(Not) Thinking about you: Differences in victims’ and perpetrators’ self-focus after interpersonal and intergroup transgressions

We tested the hypothesis that, following a transgression, victims and perpetrators differ in their focus of attention. In three studies (total N = 740), we manipulated participants’ social role (victim vs. perpetrator) in a hypothetical scenario (Studies 1 and 2) and in a perceived real conflict (Study 3) in an interpersonal (Studies 1 and 2) and an intergroup (Study 3) context. Results from all studies confirmed that victims show a stronger self-focus than perpetrators. Moreover, results suggest victims’ higher self-focus as a predictor of willingness to reconcile. Participants’ self-focus mediated the effect of social role on reconciliation intentions as a single mediator (Study 2), or in sequence with their motivation to consider the other party's needs (Study 3). Overall, the present research suggests that victims and perpetrators differ in their focus of attention, and that this difference has important theoretical and practical implications for reconciliation between individuals and between groups.     

Why Does the Risen Christ Have Scars? Why God did not immediately create the Eschaton: Goodness,Truth and Beauty

Abstract: A consideration of God's providential activity suggests that there is room for co‐operating human activity. This is particularly so with acts that might be considered ethically neutral, and so undetermined by God, which category will, eschatalogically, include all human acts. A consideration of the classical transcendentals suggests that, whilst truth and goodness may coincide, beauty is something separate, so the ethically neutral acts of human beings can be considered as contributing to the world's eschatological beauty.     

Ergebnisse der Katathymimaginativen Psychotherapie

The goal of this study was to examine the effect of guided affective imagery therapy in an outpatient setting.At first, 140 patients were recruited.Unfortunately, there were many drop-outs at the beginning of the study as well as at later assessments.The data of 66 patients could be evaluated.The patients were assessed at the beginning of the therapy, after 25 sessions, at the end of the therapy and 18 month after the end of the therapy. Because of too many drop-outs, the originally planned waiting-control-design was realized only to some extent.The diagnoses of the patients consisted mainly of neurotic disorders,many of them with a dysthymia. Data were gathered by standardized questionnaires. There were marked effects of the therapies at the end of the treatments and also at the follow-up evaluation.Effect sizes were larger than 0.8 in somatic symptoms, mood, depression and life satisfaction.On the one hand, therefore, these therapies had been very effective. On the other hand, it became obvious during the course of the study, how difficult it is to conduct such a design with many therapists in a private practice and without financial support.     

Case and Reanalysis

In this paper we discuss an asymmetry in the Case system of German and its implications for human sentence processing: the asymmetry between nominative/accusative and dative case. Starting from the assumption that dative case has a distinct grammatical representation--dative DPs are embedded into an extra structural layer KP--the results of two experiments will be presented, which show that dative assignment during reanalysis is accompanied by additional processing operations that are not needed when accusative or nominative are assigned. In particular, we show that dative assignment during reanalysis triggers reaccess to the mental lexicon, giving rise to greater processing difficulty. We conclude with a discussion of empirical and theoretical consequences of our findings.     

Personality Interacts With Implicit Affect to Predict Performance in Analytic Versus Holistic Processing

Both theoretical approaches and empirical evidence suggest that negative affect fosters analytic processing, whereas positive affect fosters holistic processing, but these effects are inconsistent. We aim to show that (a) differences in affect regulation abilities (“action orientation”) and (b) implicit more so than self‐reported affect assessment need to be considered to advance our understanding of these processes. Forty participants were asked to verify whether a word was correctly or incorrectly spelled to measure analytic processing, as well as to intuitively assess whether sets of three words were coherent (remote associates task) to measure holistic processing. As expected, implicit but not explicit negative affect interacted with low action orientation (“state orientation”) to predict higher d' performance in word spelling, whereas implicit but not explicit positive affect interacted with high action orientation to predict higher d' performance in coherence judgments for word triads. Results are interpreted according to personality systems interaction theory. These findings suggest that affect and affect changes should be measured explicitly and implicitly to investigate affect‐cognition interactions. Moreover, they suggest that good affect regulators benefit from positive affect for holistic processing, whereas bad affect regulators benefit from negative affect for analytical processing.     

Implicit affectivity and rapid processing of affective body language: An fMRI study

Previous research has revealed affect‐congruity effects for the recognition of affects from faces. Little is known about the impact of affect on the perception of body language. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship of implicit (versus explicit) affectivity with the recognition of briefly presented affective body expressions. Implicit affectivity, which can be measured using indirect assessment methods, has been found to be more predictive of spontaneous physiological reactions than explicit (self‐reported) affect. Thirty‐four healthy women had to label the expression of body postures (angry, fearful, happy, or neutral) presented for 66 ms and masked by a neutral body posture in a forced‐choice format while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants' implicit affectivity was assessed using the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test. Measures of explicit state and trait affectivity were also administered. Analysis of the fMRI data was focused on a subcortical network involved in the rapid perception of affective body expressions. Only implicit negative affect (but not explicit affect) was correlated with correct labeling performance for angry body posture. As expected, implicit negative affect was positively associated with activation of the subcortical network in response to fearful and angry expression (compared to neutral expression). Responses of the caudate nucleus to affective body expression were especially associated with its recognition. It appears that processes of rapid recognition of affects from body postures could be facilitated by an individual's implicit negative affect.     

Developing a cognitive behavioral therapy manual for delayed sleep–wake phase disorder

This article reports the development of a treatment protocol, based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles, for delayed sleep–wake phase disorder (DSWPD). The protocol consists of psycho-education, presenting a CBT model for DSWPD, case formulation, motivational interviewing, registering sleep in a diary, strategies to improve the rhythm of sleep and wakefulness, relaxation training, cognitive restructuring, strategies to cope with daytime symptoms, constructing an individualized CBT program, and learning how to deal with relapses. Qualitative data, focusing on how the patients perceived the protocol, were collected within the realm of a trial exploring the efficacy of the protocol. These findings highlighted several advantages but also disadvantages of the therapy. It is our hope that this paper might act as a platform for further clinical work and future research efforts in patients with DSWPD.     

Diagnosis by Documentary: Professional Responsibilities in Informal Encounters

Most work addressing clinical workers' professional responsibilities concerns the norms of conduct within established professional–patient relationships, but such responsibilities may extend beyond the clinical context. We explore health workers' professional responsibilities in such “informal” encounters through the example of a doctor witnessing the misdiagnosis and mistreatment of a serious long-term condition in a television documentary, arguing that neither internalist approaches to professional responsibility (such as virtue ethics or care ethics) nor externalist ones (such as the “social contract” model) provide sufficiently clear guidance in such situations. We propose that a mix of both approaches, emphasizing the noncomplacency and practical wisdom of virtue ethics, but grounding the normative authority of virtue in an external source, is able to engage with the health worker's responsibilities in such situations to the individual, the health care system, and the population at large.     

A role of goals for social inhibition of return?

The social inhibition of return (sIOR) effect refers to the finding that response initiation times are longer if a movement is executed to a location where another person has responded to just before. Previous studies have examined the influence of the goal of the action on sIOR. In these studies, however, the movement endpoint and to-be-attained goal (e.g., touching/pressing a response key) were at the same spatial location. In the present two experiments, we disentangled movement endpoint and goal's identity and locations by means of introducing action effects that followed directly from a movement. Similar methods were previously shown powerful enough to clearly show the importance of action goals for other phenomena—a finding consistent with effect-based theories of action control, such as the ideomotor theory. The results of the present study revealed that sIOR was shaped by the movement endpoint location, not the goal's identity or location. That is, in both experiments, an sIOR effect was observed, but the magnitude of the sIOR effect was not modulated by repetitions/switches of goals or their locations. Thus, results indicate that goals play a negligible role in the emergence of the sIOR and, consequently, highlight the importance of action observation for the emergence of the sIOR effect.     

Consistent Treatment of Variables and Causation Poses a Challenge for Behavioral Research Methods: A Commentary on Nesselroade and Molenaar (2016)

Nesselroade and Molenaar presented the ideographic filter as a proposal for analyzing lawful regularities in behavioral research. The proposal highlights an inconsistency that poses a challenge for behavioral research more generally. One can distinguish a broadly Humean approach from a broadly non-Humean approach as they relate to variables and to causation. Nesselroade and Molenaar rejected a Humean approach to latent variables that characterizes them as nothing more than summaries of their manifest indicators. By contrast, they tacitly accepted a Humean approach to causes characterized as nothing more than summaries of their manifest causal effects. A non-Humean treatment of variables coupled with a Humean treatment of causation creates a theoretical tension within their proposal. For example, one can interpret the same model elements as simultaneously representing both variables and causes. Future refinement of the ideographic filter proposal to address this tension could follow any of a number of strategies.