Ökonomisierung und Psychotherapie

Former fundamental social structures are disappearing and, especially by the economization and industrialization of medicine, the self-understanding of patients, doctors and hospitals has changed. From these developments psychotherapy gets into a strange area of tension, not only in the society as a whole, but also within medicine: on the one hand psychotherapy is needed more than ever, but on the other hand it finds itself in an outsider position. Thereby, the reality constructions of patients and psychotherapists are affected as well, mostly gradually, so that the consequences for the relationship between psychotherapists and patients escape attention. Dealing with these problems in a considered and transparent manner can avoid damaging the therapeutic work.     

Priming of semantic classifications by novel subliminal prime words

Four experiments demonstrate category congruency priming by subliminal prime words that were never seen as targets in a valence-classification task (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and a gender-classification task (Experiment 3). In Experiment 1, overlap in terms of word fragments of one or more letters between primes and targets of different valences was larger than between primes and targets of the same valence. In Experiments 2 and 3, the sets of prime words and target words were completely disjoint in terms of used letters. In Experiment 4, pictures served as targets. The observed subliminal priming effects for novel primes cannot be driven by partial analysis of primes at the word-fragment level; they suggest instead that primes were processed semantically as whole words contingent upon prime duration.     

Positive evidence for Eysenck’s arousal hypothesis: A combined EEG and MRI study with multiple measurement occasions

Eysenck’s arousal hypothesis suggests that introverts have greater cortical activity than extraverts. This prediction was tested in several studies that used the electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha activity to index cortical arousal, but empirical findings are inconsistent. Possibly, external factors of the measurement situation or static factors such as skull thickness may act as nuisance variables on alpha activity and thus mitigate the relation between arousal and extraversion. The aim of the present study was to test the arousal hypothesis with a focus on these methodological issues. Resting EEG was acquired on several occasions of measurement, skull thickness was quantified with anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and extraversion was assessed by questionnaire. There was a positive association between alpha activity and extraversion, which was neither affected by external factors nor by skull thickness. This finding is in line with the arousal hypothesis and suggests that external or static factors do not contribute to the inconsistency of empirical findings.     

How to make your own response boxes: A step-by-step guide for the construction of reliable and inexpensive parallel-port response pads from computer mice

Psychological research is based in large parts on response latencies, which are often registered by keypresses on a standard computer keyboard. Recording response latencies with a standard keyboard is problematic because keypresses are buffered within the keyboard hardware before they are signaled to the computer, adding error variance to the recorded latencies. This can be circumvented by using external response pads connected to the computer's parallel port. In this article, we describe how to build inexpensive, reliable, and easy-to-use response pads with six keys from two standard computer mice that can be connected to the PC's parallel port. We also address the problem of recording data from the parallel port with different software packages under Microsoft's Windows XP.     

Intra‐sentential context effects on the interpretation of logical metonymy⋆

Verbs such as enjoy in the student enjoyed the book exhibit logical metonymy: enjoy is interpreted as enjoy reading. Theoreticalwork [Computational Linguistics 17 (4) (1991) 409; The Generative Lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995] predicts that this interpretation can be influenced by intra‐sentential context, e.g., by the subject of enjoy. In this article, we test this prediction using a completion experiment and find that the interpretation of a metonymic verb is influenced by the semantic role of its subject. We present a Bayesian model that accounts for the interpretation of logical metonymy and achieves a good fit on our experimental data. We show that the parameters of the model can be estimated from completion data or from corpus data.     

Thermographic studies with fluid crystals in peripheral nerve damage

Common peripheral neurogenic lesion in various locations and of different origins were examined thermographically and the results were compared with those obtained by clinical and electromyographic methods. Lesions in the regions of the N. ulnaris and N. medianus can, except in the case of carpal tunnel syndrome, be identified without difficulty by thermography. The results obtained in the case of paresis of the radialis are non-specific, and thermographic examination of radicular lesions are also sometimes ambiguous. Damage in the plexus-brachialis and root region yield impressive results which, however, are not particularly useful.     

The disputation — a special type of cooperative argumentative dialogue

This article consists of three parts, two introductory, in which the limits and the methods of analysis of dialogues are expounded, and the major part, in which the main features of a philosophical theory of disputation are outlined.

Loss of smell and taste within the scope of vitamin B 12 deficiency

The article deals with the case of a patient who had a partial gastrectomy and developed a vitamin B12 deficiency syndrome with anemia, myelopathy and complete loss of the senses of taste and smell. Regression of the symptoms followed liberal dosing with vitamin B12.