RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN GERMANY

During the last fifty years, the dialogue between science and religion in Germany has gained momentum. This essay briefly describes the academic setting in Germany with denominational theology at state universities and explains the development of secularization in reunified Germany. Twenty‐five years after reunification, East Germany is one of the most secular societies in the world, and religion is seen as a strange relic. This poses challenges to the interaction between science and religion in both parts of Germany. The essay then presents important institutions and contributors to the interaction between science and religion in Germany over the past fifty years, emphasizing the importance of private institutes at the intersection of the academy with society, churches, and ethical challenges.     

Generalisation of fear and avoidance along a semantic continuum

Directly conditioned fear and avoidance readily generalises to dissimilar but conceptually related stimuli. Here, for the first time, we examined the conceptual/semantic generalisation of both fear and avoidance using real words (synonyms). Participants were first exposed to a differential fear conditioning procedure in which one word (e.g., “broth”; CS+) was followed with brief electric shock [unconditioned stimulus (US)] and another was not (e.g., “assist”; CS–). Next, an instrumental conditioning phase taught avoidance in the presence the CS+ but not the CS–. During generalisation testing, synonyms of the CS+ (e.g., “soup”; GCS+) and CS– (e.g., “help”; GCS–) were presented in the absence of shock. Conditioned fear and avoidance, measured via skin conductance responses, behavioural avoidance and US expectancy ratings, generalised to the semantically related, but not to the semantically unrelated, synonyms. Findings have implications for how natural language categories and concepts mediate the expansion of fear and avoidance repertoires in clinical contexts.     

Intelligence as the efficiency of cue-driven retrieval from secondary memory

Complex-span (working-memory-capacity) tasks are among the most successful predictors of intelligence. One important contributor to this relationship is the ability to efficiently employ cues for the retrieval from secondary memory. Presumably, intelligent individuals can considerably restrict their memory search sets by using such cues and can thereby improve recall performance. We here test this assumption by experimentally manipulating the validity of retrieval cues. When memoranda are drawn from the same semantic category on two successive trials of a verbal complex-span task, the category is a very strong retrieval cue on its first occurrence (strong-cue trial) but loses some of its validity on its second occurrence (weak-cue trial). If intelligent individuals make better use of semantic categories as retrieval cues, their recall accuracy suffers more from this loss of cue validity. Accordingly, our results show that less variance in intelligence is explained by recall accuracy on weak-cue compared with strong-cue trials.     

How Emotional Intelligence Might Get You the Job: The Relationship Between Trait Emotional Intelligence and Faking on Personality Tests

This study examined trait emotional intelligence (EI) in relation to the ability to fake on personality tests. Undergraduate students (N = 129) were first instructed to fill out a personality inventory honestly, and subsequently in such a way as to maximize their chances of obtaining two distinctive job positions (lawyer and file clerk). Participants were able to change their scores in line with the hypothesized job profiles. Regression analyses showed that EI statistically predicted faking ability to an equal degree in both job scenarios. Finally, EI showed incremental validity over general mental ability and the Big Five personality traits in predicting the ability to fake. Possible implications of the results for the predictive validity of personality tests are discussed.     

Effectiveness of Web- and Mobile-Based Treatment of Subthreshold Depression With Adherence-Focused Guidance: A Single-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial

Evidence for the impact of psychological Interventions for subthreshold depression (sD) is conflicting. Moreover, human resources to deliver such treatments are limited. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a web-based intervention with adherence-focused guidance in the treatment of sD. Participants with sD (CES-D ≥ 16, no Major Depressive Disorder according to DSM-IV criteria, N = 204) recruited via a large health insurance were randomly allocated to a web-based mobile-supported cognitive-behavioral intervention or to a waitlist control condition with unrestricted access to usual care. The primary outcome was the reduction in depressive symptom severity as measured by blind diagnostic raters using the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QIDS) at posttreatment. There was a statistically significant between-group difference in QIDS scores at posttreatment in favor of the intervention group, F(1, 201) = 11.31, p = .001, corresponding to a medium effect size of d = 0.37 (95% CI 0.09–0.64) and a NNT of 7 (95%–CI 3.7–41.2). Significant effects in favour of the intervention group were also found for secondary outcomes such as quality of life, anxiety, and insomnia severity. Web-based self-help interventions with adherence-focused guidance could be an acceptable and effective approach to reduce a range of negative consequences associated with subclinical depression.     

Unconscious semantic activation depends on feature-specific attention allocation

We examined whether semantic activation by subliminally presented stimuli is dependent upon the extent to which participants assign attention to specific semantic stimulus features and stimulus dimensions. Participants pronounced visible target words that were preceded by briefly presented, masked prime words. Both affective and non-affective semantic congruence of the prime-target pairs were manipulated under conditions that either promoted selective attention for affective stimulus information or selective attention for non-affective semantic stimulus information. In line with our predictions, results showed that affective congruence had a clear impact on word pronunciation latencies only if participants were encouraged to assign attention to the affective stimulus dimension. In contrast, non-affective semantic relatedness of the prime-target pairs produced no priming at all. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that unconscious activation of (affective) semantic information is modulated by feature-specific attention allocation.     

Automatically activated facets of ageism: Masked evaluative priming allows for a differentiation of age‐related prejudice

This study investigated the automatic activation of ageism by using a go/no‐go version of the masked evaluative priming task. Pictures of younger persons, of older persons in everyday contexts, and of older persons depicting age‐related conditions of decline were used as masked primes that preceded positive and negative target adjectives conveying either other‐relevant valence (e.g., just and mean) or possessor‐relevant valence (e.g., serene and lonely). The evaluative priming effect (denoting relative negativity of old‐everyday primes in comparison with younger primes) was significant, as hypothesized, only for possessor‐relevant targets. It was not moderated by explicit ageism. A second priming index (denoting relative negativity of old‐decline primes in comparison with old‐everyday primes) predicted, however, explicit ageism. Again, this result was, as expected, constrained to the index based on possessor‐relevant targets. This study provides further evidence that prejudice in terms of automatic evaluations of social stimuli can be more fine grained beyond a mere one‐dimensional positive–negative differentiation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the fate of distractor representations

Research on the topic of distractor inhibition has used different empirical approaches to study how the human mind selects relevant information from the environment, and the results are controversially discussed. One key question that typically arises is how selection deals with the irrelevant information. We used a new selection task, in which participants sometimes had to respond to the distractors instead of the target. Importantly, we varied the time interval between stimuli onset and the cue that signaled participants to respond to the distractors. We analyzed RTs and error rates from responses to distractors as a function of how long the target had been processed (and the distractor ignored) before the cue required a response to the distractor (i.e., stimulus-cue SOA). The data are compatible with selection models assuming that distractor stimuli are initially activated and then deactivated. Thus, we argue for selection models assuming top down deactivation of distractor representations that work in parallel with top down activation of target representations.     

Coordinated flexibility: how initial gaze position modulates eye-hand coordination and reaching

Reaching to targets in space requires the coordination of eye and hand movements. In two experiments, we recorded eye and hand kinematics to examine the role of gaze position at target onset on eye-hand coordination and reaching performance. Experiment 1 showed that with eyes and hand aligned on the same peripheral start location, time lags between eye and hand onsets were small and initiation times were substantially correlated, suggesting simultaneous control and tight eye-hand coupling. With eyes and hand departing from different start locations (gaze aligned with the center of the range of possible target positions), time lags between eye and hand onsets were large and initiation times were largely uncorrelated, suggesting independent control and decoupling of eye and hand movements. Furthermore, initial gaze position strongly mediated manual reaching performance indexed by increments in movement time as a function of target distance. Experiment 2 confirmed the impact of target foveation in modulating the effect of target distance on movement time. Our findings reveal the operation of an overarching, flexible neural control system that tunes the operation and cooperation of saccadic and manual control systems depending on where the eyes look at target onset.