Selbstpathologie und der post-moderne Mensch

The author describes the difficult situation of client-centered therapy in continental Europe. The formulas which arised to its rescue are provisionally signalized: person-centeredness, process differentiation and integrative psychotherapy. In addressing these themes the narcissistic defense is proposed as the big challenge of our time and the role of process differentiation and person-centeredness is discussed in respect to this development. Successively, the changing language of psychopathology, the rise of self-pathology, the broader nosological and sociological perspectives on the loss of identity and the development of a postmodern human type are discussed. Further, the treatment of this new challenge by a person-centered approach, especially in its process oriented form, is proposed. Finally, the magic formulas are revisited more precisely: Person-centeredness and process differentiation are considered to be inseperable, needing each other in the treatment of the narcissistic defense.     

Capacity limitations and the detection of correlations: comment on Kareev (2000)

Y. Kareev (2000) argued that the limited capacity of working memory may be an adaptive advantage for the early detection of useful correlations. His analysis indeed suggests that the optimal sample size is close to G. A. Miller's (1956) "magical number 7 +/- 2." The authors point out logical and statistical limitations of Y. Kareev's (2000) analysis, including that it neglects that the adaptive value is not determined by the hit rate but by the posterior probability of hit and that only signal trials are considered. The authors' analysis demonstrates that when these limitations are corrected for, the alleged benefit for small samples does not occur, and larger samples imply considerable improvement in the detection of correlations.     

Quality of phonological representations, verbal learning, and phoneme awareness in dyslexic and normal readers

This study of dyslexia was concerned with the quality of phonological representations of lexical items. It extended the studies of verbal learning in dyslexia from learning new vocabulary items (pseudo-names) to the learning of more well-specified variants of known words. The participants were 19 dyslexic adolescents in grades 4 to 6 and 19 younger normal readers in grade 2 matched on single word decoding. The dyslexics were significantly outperformed by the reading-age controls in non-word reading and in phoneme awareness. The dyslexics also took longer time to learn to associate a set of pseudo-names with pictures of persons although the dyslexics learned to associate familiar names with pictures as quickly as the controls did. The acquisition of new phonological representations of words was studied in an imitation task with maximally distinct pronunciations of long, familiar words. The dyslexics gained less than the controls in this task. They also gained less on one measure taken from a phoneme substitution task with the same words as in the distinctness task. The results are interpreted in the light of the hypothesis that poorly specified phonological representations may be an underlying problem in dyslexia.     

Reading the hippocampal code by theta phase-locking

Both the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are crucial for memory encoding and recall. However, it remains unclear how these brain regions communicate to exchange information. Recent findings using simultaneous recordings from the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex of the behaving rat have demonstrated that prefrontal cells' firing is phase-locked to the hippocampal theta rhythm. This suggests that phase synchronization clocked by the theta rhythm could be crucial for the communication between hippocampal and prefrontal regions.     

Bimodal and trimodal multisensory enhancement: effects of stimulus onset and intensity on reaction time

Manual reaction times to visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli presented simultaneously, or with a delay, were measured to test for multisensory interaction effects in a simple detection task with redundant signals. Responses to trimodal stimulus combinations were faster than those to bimodal combinations, which in turn were faster than reactions to unimodal stimuli. Response enhancement increased with decreasing auditory and tactile stimulus intensity and was a U-shaped function of stimulus onset asynchrony. Distribution inequality tests indicated that the multisensory interaction effects were larger than predicted by separate activation models, including the difference between bimodal and trimodal response facilitation. The results are discussed with respect to previous findings in a focused attention task and are compared with multisensory integration rules observed in bimodal and trimodal superior colliculus neurons in the cat and monkey.     

Stability, Strength and Sensitivity:Converting Belief into Knowledge

In this paper I discuss the relation between various properties that have been regarded as important for determining whether or not a belief constitutes a piece of knowledge: its stability, strength and sensitivity to truth, as well as the strength of the epistemic position in which the subject is with respect to this belief. Attempts to explicate the relevant concepts more formally with the help of systems of spheres of possible worlds (à la Lewis and Grove) must take care to keep apart the very different roles that systems of spheres can play. Nozicks sensitivity account turns out to be closer to the stability analysis of knowledge (versions of which I identify in Plato, Descartes, Klein and Lehrer) than one might have suspected.     

Personality traits in eating-disordered patients with and without self-injurious behaviors

Although there is a high comorbidity of eating disorder and self-injurious behavior (SIB), no systematic research has focused on personality trait differences in patients with and without SIB. In this study, a Dutch adaptation of the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1985, 1992) was completed by 178 female, eating-disordered (ED) patients of whom 46.5% showed at least 1 form of SIB (e.g., cutting, burning, hair pulling). A subsample of 41 patients also completed the NEO-PI-R. Compared to patients without SIB, ED patients with SIB scored significantly higher on the Neuroticism scale and significantly lower on the Extraversion scale; on subtraits (facet scores) they appeared to be more anxious, more willing to please and less cheerful, efficient and ambitious. Personality traits were not associated with frequency or form of SIB or subtype of ED (except for impulsiveness). We also did not find a significant interaction effect between ED subtype and presence/absence of SIB.     

Determining sociability, social space, and social presence in (a)synchronous collaborative groups.

The effectiveness of group learning in asynchronous distributed learning groups depends on the social interaction that takes place. This social interaction affects both cognitive and socioemotional processes that take place during learning, group forming, establishment of group structures, and group dynamics. Though now known to be important, this aspect is often ignored, denied or forgotten by educators and researchers who tend to concentrate on cognitive processes and on-task contexts. This "one-sided" educational focus largely determines the set of requirements in the design of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments resulting in functional CSCL environments. In contrast, our research is aimed at the design and implementation of sociable CSCL environments which may increase the likelihood that a sound social space will emerge. We use a theoretical framework that is based upon an ecological approach to social interaction, centering on the concept of social affordances, the concept of the sociability of CSCL environments, and social presence theory. The hypothesis is that the higher the sociability, the more likely that social interaction will take place or will increase, and the more likely that this will result in an emerging sound social space. In the present research, the variables of interest are sociability, social space, and social presence. This study deals with the construction and validation of three instruments to determine sociability, social space, and social presence in (a)synchronous collaborating groups. The findings suggest that the instruments have potential to be useful as measures for the respective variables. However, it must be realized that these measures are "first steps."     

Comparison of optimal cutoff points for single and multiple tests in personnel selection

This paper compares the determination of optimal cutoff points for single and multiple tests in the field of personnel selection. Decisional skills of predictor tests composing the multiple test are assumed to be endogenous variables that depend on the cutting points to be set. It is shown how the predictor cutoffs and the collective decision rule are determined dependently by maximizing the multiple test's common expected utility. Our main result specifies the condition that determines the relationship between the optimal cutoff points for single and multiple tests, given the number of predictor tests, the collective decision rule (aggregation procedure of predictor tests' recommendations) and the function relating the tests' decisional skills to the predictor cutoff points. The proposed dichotomous decision-making method is illustrated by an empirical example of selecting trainees by means of the Assessment Center method.