When views about alternative medicine,nature and god come in the way of people's vaccination intentions

In spite of the safety and efficiency of the COVID-19 vaccines and the many promotion efforts of political and expert authorities, a fair portion of the population remained hesitant if not opposed to vaccination. Public debate and the available literature point to the possible role of people's attitudes towards medical institutions as well as their preference for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) on their motivations and intentions to be vaccinated. Other potential ideological factors are beliefs about environmental laissez-faire and divine providence insofar as they encourage people to let the pandemic unfold without human interference. In three cross-sectional samples (total N = 8214), collected at successive moments during the Belgian vaccination campaign, the present research examines the distal role of these psychological and ideological factors on vaccination intentions via motivational processes. Study 1 gauges the relation between trust in medical institutions and preference for CAM on intentions to get vaccinated via motivations. Study 2 examined the role of beliefs in the desirability of letting nature take its course (‘environmental laissez-faire beliefs’) on vaccination intention via motivations. Study 3 tests whether people's adherence to environmental laissez-faire and beliefs about divine providence are linked to their motivations for vaccination via trust in the medical institutions and CAM. Results show that adherence to CAM has a deleterious effect on vaccination intentions, whereas trust in medical institutions has a positive effect. Both ideological factors pertaining to external control are only moderately related, with environmental laissez-faire beliefs having stronger effects on CAM, medical trust and vaccination motivations. We discuss the importance of this set of results in light of the growing interest in CAM and the increasing presence of messages appealing to the environment.     

Learning in honey bees with brain lesions: how partial mushroom-body ablations affect sucrose responsiveness and tactile antennal learning

Honey bees are ideal organisms for studying associative learning, because they can rapidly learn different sensory cues, even under laboratory conditions. Classical olfactory learning experiments have shown that the mushroom bodies (MBs), a prominent neuropil of the central nervous system of the bee, are involved in olfactory learning and memory formation. We tested whether the MBs are also involved in tactile antennal learning. As in olfactory learning, bees use the antennae during tactile learning to sense tactile cues. We produced specific MB ablations by applying the mitotic blocker hydroxyurea (HU). In Drosophila, HU-induced brain lesions of the MBs strongly impaired olfactory memory formation. As treatment with HU might also interfere with the processing of the reward stimulus, sucrose, we measured the responsiveness to sucrose stimuli in these bees. Treatment with HU led to partial ablations of the median MB sub-units on one or both sides of the brain. We analysed side-specific effects in double-blind tests, testing sucrose responsiveness separately for each antenna, and conditioning first one antenna and then the other in a reversal learning assay. HU-treated bees without detectable ablations were less responsive to sucrose and had a poorer learning performance than untreated controls. Partial MB ablation did not additionally affect responsiveness to sucrose or tactile antennal learning. Interestingly, bees with bilateral MB ablations did not differ from untreated controls in their learning performance during the first learning phase. During reversal learning, acquisition in these bees was significantly lower than that in untreated controls. It is concluded that HU treatment affects sucrose responsiveness and tactile learning even without detectable ablation of neuropils. The effects of MB ablations on tactile learning are not side-specific and not correlated with the volume of the ablated neuropil. Accepted after revision: 15 January 2001 ❚ Electronic Publication     

Factors Affecting the Use of Dimensional Prepositions in German and American English: Object Orientation, Social Context, and Prepositional Pattern

Spatial language and the use of spatial prepositions has recently been intensively investigated. We add two novel aspects to the question of which frame of reference, i.e., the deictic or the intrinsic frame, is used when communicating about dimensional relations between objects. We restrict ourselves to the use of prepositions that refer to the first horizontal axis, i.e., in front of and behind in English, and vor and hinter in German, respectively, and report on a series of 16 experiments on the connection between the use of these prepositions and the indication of particular subspaces adjacent to reference objects in a traffic environment. First, we will show that an interaction between the intrinsic orientation of the reference object, the type of social situation in which spatial communication occurs, and the used language's pattern of prepositional word forms for temporal and spatiodimensional relations contributes to the proper prediction of the use of spatial prepositions. Second, we systematically consider production as well as interpretation of prepositions in two different languages in the same experimental setting, which allows for the estimation of communicative success. Here, it turns out that in German as well as in American English there are conditions in which speakers and listeners either agree or disagree on the chosen frame of reference; however, these conditions are different in the two languages investigated.     

Dementia with Lewy bodies: a pure case

A pure case of autopsy-confirmed dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is described. The patient presented with distinctive verbal fluency deficits in the context of mild language impairment, intact recognition memory, and impaired paragraph recall. Neuroimaging (CT and SPECT) showed progressive medial temporal lobe atrophy. Neuropathology revealed Lewy bodies, degeneration in the substantia nigra, nucleus basalis of Meynert (Nakano & Hirano, 1984), and locus ceruleus, but no pathology characteristic of Alzheimer's disease. It is in this sense that the case is "pure" DLB. Early neuropsychological diagnosis of DLB is essential (Salmon et al., 1996) given the potentially fatal hazard of neuroleptics (McKeith et al., 1992) and the difficulties associated with clinical neurological diagnoses (Litvan et al., 1998).     

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.     

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     

Die Entstehung einer personalistischen Philosophie im heutigen Russland

Ohne ZusammenfassungText eines Vortrages an einem Kolloquium den 24 Mai, 1992 zu Ehren von Prof. Joseph M. Bochenski an Lässlich seines 90. Geburtstags.     

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.     

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.     

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”.