Characterological psychology and German political economy in the Weimar period (1919-1933)

In the mid-1920s, applied (and theoretical) psychologists in many countries turned from studying elementary abilities to studying character or personality. This article examines this shift within the offices of the German labor administration, which aimed to place all German youths in appropriate jobs. Contrary to recent works on the history of psychology, which have emphasized the importance of cultural context, this article explains the turn to characterology in terms of German industry's evolving production strategies. As German companies developed a niche in flexible production, they came to value the highly skilled worker, who needed such character qualities as reliability, diligence, and conscientiousness. The article thus argues that historical analyses of applied, and perhaps even theoretical, psychology should also consider political economy as a potentially important context.     

When does word meaning affect immediate serial recall in semantic dementia?

Patients with semantic dementia can show superior immediate recall of words that they still understand relatively well, as compared with more semantically degraded words, suggesting that conceptual knowledge makes a major contribution to phonological short-term memory. However, a number of studies have failed to show such a recall difference, challenging this view. We examined the effect of several methodological factors on the recall of known and degraded words in 4 patients with semantic dementia, in order to investigate possible reasons for this discrepancy. In general, our patients did exhibit poorer recall of the degraded words and made more phonological errors on these items. In addition, set size affected the magnitude of the recall advantage for known words. This finding suggests that semantic degradation influenced the rate of learning in the immediate recall task when the same items were presented repeatedly. The methods used to select known and degraded items also impacted on the recall difference. List length, however, did not affect the advantage for known words. The coherence of items in phonological short-term memory was affected by their semantic status, but not by the length of the material to be retained. The implications of these findings for the role of semantic and phonological representations in verbal short-term memory are discussed.     

Analyzing anger: how to make people mad

Does simple displeasure cause anger without appraisals or agency attributions? The authors offer 8 observations: (a) Appraisal theory also predicts that displeasure promotes anger, (b) An emotion of frustration can be usefully distinguished from anger, (c) Aggressive reactions to norm violations among animals suggest that they too distinguish bad behavior from bad outcomes, (d) Attributions to agency are perceptual and automatic in social situations, (e) It is tenuous to argue that agency attributions are enacted in angry aggression, but absent in anger elicitation. (f) The contextualized meanings of expressive movements, rather than movements themselves, elicit emotion, (g) Expressions may be better seen as constituents than as causes of emotions, (h) Cognitive components of emotion generally come before, not after, eliciting events.     

Psychopathy is related to negative affectivity but not to anxiety sensitivity

Although the hypothesis that psychopathic individuals are characterized by a reduced capacity for experiencing anxiety is central to many theories of psychopathy, most prior studies have examined anxiety and fear measures generally considered outdated in the literature. Moreover, prior findings are mixed, with several studies reporting no relationships between psychopathy and anxiety, and others suggesting negative relationships for the affective, interpersonal aspects of the disorder and positive relationships for the antisocial behavior dimension. To examine whether psychopathy dimensions are associated with contemporary measures of anxiety, the Anxiety Sensitivity Index and State Trait Anxiety Inventory-Trait scale were administered to 157 male inmates. Participants also completed the MMPI-derived Welsh Anxiety Scale (WAS), commonly used in psychopathy studies. Analyses provide no evidence for a negative relationship between psychopathy's affective, interpersonal factor and anxiety sensitivity after controlling for trait anxiety. Trait anxiety and WAS scores were positively associated with the antisocial behavior dimension of psychopathy. Findings do replicate prior relationships between the WAS and psychopathy, suggesting the WAS may measure aspects of negative affectivity that differ from anxiety.     

Strategy choices in simple and complex addition: Contributions of working memory and counting knowledge for children with mathematical disability

Groups of first-grade (mean age = 82 months), third-grade (mean age = 107 months), and fifth-grade (mean age = 131 months) children with a learning disability in mathematics (MD, n = 58) and their normally achieving peers (n = 91) were administered tasks that assessed their knowledge of counting principles, working memory, and the strategies used to solve simple (4+3) and complex (16+8) addition problems. In all grades, the children with MD showed a working memory deficit, and in first grade, the children with MD used less sophisticated strategies and committed more errors while solving simple and complex addition problems. The group differences in strategy usage and accuracy were related, in part, to the group difference in working memory and to group and individual differences in counting knowledge. Across grade-level and group, the switch from simple to complex addition problems resulted in a shift in the mix of problem-solving strategies. Individual differences in the strategy mix and in the strategy shift were related, in part, to individual differences in working memory capacity and counting knowledge.     

Effects of anorectic drugs on food intake under progressive-ratio and free-access conditions in rats

The effects of two anorectic drugs, dexfenfluramine and phentermine, on food intake under different food-access conditions were examined. Experiment 1 compared the effects of these drugs on food intake under a progressive-ratio (PR) schedule and free-access conditions. Dexfenfluramine decreased food intake under both conditions, but the doses required to decrease intake under free-access conditions were higher than those required to reduce intake under the PR condition. Intermediate doses of phentermine sometimes increased breaking points, and higher doses decreased them. Phentermine decreased food intake at the same doses under both access conditions. Thus the potency of dexfenfluramine, but not phentermine, to decrease food-maintained behavior depended upon the food-access condition. Experiment 2 used a novel mixed progressive-ratio schedule of food delivery to study the duration of drug effects. Sessions consisted of five components separated by 3-hr timeouts. The ratio requirement reset at the beginning of each component and a new breaking point was obtained. Both dexfenfluramine and phentermine dose-dependently decreased breaking points early in the session. In some rats, compensatory increases in breaking point were observed. That is, breaking points later in the session increased over control levels, resulting in no change in the total number of food pellets earned for the session compared to control. The present findings suggest that the effects of some anorectic drugs depend upon the access conditions for food; increasing the effort to obtain food may enhance their ability to decrease food-maintained behavior.     

Task characteristics and performance in interpersonal cognitive problem solving

The authors examined the extent to which performance on interpersonal cognitive problem-solving (ICPS) tasks is affected by whether the goals within the dilemmas to be addressed are sex typed. Fifty children, aged 7-8 years old, were tested for the core ICPS skills of Alternative Solutions Thinking (AST) and Consequential Thinking (CT) on a series of 8 social problem-solving tasks, 4 having goals characteristically more attractive to boys and 4 with goals more attractive to girls. A 2 x 2 MANOVA was used to compare the performances of boys and girls on each set of sex-typed tasks with the 3 dependent variables of liking for the tasks, number of alternative solutions suggested, and the number of consequences anticipated. As expected, liking for the tasks was higher if the activities were characteristically associated with the participant's own gender (p < .001), although the different tasks did not produce any significant gender differences in the numbers of AST or CT suggestions they prompted. Gender differences in children's peer relationships were considered, and the implications of these results for the format of ICPS interventions are noted.     

Disrupting feedback processing interferes with rule-based but not information-integration category learning

The effect of a sequentially presented memory scanning task on rule-based and information-integration category learning was investigated. On each trial in the short feedback-processing time condition, memory scanning immediately followed categorization. On each trial in the long feedback-processing time condition, categorization was followed by a 2.5-sec delay and then memory scanning. In the control condition, no memory scanning was required. Rule-based category learning was significantly worse in the short feedback-processing time condition than in the long feedback-processing time condition or control condition, whereas information-integration category learning was equivalent across conditions. In the rule-based condition, a smaller proportion of observers learned the task in the short feedback-processing time condition, and those who learned took longer to reach the performance criterion than did those in the long feedback-processing time or control condition. No differences were observed in the information integration task. These results provide support for a multiple-systems approach to category learning and argue against the validity of single-system approaches.