Das Klimakterium als Herausforderung

The menopause is like puberty a period of life, which implies an interaction between hormonal changes and personal reorientation. In addition to the hormonal changes a variety of psychosocial changes occur. Complaints may indicate a lack of orientation in this phase. One third of German women experience a significant deterioration in life quality because of their complaints related to menopause. These women attribute their complaints mainly to their individual life-attitudes and the hormonal changes. The gynaecologist has, therefore, a high responsibility in counselling, since empirical studies have shown, that psychosocial factors like self-confidence, quality of partnership, job-satisfaction and family network substantially influence the occurrence of specific complaints and the life-quality during that time. Furthermore, social aspects are very important. The results of the German cohort study of women’s health, showing a generally better psychological well-being as compared to younger women, are remarkable in this context. The present generation of women perceive midlife positively as a period of life allowing a fresh start.     

Psychometric Properties of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales in an Undergraduate Sample: Classical Test Theory,Item Response Theory,and Differential Item Functioning

The Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales are widely used for assessing schizotypy in nonclinical and clinical samples. However, they were developed using classical test theory (CTT) and have not had their psychometric properties examined with more sophisticated measurement models. The present study employed item response theory (IRT) as well as traditional CTT to examine psychometric properties of four of the schizotypy scales on the item and scale level, using a large sample of undergraduate students (n = 6,137). In addition, we investigated differential item functioning (DIF) for sex and ethnicity. The analyses revealed many strengths of the four scales, but some items had low discrimination values and many items had high DIF. The results offer useful guidance for applied users and for future development of these scales.     

Parental conflict resolution styles and children's adjustment: children's appraisals and emotion regulation as mediators

Guided by the emotional security hypothesis and the cognitive-contextual framework, the authors investigated whether the associations between negative parental conflict resolution styles and children's internalizing and externalizing problems were mediated by children's appraisals of threat and self-blame and their emotion regulation. Participants were 192 Swiss 2-parent families with children aged 9-12 years (M age = 10.62 years, SD = 0.41 years). Structural equation modeling was used to test the empirical validity of the theoretical model. Results indicated that children's maladaptive emotion regulation mediated the association between negative parental conflict resolution styles and children's internalizing as well as externalizing problems. Whereas perceived threat was related only to children's internalizing problems, self-blame did not mediate the links between negative parental conflict resolution styles and children's adjustment. Implications for understanding the mechanisms by which exposure to interparental conflict could lead to children's maladjustment and limitations of the study are discussed.     

Modulation of facial mimicry by attitudes

The current experiment explored the influence of attitudes on facial reactions to emotional faces. The participants’ attitudes (positive, neutral, and negative) towards three types of characters were manipulated by written reports. Afterwards participants saw happy, neutral, and sad facial expressions of the respective characters while their facial muscular reactions (M. Corrugator supercilii and M. Zygomaticus major) were recorded electromyografically. Results revealed facial mimicry reactions to happy and sad faces of positive characters, but less and even incongruent facial muscular reactions to happy and sad faces of negative characters. Overall, the results show that attitudes, formed in a few minutes, and only by reports and not by own experiences, can moderate automatic non-verbal social behavior, i.e. facial mimicry.     

Differential effects of social and non‐social reward on response inhibition in children and adolescents

An important issue in the field of clinical and developmental psychopathology is whether cognitive control processes, such as response inhibition, can be specifically enhanced by motivation. To determine whether non‐social (i.e. monetary) and social (i.e. positive facial expressions) rewards are able to differentially improve response inhibition accuracy in typically developing children and adolescents, an ‘incentive’ go/no‐go task was applied with reward contingencies for successful inhibition. In addition, the impact of children's personality traits (such as reward seeking and empathy) on monetary and social reward responsiveness was assessed in 65 boys, ages 8 to 12 years. All subjects were tested twice: At baseline, inhibitory control was assessed without reward, and then subjects were pseudorandomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, including (1) social reward only, (2) monetary reward only, (3) mixed social and monetary reward, or (4) a retest condition without reward. Both social and non‐social reward significantly improved task performance, although larger effects were observed for monetary reward. The higher the children scored on reward seeking scales, the larger was their improvement in response inhibition, but only if monetary reward was used. In addition, there was a tendency for an association between empathic skills and benefits from social reward. These data suggest that social incentives do not have an equally strong reinforcing value as compared to financial incentives. However, different personality traits seem to determine to what extent a child profits from different types of reward. Clinical implications regarding probable hyposensitivity to social reward in subjects with autism and dysregulated reward‐seeking behaviour in children with attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are discussed.     

Brief assessment of schizotypy: Developing short forms of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales

The Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales—the Perceptual Aberration, Magical Ideation, Physical Anhedonia, and Revised Social Anhedonia Scales—have been used extensively since their development in the 1970s and 1980s. Based on psychometric analyses using item response theory, the present work presents 15-item short forms of each scale. In addition to being briefer, the short forms omit items with high differential item functioning. Based on data from a sample of young adults (n = 1144), the short forms have strong internal consistency, and they mirror effects found for the longer scales. They thus appear to be a good option for researchers interested in the brief assessment of schizotypic traits. The items are listed in an Appendix A.     

Attitudes towards people with AIDS and avoidance behavior: Automatic and reflective bases of behavior

We tested the assumption that implicit attitude measures are related to automatic behavior, while explicit attitude measures are related to reflective behavioral intentions. In our study, attitudes towards persons with AIDS were assessed with both the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and an explicit attitude measure. Behavioral intentions were measured through a questionnaire. Automatic approach and avoidance predispositions were operationalized as the speed with which a computer mouse was either pulled towards (approach) or pushed away from the body (avoidance). Consistent with our expectations, the IAT was related to the automatic approach and avoidance behaviors, while the explicit attitude measure was related to behavioral intentions. These findings support the idea that automatic and reflective processes exert independent effects on behavior.     

Local and global processing in savant artists with autism

We explored the hypothesis that an enhanced local processing style is characteristic of both art and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by examining local and global processing in savant artists with ASD. Specifically, savant artists were compared against non-talented individuals with ASD or mild/moderate learning difficulties (MLD), as well as artistically talented or nontalented students, on the block-design task and meaningful and abstract versions of the embedded figures test (EFT). Results demonstrated that there were no significant differences between the meaningful and abstract versions of the EFT, in any of the groups. This suggests that the primary process governing performance on this task was perceptual (local), rather than conceptual (global). More interestingly, the savant artists performed above the level of the ASD and MLD groups on the block-design test, but not the EFT. Despite both the block-design task and the EFT measuring local processing abilities, we suggest that this result is due to the block-design task being an active construction task (requiring the conversion of a visual input into a motor output), whereas the EFT is a passive recognition task. Therefore, although an enhanced local processing style is an important aspect of savant artistic talent, motor control also appears to be a necessary skill.     

Effects of variation in the warning signal on reaction times of severe subnormals

Reaction times of normal and subnormal subjects were compared, when a warning stimulus varied in modality as well as in its temporal relation to the RT signal. When the warning stimulus was in a different modality from the RT signal, reaction times were shorter than when both were in the same modality. Mongols, in contrast to the other subjects, responded relatively faster to light than to sound.

The effect of varying the time interval between warning and signal was linearly related to response speed. The results are discussed in respect to the comparative alerting effects of temporal relations between stimuli and their different modalities.