Development of a career-enabler framework within a South African higher education institution

This study developed a preliminary career-enabler framework for use in a higher education setting. A quantitative survey was conducted with a sample of 1392 employees within a higher education institution in South Africa. Structural analysis was performed using exploratory factor analysis. The analysis yielded three enablers with acceptable psychometric properties, namely: self-transcendence, self-enhancement and self-conservation through work motives and needs. Interventions that focus on career-enablers within a higher education institution need to address these three factors.     

Monkeys perform as well as apes and humans in a size discrimination task

Whether the cognitive competences of monkeys and apes are rather similar or whether the larger-brained apes outperform monkeys in cognitive experiments is a highly debated topic. Direct comparative analyses are therefore essential to examine similarities and differences among species. We here compared six primate species, including humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas (great apes), olive baboons, and long-tailed macaques (Old World monkeys) in a task on fine-grained size discrimination. Except for gorillas, subjects of all taxa (i.e. humans, apes, and monkeys) were able to discriminate three-dimensional cubes with a volume difference of only 10 % (i.e. cubes of 50 and 48 mm side length) and performed only slightly worse when the cubes were presented successively. The minimal size discriminated declined further with increasing time delay between presentations of the cubes, highlighting the difficulty to memorize exact size differences. The results suggest that differences in brain size, as a proxy for general cognitive abilities, did not account for variation in performance, but that differential socio-ecological pressures may better explain species differences. Our study highlights the fact that differences in cognitive abilities do not always map neatly onto phylogenetic relationships and that in a number of cognitive experiments monkeys do not fare significantly worse than apes, casting doubt on the assumption that larger brains per se confer an advantage in such kinds of tests.     

A PRP-study to determine the locus of target priming effects

Visual stimuli that are made invisible by a following mask can nonetheless affect motor responses. To localize the origin of these target priming effects we used the psychological refractory period paradigm. Participants classified tones as high or low, and responded to the position of a visual target that was preceded by a prime. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between both tasks varied. In Experiment 1 the tone task was followed by the position task and SOA dependent target priming effects were observed. When the visual position task preceded the tone task in Experiment 2, with short SOA the priming effect propagated entirely to the tone task yielding faster responses to tones on visually congruent trials and delayed responses to tones on visually incongruent trials. Together, results suggest that target priming effects arise from processing before and at the level of the central bottleneck such as sensory analysis and response selection.     

Salience and asymmetric judgments of physical distance

Previous research has shown that distance estimates made from memory are often asymmetric. Specifically, when A is a prominent location (a landmark) and B is not, people tend to recall a longer distance from A to B than from B to A. Results of two experiments showed that asymmetric judgments of distance are not restricted to judgments made from memory but occur also for judgments made when all relevant visual cues are still present. Furthermore, results indicated that situational salience is sufficient to produce asymmetric judgments and that distinctiveness (such as in the case of architectural landmarks) is not necessary.     

Kongresskalender

Kongresskalender

Kongresskalender     

Patientenpfade im psychiatrischen Ma?regelvollzug �C Intensivere Behandlung, k��rzerer Freiheitsentzug?

This article reports on the results of two workshops which attempted to register and characterize clinical pathways in special hospitals for schizophrenic offenders. The starting point for both workshops was the analysis of the stages and elements which naturally constitute long-term therapy in schizophrenic patients. Based on this analysis it was aimed to develop standardized operating procedures: which mode of action is most sensible in which phase of treatment? How to respond to the different problems arising during therapy? How to prevent therapeutic stagnation? How to retain up-to-date knowledge on the patient? How to manage a faster and more effective transfer into outpatient care? This article focuses particularly on the course of patientsduring the process of in-patient care in special hospitals for schizophrenic offenders.     

Entlassene Problemf?lle in der ambulanten Nachsorge von langzeitinhaftierten und langzeituntergebrachten Patienten

The reintegration of patients into society after long-term inmate or long-term forensic hospital treatment is as difficult as it is important. At present only a few specialized forensic outpatient departments can be found in Germany. In the following article essential pillars for successful outpatient care by taking all participants in the reintegration process into account will be presented.