Psychological and demographic correlates of career patterns

Recent years have witnessed a growing diversity of career patterns, resulting from the relative decline of stable employment. In the present study of 1368 employed and self-employed German adults career pattern diversity was assessed using nine pictograms. The goal was to identify psychological and demographic correlates of these patterns and to answer the question of whether they differed for participants from the former (communist) East and the capitalist West. Findings indicated that upward-pointing career patterns still connected to extrinsic criteria such as income and job security. With regard to psychological correlates, upward patterns connected to lower work-related demands imposed by social change and a higher level of personal and social resources. Only in the West, upward patterns related to male gender and high education, reflecting more traditional access to upwardly mobile career opportunities.     

Salient features in 3-D haptic shape perception

Shape is an important cue for recognizing an object by touch. Several features, such as edges, curvature, surface area, and aspect ratio, are associated with 3-D shape. To investigate the saliency of 3-D shape features, we developed a haptic search task. The target and distractor items consisted of shapes (cube, sphere, tetrahedron, cylinder, and ellipsoid) that differed in several of these features. Exploratory movements were left as unconstrained as possible. Our results show that this type of haptic search task can be performed very efficiently (25 msec/item) and that edges and vertices are the most salient features. Furthermore, very salient local features, such as edges, can also be perceived through enclosure, an exploratory procedure usually associated with global shape. Since the subjects had to answer as quickly as possible, this suggests that speed may be a factor in selecting the appropriate exploratory procedure.     

Haptic identification of curved surfaces

In two experiments, the active haptic identification of three-dimensional mathematically welldefined objects is investigated. The objects, quadric surfaces, are defined in terms of the shape index, a quantity describing the shape, and curvedness, a quantity describing overall curvature. Both shape index and curvedness are found to have a significant influence on haptic shape identification . Concave surfaces lead to a larger spread in responses than convex ones. Hyperbolic surfaces show a slight tendency to be identified with more difficulty than elliptic ones. Surfaces with a high curvedness are identified more easily than those with a low curvedness. Results from experiments with constant and with random curvedness are indistinguishable . It is concluded that shape index and curvedness are psychophysically not confounded.     

Sich verlieben und die große Liebe

Although romantic love plays an important role for many people, empirical studies on romantic love have only been carried out recently. This article describes the results of a questionnaire on romantic love completed by 606 volunteers. The results show that nearly everyone has had the personal experience of falling in love at least once. According to the reports in the questionnaire, men and women do not differ with respect to the frequency and to the velocity with which they fall in love. Women, however, more often believe that their respective partner has fallen in love at a relatively early stage, whilst men believe that their respective partner has fallen in love only later. Both men and women exhibit distinct physical and emotional phenomena when they have fallen in love – women more pronouncedly than men. The quality of the relationship between men and women appears to be better if the partners have initially fallen in love with each other. From the point of view of couple therapy, the quality and quantity of being in love appear to be less important than the methods of coping with it, i.e. accepting that the initial romantic love period may not stay forever but must be replaced by another type of love, or accepting that a couple can also have a highly satisfactory relationship, although there was no initial period of romantic love.     

The visual contour in depth

We asked subjects to match points on the surface of a smooth three-dimensional (3-D) shape with points on the surface of another object that was geometrically identical to the first object but was placed in a different pose, was differently textured, and was differently shaded. In all cases, the fiducial point was on the rim of one of the objects (i.e., the boundary of the visible region of the surface), whereas the matching point was well within the silhouette of the other object. This allowed us to draw (preliminary) conclusions concerning the way monocular human observers are able to handle the neighborhood of the rim, where the local slant assumes arbitrarily high values. All experiments were done in real space with real objects (no computer-simulated scenes), the points being indicated with laser beam illumination. The subject was given control over the direction of the laser beams and was thus able to perform the task by adjustment from the vantage position. We studied both consistency (whether the subject’s judgments were invariant against changes of relative pose) and veridicality (whether the depth of the visual contour as calculated from the settings agreed with the true distance as measured by mechanical means). Subjects caught much of the 3-D structure of the contour but did deviate appreciably and apparently idiosyncratically from the true geometry.     

Detection of spatial discontinuities in first-order optical flow fields

We investigated the extent to which the human visual system can detect discontinuities in firstorder optical flow fields. We constructed two types of spatial discontinuities: a circular split field with a straight edge and a disk with annular surround. We used two different first-order optical flow components: an expansion and a rotation. We found an intriguing difference in the detection thresholds for straight and circular discontinuities. Whereas straight discontinuities yielded thresholds of 10%— 50% difference in expansion or rotation, circular discontinuities could, at first, only be detected at extreme differences (>>100%). After a learning period, thresholds for such stimuli decreased, but they remained significantly higher than thresholds for the straight edge. Thresholds rose for stimuli that formed a gradual transition between a circular and a straight edge, and they decreased with increasing eccentricity of the circular discontinuity. Results suggest that symmetry in the stimulus, defined by the coincidence of the center of expansion or rotation and the center of the circular discontinuity, was responsible for the difference in thresholds for circular and straight discontinuities.     

Job Pressures, Organizational Support, and Health Among Norwegian Women Managers

Questionnaire data were collected from 191 professional and managerial women in Norway. Measures included demographic and work characteristics, job pressures (hours worked, level of management, work-family conflict), organizational supports (acceptance, support, training and development, challenging and visible jobs), and health indicators (life satisfaction, psychosomatic complaints, emotional exhaustion). Emotional exhaustion and psychosomatic complaints were combined into a stress index. Results indicated that women who experienced high role conflict and work-family pressures also reported poor health outcomes and little life satisfaction. Organizational initiatives to support and develop women's careers were associated with lower exhaustion and psychosomatic symptomatology and more life satisfaction. While the relationship between women's employment and physical and psychological well-being is not clear-cut, there is perhaps a need for organizations to focus on initiatives that will allow diversity in the choices women make with regard to involvement in careers and family, as well as a need to find ways to support and encourage such diversity. Not only may this have a beneficial effect on women workers' health and energy to use at work, but it may also make way for alternative career paths into top management positions for professional women.     

Similar mechanisms underlie curvature comparison by static and dynamic touch

In four experiments, we tested whether haptic comparison of curvature ranging from ?41m to +41m is qualitatively the same for static and for dynamic touch. In Experiments 1 and 3, we tested whether static and dynamic curvature discrimination are based on height differences, attitude (slope) differences, curvature differences, or a combination of these geometrical variables. It was found that both static and dynamic haptic curvature discrimination are based on attitude differences. In Experiments 2 and 4, we tested whether this mechanism leads to errors in the comparison of stimuli with different lengths for static and dynamic touch, respectively. If the judgments are based on attitude differences, subjects will make systematic errors in these comparisons. In both experiments, we found that subjects compared the curvatures of strips of the same length veridically, whereas they made systematic errors if they were required to compare the curvatures of strips of different lengths. Longer stimuli were judged to be more curved than shorter stimuli with the same curvature. We conclude that similar mechanisms underlie static and dynamic haptic curvature comparison. Moreover, additional data comparison showed that static and dynamic curvature comparison is not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively similar.     

Amygdala activation during masked presentation of emotional faces predicts conscious detection of threat-related faces

It has been argued that critical functions of the human amygdala are to modulate the moment-to-moment vigilance level and to enhance the processing and the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing material. In this functional magnetic resonance study, pictures of human faces bearing fearful, angry, and happy expressions were presented to nine healthy volunteers using a backward masking procedure based on neutral facial expression. Activation of the left and right amygdala in response to the masked fearful faces (compared to neutral faces) was significantly correlated with the number of fearful faces detected. In addition, right but not left amygdala activation in response to the masked angry faces was significantly related to the number of angry faces detected. The present findings underscore the role of the amygdala in the detection and consolidation of memory for marginally perceptible threatening facial expression.