Psychoanalyse und Traumatherapie

The author is of the opinion that for patients with combined traumas of commitment and violence a psychoanalytical long-term treatment which takes into consideration the peculiarities of this group of patients will continue to be the therapy of choice. Special ??trauma therapies?? may be useful after acute traumas and in cases in which external conditions exclude psychoanalytical treatment. Depending on the situation of the individual case, though, specific modifications of the technique may be necessary, which possibly include proven specific trauma therapeutic techniques as parameters. Based on the parallelism of the economic aspect of the trauma and the aspect of object relationship, a decisive role in the therapeutic process befits the recognition of the traumatic reality and the working out of traumatic transference, which, however, must not traumatize under any circumstances. This is accompanied by the restitution of a good interior object, which only becomes possible within a frame giving security and support. The establishment and preservation of this frame may also be due to especially required parameters derived from trauma therapies, the psychodynamic significance of which must be analyzed with the individual patient. The author's approach is clarified by two case vignettes in which the theoretical reflections have led to very different technical procedures. The author comes to the conclusion that the psychoanalytical trauma therapy shows how therapeutic concepts aiming at an optimum result must still be tailored to the individual case.     

Reactions and Strategies of German Catholic Priests to Cope with Phases of Spiritual Dryness

Journal of Religion and Health - We investigated strategies of 763 Catholic priests (response rate 36%) to deal with phases of spiritual dryness, specifically their reactions toward these feelings,...     

Do specific types of networking predict specific mobility outcomes? A two-year prospective study

Previous research has established a general relation between networking and career outcomes, as postulated by theories on protean careers and career self management. We suggest that specific facets of networking behavior differentially affect specific career mobility outcomes over time. In a 2-year prospective study, we examined the impact of six facets of networking on the likelihood receiving a promotion, changing employer, or remaining in the current position. Results show that internal networking is related to promotions and change of employer, whereas external networking is only related to change of employer. Moreover, internal networking shows a differential relation with the temporal proximity of promotions where using internal contacts predicts promotions in the first year and building and maintaining internal contacts predict promotions in the second year. However, this temporal pattern did not hold for external networking, where only maintaining external contacts predicted change of employer in the second year.     

Pseudocontingencies can override genuine contingencies between multiple cues

The cognitive process of contingency assessment has traditionally been conceived as an inference from the joint frequencies (table cell entries) of correlated cues. Alternatively, pseudocontingency (PC) inferences are derived from the alignment of separate base rate trends (table marginals). The present research extends PCs to the simultaneous assessment of six contingencies between four personality cues. Consistently obtained PC effects, reflecting accurately assessed base rate trends, were unaffected by the actual cue intercorrelations, which were zero or consistent or inconsistent with the PCs. The functional value of PC inferences is discussed. Although PCs can be misleading, they afford approximations of actually existing correlations that suffice under many, although not under all, conditions.     

Sound source location modulates the irrelevant-sound effect

Participants memorized lists of visually presented digits in silence or while ignoring distractor sounds that either came from the front and thus from the direction in which participants' attention was oriented, or from behind. Distractor sounds impaired recall performance, but the largest impairment was observed when the sound source was directionally close to the frontal visual target display. The results are consistent with the assumption of cross-modal attentional links in models of attention, and they are problematic for explanations of the irrelevant-sound effect within working memory models that do not specify an explicit role of attention in the maintenance of information for immediate serial recall.     

Individual differences in conflict-monitoring: testing means and covariance hypothesis about the Simon and the Eriksen Flanker task

Conflict and context slow-down have been proposed as indicators of a conflict-monitoring system that initiates cognitive control to resolve conflicts in information processing. We investigated individual differences in conflict-monitoring and their associations with working memory (WM) and impulsivity. A total of 150 adults completed a Simon and an Eriksen flanker task, together with measures of WM and impulsivity. On both tasks, responses were slower and less accurate on incompatible than on compatible trials (conflict effect), and the conflict effect was larger when the preceding trial was compatible than when it was incompatible (context effect). Stimulus repetition did not explain the context effect. Individual differences could be attributed to three separable factors for each task: general speeded performance, conflict effect, and context effect. Evidence for across-task generality of these factors was sparse. Associations of these factors with impulsivity were weak at best. WM was correlated with general speed, and also with some but not all factors reflecting conflict-related processes.     

The impact of open and closed mindsets on evaluative priming

In the present research, we argue that open versus closed mindsets, accompanying ongoing versus completed mental jobs on the prime, determine the size of congruity effects in the evaluative priming paradigm. More specifically, we hypothesised that disfluent primes that resist an easily completed encoding process should induce an open mindset and thereby result in stronger congruity effects than fluent primes that induce closed mindsets. Across two experiments, we applied two different manipulations of prime fluency: gradual demasking (experiment 1) and colour contrast (experiment 2). As expected, in both experiments we found robust congruity effects, but only on trials with disfluent (vs. fluent) primes. Results of a follow-up experiment suggest that these effects are not due to attentional processes. We conclude that the mindsets resulting from individuals' activities during encoding are crucial in determining the outcome of evaluative priming effects.