Beurteilung von Einsichts- und Steuerungsfähigkeit bei Personen mit geistiger Behinderung im Strafverfahren

Reference is made to the content determination of the entry term “mental retardation” in the criminal responsibility paragraphs of the Penal Code. The forensic relevance of intellectual disability is low. Forensic effects of retarded ability for reasoning usually fail due to the understanding in question. A diminution of criminal responsibility can if necessary be justified by a reduction in accountability.     

Academic Misconduct in Nigerian Medical Schools-A Report from Focus Group Discussions among House Officers

Concern is growing as research continues to find evidence of academic misconduct among medical students. There is, however, paucity of information on this issue among medical students and medical graduates in Africa. We determined the perceptions and attitude of house officers on academic misconduct within Nigerian medical schools. We conducted 7 focus group discussions (FGDs) among pre-registration house-officers (PRHOs) working in a Nigerian Teaching hospital between October and November 2013. A FGD guide containing 7 broad questions related to their perception and attitude on academic misconduct was employed. Ethnographic content analysis and manual coding were adopted in identifying themes, issues and representative quotations. A total of 58 participants out of an eligible pool of 76 PRHOs were recruited. All the groups associated academic misconduct chiefly with cheating in examinations, and perceived it as a commonplace problem. “It is a part of school life”, admitted one PRHO. Copying during exam appeared to be the commonest form of cheating. Another respondent opined that “The lecturers should be more concerned with helping students understand better. They should not make passing an exam a do-or-die affair.” The perception and attitudes towards academic misconduct may be a reflection of the prevailing moral decline in the contemporary Nigerian society. Underlying the reasons adduced by the participants for getting involved in academic misconduct is the fear of failure in examinations. Apart from consolidating formal and informal medical ethics education, the medical schools should ensure that the opportunities and pressures to indulge in academic misconduct are minimized.     

Automated Item Generation with Recurrent Neural Networks

Utilizing technology for automated item generation is not a new idea. However, test items used in commercial testing programs or in research are still predominantly written by humans, in most cases by content experts or professional item writers. Human experts are a limited resource and testing agencies incur high costs in the process of continuous renewal of item banks to sustain testing programs. Using algorithms instead holds the promise of providing unlimited resources for this crucial part of assessment development. The approach presented here deviates in several ways from previous attempts to solve this problem. In the past, automatic item generation relied either on generating clones of narrowly defined item types such as those found in language free intelligence tests (e.g., Raven’s progressive matrices) or on an extensive analysis of task components and derivation of schemata to produce items with pre-specified variability that are hoped to have predictable levels of difficulty. It is somewhat unlikely that researchers utilizing these previous approaches would look at the proposed approach with favor; however, recent applications of machine learning show success in solving tasks that seemed impossible for machines not too long ago. The proposed approach uses deep learning to implement probabilistic language models, not unlike what Google brain and Amazon Alexa use for language processing and generation.     

Counterpossibles in Science: The Case of Relative Computability

I develop a theory of counterfactuals about relative computability, i.e. counterfactuals such as

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Inventar zur therapeutischen Beziehung (ITB)

A successful psychotherapy requires a good therapeutic relationship. An adequate operationalization by German diagnostic instruments has to be improved. A new instrument for measuring the therapeutic relationship from the patient’s perspective is presented. It is suitable for various therapeutic orientations, integrates current empirical findings in a broad theoretical framework and corrects methodological deficits of the existing German questionnaires. The therapeutic relationship questionnaire (ITB) was developed with a sample of 44 therapists and 519 inpatient, outpatient and day clinic patients. The ITB findings confirm a very good reliability (internal consistency and retesting reliability). There is initial evidence for convergent, divergent and differential validity and for associations with therapy effects. The ITB is an economic instrument that in contrast to other questionnaires measures a general factor which could be replicated in several confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses.     

Configurations of unemployment,reemployment, and psychological well-being: A longitudinal study of unemployed individuals in Portugal

This study examined how four different configurations of unemployment and reemployment (defined by history of past unemployment and unemployment/reemployment 3 years later) related to changes in psychological well-being. The longitudinal sample consisted of 566 Portuguese men and women who were unemployed at the beginning of the study. Using true change score models, we found that individuals who reported a long period of unemployment at T1 but were reemployed at T2 showed meaningful gains in positive affect and life satisfaction compared to those who had a shorter history of unemployment and were reemployed. An examination of gender differences revealed that the women who were reemployed after a long history of unemployment showed the greatest relative gains in positive affect. We conclude by noting limitations of this research and suggesting future research to address these limitations.     

End-state comfort in bimanual object manipulation

The present experiment investigated the sensitivity for end-state comfort in a bimanual object manipulation task. Participants were required to simultaneously reach for two bars and to place the objects' ends into two targets on the table. The design of the experiment allowed to dissociate the relative roles of initial means (e.g., the selection of grips) and final postures (e.g., the anticipation of end-states). The question of interest was whether affording different grip patterns for the two hands would introduce a bias away from reaching end-state comfort. Results revealed a strong sensitivity for end-state comfort, independent of the required grip patterns. In particular, end-state comfort was preferred even if this meant selecting different initial means (i.e., different grips) for the two hands. Hence, end-state oriented action planning appears to dominate interaction costs that may result from motor-related, intermanual interference. We infer that movement planning is constrained by action goals (e.g., a comfortable end-posture for both hands), but largely unaffected by the type of motor actions necessary to achieve these goals.