Personality, acculturation, and psychosocial adjustment of Chinese international students in Germany

The effect of personality traits and acculturation variables on crosscultural adjustment were investigated in 139 Chinese students in Germany (52% girls; M age = 25.3 yr., SD = 2.9). Participants were surveyed by house visits to their dormitories. Several scales were administered: (a) Big Five Inventory; (b) Vancouver Index of Acculturation; (c) sociocultural adjustment, general and academic; and (d) psychological adjustment, i.e., depression, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. Results showed that Neuroticism and Openness were two shared predictors of sociocultural adjustment. Agreeableness and mainstream acculturation were only related to general adjustment, while Conscientiousness was only related to academic adjustment. All facets of psychological adjustment were related to Neuroticism and Consciousness, while positive components (self-esteem and life satisfaction) were also related to Extraversion and Openness. No influence of heritage acculturation was found. The findings are discussed in light of measurement issues and the shared and unique individual predictors of the different facets of adjustment.     

Strategy Induction Enhances Creativity in Figural Divergent Thinking

Instructional effects in creative‐thinking tasks are important to understand in order to promote creative performance of individuals. In divergent‐thinking tasks, for example, instructional and strategic enhancement effects have been extensively studied for verbal tasks. However, while studies on instructional enhancement effects on creative drawing tasks exist, it is surprising that strategy enhancement in figural divergent thinking is still underresearched. In this study, we used a strategy manipulation approach to reassess the role of executive strategy implementation and the moderating role of an indicator of fluid intelligence, figural analogical reasoning, in two types of figural divergent‐thinking tasks (abstract vs. concrete). The sample comprised N = 75 high‐school students. Importantly, we found strategic enhancement effects by combining strategy instructions with a prompt to “be creative.” This combined instruction was contrasted with a standard instruction, and main effects were found for overall, concrete, and abstract creativity. Moreover, we found in a regression analysis a main effect for figural analogical reasoning on overall creativity and creativity for only the concrete object tasks. An expected interaction effect of instruction and figural analogical reasoning was not found. As another addition, the role of current motivation in figural divergent thinking was explored.     

Switching, induction of rapid cycling, and increased suicidality with antidepressants in bipolar patients: fact or overinterpretation?

Antidepressants constitute a central cornerstone in the treatment of depressive syndromes. In bipolar patients, however, there is an ongoing controversy about their usefulness for at least 3 decades. Early reports, mainly concerning tricyclic antidepressants, have repeatedly pointed toward unfavorable side effects on the course of the disorder, namely switching into (hypo)mania, induction of rapid cycling, and increased risk of suicide. Most evidence for both unfavorable and favorable effects has been deducted, thus far, from small studies with methodological flaws. More substantiated evidence only recently became available. From this it appears that, at least, the switch risk, and perhaps also the risk for rapid cycling and new-onset suicidality have been overinterpreted. At the same time, these new data raise doubt about the efficacy of antidepressants as a primary-treatment choice in bipolar depression.     

Material properties determine how force and position signals combine in haptic shape perception

When integrating estimates from redundant sensory signals, humans seem to weight these estimates according to their reliabilities. In the present study, human observers used active touch to judge the curvature of a shape. The curvature was specified by positional and force signals: When a finger slides across a surface, the finger's position follows the surface geometry (position signal). At the same time, it is exposed to patterns of forces depending on the gradient of the surface (force signal; Robles-de-la-Torre, G., & Hayward, V. (2001). Force can overcome object geometry in the perception of shape through active touch. Nature, 412, 445-448). We show that variations in the surface's material properties (compliance, friction) influence the sensorily available position and force signals, as well as the noise associated with these signals. Along with this, material properties affect the weights given to the position and force signals for curvature judgements. Our findings are consistent with the notion of an observer who weights signal estimates according to their reliabilities. That is, signal weights shifted with the signal noise, which in the present case resulted from active exploration.     

向乌托邦告别吗?

存在三种意义上的向乌托邦告别.从前的乌托邦主义者是马克思主义的先行者,但是乌托邦主义者缺乏中间阶段,脱离现实,不善生活.马克思主义并非不是乌托邦,而是一种具体的乌托邦的新事物.具体的乌托邦要求我们善于同可能性打交道,努力领悟可能性,使之成为一种智力参谋部,从而建设一个公正的、美好的、人道的社会.具体的乌托邦永不满足.     

Sustaining work force inclusion and well-being of mothers on public assistance: Individual deficit and social ecology perspectives

This study compared theoretical perspectives on the psychological and paid labor activity implications of mandating mothers initially on US welfare to participate in labor force activities. Data were collected that reflected these areas: government public policy interventions, family social ecology measures, mother’s psychological and human capital, and community capital. A quasi-experimental design was used, and multiple source data was collected over time. In the initial part of the study, 144 welfare mothers and one of their children between 9 and 13 years were interviewed. Results indicated that having high levels of individual human and psychological capital and lower levels of family social ecological barriers predicted higher levels of maternal paid labor market activity and psychological well-being. Using archival records, additional analyses involved a 32-month review of state records for nearly 1200 mothers initially on welfare. Results revealed that the lower one’s initial capital—either educational (lacking GED or high school diploma) or community-based (residents spending a high percentage of gross income on rent), the greater one’s economic dependence on public welfare, regardless of whether one was assigned to a welfare to work program or to a control group. Thus, mandating labor market activity as a government public policy was not effective as an isolated strategy to uphold employability over time. These results suggest that employers and government leaders need to provide individual human capital and community capital investments to sustain work force inclusion of low-income mothers.     

Emotional after‐effects on the P3 component of the event‐related brain potential

Agrowing body of literature indicates that affective states can influence cognitive processes. The core assumption of Ellis and Ashbrook's (1988) model explaining these emotional after‐effects on cognition is that the emotional state regulates the allocation of processing resources. A negative emotional state is supposed to pre‐empt capacity normally allocated to the cognitive task at hand. This is assumed to occur because the negative emotional state leads to an increase in intrusive, irrelevant thoughts, which compete with relevant cognitive activities and thus result in a lack of attention given to relevant features of the task to be performed. In the present study, the hypothesis that negative emotions lead to a reduced information‐processing capacity and that this is observable on a very basic level of information processing is tested. Therefore, 102 participants were assigned to three independent groups, each inducing one of a negative, a positive, or a neutral mood by means of a 3‐minute video‐clip. Shortly after the video‐clip, two acoustical stimuli with increasing information were presented, while the P3 component of the event‐related brain potential on these stimuli was measured as a psychophysiological indicator of cognitive resource allocation. In addition, the expenmental manipulation was checked by assessing subjective and external mood ratings as well as cortical alpha activity. Results show that the videos did in fact induce positive, neutral, or negative mood. Moreover, even when controlling for video‐related unspecific cortical arousal, a significant emotional after‐effect was found on the P3 component of the event‐related brain potential, indicating reduced information‐processing capacity, particularly in the negative mood condition. The reported data support Ellis and Ashbrook's model of emotional after‐effects on cognitive processes. As those effects were observable after an event that did not demand a high amount of cognitive resources, this suggests that even tasks that do not heavily engage central processing resources and are not likely to be influenced by cognitive strategies, seem to be affected by a negative emotional state.     

Transition Discontinuities and the Biographical Shaping of Early Work Careers

Because of the restructuring of work and deregulation of the labor market school-to-work transitions have been predicted to become destandardized. These structural changes will finally also erode Germany's renowned dual system of apprenticeship training. From an economic-structural point of view it is likely that young persons' social integration and biographical plans can no longer rely on this occupation-driven transition arrangement. Based on a quantitative and qualitative longitudinal study with young adults in two German labor-market regions, this exploratory study shows that the dual system not only trains for certain occupations, but also socializes for the contingencies of the labor market. The results are interpreted in the new conceptual framework of self-socialization, which links individual agency with social contexts across the life course in terms of a biography-environment fit. Applied to transition discontinuities and shifting contexts of career development, processes of self-socialization are reflected in different modes of biographical agency in the shaping of early employment careers. Self-initiated and enforced discontinuous employment and occupational change are mediated by various constellations of occupational contexts and modes of biographical agency. The study suggests that for young adults the dual system still provides skills and orientations for coping with career discontinuity.     

Neural Correlates of Reward Processing in Adolescents With a History of Inhibited Temperament

ABSTRACT— Functional imaging data were acquired during performance of a reward-contingency task in a unique cohort of adolescents (ages 14–18 years) who were characterized since infancy on measures of temperamental behavioral inhibition. Neural activation was examined in striatal structures (nucleus accumbens, putamen, caudate) with a known role in facilitating response to salient reward-related cues. Adolescents with a history of behavioral inhibition, relative to noninhibited adolescents, showed increased activation in the nucleus accumbens when they believed their selection of an action would affect reward outcome. Neural responses did not differ between the two groups when participants made a prespecified response that they knew would result in reward or when they produced random motor responses that they knew would not be rewarded. These results link inhibited temperament and perturbed neural responses to reward-contingency cues.