“How much do you like your name?” An implicit measure of global self-esteem

We introduce a single-item implicit measure of global self-esteem. The measure is based on the mere-ownership effect and asks participants to indicate how much they like their name. Six studies attested to the validity of this measure. In addition to showing high test-retest reliability (r = .85), the studies found that Name-Liking was (a) unrelated to impression management, (b) positively related to the Name-Letter-Task, the Self-Esteem IAT, explicit self-esteem measures, and self-reported subjective well-being, (c) more strongly related to explicit measures of global than domain-specific self-esteem, (d) more strongly related to self-esteem judgments made spontaneously as well as under cognitive load, and (e) predicted observer-reported anxiety during an anxiety-inducing interview whereas an explicit measure of self-esteem did not.     

Interpreting ambiguous stimuli: Separating perceptual and judgmental biases

Interpreting ambiguous situations is not a purely data-driven process but can be biased towards positive interpretations by top-down influences. The present study tries to identify the underlying processes of these top-down influences. There are two separable types of processes that can be influenced by motivational biases: A perceptual bias affects information uptake whereas a judgmental bias affects acceptance criteria for positive and negative outcomes. In the present study, motivated influences on perception and judgment were investigated with a simple color discrimination task in which ambiguous stimuli had to be classified according to their dominating color. One of two colors indicated a financial gain or a loss, whereas a third color was neutral. To separate perceptual and judgmental biases, Ratcliff’s [Ratcliff, R. (1978). A theory of memory retrieval. Psychological Review, 85, 59–108] diffusion model was employed. Results revealed motivational influences on perception and judgment.     

Personality, political skill, and job performance

Based on the socioanalytic perspective of performance prediction [Hogan, R. (1991). Personality and personality assessment. In M. D. Dunnette, L. Hough, (Eds.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (2nd ed., pp. 873–919). Chicago: Rand McNally; Hogan, R., & Shelton, D. (1998). A socioanalytic perspective on job performance. Human Performance, 11, 129–144.], the present study tests whether motives to get along and to get ahead produce greater performance when interactively combined with social effectiveness. Specifically, we investigated whether interactions of the Five-Factor Model constructs of agreeableness and conscientiousness with political skill predict job performance. Our results supported our hypothesis for the agreeableness-political skill interaction. Additionally, after correcting for the unreliability and restricted range of conscientiousness, we found that its interaction with political skill also significantly predicted job performance, although not precisely as hypothesized. Implications of the results and directions for future research are provided.     

Psychotherapie von Anpassungsstörungen

In this study we examined the effectiveness of an outpatient client-centered psychotherapy of patients with adjustment disorders (ICD-10 F43.2) limited to twelve sessions in comparison to an untreated control group. The patients of each group (n_treatment= 31 and n_control= 19) had been diagnosed with an adjustment disorder in response to one of the following stressful events: either the loss of an important person or performance deficits at work or university. Compared with the untreated control group the immediate therapy group improved significantly on rating scales and questionnaires. These positive treatment effects proved stable at a 3 months follow-up. Individual treatment gains were also analyzed for clinical and statistical significance. The improvements of the treatment group were significantly greater in all used measures than those of the control group. These improvements were interpreted as an effect of the client-centered treatment which resulted in high individual overall treatment gains and in high effectsizes.     

At your own peril: An ERP study of voluntary task set selection processes in the medial frontal cortex

A tool that is commonly used to investigate selection among different alternatives in a changing environment is the task-switching paradigm. Functional neuroimaging has pointed out a role for the posterior medial frontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex in the voluntary selection of task sets. In the present study, we set out to investigate the temporal dynamics of these agency-related processes (in task choice vs. no-choice conditions) using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results revealed agency-related modulations of a series of ERP components, including (1) an early parieto-occipital activation, taken to reflect the evaluation of choice versus no choice; (2) a subsequent medial frontal expression of the voluntary selection between task sets; (3) a CNV-like sustained negativity in preparation for the target; (4) a target-induced N210—P210 complex, taken to reflect early sensory-perceptual processing; and (5) a target-induced P3, associated with the evaluation of the stimulus and its designated response vis-à-vis the chosen versus competing task sets. Together, these results indicate that the opportunity to choose between tasks invokes activity originating from the medial frontal cortex, associated with voluntary task set selection, but also activation at different time points in a number of other brain areas, not necessarily captured by functional neuroimaging.     

Experimentelle Untersuchungen zum Problem der Schreibgeschwindigkeit

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Concurrent and lasting effects of emotion regulation on amygdala response in adolescence and young adulthood

This study used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine a novel aspect of emotion regulation in adolescent development: whether age predicts differences in both the concurrent and lasting effects of emotion regulation on amygdala response. In the first, active regulation, phase of the testing session, fMRI data were collected while 56 healthy individuals (age range: 10.50–22.92 years) reappraised aversive stimuli so as to diminish negative responses to them. After a short delay, the second, re‐presentation, phase involved passively viewing the aversive images from the reappraisal task. During active regulation, older individuals showed greater drops in negative affect and inverse rostrolateral prefrontal‐amygdala connectivity. During re‐presentation, older individuals continued to show lasting reductions in the amygdala response to aversive stimuli they had previously reappraised, an effect mediated by rostrolateral PFC. These data suggest that one source of heightened emotionality in adolescence is a diminished ability to cognitively down‐regulate aversive reactions.     

Does feature similarity facilitate attentional selection?

Object-based attention enables us to simultaneously select and report two features from the same visual object. Does feature-based attention contribute similarly to visual selection? In the present study, we investigated the concurrent discrimination of two motion fields with a divided attention paradigm. We found that dual-task performance improved when the two fields conformed to a continuous optic flow, consistent with “object-based” selection. However, we found no such improvement when the two motion fields were merely similar, as would have been expected from “feature-based” selection. Therefore, feature similarity does not facilitate attentional selection in the same way as belonging to the same object does.     

The efficacy of systemic therapy with adult patients: a meta-content analysis of 38 randomized controlled trials

Systemic therapy is a widely used psychotherapy approach. Yet there exist few systematic reviews on its efficacy. A meta-content analysis was performed to analyze the efficacy of systemic therapy for the treatment of mental disorders in adulthood. All randomized (or matched) controlled trials (RCT) evaluating systemic/systems oriented therapy in various settings (family, couple, individual, group, multifamily group therapy) with adult index patients suffering from mental disorders were identified by database searches and cross-references in other reviews. Inclusion criteria were: index patient diagnosed with a DSM or ICD listed mental disorder, trial published in any language up to the end of 2008. The RCTs were content analyzed according to their research methodology, interventions applied, and results. Thirty-eight trials published in English, German, Spanish, and Chinese were identified, 34 of them showing systemic therapy to be efficacious for the treatment of mood disorders, eating disorders, substance use disorders, mental and social factors related to medical conditions and physical disorders, and schizophrenia. Systemic therapy may also be efficacious for anxiety disorders. Results were stable across follow-up periods of up to 5 years. There is a sound evidence-base for the efficacy of systemic therapy for adult index patients with mental disorders in at least five diagnostic groups.