Direct brain communication: neuroelectric and metabolic approaches at Tübingen

The brain–computer interface (BCI) provides users with the possibility of sending messages and commands to the external world without using their muscles, thus enabling communication to occur independent of movement. Such a possibility is of utmost importance for paralyzed patients who may otherwise lose their ability to communicate. Enhanced methodology and the development of faster computers have substantially improved applications and offer new possibilities in this field. To date, there have been over 20 BCI research groups working on different approaches. In this paper, we review our studies of BCI based on electric and metabolic activity of the brain.     

RACE DIFFERENCES IN TERMINATION AT WORK: THE ROLE OF EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY

Prior research has demonstrated that race, at least to some extent, is related to employment decisions such as selection and performance appraisals. However, little prior research has addressed the impact of race on employment termination. The current study investigates whether race is related to employment termination and highlights the importance of education, an important component of human capital, in understanding racial differences in termination. Results based on 548 employees from a large hotel chain indicate that race is related to termination; however, race is not predictive of termination when education is included in the regression analysis as a predictor. These findings support the notion that a societal level variable (i.e., education) is an important factor in reducing racial inequality in employment practices.     

Strategy Induction Enhances Creativity in Figural Divergent Thinking

Instructional effects in creative‐thinking tasks are important to understand in order to promote creative performance of individuals. In divergent‐thinking tasks, for example, instructional and strategic enhancement effects have been extensively studied for verbal tasks. However, while studies on instructional enhancement effects on creative drawing tasks exist, it is surprising that strategy enhancement in figural divergent thinking is still underresearched. In this study, we used a strategy manipulation approach to reassess the role of executive strategy implementation and the moderating role of an indicator of fluid intelligence, figural analogical reasoning, in two types of figural divergent‐thinking tasks (abstract vs. concrete). The sample comprised N = 75 high‐school students. Importantly, we found strategic enhancement effects by combining strategy instructions with a prompt to “be creative.” This combined instruction was contrasted with a standard instruction, and main effects were found for overall, concrete, and abstract creativity. Moreover, we found in a regression analysis a main effect for figural analogical reasoning on overall creativity and creativity for only the concrete object tasks. An expected interaction effect of instruction and figural analogical reasoning was not found. As another addition, the role of current motivation in figural divergent thinking was explored.     

Age-of-acquisition and subjective frequency estimates for all generally known monosyllabic French words and their relation with other psycholinguistic variables

Ratings for age of acquisition (AoA) and subjective frequency were collected for the 1,493 monosyllabic French words that were most known to French students. AoA ratings were collected by asking participants to estimate in years the age at which they learned each word. Subjective frequency ratings were collected on a 7-point scale, ranging from never encountered to encountered several times daily. The results were analyzed to address the relationship between AoA and subjective frequency ratings with other psycholinguistic variables (objective frequency, imageability, number of letters, and number of orthographic neighbors). The results showed high reliability ratings with other databases. Supplementary materials for this study may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Does the Implicit Association Test for assessing anxiety measure trait and state variance?

The stability of the Implicit Association Test for assessing anxiety (IAT‐Anxiety) is lower than its internal consistency, indicating that the IAT‐Anxiety measures both stable and occasion‐specific variance. This suggests that the IAT‐Anxiety may be not only a valid measure of trait anxiety but also one of state anxiety. To test this assumption, two studies were conducted in which state anxiety was experimentally induced by a public speaking task. However, both studies showed that the IAT‐Anxiety score did not change when a state of anxiety was induced. Thus, it seems that occasion‐specific factors other than variations in state anxiety lead to occasion‐specific variance in the IAT‐Anxiety score. Implications for the indirect assessment of personality dispositions with the IAT are discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Relations Between Emotion Regulation, Parenting, and Psychopathology in Young Maltreated Children in Out of Home Care

Young maltreated children, birth to three years, represent the age group with the highest rates of maltreatment in the United States (ACYF 2007). There are few studies to date that have investigated early childhood maltreatment and its effects on emotion regulatory processes and psychopathology. In response, the current investigation uses a dyadic assessment procedure to examine the relationship between parenting, emotion regulation, and symptoms of psychopathology among maltreating and non-maltreating parent–child interactions. The participants in this study were 123 children (66 maltreated and 57 nonmaltreated) from ages 1–3. Child and parent affect and child effortful control were observed during a parent–child interaction task. Symptoms of psychopathology were measured using the Child Behavior Checklist. The maltreated children exhibited more anger, more internalizing symptomatology, and less positive affect compared to non-maltreated children. Among maltreated children, emotion dysregulation was associated with internalizing symptomatology. Moreover, these data reveal parental positive affect was associated with lower child internalizing symptomatology and parental anger was associated with higher child internalizing symptomatology in the entire sample. This investigation offers evidence that emotion dysregulation subsequent to poor dyadic interactions is associated with early child maltreatment. These data suggest that maltreated children experience difficulties in emotion regulation which may be related to their higher levels of behavioral symptomatology.     

The Role of the Group in Individual Functioning: School Identification and the Psychological Well-Being of Staff and Students

Many studies have demonstrated that organisations exert a powerful impact on their members, but the mechanisms through which this occurs are not well understood. In the present paper, using social identity and self-categorisation theories as theoretical frameworks, we explore the role that social identity plays in affecting individual well-being of staff ( N = 113) and students ( N = 693) in two Australian high schools. Well-being includes positive aspects of personal functioning, such as self-esteem, positive affect, and job involvement, but also negative aspects, such as depression, anxiety, loss of emotional control, aggressive and disruptive behaviour. In line with predictions, social identification was significantly related to, and mediated the relationship between, organisational factors and individual psychological well-being. This work provides a bridge between social psychological concepts and the clinical and educational domains. It reinforces the need to integrate the role of the social self and social identity processes in understanding the (individual) psychology of the person.     

Book reviews

A stor , J ames Michael Fordham; Innovations in Analytical Psychology
K ast , V erena . Joy, Inspiration, and Hope
K ugler , P aul (ed.). Jungian Perspectives on Clinical Supervision
R obertson , R obin . Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Gödel, and the History of Archetypes
R oss , L ena B, & R oy , M anisha (eds). Cast the First Stone: Ethics in Analytic Practice
H acking , I an . Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory     

Investigations of perception and imagery using CAEs: The role of experimental design and psychophysical method

Orientation-contingent color aftereffects (CAEs) were measured using 174 observers ran-domly allocated to one of eight experimental conditions formed by the factorial combination of three two-level factors. These were experimental design (pretest and posttest measures taken vs. posttest measures taken alone), psychophysical method (forced-choice vs. magnitude estimation), and inspection procedure (inspection of real contours vs. inspection of imagined contours). In addition to color responses, written introspective reports of the strategies used in providing color responses were obtained. As a basis for the rejection of observers using inappropriate strategies, reported strategies were coded as appropriate or inappropriate. An analysis of the color reports of all observers was performed, as well as two analyses of the color reports of only those observers identified as using appropriate response strategies. In all cases, the results showed that CAEs were reported after inspection of real contours irrespective of the experimental design or psychophysical method used. There were no significant CAEs reported in any conditions that involved the imagination of contours. A separate analysis of the relationship between observers’ response strategies, the coding of these strategies, and observers’ actual color reports revealed some problems concerning the use of such introspective techniques. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of theoretical assumptions about the nature of imagery and perception.