Körperbeschwerden bei niedergelassenen Psychologischen Psychotherapeuten

From June until August 2004 we asked 488 freely practising psychological psychotherapists in selected German federal states for the frequency of somatic complaints using the short version of the Gießener Beschwerdebogen (GBB-)24. It turned out that the psychotherapists suffered most from exhaustion and pain. Their somatic complaints were remarkably less influenced by sociodemographic characteristics like age, gender and location of practising (East/West). In comparison to the overall population the psychotherapists in total reported quantitatively the same frequencies of somatic complaints. Qualitatively the psychotherapists reported less problems concerning gastric and heart complaints but more problems concerning exhaustion than the overall population. Compared with a sample of saxonian general practitioners, the psychotherapists suffered from slightly less somatic complaints.     

Innerdeutsche Migration und psychisches Befinden

In a representative study German migrants within Germany were assigned to two different groups depending on their answers to the following two questions (?Where did you mainly grow up – Eastern Germany or Western Germany?“ and ?Where do you live now?“). The migrants (54 West-East and 68 East-West migrants) were compared with non-migrants (1,136 Western and 294 Eastern Germans) concerning different variables of their psychic condition. Migrants suffered from higher stress, less bodily well-being and more somatic symptoms than non-migrants. Probands migrating from Western to Eastern Germany reported the lowest levels of quality of life.     

Sequential processing of cues in memory-based multiattribute decisions

When probabilistic inferences have to be made from cue values stored in long-term memory, many participants appear to use fast and frugal heuristics, such as “take the best” (TTB), that assume sequential search of cues. A simultaneous global matching process with cue weights that are appropriately chosen would mimic the decision outcomes, albeit assuming different cognitive processes. We present a reanalysis of response times (RTs) from five published experiments (n 5 415) and one new experiment (n 5 82) that support the assumption of sequential search. In all instances in which decision outcomes indicated the use of TTB’s decision rule, decision times increased monotonically with the number of cues that had to be searched in memory. Furthermore, RT patterns fitted the outcome-based strategy classifications, which further validates both measures.     

Effect of shared information and owner behavior on showing in dogs (Canis familiaris)

Animal Cognition - Dogs’ production of referential communicative signals, i.e., showing, has gained increasing scientific interest over the last years. In this paper, we investigate whether...     

Imagery-induced negative affect,social touch and frontal EEG power band activity

Social touch seems to modulate emotions, but its brain correlates are poorly understood. Here, we investigated if frontal power band activity in the electroencephalogram (EEG) during aversive mental imagery is modulated by social touch from one’s romantic partner and a stranger. We observed the highest theta and beta power when imaging alone, next so when being touched by a stranger, with lowest theta and beta activity during holding hands with the loved one. Delta power was higher when being alone than with a stranger or a partner, with no difference between the two. Gamma power was highest during the stranger condition and lower both when being alone and with the partner, while alpha power did not change as a function of social touch. Theta power displayed a positive correlation with electrodermal activity supporting its relation to emotional arousal. Attachment style modulated the effect of touch on the EEG as only secure but not insecure partner bonding was associated with theta power reductions. Because theta power was sensitive to the experimental perturbations, mapped onto peripheral physiological arousal and reflected partner attachment style we suggest that frontal theta power might serve as an EEG derived bio-marker for social touch in emotionally significant dyads.     

On Defining “Reliance” and “Trust”: Purposes,Conditions of Adequacy,and New Definitions

Philosophia - Trust is often perceived as having great value. For example, there is a strong belief that trust will bring different sorts of public goods and help us preserve common resources. A...     

Recalling semantic information about personally known faces and voices

Previous research that investigated whether biographical information about familiar people is harder to retrieve from voices than from faces produced contrasting results. However, studies that used a strict control of the content of spoken extracts reported that semantic information about familiar people is easier to retrieve when recognising a face than when recognising a voice. In all previous studies faces and voices of famous people were used as stimuli. In the present study, personally familiar people's voices and faces (standard faces and blurred faces) were used. Presenting such people (i.e., participants’ teachers) allowed controlling still more strictly the content of the spoken extracts since it was possible to ask all the target persons to speak the same words. In addition, it was previously stressed that we encounter famous people's faces in the media more frequently than we hear their voice. This methodological difficulty was presumably reduced when teachers’ faces were presented. Present results showed a significant decrease in retrieval of biographical information from familiar voices relative to blurred faces even though the level of overall recognition was similar for blurred faces and voices. The role of the relative distinctiveness of voices and faces is discussed and further investigation is proposed.     

Examining antecedents and outcomes of part‐time working nurses' motives to search and not to search for a full‐time position

Grounded in self‐determination theory, this study sought to examine the antecedents and outcomes of part‐time working nurses' (n = 404) motives for searching and not searching for full‐time employment. After controlling for various background variables, autonomous motivation and economic motivation to search for a full‐time job related positively to job search intensity, controlled motivation to search related negatively to experienced positive experiences of part‐time work, whereas autonomous motivation not to search related negatively to job search intensity and positively to positive experiences from part‐time work. Finally, experienced managerial autonomy support toward part‐time work and negative feedback from colleagues regarding part‐time work were established as contextual antecedents of part‐time nurses' autonomous and controlled motives to search and not to search.     

Effects of Personal Epistemology on the Understanding of Multiple Texts

We examined whether the text understanding of students holding naïve and sophisticated epistemological beliefs was differentially affected by text format, also controlling for effects of gender, word decoding, and prior knowledge on understanding. The participants were 39 Norwegian first-year teacher students, and the topic of reading was attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It was found that only readers holding sophisticated epistemological beliefs displayed adequate understanding when reading multiple, partly conflicting, texts about ADHD, whereas students holding naïve epistemological beliefs gained better understanding when reading a single textbook-like source with identical content. This finding, however, depended on the level of understanding being measured by the criterial task, with only the task measuring deeper situational text understanding showing an interaction between epistemological beliefs and text format. This study provides evidence that not only knowledge itself, but also personal beliefs about knowledge, may enhance or constrain deeper understanding of multiple texts.