Different Roots of Human Intentionality in Mammalian Mentality

Five mental components of human intentionality are distinguished and related to different properties of mammalian orientation. It is proposed that, in the course of evolution, these old properties became integrated and thereby allowed for the development of a new quality: human orientation. The existence of more than 4,000 mammal species with their various forms and levels of mental organization, offering a panorama of different combinations of differently developed components of mentality, provide ample opportunities for comparative studies. The difficulties in assessing specific types are outlined, drawing on over 40 years of observation. Based on this knowledge, an argument is made for the importance of staying in contact with the empirical objects and of considering their ontological status when rising the standards of precision of formal analysis. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Psychotherapie zwischen Narrativ und Qualit?tssicherung

Two important books and a psychotherapeutic quality study published in 2011 serve as background for the examination of the polar conditions that determine psychotherapeutic work: the laws of the narrative, i.e. of relating, which provides the contents of the psychotherapeutic work and quality assurance as the canon of the scientific, politically correct and governmental controls of psychotherapeutic practice. The narrative is a composition formally characterized by a course scheme and in terms of contents as an enactment of the first person narrator and a narrated first person. Different from daydreams it seeks public attention and the listener in order to evoke concern and identification. It transports wishes, anxiety, fulfillment and catastrophes. The narrative is the phenomenology of speech logic and interpersonal coherence and can be linked to different theories, above all psychoanalytical ones. For psychotherapy it opens the world of the ??I??, with its conflicts, assessments and stabilizing efforts in the interpersonal context. Quality control is also a scientifically based steering of practical work which is increasingly being manifested in psychotherapy as well as in medicine and other areas of life. A study of the Techniker Krankenkasse (Technical Health Insurance) concluded in May 2011, confirms the uselessness of time-consuming and costly control procedures in psychotherapy and emphasizes the importance of good training and further education, for which the study has attested a high quality for Germany.     

Which processes are involved in cognitive procedural learning?

Procedural memory is characterised by a relative resistance to pathology, making its assessment of the utmost importance. However, few studies have looked at the cognitive processes involved in cognitive procedural learning. In an initial experiment, we studied the role of different cognitive functions in massed cognitive procedural learning. Our results confirmed the existence of three separate learning phases and, for the first time, demonstrated the involvement of episodic memory and executive functions in the first learning phase. In a second experiment, we studied the effect of distributed learning conditions on the dynamics of procedural learning. This second study confirmed our results but showed that these conditions slow down the process of cognitive procedural learning. Our overall findings call into question the status of functionally autonomous memory system that is currently allotted to procedural memory, and suggest that the role of nonprocedural cognitive components should be taken into account in patient rehabilitation.     

You can't get something for nothing: Kierkegaard and Heidegger on how not to overcome Nihilism 1

This paper analyzes Kierkegaard's Religiousness A sphere of existence, presented in his edifying works, and Heidegger's concept of authenticity, proposed in Being and Time, as responses to modern nihilism. While Kierkegaard argues that Religiousness A is an unsuccessful response to modern nihilism, Heidegger claims that authenticity, a secularized version of Religiousness A, is a successful response. We argue that Heidegger's secularization of Religiousness A is incomplete and unsuccessful, that Heidegger's later work offers a reconsideration of the problem of modern nihilism, and that later Heidegger suggests a way out of nihilism which is compatible with Kierkegaard's Religiousness B sphere of existence.     

Expertise in basketball modifies perceptual discrimination abilities,underlying cognitive processes,and visual behaviours

In this paper, the links between cognitive constraints, visual behaviours, and perceptual judgements are examined. Two experiments investigated the perceptual processes employed during same-different judgement tasks. In Experiment 1, experts' eye movements (i.e., number of fixations and fixation duration) were consistent across discrepant source and target conditions where the number of displaced elements was manipulated. In contrast, novices decreased the number of fixations employed as the number of elements displaced increased. The findings are consistent with the view that both experts and novices process information in a manner (relational or attributional) that constrains the type of visual search used (low or high sensitive to attributional change). In Experiment 2, manipulation of target presentation confirmed that recognition was viewpoint dependent for both expert and novice players. The degradation in performance was accompanied by a change in the visual search behaviours employed by experts, which confirmed thr strength of the search–cognition–performance links     

The Intersection of Mutual Partner Violence and Substance Use Among Urban Gays,Lesbians, and Bisexuals

Intimate partner violence among gays and lesbians has gained increased attention in recent years. The present study assessed mutual partner violence within a gay, lesbian, bisexual (GLB) community sample to explore how mutual partner violence relates to the use of psychoactive substances. The results suggest that individuals engaging in mutual partner violence are more likely to report the use of numerous drugs than other subjects. However, this finding holds more consistently among men. The results also indicate that the exchange of violence is more significant for substance use than the particular type of violence involved. The authors suggest that minority stress may be an underlying mechanism of both substance use and partner violence and may contribute to the intersection of these deviant phenomena in the GLB community.     

Refocusing the question: Can there be skillful coping without propositional representations or brain representations?

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences -     

Self, Other, Positive, and Negative Affect Scales of the Self-Confrontation Method: factorial structure and unidimensionality

In the self-confrontation method, the rows of a grid consist of valuations (i.e. summaries of important personal narratives), while the columns contain affects grouped into four scales (see title). These affects (varying from 16 to 30) are rated on a 0–5 scale of intensity, resulting in an affect profile for each valuation. Principal components analysis on the affect profiles of a client sample, using a list of 30 affects, yielded a 3-factor solution, with 2 unipolar and 1 bipolar factor, in accordance with the four scales. On the basis of this analysis, a list of 24 affects was derived with six affects per scale. This list was then applied to a student sample to cross-validate the results. Unidimensionality of the four scales was found at the level of single grids, and across both client and student samples. It was concluded that the four scales of the 24-affect list appeared to be psychometrically sound and optimally suited for use in research and practice.