Was bringt die Muster-Weiterbildungsordnung?

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The temporal distribution of autobiographical memory: changes in reliving and vividness over the life span do not explain the reminiscence bump

When autobiographical memories are elicited with word cues, personal events from middle childhood to early adulthood are overrepresented compared to events from other periods. It is, however, unclear whether these memories are also associated with greater recollection. In this online study, we examined whether autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood are recollected more than memories from other lifetime periods. Participants rated personal events that were elicited with cue words on reliving or vividness. Consistent with previous studies, most memories came from the period in which the participants were between 6 and 20 years old. The memories from this period were not relived more or recalled more vividly than memories from other lifetime periods, suggesting that they do not involve more recollection. Recent events had higher levels of reliving and vividness than remote events, and older adults reported a stronger recollective experience than younger adults.     

Perception of suffering and compassion experience: brain gender disparities

Compassion is considered a moral emotion related to the perception of suffering in others, and resulting in a motivation to alleviate the afflicted party. We compared brain correlates of compassion-evoking images in women and men. BOLD functional images of 24 healthy volunteers (twelve women and twelve men; age=27±2.5 y.o.) were acquired in a 3T magnetic resonance scanner while subjects viewed pictures of human suffering previously verified to elicit compassion and indicated their compassionate experience by finger movements. Functional analysis revealed that while women manifested activation in areas involved in basic emotional, empathic, and moral processes, such as basal regions and cingulate and frontal cortices, activation in men was restricted mainly to the occipital cortex and parahippocampal gyrus. These findings suggest that compassion and its moral elements constitute gender-relative subjective phenomena emerging from differently evolved neural mechanisms and socially learned features possibly related to nurturing skills.     

Sadness, suicide, and their association with video game and internet overuse among teens: results from the youth risk behavior survey 2007 and 2009

We investigated the association between excessive video game/Internet use and teen suicidality. Data were obtained from the 2007 and 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), a high school-based, nationally representative survey (N = 14,041 and N = 16,410, respectively). Teens who reported 5 hours or more of video games/Internet daily use, in the 2009 YRBS, had a significantly higher risk for sadness (adjusted and weighted odds ratio, 95% confidence interval = 2.1, 1.7-2.5), suicidal ideation (1.7, 1.3-2.1), and suicide planning (1.5, 1.1-1.9). The same pattern was found in the 2007 survey. These findings support an association between excessive video game and Internet use and risk for teen depression and suicidality.     

Ecological and ethical issues in virtual reality research: A call for increased scrutiny

We argue that moral judgment studies currently conducted utilizing virtual reality (VR) devices must confront a dilemma as a result of how virtual environments are designed and how those environments are experienced. We first begin by describing the contexts present in paradigmatic cases of naturalistic moral judgments. We then compare these contexts to current traditional (vignette-based) and VR-based moral judgment research. We show that, contra to paradigmatic cases, vignette-based and VR-based moral judgment research often fails to accurately model the situational features of paradigmatic moral judgments. In particular, we compare and contrast six recent VR studies to support our view that only simulations high in context-realism and perspectival-fidelity can produce “virtually-real experiences.” After analyzing the constituents of a virtually-real experience, we go on to propose guidelines for the creation of VR studies. These guidelines serve two purposes. First, we aim to increase the ecological validity of such studies to advance our understanding of moral judgments. Second, we believe that such guidelines should inform how Institutional Review Boards assess VR research. We show that our guidelines are urgently needed, given the current lax review standards in place.     

Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay when an inflected form contained positive feature specifications for grammatical features that did not match the feature specifications of the grammatical context in which it appeared. No delay, however, occurred when an incorrectly inflected form had mismatching negative specifications, whereas its positively specified features matched the respective positive features of the context. This result provides evidence for a different status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features. It supports the idea of radical underspecification according to which only positive feature specifications are part of the representations of morphologically complex forms or affixes, whereas negative feature specifications are assigned on the basis of paradigmatic contrasts.     

Derogation and distancing as terror management strategies: the moderating role of need for closure and permeability of group boundaries

Previous research has revealed that when individuals are confronted with criticism of a personally relevant group, mortality salience can lead to either derogation of the source of criticism or distancing from the group. In this article, the authors investigated closure as a potential moderator of these reactions. In Study 1, mortality salience led to greater derogation of a critic of a relevant group among high-need-for-closure participants but led to distancing from the group among low need-for-closure participants. Study 2 showed that when a relevant group was criticized, mortality salience led to greater derogation among participants who were led to believe that the boundaries of that group were impermeable but led to greater distancing among participants who were made aware of the permeable nature of the group boundaries. These findings demonstrate that closure of group membership moderates reactions to criticism of a personally relevant group after mortality salience.     

A preliminary analysis of the effects of response cards on student performance and participation in an upper division university course

We evaluated the effects of response cards on student quiz scores and participation in an upper division undergraduate course at a small, private university. Results showed that response cards increased both quiz scores and student participation. In addition, a measure of the social validity of the response-card procedure suggested that students approved of the use of the cards.     

Spiritual Care in the ICU: Perspectives of Dutch Intensivists,ICU Nurses,and Spiritual Caregivers

Since there are no scientific data available about the role of spiritual care (SC) in Dutch ICUs, the goal of this quantitative study was twofold: first, to map the role of SC as a part of daily adult ICU care in The Netherlands from the perspective of intensivists, ICU nurses, and spiritual caregivers and second, to identify similarities and differences among these three perspectives. This study is the quantitative part of a mixed methods approach. To conduct empirical quantitative cohort research, separate digital questionnaires were sent to three different participant groups in Dutch ICUs, namely intensivists, ICU nurses, and spiritual caregivers working in academic and general hospitals and one specialist oncology hospital. Overall, 487 participants of 85 hospitals (99 intensivists, 290 ICU nurses, and 98 spiritual caregivers) responded. The majority of all respondents (>70%) considered the positive effects of SC provision to patients and relatives: contribution to mental well-being, processing and channeling of emotions, and increased patient and family satisfaction. The three disciplines diverged in their perceptions of how SC is currently evolving in terms of information, assessment, and provision. Nationwide, SC is not implemented in daily ICU care. The majority of respondents, however, attached great importance to interdisciplinary collaboration. In their view SC contributes positively to the well-being of patients and relatives in the ICU. Further qualitative research into how patients and relatives experience SC in the ICU is required in order to implement and standardize SC as a scientifically based integral part of daily ICU care.