Langzeitwirkungen psychoanalytischer und verhaltenstherapeutischer Langzeitpsychotherapien

The prospective study compares 31 patients in long-term behavior therapy with 31 patients in psychoanalytically oriented long-term therapy. A naturalistic design was applied within the German health system. All patients underwent a diagnostic interview (SCID) by an external interviewer. Only patients who fulfilled the DSM III-R criteria for a depression or an anxiety disorder were included in the study. Although the diagnoses of the patients undergoing long-term behaviour therapy and long-term psychoanalytical psychotherapy were comparable, we found that they differed in various ways. The differences arose in a number of characteristics, such as education, access to psychotherapy (recommended by professionals versus patients introducing themselves), usage of psychotropic medication, and the strain of symptoms. The average duration of long-term behavior therapy was 2.4 years and 64 sessions. The average duration of psychoanalytically oriented long-term therapy was 3.6 years and 209 sessions. Symptoms (SCL-90-R) and interpersonal problems (IIP) were examined at the beginning, after 1 year, 2.5 years, 3.5 years and after 7 years. Both groups showed significant degrees of improvement within the first 3.5 years and remained stabilized in the following 3.5 years regarding the symptomatic aspects. Focussing on the interpersonal problems, group PA showed further improvement after the 3.5-year period. The BT group however, showed no further improvement after 3.5 years but stabilized. The evaluated phase-model of psychotherapeutic change for short-term therapy was confirmed more clearly for long-term therapies of psychoanalytical orientation than for long-term therapies of behavioral orientation.     

Adolescents’ Exposure to a Sexualized Media Environment and Their Notions of Women as Sex Objects

This study was designed to investigate whether adolescents’ exposure to a sexualized media environment is associated with stronger beliefs that women are sex objects. More specifically, we studied whether the association between notions of women as sex objects and exposure to sexual content of varied explicitness (i.e., sexually non-explicit, semi-explicit, or explicit) and in different formats (i.e., visual and audio-visual) can be better described as cumulative or as hierarchical. Further, we investigated whether this association was contingent on gender. Based on data from an on-line survey of 745 Dutch adolescents aged 13 to 18, we found that the relationship between exposure to a sexualized media environment and notions of women as sex objects followed a hierarchical pattern: Starting with adolescents’ exposure to sexually semi-explicit content, the statistical significance of the relationship with notions of women as sex objects moved from semi-explicit to explicit sexual content and from visual to audio-visual formats. Exposure to sexually explicit material in on-line movies was the only exposure measure significantly related to beliefs that women are sex objects in the final regression model, in which exposure to other forms of sexual content was controlled. The relationship between exposure to a sexualized media environment and notions of women as sex objects did not differ for girls and boys.     

Evaluating dynamic performance: the influence of salient Gestalt characteristics on performance ratings

It is well recognized that performance changes over time. However, the effect of these changes on overall assessments of performance is largely unknown. In a laboratory experiment, we examined the influence of salient Gestalt characteristics of a dynamic performance profile on supervisory ratings. We manipulated performance trend (flat, linear-improving, linear-deteriorating, U-shaped, and inverted U-shaped), performance variation (small, large), and performance mean (negative, zero, positive) within subjects and display format (graphic, tabular) between subjects. Participants received and evaluated information about the weekly performance of different employees over a simulated 26-week period. Results showed strong main effects on performance ratings of both performance mean and performance trend, as well as interactions with display format. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

Computer-mediated communication and interpersonal attraction: an experimental test of two explanatory hypotheses.

The aims of this study were (a) to investigate the influence of computer-mediated communication (CMC) on interpersonal attraction and (b) to examine two underlying processes in the CMC-interpersonal attraction relationship. We identified two variables that may mediate the influence of CMC on interpersonal attraction: self-disclosure and direct questioning. Focusing on these potential mediating variables, we tested two explanatory hypotheses: the CMC-induced direct questioning hypothesis and the CMC-induced self-disclosure hypothesis. Eighty-one cross-sex dyads were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: text-only CMC, visual CMC, and face-to-face communication. We did not find a direct effect of CMC on interpersonal attraction. However, we did find two positive indirect effects of text-only CMC on interpersonal attraction: text-only CMC stimulated both self-disclosure and direct questioning, both of which in turn enhanced interpersonal attraction. Results are discussed in light of uncertainty reduction theory and CMC theories.     

God’s categories: The effect of religiosity on children’s teleological and essentialist beliefs about categories

Creationism implies that God imbued each category with a unique nature and purpose. These implications closely correspond to what some cognitive psychologists define as an essentialistic and teleological stance towards categories. This study assessed to what extent the belief in God as creator of categories is related to the mappings of these stances to categories in different domains. Israeli secular and orthodox Jewish 1st and 5th graders responded to questions assessing these three types of beliefs. The results revealed that secular children did not differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of animal category membership, and their teleological construal of artifacts. In turn, secular children did differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of social category membership, and their teleological construal of both animal and social categories. These findings intimate that while essentialist beliefs about animals, and teleological beliefs about artifacts do not require cultural input in order to emerge, essentialist beliefs about social categories, and teleological beliefs about both animal and social categories do.     

Fast-dm: A free program for efficient diffusion model analysis

In the present article, a flexible and fast computer program, called fast-dm, for diffusion model data analysis is introduced. Fast-dm is free software that can be downloaded from the authors' websites. The program allows estimating all parameters of Ratcliff's (1978) diffusion model from the empirical response time distributions of any binary classification task. Fast-dm is easy to use: it reads input data from simple text files, while program settings are specified by commands in a control file. With fast-dm, complex models can be fitted, where some parameters may vary between experimental conditions, while other parameters are constrained to be equal across conditions. Detailed directions for use of fast-dm are presented, as well as results from three short simulation studies exemplifying the utility of fast-dm.     

The independence of size perception and distance perception.

Research on distance perception has focused on environmental sources of information, which have been well documented; in contrast, size perception research has focused on familiarity or has relied on distance information. An analysis of these two parallel bodies of work reveals their lack of equivalence. Furthermore, definitions of familiarity need environmental grounding, specifically concerning the amount of size variation among different tokens of an object. To demonstrate the independence of size and distance perception, subjects in two experiments were asked to estimate the sizes of common objects from memory and then to estimate both the sizes and the distances of a subset of such objects displayed in front of them. The experiments found that token variation was a critical variable in the accuracy of size estimations, whether from memory or with vision, and that distance had no impact at all on size perception. Furthermore, when distance information was good, size had no effect on distance estimation; in contrast, at far distances, the distances to token variable or unknown objects were estimated with less accuracy. The results suggest that size perception has been misconceptualized, so that the relevant research to understand its properties has not been undertaken. The size-distance invariance hypothesis was shown to be inadequate for both areas of research.