Die Entwicklung der Tötungsdelikte in Deutschland

Despite its low quantitative importance compared to total crime, the development of homicide is a fundamental indicator for crime-policy efficiency. A low crime rate has a significant positive effect on the quality of life. This article analyses the development of homicide on the basis of its registration by the Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik (Police Crime Statistics) from 1953 to 2006. The development is not consistent. There are five phases where moderate increase, strong increase, stabilisation and decrease have to be differentiated. At present there is a phase of obvious decrease so that the current percentage of homicide corresponds to that at the end of the 1960ies. There is also a striking difference between attempted and accomplished offences. While the percentage of accomplished homicide was almost constant in the period mentioned, the percentage of attempted offences has meanwhile almost tripled and is twice as high compared to the situation in 1953.     

Kriminologische Beiträge

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Psychosomatische und psychotherapeutische Probleme in der Frauenheilkunde und Geburtshilfe

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Proneness to psychosis and selection of objects of visual attention: individual differences in visual marking

Deficits in early visual attention and perceptual organisation have frequently been shown to associate with both poor pre-morbid schizophrenia and those at a greater putative risk of psychosis. The nature of the deficit is unclear. The present study investigated the relationship between speed of visual marking and proneness to psychosis. 20 males and 20 females completed several tasks assessing speed of selection and de-selection of visual objects. As predicted, negative schizotypy was associated with poorer marking in males, but socially desirable responding potentially confounded this result. In addition, impulsive non-conformity swas associated with poorer visual marking, more prominently in females. These results are discussed in relation to possible mechanisms by which psychosis-proneness and impulsivity may restrict the top–down influences operating on early visual attention.     

Die Vielfalt der Persönlichkeit—Gefährdung der Einheit der Person?

Uniformity against manifold faces of a personality are manifest presentations of a supposed underlying person (subjectum) as its synthetic-cohesive potential. The association-psychology of the 19th century brought forward the concept of dissociation, which allows to interpret a broad spectrum of phenomena between adaptive functioning (salutary) and maladaptive, dysfunctional phenomena of psychopathology: it opens a dimensional perspective which includes dissociative identity disorder, dissociative trance disorder, borderline-pathologies and the most severe forms of ego/self-dissociation, -fragmentation in schizophrenic disorders.     

Predicting uptake of housing services: The role of self-categorization in the theory of planned behaviour

The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and self-categorization theory (SCT) were used to predict homeless people’s (n = 80) uptake of housing support services. Homeless people’s uptake behaviour was measured one year after a TPB/SCT-based interview schedule was administered. Congruent with previous research, TPB variables were influential predictors of both intention and behaviour. However, the addition of self-categorization variables, such as friendship group norms and identification as a housing support service user, significantly increased the rate prediction for both intention and behaviour, respectively. The implications of the research are firstly, that social cognition models are useful for understanding uptake of housing support services; and secondly, the addition of self-categorization variables aids in exploring the central role that social norms play in understanding the uptake of these services. These findings are discussed in terms of their impact on theory and practice.     

Can religious and secular belief be rationally combined?

Sometimes the cognitive part of the human mind is modelled in a simplified way by degrees of belief. E.g., in philosophy of science and in formal epistemology agents are often identified by their credences in a set of claims. This line of dealing with the individual mind is currently expanded to groups by attempts of finding adequate ways of pooling individual degrees of belief into an overall group credence or, more abstractly speaking, into a collective mind. In this paper, we model religious people’s minds as such a collective mind. Religious people are therein identified with a set of degrees of beliefs containing religious and secular credences. E.g., within a religious context a person may be sure that some statement is true, whereas the same person lacks non-religious support for such a credence and hence may doubt the truth of that statement within a secular context. We will also present two results on the adequacy of this model.     

Paradigm Terms: The Necessity of Kind Term Identifications Generalized

Standard Kripke-Putnam semantics is widely taken to entail that theoretical identifications like ‘Brontosauruses are Apatosauruses’ or ‘Gold is ⁷⁹Au’ are necessary, if true. I offer a new diagnosis as to why this modal consequence ensues. Central to my diagnosis is the concept of a paradigm term. I argue that modal and epistemic peculiarities that are commonly considered as distinctive of natural kind expressions are in fact traits that are shared by paradigm terms in general. Philosophical semantics should broaden its focus from natural kind expressions to paradigm terms.