Psychoedukation bei Personen mit erh?htem Psychoserisiko

Background

So far only few studies are available which have evaluated the effectiveness of psychoeducation for individuals at risk of psychosis in the early initial prodromal state (EIPS) whereas the benefit of psychoeducation in psychotic patients has been repeatedly confirmed. Thus the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of psychoeducation in individuals with increased risk of psychosis in the EIPS.

Method

A total of 128 help-seeking outpatients in the EIPS participated in a randomized controlled multicentre trial of 12 months of either psychoeducation as part of an integrated psychological intervention (IPI) or supportive counseling (SC). The time to transition to psychosis at 12-month and 24-month follow-up as well as the social adjustment at baseline, time of transition or post-treatment by means of the social adjustment scale (SAS?II) were assessed.

Results

The IPI was superior to SC in preventing progression to psychosis at 12-month (3.2% versus 16.9%, p?=0.008) and 24-month follow-up (6.3% versus 20.0%, p?=0.019). Both treatments resulted in significant pre-post improvements in SAS?II with no significant differences between the two groups.

Conclusions

Psychoeducation as part of an integrated intervention is effective for preventing the onset of psychosis over a 24-month time period in people in an EIPS. Moreover patients at risk of developing first episode psychosis seem to benefit from a specific psychoeducational intervention in the context of other treatments as well as from SC.     

Appresentation and Simultaneity: Alfred Schutz on Communication between Phenomenology and Pragmatics

In his theory of communication Schutz exhibits a significant tension between two fundamental perspectives, phenomenology and pragmatism, and in the long run he fails to reconcile the contradictory implications these perspectives have with regard to his model of interaction.The main problem seems to be the notion of sense-constitution. Schutz develops two distinguishable accounts of constitution: an egological one and a model based on the phenomenon of direct interaction of empirical subjects. Two key concepts are related to these different modes of constitution: the model of appresentation with regard to language, symbols and signs, and the model of synchronisation as triangulation of streams of consciousness and outward action sequences. They are analyzed as significant for two different methods and two different theories of communication. I propose some reasons for Schutz's insistence on a phenomenological account of the ego and the constitution of sense, and offer a brief sketch of an alternative strategy that is implicit in Schutz's theory.     

Zahnhartsubstanzschäden bei Essstörungen

Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa lead to several serious physical problems. One possible consequence is acid-related dental erosion. Dental erosion can be identified early and is caused by exogenic (selection of food) and / or endogenic (gastric acid) factors. That is why dentists play an important role in the early identification of eating disorders as well as in the prevention and therapy of dental erosion. They should be important collaborators of psychotherapists. We review characteristic damages to the teeth that are seen in eating disorders as well as preventive and therapeutic interventions. Psychotherapists should be informed about dental problems and preventive strategies to educate their patients.     

Continuous information processing in conceptual identifications

Summary This investigation was aimed at the analysis of processes of the conceptual object identification. Three experiments were performed which utilized a response preparation paradigm developed by Miller (1982). The results confirm the psychological validity of a distinction between sensorily and categorially represented concepts proposed formerly by the authors. The process of identification of objects as belonging to sensory concepts was analysed in more detail. The experimental results suggest that it may be a sequential feature matching process which is characterized by continuous information processing. Early in the process the figurative features allowing an identification of an object as belonging to a more general sensory concept are processed. In following processing stages this first conceptual identification is more and more specified by an additional checking of more detailed figurative features. More importantly, the results indicate that the information about the general conceptual identity of an object is not only available early in the identification process but can also be used for the preparation of following processes or processing stages even before the object is fully identified. Possible influences of the early information on the control of the conceptual identification itself and on the selection and control of motor behavior are discussed.We wish to thank the following psychology students at the Humboldt University in Berlin for their help in performing the experiments: Kathrin Hänel, Erika Küchler and Christina Matthé. Furthermore, we wish to thank the two anaonymous reviewers and Johannes Engelkamp for their helpful comments on a first draft of our paper     

Semantic control of selective attention

Summary It is argued that at least three modes of information processing should be distinguished: (1) sensory preprocessing; (2) activation and inhibition of knowledge structures, which run parallel and are unlimited in terms of capacity; (3) activated knowledge structures are used to make behavioral decisions. Decision processes are assumed to be sequentially organized because at any moment only one unit of the activated knowledge can be taken into account. Selective attention mainly refers to the third mode of processing. In this paper, potential rules are investigated that may determine what part of the activated knowledge influences making decisions about behavior. An intuitively plausible speculation about a rule of this kind is that activated knowledge is taken into account in the order of its activation level. Certain phenomena in selective attention are related to the operation of the rule, and some data are presented that seem to favor the validity of the rule's operation in the processing of multi-element visual displays.     

Preference,Expectations, and Attributional Bias: Two Field Studies1

Two quasi-experiments were conducted to test the relationship among a perceiver's preference, expectations, and causal attributions for an event, when the outcome of the event ran for and counter to expectation and preference. Following the 1976 Superbowl, fans of Dallas and Pittsburgh and fans with no preference were asked to attribute causality for a series of game events, counterbalanced for (un)favorability for each team. Following the 1976 Presidential election, fans of Carter and Ford were asked to attribute causality for the election outcome and estimate its repeatability and mutability. Both studies revealed that fans exhibit a biased attributional pattern, offering more credit to their own side for their successes than to the opponents for their successes. Furthermore, fans see their side's successes as replicable and their side's failures as nonreplicable. The implications of the data patterns for real world manifestations of attributional bias are discussed.     

Reliability and validity of two widely-used worry questionnaires: self-report and self-peer convergence

The reliability and validity of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) and the Worry Domains Questionnaire (WDQ) were examined with self-ratings from a non-clinical sample of 148 students in a test-retest design across four weeks. Ratings from three well-acquainted peers were also obtained. With internal consistencies and test-retest correlations of at least 0.85, the present study confirmed the high reliability of the questionnaires. Moreover, both measures demonstrated substantial convergent validity: Average agreement among peers was 0.42 (PSWQ) and 0.47 (WDQ) and aggregated self-peer agreement was 0.55 (PSWQ) and 0.49 (WDQ). Self-peer agreement was not biased by social desirability. These findings challenge views that worry is an unreliable and unobservable phenomenon.     

Verlorenes Objekt, Trennung und Anerkennung

Zusammenfassung. Die Verarbeitung von Trennungserfahrungen ist für die Psychoanalyse ein zentrales Anliegen. Trennungserfahrungen spielen in verschiedenen analytischen Konzepten eine Rolle. Zun?chst mu? daher gekl?rt werden, welche verschiedenen Dimensionen des Themas „Trennung” in der psychoanalytischen Theorie ausgearbeitet worden sind. Da? Trennungen verarbeitet werden k?nnen, ist an bestimmte Voraussetzungen geknüpft. Die Folgen von Trennungserfahrungen sind v.a. aus einer intrapsychischen Perspektive beschrieben worden. Diese Betrachtungsweise mu? durch eine intersubjektive erg?nzt werden. Klinische Konzepte früher Trennungspathologien und die neuere S?uglingsforschung weisen auf die Bedeutung der intersubjektiven Perspektive für die Psychoanalyse hin. Intrapsychische und intersubjektive Perspektive schlie?en einander nicht aus, sondern verschr?nken sich miteinander. Wesentlich für dieses Wechselspiel ist der Begriff der Anerkennung, der in Anlehnung an Benjamin eingeführt wird. Er ist hilfreich, um die ethischen Implikationen der psychoanalytischen Trennungsmodelle zu bedenken.

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The lost object, separation and recognition. About the foundation of psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalytic ethics concerning the experience of separation

Summary. There exists not only one psychoanalytic concept of ”separation”. Instead, it covers a wide range of psychoanalytic constructs, such as separation in Mahler’s terms, object loss, castration, the Lacanian model of psychic representation and so forth. The first aim of the present paper is to clarify the various concepts. As will be shown, most psychoanalytic concepts focus on the intrapsychic dimension of separation processes. Nevertheless, the working through of separation experiences is bound to intersubjective experiences as can be shown in reference to the clinical concepts on very early interpersonal pathology and to the contemporary research on infantile development. The intersubjective and intrapsychic perspectives do not contradict, but supplement each other. J. Benjamin has introduced the term ”recognition” into the psychoanalytic debate. Recognition is a major link between the two perspectives. It is helpful to outline the ethical consequences that can be drawn from the psychoanalytic concepts on ”separations”.

     

Stimulus-response compatibility and sequential learning in the serial reaction time task

The serial reaction time (SRT) task is a commonly used paradigm to investigate implicit learning. In most studies the settings originally introduced by Nissen and Bullemer are replicated, i.e., subjects respond to a visuo-spatial sequence of stimulus locations by pressing spatially compatible arranged keys. The present experiment was designed to explore to what degree the sequential learning observed under these conditions depends on the use of locational sequences. Under otherwise identical conditions, first the S-R compatibility was reduced by using symbols instead of locations as stimuli, and second, the connectibility, i.e, the ease of connecting successive stimuli into coherent pattern, was varied. Effects on reaction times (RT) in the SRT task and on explicit memory in a generation task were evaluated. The results indicate that the connectibility of the stimuli has no effect at all and that S-R compatibility influences only the general RT level but does not seem to modify the learning process itself. Thus, the data are more consistent with the notion that learning is based primarily on the sequence of responses rather than on the sequence of stimuli. Moreover, a post hoc classification of subjects with regard to the amount of explicit sequence knowledge they have acquired reveals a striking modification of the general result: The RT difference between responses to locations and symbols vanishes in the course of learning for the complete explicit knowledge group. In order to account for this effect, we presume that the response control of these subjects shifts from stimuli to motor programs, so that RTs become increasingly independent of the stimuli used.