Emotional scenes in peripheral vision: selective orienting and gist processing, but not content identification

Emotional-neutral pairs of visual scenes were presented peripherally (with their inner edges 5.2 degrees away from fixation) as primes for 150 to 900 ms, followed by a centrally presented recognition probe scene, which was either identical in specific content to one of the primes or related in general content and affective valence. Results indicated that (a) if no foveal fixations on the primes were allowed, the false alarm rate for emotional probes was increased; (b) hit rate and sensitivity (A') were higher for emotional than for neutral probes only when a fixation was possible on only one prime; and (c) emotional scenes were more likely to attract the first fixation than neutral scenes. It is concluded that the specific content of emotional or neutral scenes is not processed in peripheral vision. Nevertheless, a coarse impression of emotional scenes may be extracted, which then leads to selective attentional orienting or--in the absence of overt attention--causes false alarms for related probes.     

Subjektive Einschätzung der eigenen Gesundheit und gesundheitsrelevantes Verhalten bei niedergelassenen Psychologischen Psychotherapeuten

From June until August 2004 we asked 488 established psychological psychotherapists in selected German federal states for a subjective evaluation of their own health, their utilization of the health care system and their health-related behavior. It turned out that the psychotherapists mainly reported a good state of health although their reported state of health was more negative than in the general population with equal age and level of education. This finding is surely connected with specific mental, physical and existential burdens of their profession as well as with specifics of the “psychotherapist personality”. The psychotherapists’ evaluations highly depend on age, but not significantly on sociodemographical criteria like gender and place of establishment (East/West Germany). Also the affiliation to a therapy school (psychoanalysis, depth psychological funded psychotherapy, behavior therapy) is irrelevant for the subjective evaluation of one’s own health. Concerning the annual number of consultations and disability days the psychotherapists are clearly below average. They report a lot of attentiveness about their health and practice a health-benefical behavior. In this case they make higher demands on themselves than the general population.     

Knowing Through Making: The Role of the Artefact in Practice-led Research

During the last decade, research in art and design in Finland has begun to explore new dimensions. Artists and designers have taken an active role in contextualising and interpreting the creative process in practice, as well as the products of this process, by looking at the process itself and the works produced through it. From this new point of view, the knowledge and the skills of a practising artist or designer form a central part of the research process, and this has produced a new way of doing research. In this new type of research project, part of the research is carried out as art or design practice. The central methodological question of this emerging field of research is: how can art or design practice interact with research in such a manner that they will together produce new knowledge, create a new point of view or form new, creative ways of doing research? In this article, the making and the products of making are seen as an essential part of research: they can be conceived both as answers to particular research questions and as artistic or designerly argumentation. As an object made by an artist–researcher, the artefact can also be seen as a method for collecting and preserving information and understanding. However, the artefacts seem unable to pass on their knowledge, which is relevant for the research context. Thus, the crucial task to be carried out is to give a voice to the artefact. This means interpreting the artefact. During the process of interpretation, furthermore, the artefact has to be placed into a suitable theoretical context. In this process, the final products (the artefacts) can be seen as revealing their stories, i.e. the knowledge they embody.     

How Do You Say Nature?: Opening the Design Space with a Knowledge Environment

In this paper, we describe a design study on how families in Los Angeles experience nature, with a particular focus on how using alternative formats for research analysis and presentation can enrich a design research inquiry. Conducted in Pasadena, CA as a part of Super Studio, the year-long design research class emphasized knowledge building and sharing through design methods of analysis, exhibition, and concept prototypes. After conducting interviews and engaging participants with probes, the class built the results into an open-ended knowledge environment. The main observation from the exhibition – that Angelenos have a limited vocabulary for describing nature and their interaction with it – helped to define the opportunity for design intervention that created connection points between Angelenos and nature. There are few attempts to describe how probe returns evolve into design concepts. Showcased is a process that depends on the unique affordances of design as the vehicle for discovery and invention.     

Psychische Gesundheit von Studierenden der Medizin

Objectives and methods

Concerning mental disorders, both physicians and alumni of medical sciences report a higher symptom load than the average population. Up to now however only a few studies have been conducted concerning the mental health of medical students. The aim of this study is to explore, whether medical students show a higher symptom load than their peers and whether there are differences concerning sex, phases of the studies and point of origin. For this survey the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) was applied to 390 medical students from the University Leipzig. Their results were compared to a representative sample of peers (n=225).

Results

The analysis of variance shows significant differences between the male and female student samples on the one side and the same sex peer samples on the other. Both student samples scored significantly higher on the scales Other Anxiety Syndrome, Major Depressive Syndrome and Stress. Additionally, male students scored higher on the Other Depressive Syndrome scale and the Somatoform Syndrome scale. Further analysing the medical students sample, the females’ measures were significantly higher for the Somatoform Syndrome, Depression and Stress scales. In addition, an interaction was found between sex and point of origin.

Conclusions

Medical students report more symptoms of mental disorders than their peers. Therefore extensive prevention concepts are needed for this group.     

Posttraumatische Belastungssymptome als Spätfolge von Kindheiten im Zweiten Weltkrieg

Psychological late-life sequelae of war childhood have rarely been examined. The study evaluated posttraumatic symptoms and current psychopathology in a sample of former German war children of which 10.8% reported significant posttraumatic symptoms indicating a possible posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The presence of PTSD symptoms was significantly associated with current psychopathological distress, even 6 decades after World War II. Our data underline the urgent need for research in this field. Clinical implications for a psychotherapeutic approach are discussed.     

Remembering can cause forgetting--but not in negative moods

Repeated retrieval of a subset of previously observed events can cause forgetting of the non-retrieved events. We examined how affective states experienced during retrieval modulate such retrieval-induced forgetting by inducing positive, negative, and neutral moods in subjects immediately before they attempted to retrieve studied items. On the basis of recent work, we hypothesized that positive moods encourage relational processing, which should increase interference from related events and thus enhance retrieval-induced forgetting. By contrast, negative moods should encourage item-specific processing, which should reduce interference and thus reduce such forgetting. Our results are consistent with these predictions. When subjects were in negative moods, repeated retrieval did not cause forgetting of the non-retrieved material, whereas when subjects were in positive and neutral moods, they showed reliable retrieval-induced forgetting. Our findings suggest that the emotions involved during interrogation of a witness can affect the result of repeated interrogations.     

Strategy use in the reading span test: an analysis of eye movements and reported encoding strategies

Strategy use in the traditional reading span test was examined by recording participants' eye movements during the task (Experiment 1) and by interviewing participants about their strategy use (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, no differences between individuals with a low, medium, and high span were observed in how they distributed processing time between task elements. In all three groups, fixation times on words up to the to-be-remembered (TBR) word became shorter and the time spent on the TBR longer as memory load in the task increased. The results of Experiment 2, however, show that span groups differ in the use of memory encoding strategies: individuals with a low span use mainly rehearsal, whereas individuals with a high span use almost exclusively semantic elaboration. The results indicate that the use of elaborative strategies may enhance span performance but that not all individuals are necessarily able to use such strategies efficiently.     

Are we there yet? A review of gender comparisons in three behavioral journals through the 20th century

Despite overwhelming evidence that gender plays a significant role in the course of numerous psychological disorders, researchers have historically neglected to address gender similarities and differences in their research. Previous reviews of the psychological literature have indicated that personality, psychotherapy, and behavioral psychology journals have published few studies that focus on gender comparisons. The current review examined published articles in three prominent behavioral psychology journals—Behavior Therapy, Behavior Modification, and Behaviour Research and Therapy—from their inception through 2001. Raters coded each article (N = 4,635) for gender content in the title or abstract, analyses of gender differences, and discussion of gender. Overall, very few articles focused on gender content in the title, abstract, or discussion or analyzed data by gender. Implications of these results and suggestions for enhancing attention to gender comparisons are discussed.     

Investigating a computerised test of the Stroop effect extended by inclusion of a third, more difficult task

A validation study of a computerised test recently developed involving the Stroop effect, extended here by inclusion of a third, more difficult test series, is presented. Three groups of men belonging to the Swedish armed forces and adjudged to differ in their qualifications (20, 32, and 19 men of levels 1, 2, and 3, respectively) and a fourth group of 18 men convicted of serious crimes of violence were given this test, termed the Stress Strategy Test. Discriminant analysis of the test's 12 variables (four for each of the three test series) yielded a discriminant power of 65% for the total group, highest for the level 1 group (80%) and for the nonmilitary group (72%), results substantially better than obtained for the original version of the test with use of similar subject groups.