Der Arztbrief

The right of inspection in the hospital documents, the hospital discharge report for example, is often refused to patients in in-patient psychotherapeutic treatment (psychiatry, psychosomatic and psychotherapeutic medicine) with reference to the protection of the patients themselves, their doctors or relatives. Within a systemic therapy approach patients of an acute psychosomatic care unit in a hospital the patients could inspect the report of their hospital treatment including all ?objective” and ?subjective” data of their hospital stay. The conversation with patients and their relatives about this report and modifications of the details and addresses of the report in case of patients’ objections is considered as a psychotherapeutic tool (narrative of doctor and patient) in order to improve the transparency of the diagnostic and therapeutic process and the insights in the psychosomatic mechanisms of the patient’s disease. We discuss our organisation of cocreating the hospital discharge report and our experiences with this type of patient-doctor-communication.     

Montaigne: The Embodiment of Identity as Grounds for Toleration

Res Publica - One of the most important issues today is the conflict between identity groups. Can the concept of toleration provide resources for thinking about this? The standard definition of...     

Long-term memory in pigeons: I. The role of discrimination problem difficulty assessed by reacquisition measures II. The role of stimulus modality assessed by generalization slope

Pigeons learned either an easy or a difficult line angle discrimination (Experiment 1) or wavelength discrimination (Experiment 2), and then they were given a reacquisition test of retention after delays of 1 min, 1 day, or 1 week. Both percentage of responses to the S+ in the initial 10-trial block and number of blocks to criterion showed a progressive memory loss which was greater for the difficult problem. These results extend recent findings by using a free operant rather than a discrete trial task and by varying problem difficulty by altering the dimensional separation between training stimuli. In Experiment 3, pigeons were given variable interval training with either a wavelength or a line angle stimulus, and then they were tested for generalization in extinction after delays of 1 min, 1 day, and 1 week. With both dimensions, the relative gradients became progressively flatter with increasing delay intervals. This replicates earlier findings and extends them to the line angle dimension. The evidence of substantial forgetting in the first 24 h in all three experiments suggests that operant free-response procedures are more sensitive to forgetting effects than are discrete trial tasks.     

Influence of shape on haptic curvature perception

Curvature discrimination of hand-sized doubly curved surfaces by means of static touch was investigated. Stimuli consisted of hyperbolical, cylindrical, elliptical and spherical surfaces of various curvatures. In the first experiment subjects had to discriminate the curvature along a specified orientation (the discrimination orientation) of a doubly curved surface from a flat surface. The curvature to be discriminated was oriented either along the middle finger or across the middle finger of the right hand. Independent of the shape of the surface, thresholds were found to be about 1.6 times smaller along the middle finger than across the middle finger. Discrimination biases were found to be strongly influenced by the shape of the surface; subjects judged a curvature to be more convex when the perpendicular curvature was convex than when this curvature was concave. With the results of the second experiment it could be ruled out that the influence of shape on curvature perception was simply due to a systematic error made by the subject regarding the discrimination orientation.     

Serial reaction time performance following right parietal lobe damage

The serial reaction time task (SRT) is used to assess implicit sequence learning. Neuroimaging studies implicate parietal involvement; however, the necessity of this area is unclear. We tested six unilateral right parietal patients and compared their performance to matched controls. Both groups showed similar levels of learning and explicit awareness. Two patients with the largest lesions extending into either frontal or cerebellar regions showed no learning. These data suggest that implicit sequence learning can occur despite damage to the right parietal lobe.     

Gender Differences in Social Dominance Orientation: Gender Invariance May Be Situation Invariance

Most studies of gender differences in social dominance orientation (SDO) have investigated settings more or less hierarchy-enhancing. The aim of this study was to explore gender differences in SDO (1) within social structures varying in equality-enhancement, i.e., communities differing in political equality between men and women, and (2) settings where equality was maximized and held constant, i.e., democratic, voluntary associations, but varying in gender composition, using survey data from a random sample of 831 Swedish adults (median age?=?47 years). There was a significant interaction effect between gender and membership in voluntary associations dominated by women, with men and women displaying equally low levels of SDO. In all other instances the main effect of gender remained statistically significant.