Degenerative Lendenwirbelsäulenerkrankungen

psychopraxis. neuropraxis - Die Literatur bestätigt, dass Operationen bei degenerativen Lendenwirbelsäulen(LWS)-Erkrankungen besser sind als ihr Ruf. Getragen wurde diese Entwicklung...     

Churches in Dutch: Causes of Religious Disaffiliation in The Netherlands, 1937–1995

The Netherlands has become one of the most secular countries in the world. A vast majority of the Dutch people does not attend church regularly and more than half its population is not affiliated with any church at all. In this study we set out to test which individual and contextual characteristics affect religious disaffiliation. We deduced several hypotheses from theories on social integration and rationalization. To test these hypotheses we used retrospective data containing information on events that took place in the lives of our respondents since adolescence. These data were analysed using a discrete-time event history model. We found that the higher the level of rationalization in a certain year, the more likely people were to disaffiliate. This effect was particularly strong for young people. Moreover, by introducing rationalization in the model we found a number of spurious relationships that at first glance seemed to be causal. Not surprisingly, respondents were more likely to disaffiliate in cases where their partners were nonreligious. However, as respondents and their partners presumably are effected equally by rationalization, we cannot but conclude that the process of rationalization is mainly responsible for the process of religious disaffiliation that takes place in The Netherlands.     

Two observations about human reason

The first observation is that existential reason has two principal strata. While the function of lower reason is primarily reasoning or logic, upper reason ponders emotions, the meaning of existence, the transcendent. Those whose understanding of reason is confined to lower reason are handicapped in coping with emotional and spiritual suffering. Upper reason is a necessary intellectual facility in the resolution of such suffering. The second observation is of thedialectical nature of reason, with which clinicians and theologians trade when pondering reality and in dealing with those they counsel. Yet, many people, especially Americans, are oblivious to the “both-and” reality of existence. Consequently they are not realistic about life nor are they skillful in dealing with their resulting existential conflicts. They are lost when psychological problems cannot be satisfactorily resolved by lower reason; for only upper reason can perceive and creatively integrate the dialectical tensions of existential problems.     

Acute psycho-social stress does not disrupt item-method directed forgetting, emotional stimulus content does

It has been shown that stress affects episodic memory in general, but knowledge about stress effects on memory control processes such as directed forgetting is sparse. Whereas in previous studies item-method directed forgetting was found to be altered in post-traumatic stress disorder patients and abolished for highly arousing negative pictorial stimuli in students, no study so far has investigated the effects of experimentally induced psycho-social stress on this task or examined the role of positive picture stimuli. In the present study, 41 participants performed an item-method directed forgetting experiment while being exposed either to a psychosocial laboratory stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), or a cognitively challenging but non-stressful control condition. Neutral and positive pictures were presented as stimuli. As predicted, salivary cortisol level as a biological marker of the human stress response increased only in the TSST group. Still, both groups showed directed forgetting. However, emotional content of the employed stimuli affected memory control: Directed forgetting was intact for neutral pictures whereas it was attenuated for positive ones. This attenuation was primarily due to selective rehearsal improving discrimination accuracy for neutral, but not positive, to-be-remembered items. Results suggest that acute experimentally induced stress does not alter item-method directed forgetting while emotional stimulus content does.     

How Implicit–Explicit Consistency of the Intelligence Self‐Concept Moderates Reactions to Performance Feedback

At present, it is not well understood which individual characteristics determine whether individuals will benefit or suffer from feedback about suboptimal performance. Three separate studies tested the idea that individuals' reactions to (neutral versus negative; positive versus negative) feedback as either improving or deteriorating performance in intelligence tests depended on their explicit and implicit self‐concept of intelligence (eSCI and iSCI). In all studies (Study 1, N = 177; Study 2, N = 165; Study 3, N = 132), persons with low eSCI/high iSCI showed a boost in performance after negative feedback, whereas persons with any other combination showed a decline in performance. The studies also provide an explanation for these effects in terms of mediating mechanisms. Whereas the performance boost of individuals with low eSCI/high iSCI can be best explained by achievement‐related reactance (Studies 2 and 3) and decrease in ruminative thinking (Study 3), the performance declines in the other configurations were mediated by decreased achievement motivation, increased frustration and increased outrage (Study 3). All these mediating mechanisms proved independent and incremental in a bootstrapping‐based moderated meditation analysis. The results are discussed in light of the construct validity of our Implicit Association Test (IAT) and IATs in general. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What moderates implicit—explicit consistency?

Implicit and explicit indicators of attitudes or personality traits are positively, and variably, related. This review places the question of implicit ‐ explicit consistency into the tradition of attitude/trait ‐ behaviour consistency (e.g., Wicker, 1969). Drawing on dual-process models, such as the recent distinction between associative and propositional representations (Strack & Deutsch, 2004), we identify a working model of implicit ‐ explicit consistency that organises the empirical evidence on implicit ‐ explicit moderation into five factors: translation between implicit and explicit representations (e.g., representational strength, awareness), additional information integration for explicit representations (e.g., need for cognition), properties of explicit assessment (e.g., social desirability concerns), properties of implicit assessment (e.g., situational malleability), and research design factors (e.g., sampling bias, measurement correspondence).     

What gives victims satisfaction when they seek revenge?

The present paper aims to elucidate under what conditions victims of injustice who seek revenge feel satisfied and perceive that everybody got what he or she deserved. Two hypotheses are discussed: The comparative suffering hypothesis states that seeing the offender suffer from fate is sufficient for evoking satisfaction and perceptions of deservingness among victims. The understanding hypothesis states that revenge can only be satisfactory when the offender understands it as a response to his or her prior behavior. These hypotheses were tested in three experimental studies. The comparative suffering hypothesis received only weak support. The understanding hypothesis, on the other hand, received much stronger support: When the offender understood revenge as punishment, revenge led to satisfaction and deservingness among victims. These findings are discussed with regard to the question why people take revenge. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Levels of Emotional Awareness: a model for conceptualizing and measuring emotion-centered structural change

The need to establish the efficacy of psychoanalytic long-term treatments has promoted efforts to operationalize psychic structure and structural change as key elements of psychoanalytic treatments and their outcomes. Current, promising measures of structural change, however, require extensive interviews and rater training. The purpose of this paper is to present the theory and measurement of Levels of Emotional Awareness (LEA) and to illustrate its use based on clinical case vignettes. The LEA model lays out a developmental trajectory of affective processing, akin to Piaget's theory of sensory-cognitive development, from implicit to explicit processing. Unlike other current assessments of psychic structure (Scales of Psychological Capacities, Reflective Functioning, Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics) requiring intensive rater and interviewer training, it is easily assessed based on a self-report performance test. The LEA model conceptualizes a basic psychological capacity, affect processing. As we will illustrate using two case vignettes, by operationalizing implicit and explicit modes of affect processing, it provides a clinical measure of emotional awareness that is highly pertinent to the ongoing psychoanalytic debate on the nature and mechanisms of structural change.     

Visual detection and identification are not the same: evidence from psychophysics and fMRI

Sometimes object detection as opposed to identification is sufficient to initiate the appropriate action. To explore the neural origin of behavioural differences between the two tasks, we combine psychophysical measurements and fMRI, specifically contrasting shape detection versus identification of a figure. This figure consisted of Gabor elements being oriented differently from those in the background. We equalized performance levels for detection and identification by adjusting orientation differences accordingly for each observer. Hence, stimulus saliency was constant for both tasks allowing a differentiation between the activations specific for detection versus identification processes. Identification yielded higher psychophysical thresholds, slower reaction times and increased hemodynamic activations in the lateral-occipital complex (LOC) and an adjacent area in the collateral sulcus (CoS). Additional analysis using cortex-based alignment revealed four voxel-clusters differentially activated by the tasks, situated in the inferior parietal lobe, the precuneus, the anterior cingulum and the medial frontal gyrus. Our results indicate partly separated cortical mechanisms for object detection and identification.