Objekt und Methode in der Biologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Social Construction of Intimate Partner Violence: A Brief Report on Quantitative Grammatical Analysis

This pilot study uses a quantitative linguistic analysis to assess evidence of agency and control, as well as treatment engagement, in letters written by men (N = 46, 37% Latino) participating in a batterer intervention program. At the program’s conclusion, men were asked to imagine their situation in 5 years and write a letter from their “future self” to their “present self.” Letters were scored for grammatical representations of agency and objectification, and temporal complexity. Results showed that the men tended to grant themselves the subject position (conferring agency) and to grant others the object position (deferring or denying agency) by almost equal margins, both rhetorical maneuvers suggesting an objectifying stance toward others. Moreover, they employed several strategies to address temporality, with more complex strategies suggesting greater treatment engagement. Findings suggest that quantitative linguistic analysis is a promising tool for assessing participants’ progress in and engagement with treatment.     

Repeatedly reactivated memories become more resistant to hippocampal damage

We examined whether repeated reactivations of a context memory would prevent the typical amnesic effects of post-training damage to the hippocampus (HPC). Rats were given a single contextual fear-conditioning session followed by 10 reactivations, involving a brief return to the conditioning context (no shock). Subsequently, the rats received sham or complete lesions of the HPC. When tested for retention, the HPC rats that experienced the reactivations froze significantly more than nonreactivation HPC rats and did not significantly differ from their respective control group. These findings suggest that memory reactivations contribute to long-term memories becoming independent of the HPC.     

Linguistic meaning related differences in evoked potential topography: English, Swiss-German, and imagined

Functionally different neural populations for processing different categories of word meaníng are suggested by the topography of event-related EEG scale-field distributions. Noun and verb meanings of English and Swiss-German homophones produced differences in anterior-posterior topography during the first 300 to 350 msec of the response. Similar results were found for a degraded-speech stimulus when subjects imagined noun and verb meanings. Anterior—posterior scalp-field differences appeared both in an analysis of the positions of field maximal and minimal values; and in principal component analysis of ERPs.     

The development of children's achievement-related expectancies and subjective uncertainty

Children between the ages of 3 and 6 years were asked to predict their success or failure in two different tasks: a box-lifting task and a task in which marbles had to be rolled through gates of different widths. Both tasks had five difficulty levels which were presented either simultaneously or successively. Along with the verbal or nonverbal responses to questions about their chances of success, the time children needed to make the prediction (decision time), the number of eye movement during the decision time, and, in the box-lifting task, the time taken to approach the box were assessed. The results indicated that children from 3 years on make realistic assessments of their chances for success at the five different difficulty levels. The simultaneous presentation mode enables the children to make more realistic success predictions only in the marble-rolling task. For the box-lifting task, children seem to have a stabilized difficulty scale which allows sure predictions without the whole range of difficulty levels being physically presented.