts in their assessment of the shortcomings in public health messages. Experts’ casuistic narration thus does not merely construct credibility but has epistemic functions in constructing dietary knowledge tangible with respect to actual eating practices.     

Determining the significance of scale values from multidimensional scaling profile analysis using a resampling method

Although multidimensional scaling (MDS) profile analysis is widely used to study individual differences, there is no objective way to evaluate the statistical significance of the estimated scale values. In the present study, a resampling technique (bootstrapping) was used to construct confidence limits for scale values estimated from MDS profile analysis. These bootstrap confidence limits were used, in turn, to evaluate the significance of marker variables of the profiles. The results from analyses of both simulation data and real data suggest that the bootstrap method may be valid and may be used to evaluate hypotheses about the statistical significance of marker variables of MDS profiles.     

Judgment of the credibility of rape allegations: a content analytic field experiment]

This study explores the issue of whether allegations of rape can be correctly identified as true or false on the basis of a set of content criteria used successfully in previous studies with respect to children's accounts of sexual abuse. A sample of 30 authentic protocols of police interrogations of women reporting rape were selected for the study. Fifteen cases were classified as false accounts because the complaints eventually confessed to having fabricated their allegations. The remaining cases were classified as true rapes on the basis of medical and other corroborating evidence. A group of experienced police officers (N = 30) judged these cases in terms of their credibility on the basis of the 19 content criteria suggested by Steller & K?hnken (1989) and gave an overall judgment of the true vs. false nature of each statement. A second group of police officers (N = 22) judged the credibility of the statements without reference to these criteria. The findings from a series of discriminant function analyses showed that the set of criteria as a whole is successful in distinguishing between true and false rape allegations. The results of the stepwise discriminant function analyses reveal which criteria in particular contribute to the correct identification of true and false cases. However, the higher percentage of correct classifications in the group using the content criteria was only marginally significant compared to the second group judging the cases without reference to the criteria. Altogether, the findings of this study support the basic tenet of statement analysis that the linguistic features of a statement contain essential clues for assessing its credibility.     

Organisation and evocation of the semantic knowledge: a non-abstractive approach

The majority of the models which attempt to explain category-specific deficits are based on the assumption that the conceptual knowledge is represented in a permanent way in memory (abstractive view). showed that a non-abstractive view would be more suitable to account for some of these cases. The present study aims to assess the hypotheses on the meaning evocation process as formulated by these authors, using a property verification task conducted on healthy subjects. The data were in agreement with these hypotheses and would be more hardly accounted in the frame of the abstractive view.     

Organization justice evaluations, job control, and occupational strain.

To explore how organizational justice evaluations affect the occupational stress process, the authors formulated and tested the following 2 hypotheses: (a) The effect of job control on strain is mediated by justice evaluations, and (b) justice evaluations moderate the effect of job control on occupational strain. The results of structural equation modeling, based on data collected from 688 employees, suggest that job control affects strain through justice evaluations. Thus, the results of this study supported the 1st hypothesis and provided evidence that perceptions of the organization are potential factors contributing to employee health.     

Types of Creativity and Visualization in Teams of Different Educational Specialization

This research is the first to examine different types of creativity dimensions in relation to different types of visualization on a team level, by comparing adolescences’ teams of different specialization (visual artist, scientists, and humanities) during a complex creative task in an ecologically valid educational setting First, the difference between all teams’ creative outputs (drawings) was compared in terms of their visual characteristics and represented content based on parameters derived from the content analysis of visual media. Second, the teams’ creative performance was compared using evaluations of experts from different professional domains. Based on the evidence from examination of teams’ creative products (final drawings) and their evaluations by professionals, this research suggests that object visualization is related to artistic creativity and spatial visualization is related to scientific creativity on the team-level. Furthermore, the findings provide a clear indication that assessing general creativity independently of the domain, as it has been done so far in most team creativity literature, might be somewhat limited.     

Basic statistics and the inconsistency of multiple comparison procedures.

This paper has two main themes. First, the various statistical measures used in this journal are summarized and their interrelationships described by way of a flow chart. These are the pooled standard deviation, the pooled variance or mean square error (MSE), the standard error of each treatment mean (SEM) and of the difference between two treatment means (SED), and the least difference between two means which is significant at (e.g.) the 5% level of significance (LSD(5%)). The last three measures can be displayed as vertical bars in graphs, and the relationship between the lengths of these bars is graphically illustrated. It is suggested that the LSD is the most useful of these three measures. Second, when the experimenter has no prior hypotheses to be tested using analysis of variance "contrasts," a multiple comparison procedure (MCP) that examines all pair-wise differences between treatment means, may be appropriate. In this paper a fictitious experimental data set is used to compare several well-known McPs by focussing on a particular operating characteristic, the consistency of the results between an overall analysis of all treatments and an analysis of a subset of the experimental treatments. The procedure that behaves best according to this criterion is the unrestricted least significant difference (LSD) procedure. The unrestricted LSD is therefore recommended with the proviso that it be used as a method of generating hypotheses to be tested in subsequent experimentation, not as a method that attempts to simultaneously formulate and test hypotheses.     

Please be Honest and Provide Evidence: Deterrents of Deception in an Online Insurance Fraud Context

The present experiment examined whether people could be deterred from lying in an online insurance claim setting. A total of 96 participants were asked to submit a theft insurance claim. Reflecting real life, submitting a claim that went beyond the actual costs of the stolen items was associated with advantages and disadvantages. Two deterrence factors were introduced: asking claimants to provide evidence that they actually owned the stolen items (Evidence Instruction, often used by insurers) and asking participants to read out before starting to submit the claim that they will be truthful (Honesty Statement, not often used by insurers). We also examined at what stage of the interview claimants embedded their lies in their otherwise truthful stories. The honesty statement but not the evidence instruction made claimants more honest, and participants lied more as the interview progressed. © 2016 The Authors Applied Cognitive Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Psychiatry and religion: consensus reached!

ABSTRACT

In December 2015 the Executive Committee of the World Psychiatric Association accepted a position statement on spirituality and religion in psychiatry. In this contribution the author will (briefly) sketch the background of the development of this position statement, and the criteria it needs to fulfil. The aim of the final result will be explained, and some desiderata with regard to its future will be expressed. The full text of the Position Statement as it has been published in World Psychiatry (February 2016) is added as appendix (permission granted by the editor).     

Tell Me What I Wanted to Hear: Confirmation Effect in Lay Evaluations of Financial Expert Authority

In real life, people engage in interactive decision processes by consulting with experts. However, before taking advice, they must recognise the authority of an expert to assess the quality of the advice. The main goal of this research was to investigate how the confirmation effect affects lay evaluations of the epistemic authority of financial experts. Experiment 1 showed that lay people tend to ascribe greater epistemic authority to those experts whose advice confirms people's opinions, both measured and manipulated. Experiment 2 revealed that when participants' own opinions are not salient, people tend to evaluate experts' authority as higher when their advice confirms social norms. In Experiment 3 we jointly investigated the effects of participants' own opinions and social norms on the evaluations of authority. When both sources of expertise were made salient, decision‐makers favoured advice confirming their own beliefs and used it to evaluate experts' authority. Three interpretations of the role confirmation plays in the experts' authority evaluations are proposed: (1) self‐defensive strategies; (2) processing fluency; and (3) psychological consequences of naïve realism. The paper discusses practical implications of the results. We propose that increasing consumers' knowledge about biases might protect their evaluations of financial advice from being susceptible to the confirmation effect.     

十文钱问题再探

本研究设计了三个实验,探讨了被试在经典的十文钱问题以及与其异质同构的组团旅游问题中的推理情况。实验1通过调查法发现,被试在十文钱异质同构问题中表现出了与十文钱问题同样高的错误率,属于推理错觉问题。在此基础上,实验二、三就其推理错误的可能原因进行了实证探究,结果发现：（1）题目表面特征的弱化能显著提高被试的推理成绩。（2）批判性思维意识与批判性思维技巧的线索提示能显著提高被试的推理成绩。