Kognitive Dissonanz nach Entscheidungen und psychische Erkrankungen

Building upon Grawe’s consistency theory the target of this study was to examine if cognitive dissonance has an influence on mental disorders. More precisely, whether post-decisional cognitive dissonance (1) is more pronounced in patients with mental disorders and (2) whether it correlates with symptom burden. Obsessive-compulsive disorder patients (OCD; n?=?15), depressive patients (n?=?20) and controls (n?=?42) completed a post-decisional cognitive dissonance scale as well as a scale assessing their respective symptom burden. Solely OCD patients showed heightened cognitive dissonance compared to controls (p?=?0.019). Among depressive patients, however, a very high correlation was found to exist between symptom burden and cognitive dissonance (r?=?0.70). Therefore, OCD seems to be related to increased cognitive dissonance which supports the assumption that cognitive dissonance plays a role in this mental disorder.     

Has the World Changed? My Neighbor Might Know: Effects of Social Context on Routine Deviation

Routines help individuals save decision effort and protect them from overreacting to volatile environments. Yet routines become dysfunctional if the environment changes fundamentally. Whether the environment has truly changed is often not easy to tell. We experimentally study adaptation to a change in a previously stable environment. Participants have to choose between one of the four decks of cards. Each deck represents a lottery, with a distribution of gains and losses initially unknown to participants. In the learning phase of the experiment, participants acquire the routine to choose the most attractive deck. Unbeknownst to participants, after an interruption, the lotteries represented by the competing decks are changed. We study how participants react to this change. We manipulate whether participants have access to choices by a confederate who most of the time makes the normative choice. In baseline condition, they never do. In the treatments, access is provided either during the learning phase, during the test phase, or during both phases. Participants are most likely to realize that the world has changed if they had access to the confederate's choices in both phases. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The relation between students’ justice experiences and their school refusal behavior

In a cross-sectional questionnaire study with N = 1658 German students, aged between 12 and 17 years (M = 14.1, SD = 0.5), we investigated the relation of students’ personal belief in a just world (BJW) to their school absenteeism and functions of school refusal behavior. In accordance with recent studies which identified negative relations between students’ BJW and different forms of rule-breaking behavior (e.g., bullying, cheating), we expected that students with a strong BJW would be less likely to refuse school than those with a weak BJW. Furthermore, we considered students’ personal experience of teacher justice and their feelings of exclusion from school as possible mediators in this relation. We also controlled for confounding effects of gender, age, social desirability, school reluctance, and test anxiety. To test our hypotheses, we used bootstrap mediation analyses. As expected, these analyses showed that the more students endorsed personal BJW, the less likely they were to report that they refused school. The students’ personal experience of teachers justice and especially their feelings of exclusion from school at least partly mediated personal BJW’s relation to school refusal behavior and its functions. The observed relations mainly persisted when we controlled for gender, age, social desirability, school reluctance, and test anxiety. We discussed the adaptive functions of BJW and implications for future school research and practice.     

The Well- and Unwell-Being of a Child

The concept of the ‘well-being of the child’ (like the ‘child’s welfare’ and ‘best interests of the child’) has remained underdetermined in legal and ethical texts on the needs and rights of children. As a hypothetical construct that draws attention to the child’s long-term welfare, the well-being of the child is a broader concept than autonomy and happiness. This paper clarifies some conceptual issues of the well-being of the child from a philosophical point of view. The main question is how well-being could in practice acquire a concrete meaning and content for a particular issue or situation. A phenomenological-hermeneutic research perspective will be outlined that allows the child’s well-being to be elucidated and specified as an anthropological and ethical idea. It is based on a contextual understanding of generative relationships, a combination of the theory and practice of making sense, here described as ‘generative insight’, which could provide ethical guidance for decision making in families, legal practice, medicine or biomedical research.     

Assessing the belief bias effect with ROCs: reply to Dube, Rotello, and Heit (2010)

Dube, Rotello, and Heit (2010) argued (a) that the so-called receiver operating characteristic is nonlinear for data on belief bias in syllogistic reasoning; (b) that their data are inconsistent with Klauer, Musch, and Naumer's (see record 2000-02818-008) model of belief bias; (c) that their data are inconsistent with any of the existing accounts of belief bias and only consistent with a theory provided by signal detection theory; and (d) that in fact, belief bias is a response bias effect. In this reply, we present reanalyses of Dube et al.'s data and of old data suggesting (a) that the receiver operating characteristic is linear for binary "valid" versus "invalid" responses, as employed by the bulk of research in this field; (b) that Klauer et al.'s model describes the old data significantly better than does Dube et al.'s model and that it describes Dube et al.'s data somewhat better than does Dube et al.'s model; (c) that Dube et al.'s data are consistent with the account of belief bias by misinterpreted necessity, whereas Dube et al.'s signal detection model does not fit their data; and (d) that belief bias is more than a response bias effect.     

In defence of virtue epistemology

In a number of recent papers Duncan Pritchard argues that virtue epistemology’s central ability condition—one knows that p if and only if one has attained cognitive success (true belief) because of the exercise of intellectual ability—is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge. This paper discusses and dismisses a number of responses to Pritchard’s objections and develops a new way of defending virtue epistemology against them.     

Interactive coordination of currently depressed inpatient mothers and their infants during the postpartum period

In healthy mother–infant dyads, interactions are characterized by a pattern of matching and mismatching interactive states with quick reparation of mismatches into matches. In contrast, dyads in which mothers have postpartum depression show impaired mother–infant interaction patterns over the first few months of the infant's life. The majority of studies that have examined such interaction patterns have drawn on community samples rather than on depressed inpatient samples of mothers who were in a state of current depression at the time of assessment. To date, no study has investigated specific microanalytic patterns of interactive coordination between depressed German mothers and their infants using the Face‐to‐Face Still‐Face paradigm (FFSF). The primary goal of this study was to evaluate specific patterns of dyadic coordination and the capacity for repairing states of miscoordination in an inpatient sample of postpartum currently depressed mothers and their infants as compared with a healthy control group. A sample of 28 depressed inpatient German mothers and their infants (age range = 1–8 months, M age = 4.06 months) and 34 healthy dyads (range = 1–8 months, M age = 3.89 months) were videotaped while engaging in the FFSF. A focus was placed on the play and reunion episodes. Compared with healthy dyads, dyads with depressed mothers showed less coordination of positive matched states and longer latencies when repairing interactive mismatching states into positive matched states. Clinical implications are discussed.     

Ressourcenaktivierung bei Patienten

Background

Starting from Klaus Grawe’s draft of a general psychotherapy, the patient’s resources and resource-activating interventions have received increasing attention in empirical research.

Objective

The effectiveness of standardized writing instructions for the activation of patients’ resources before participating in internet chat aftercare groups for psychosomatic patients was examined.

Method

In a randomized controlled trial writing instruction for the activation of patients’ resources was given in 52 out of 102 internet chat aftercare sessions. The effects of this minimal intervention on the patients’ activity and the number of positive emotion words expressed during the chat session were examined. Additionally, the effects on patients’ self-esteem, attachment, orientation, control and well-being after the group sessions were assessed.

Results

Patients reported higher levels of self-esteem, orientation, control and well-being after chat sessions with a resource-activating intervention. No differences between intervention and control groups were detected on the text-based variables activity and number of positive emotion words.

Conclusions

Standardized minimal interventions for the activation of patients’ resources seem to be promising for enhancing the effectiveness of therapeutic Internet chat groups.     

Moral Desirability and Rational Decision

Being a formal and general as well as the most widely accepted approach to practical rationality, rational decision theory should be crucial for justifying rational morals. In particular, acting morally should also (nearly always) be rational in decision theoretic terms. After defending this thesis, in the critical part of the paper two strategies to develop morals following this insight are criticized: game theoretical ethics of cooperation and ethical intuitionism. The central structural objections to ethics of cooperation are that they too directly aim at the rationality of moral action and that they to do not encompass moral values or a moral desirability function. The constructive half of the paper takes up these criticisms by developing a two-part strategy to bring rationality and morals in line. The first part is to define ‘moral desirability’. This is done, using multi-attribute utility theory, by equating several adequate components of an individual’s comprehensive (rational) utility function with the moral desirability function. The second part is to introduce mechanisms, institutions, in particular socially valid moral norms, that provide further motivation for acting in accordance with morals.