Untersuchungen zur Handlungs- und Affektpsychologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung Mit 13 Textabbildungen. Dissertation der Philosophischen Fakult?t Berlin.     

Right-sided human prefrontal brain activation during acquisition of conditioned fear

This H2(15)O positron emission tomography (PET) study reports on relative regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) alterations during fear conditioning in humans. In the PET scanner, subjects viewed a TV screen with either visual white noise or snake videotapes displayed alone, then with electric shocks, followed by final presentations of white noise and snakes. Autonomic nervous system responses confirmed fear conditioning only to snakes. To reveal neural activation during acquisition, while equating sensory stimulation, scans during snakes with shocks and white noise alone were contrasted against white noise with shocks and snakes alone. During acquisition, rCBF increased in the right medial frontal gyrus, supporting a role for the prefrontal cortex in fear conditioning to unmasked evolutionary fear-relevant stimuli.     

On euthanasia: blindspots in the argument from mercy

In the euthanasia debate, the argument from mercy holds that if someone is in unbearable pain and is hopelessly ill or injured, then mercy dictates that inflicting death may be morally justified. One common way of setting the stage for the argument from mercy is to draw parallels between human and animal suffering, and to suggest that insofar as we are prepared to relieve an animal's suffering by putting it out of its misery we should likewise be prepared to offer the same relief to human beings.
In this paper, I will argue that the use of parallels between human and animal suffering in the argument from mercy relies upon truncated views of how the concept of a human being enters our moral thought and responsiveness. In particular, the focus on the nature and extent of the empirical similarities between human beings and animals obscures the significance for our moral lives of the kind of human fellowship which is not reducible to the shared possession of empirical capacities.
I will suggest that although a critical examination of the blindspots in these arguments does not license the conclusion that euthanasia for mercy's sake is never morally permissible, it does limit the power of arguments such as those provided by Rachels and Singer to justify it. I will further suggest that examination of these blindspots helps to deepen our understanding of what is at stake in the question of euthanasia in ways that tend otherwise to remain obscured.     

Online Victimization,Womanism, and Body Esteem among Young Black Women: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Digital media use represents a central part of young adults’ daily life, within which social interactions increasingly center on visual content. While visual content, such as representations of self, may facilitate positive social interactivity, it may also increase susceptibility to harmful social interactions, such as appearance-related online victimization. Black women’s bodies are often the target of gendered racial microaggressions and sexual victimization which can contribute to body image concerns. Still, the online victimization–body esteem link among Black women remains unexamined. This study used structural equation modeling to examine the associations between four categories of online victimization (i.e., general online victimization, online individual racial victimization, online vicarious racial victimization, online sexual victimization) and body esteem. We further examined whether womanism, an identity-based factor, moderated the relationship between online victimization and body esteem. A sample of 1,595 young Black women completed an online survey. Results showed that online sexual victimization was significantly negatively associated with body esteem and that high levels of womanism buffered the harmful impact of general online victimization on body esteem. Future research is needed to examine Black women’s and gender expansive people’s experiences with online gendered racial victimization along with other forms of online intersectional oppression.

     

Daily Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Accommodation and Relationship Functioning in Military Couples

Romantic partners’ accommodation of trauma survivors’ posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms (e.g., taking on tasks, survivors avoid participating in social withdrawal) is associated with lower relationship satisfaction for both partners and survivors. Little is known about associations of partner accommodation with other aspects of relationship functioning, like intimacy. Sixty‐four male military veterans with at least subclinical PTSD and their partners participated in a 2‐week daily diary study. Veterans completed nightly measures of PTSD symptoms, while female partners completed nightly measures of accommodating behaviors performed that day. Both partners reported feelings of intimacy each night. Multilevel models revealed that accommodation was significantly, negatively associated with feelings of intimacy, with stronger effects for partners (t = ?8.70) than for veterans (t = ?5.40), and stronger effects when veterans had lower (t = ?7.43) rather than higher (t = ?5.20) levels of daily PTSD symptoms. Therapists should consider accommodating behaviors as a potential impediment to relationship intimacy, particularly when veterans have less severe symptoms of PTSD. Accommodating behaviors are an ideal treatment target in behavioral couple therapies.     

Is it enough to be willing to win or do you have to be smart? The relationship between competitive worldviews,cognitive abilities,and applicant faking in personality tests

Recent research has highlighted competitive worldviews as a key predictor of faking—the intentional distortion of answers by candidates in the selection context. According to theoretical assumptions, applicants’ abilities, and especially their cognitive abilities, should influence whether faking motivation, triggered by competitive worldviews, can be turned into successful faking behavior. Therefore, we examined the influence of competitive worldviews on faking in personality tests and investigated a possible moderation of this relationship by cognitive abilities in three independent high school and university student samples (N₁ = 133, N₂ = 137, N₃ = 268). Our data showed neither an influence of the two variables nor of their interaction on faking behavior. We discuss possible reasons for these findings and give suggestions for further research.     

Common mechanisms of executive attention underlie executive function and effortful control in children

Executive Function (EF) and Effortful Control (EC) have traditionally been viewed as distinct constructs related to cognition and temperament during development. More recently, EF and EC have been implicated in top‐down self‐regulation ‐ the goal‐directed control of cognition, emotion, and behavior. We propose that executive attention, a limited‐capacity attentional resource subserving goal‐directed cognition and behavior, is the common cognitive mechanism underlying the self‐regulatory capacities captured by EF and EC. We addressed three related questions: (a) Do behavioral ratings of EF and EC represent the same self‐regulation construct? (b) Is this self‐regulation construct explained by a common executive attention factor as measured by performance on cognitive tasks? and (c) Does the executive attention factor explain additional variance in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) problems to behavioral ratings of self‐regulation? Measures of performance on complex span, general intelligence, and response inhibition tasks were obtained from 136 preadolescent children (M = 11 years, 10 months, SD = 8 months), along with self‐ and parent‐reported EC, and parent‐reported EF, and ADHD problems. Results from structural equation modeling demonstrated that behavioral ratings of EF and EC measured the same self‐regulation construct. Cognitive tasks measured a common executive attention factor that significantly explained 30% of the variance in behavioral ratings of self‐regulation. Executive attention failed to significantly explain additional variance in ADHD problems beyond that explained by behavioral ratings of self‐regulation. These findings raise questions about the utility of task‐based cognitive measures in research and clinical assessment of self‐regulation and psychopathology in developmental samples.     

Working memory and spatial judgments: Cognitive load increases the central tendency bias

Previous work demonstrates that memory for simple stimuli can be biased by information about the distribution of which the stimulus is a member. Specifically, people underestimate values greater than the distribution’s average and overestimate values smaller than the average. This is referred to as the central tendency bias. This bias has been explained as an optimal use of both noisy sensory information and category information. In largely separate literature, cognitive load (CL) experiments attempt to manipulate the available working memory of participants in order to observe the effect on choice or judgments. In two experiments, we demonstrate that participants under high cognitive load exhibit a stronger central tendency bias than when under a low cognitive load. Although not anticipated at the outset, we also find that judgments exhibit an anchoring bias not described previously.