Fortschritte der Psychiatrie

Die Psychiatrie hat sich in den letzten 100 Jahren zu einer faszinierenden Wissenschaft entwickelt: Es ist ihr gelungen, Forschungsergebnisse aus allen benachbarten Disziplinen einzubinden, aus den Neurowissenschaften, der Soziologie, den Kulturwissenschaften und der Psychologie. Dies erkl?rt auch den gewaltigen Erkenntnisfortschritt und die – in der Tat sensationellen – Therapieerfolge unseres Faches.     

Comparing dogs and great apes in their ability to visually track object transpositions

Knowing that objects continue to exist after disappearing from sight and tracking invisible object displacements are two basic elements of spatial cognition. The current study compares dogs and apes in an invisible transposition task. Food was hidden under one of two cups in full view of the subject. After that both cups were displaced, systematically varying two main factors, whether cups were crossed during displacement and whether the cups were substituted by the other cup or instead cups were moved to new locations. While the apes were successful in all conditions, the dogs had a strong preference to approach the location where they last saw the reward, especially if this location remained filled. In addition, dogs seem to have especial difficulties to track the reward when both containers crossed their path during displacement. These results confirm the substantial difference that exists between great apes and dogs with regard to mental representation abilities required to track the invisible displacements of objects.     

The concept of boundaries in counselling and psychotherapy

Boundaries in the mind—the relative 'thinness' and 'thickness' of many kinds of boundaries—has been studied as a measurable dimension of personality. Persons scoring 'thin' overall on the Boundary Questionnaire can be described as open, trusting, vulnerable, and usually having a rich fantasy life; they are people in whom 'everything gets through'. People who score very 'thick' tend to be solid, well-organised, and sometimes rigid. The relationship of boundaries to other measures of personality, to dreams and nightmares, to clients' occupations and interests, and finally to the conduct of psychotherapists and counsellors, including the question of boundary violations, is discussed. Some boundary violators have very thin boundaries and are unable to maintain clear distinctions between the client's needs and their own; others have relatively thick boundaries which make them insensitive to the damage that boundary violations can cause. Awareness of the client's boundaries and one's own can be useful in 'matching' a client with a therapist and in the conduct of therapy, especially at stressful times. It is also useful at times to discuss boundaries with clients.     

Structural alterations of an ambiguous musical figure: The scale illusion revisited

The scale illusion (Deutsch, 1975) shows the importance of frequency range in the perceptual organization of a sequence of notes. This paper includes three experiments on the scale illusion. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that if the structure of the pattern of notes used in the original scale illusion study is altered slightly, by adding or subtracting a pair of notes from the ends of the sequence, there is a significant decrease in the rate of frequency-based responses, suggesting a weaker illusion. Experiment 3 investigated two features of the note patterns that may have led to this change. Specifically, it asked whether the decrease in the strength of the illusion is due to (1) the nature of the notes at the extremes of the frequency range and/or (2) the nature of the notes at the crossing point of the two scales. While both sources were found to affect the strength of the scale illusion, the former had a greater influence.     

Forcing square pegs into round holes: some comments on "an analysis-of-variance model for the intrasubject replication design"

This paper critically examines the application of fixed-effect one-way analysis-of-variance procedures to learning data from a single subject. Procedures more appropriate for data obtained from intrasubject replication designs are briefly described.     

Specifically objective stochastic latency mechanisms

A two parameter additive model for psychological response latencies f_vi(t) = (θ_v + ?_i) exp(?(θ_v + ?_i)t) is suggested. Conditional inference procedures are derived for the psychometric latency model. If the model is considered as a theory for speed test construction the unrestricted comparability of measurements obtained under “speed” and “power” conditions is an attractive feature of the model. An extension of the parametric structure gives the “linear exponential model” f_vi(t) = (θ_v + Σ_ι^ma_iιη_ι) exp(?(θ_v + Σ_ι^ma_iιη_ι)t), where the time constants of the latencies are conceived as linear combinations of “basic parameters” corresponding to the experimental conditions of the latency situations. The linear exponential model includes as special cases some well known series latency mechanisms. Some generalizations of the distributional assumptions are discussed, especially the Weibull distributions. The estimation of parameters by conditional inference procedures and the evaluation of the fit of the model by conditional likelihood ratio tests is illustrated by means of the numerical data from a free recall experiment.