Plasticity of human spatial cognition: spatial language and cognition covary across cultures

The present paper explores cross-cultural variation in spatial cognition by comparing spatial reconstruction tasks by Dutch and Namibian elementary school children. These two communities differ in the way they predominantly express spatial relations in language. Four experiments investigate cognitive strategy preferences across different levels of task-complexity and instruction. Data show a correlation between dominant linguistic spatial frames of reference and performance patterns in non-linguistic spatial memory tasks. This correlation is shown to be stable across an increase of complexity in the spatial array. When instructed to use their respective non-habitual cognitive strategy, participants were not easily able to switch between strategies and their attempts to do so impaired their performance. These results indicate a difference not only in preference but also in competence and suggest that spatial language and non-linguistic preferences and competences in spatial cognition are systematically aligned across human populations.     

Ethnic Minority‐Majority Asymmetry in National Attitudes around the World: A Multilevel Analysis

Using data from the International Social Survey Programme, this research investigated asymmetric attitudes of ethnic minorities and majorities towards their country and explored the impact of human development, ethnic diversity, and social inequality as country‐level moderators of national attitudes. In line with the general hypothesis of ethnic asymmetry, we found that ethnic, linguistic, and religious majorities were more identified with the nation and more strongly endorsed nationalist ideology than minorities (H1, 33 countries). Multilevel analyses revealed that this pattern of asymmetry was moderated by country‐level characteristics: the difference between minorities and majorities was greatest in ethnically diverse countries and in egalitarian, low inequality contexts. We also observed a larger positive correlation between ethnic subgroup identification and both national identification and nationalism for majorities than for minorities (H2, 20 countries). A stronger overall relationship between ethnic and national identification was observed in countries with a low level of human development. The greatest minority‐majority differences in the relationship between ethnic identification and national attitudes were found in egalitarian countries with a strong welfare state tradition.     

Strategic adaptation to performance objectives in a dual-task setting

How do people interleave attention when multitasking? One dominant account is that the completion of a subtask serves as a cue to switch tasks. But what happens if switching solely at subtask boundaries led to poor performance? We report a study in which participants manually dialed a UK‐style telephone number while driving a simulated vehicle. If the driver were to exclusively return his or her attention to driving after completing a subtask (i.e., using the single break in the xxxxx‐xxxxxx representational structure of the number), then we would expect to see a relatively poor driving performance. In contrast, our results show that drivers choose to return attention to steering control before the natural subtask boundary. A computational modeling analysis shows that drivers had to adopt this strategy to meet the required performance objective of maintaining an acceptable lateral position in the road while dialing. Taken together these results support the idea that people can strategically control the allocation of attention in multitask settings to meet specific performance criteria.     

High regularities in eye-movement patterns reveal the dynamics of the visual working memory allocation mechanism

With only two to five slots of visual working memory (VWM), humans are able to quickly solve complex visual problems to near optimal solutions. To explain the paradox between tightly constrained VWM and impressively complex human visual problem-solving ability, we propose several principles for dynamic VWM allocation. In particular, we propose that complex visual information is represented in a temporal manner using only a few slots of VWM that include global and local visual chunks. We built a model of human traveling salesman problem solving based on these principles of VWM allocation and tested the model with eye-movement data. Exactly as the model predicted, human eye movements during traveling salesman problem solving have precise quantitative regularities with regard to both the general statistical pattern of attentional fixations and how they vary across individuals with different VWM capacities. Even though VWM capacity is very limited, eye movements dynamically allocate VWM resources to both local and global information, enabling attention to fine details without loss of the big picture.     

Evidenzbasierte Psychotherapie der Depression

Depressive disorders are among the most frequent reasons for utilizing the health care system. Despite the availability of efficacious treatments and further advances throughout the last years, there is still a need for improving diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. A promising approach is the implementation of evidence- and consensus-based guidelines. The German “Nationale VersorgungsLeitlinie Unipolare Depression” are evidence- and consensus-based clinical practise guidelines for patients with unipolar depression. All relevant stakeholders have been involved in its development and have passed the final version at the end of 2009 to foster compliance throughout. The available evidence allows the derivation of differentiated treatment recommendations, also with regard to concomitant antidepressant medication or as alternative treatment options. In acute therapy watchful waiting over 14 days is recommended for mild depression and psychotherapy after persistence of symptoms. In cases of moderate depression, psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy are equally recommended, in cases of severe depression a combination of both is recommended.     

Exploratory Health Disparities Research: The Need to Provide a Tangible Benefit to Vulnerable Respondents

This article examines the responsibilities of researchers who conduct exploratory research to provide a service to vulnerable respondents. The term "service" is used to denote the provision of a tangible benefit in relation to the research question that is apart from the altruistic research benefits. This article explores what this "service" could look like, who might be responsible for providing it, and the challenges associated with such a service. The article argues that not providing a tangible benefit to vulnerable research participants is inconsistent with the principle of social justice that undergirds much of the rationale for conducting health disparities research.     

Models of developmental regulation in emerging adulthood and links to symptomatology

This contribution deals with theoretical conceptualizations and empirical research analyzing young adults' activity in reaching normative developmental goals in emerging adulthood. It explores whether establishing a stable relationship, starting a career, and achieving residential independence are still important developmental goals now as compared to earlier decades, and how emerging adults strive to achieve them. Findings, based on a longitudinal study of 146 German emerging adults, support the model of adjustment, with developmental goals being adjusted to changes in attainment. Finally, our findings indicate that focusing, selecting, and sequencing of developmental goals during emerging adulthood is adaptive for a healthy transition.     

The Foundation of an Interpretative Sociology: A Critical Review of the Attempts of George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz

George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz proposed foundations for an interpretative sociology from opposite standpoints. Mead accepted the objective meaning structure a priori. His problem became therefore the explanation of the individuality and creativity of human actors in his social behavioristic approach. In contrast, Schutz started from the subjective consciousness of an isolated actor as a result of a phenomenological reduction. He was concerned with the problem of explaining the possibility of this isolated actor’s perceiving other actors in their existence, their concreteness, and the motives for their behavior. I treat these two approaches and their associated problems as equally relevant. My evaluation is based on their success in solving their specific problems. The aim is to decide which of the two approaches provides the more adequate foundation for an interpretative sociology.

On the interplay between familiarity and emotional expression in face perception

Traditional models of face perception (e.g. Bruce and Young 1986) stress independent routes for processing identity and emotional expression. We investigated the interplay between familiarity and emotional expression by systematically varying both factors. In contrast to earlier studies which used binary forced-choice decisions, participants had to judge the familiarity of the presented face and the emotional hedonic valence and emotional arousal of its expressed emotion (angry, happy or neutral), using rating scales. The results demonstrated symmetric, strong interactions between familiarity and expressed emotion. Thus, this study supports more recent models of face perception (Haxby et al. 2000) that were mostly based on brain imaging data. These data together with our behavioural results emphasize the interaction of emotional expression and personal identity and support approaches that propose a relative segregation of these processes, rather than completely independent coding (Calder and Young 2005).     

Nature and facts about natural and artifactual categories: Sex differences in the semantic priming paradigm

There is abundant evidence from behavioral and neurophysiological experiments for the distinction of natural versus artifactual categories and a gender-specific difference: women’s performances in cognitive tasks increase when natural categories are used, whereas men’s performances increase with artifactual categories. Here, we used the semantic priming paradigm to study retrieval processes by presenting category labels as primes and exemplars as targets. Overall, in two experiments we found larger priming effects for natural than for artifactual categories. In addition, females showed positive priming effects for natural but negative effects for artifactual categories, whereas males showed positive priming effects for both categories. This pattern matches with that from other tasks and can be interpreted as evidence that the findings from these other tasks are, at least partially, indeed due to different representations or processing modes for males and females and not (exclusively) due to—for example—different familiarity with a category. In a further experiment, we showed that the found pattern for females can be manipulated by focusing on perceptual vs. functional features. The results can be interpreted as first evidence that there are (eventually in addition to different “crystallized” semantic structures) specific default processing modes that differ for males and females.