Der ausreichend gute Therapeut

Psychotherapists show a great variation in their ability to achieve positive outcomes in therapy. Specifically, they vary in terms of their ability to identify and repair ruptures in the therapeutic alliance. Alliance ruptures are a frequent phenomenon but often go undetected; however, repairing alliance ruptures represents a great opportunity to improve the psychotherapy process and therapy outcome. Empirical research suggests that patient feedback should be included in the psychotherapy process to be able to detect alliance ruptures better. From a psychodynamic point of view, a “sufficiently good” therapist is a therapist who can acknowledge the countertransference-based limitations in evaluating the therapeutic alliance with patients and the need to use feedback in order to detect and repair inevitable alliance ruptures. The consequences for research, practice and psychotherapy training are considered.     

Relevance drives attention: Attentional bias for gain- and loss-related stimuli is driven by delayed disengagement

Attentional bias to gain- and loss-related stimuli was investigated in a dot-probe task. We used coloured stimuli that had acquired their valence during the experiment by signalling the chance to either win or lose points in a game task. Replicating previous findings with the additional singleton paradigm, we found attentional bias effects for both gain- and loss-related colours. The effects were due to delayed disengagement from valent stimuli, especially if they were positive, and could not be explained by nonattentional processes like behavioural freezing. Our findings suggest that stimuli signalling opportunities and dangers hold attention, supporting a general motivational relevance principle of the orienting of attention.     

A secondary task is not always costly: Context‐based guidance of visual search survives interference from a demanding working memory task

Repeatedly encountering a visual search display with the target located at a fixed position relative to the distractors facilitates target detection, relative to novel displays – which is attributed to search guidance by (acquired) long‐term memory (LTM) of the distractor ‘context’ of the target. Previous research has shown that this ‘contextual cueing’ effect is severely impeded during learning when participants have to perform a demanding spatial working memory (WM) task concurrently with the search task, though it does become manifest when the WM task is removed. This has led to the proposal that search guidance by LT context memories critically depends on spatial WM to become ‘expressed’ in behaviour. On this background, this study, of two experiments, asked: (1) Would contextual cueing eventually emerge under dual‐task learning conditions if the practice on the task(s) is extended beyond the short training implemented in previous studies? and given sufficient practice, (2) Would performing the search under dual‐task conditions actually lead to an increased cueing effect compared to performing the visual search task alone? The answer is affirmative to both questions. In particular, Experiment 1 showed that a robust contextual cueing effect emerges within 360–720 dual‐task trials as compared to some 240 single‐task trials. Further, Experiment 2 showed that when dual‐ and single‐task conditions are performed in alternating trials blocks, the cueing effect for the very same set of repeated displays is significantly larger in dual‐task blocks than in single‐task blocks. This pattern of effects suggests that dual‐task practice eventually leads to direct, or ‘automatic’, guidance of visual search by learnt spatial LTM representations, bypassing WM processes. These processes are normally engaged in single‐task performance might actually interfere with direct LTM‐based search guidance.     

Women of African Descent and Protestantism

This article aims to highlight critical elements of the Brazilian history and context as a basis for understanding the participation and action of women of African descent within Brazilian Protestantism. It begins by reviewing the establishment of Protestant denominations in Brazil against the background of slavery, which was abolished only in 1888, before turning to how a national identity was developed in Brazil that strove to be White, ignoring inequalities due to slavery, and the existence of racism in Brazil, thereby feeding what came to be known as the “myth of the Brazilian racial democracy.” The article goes on to discuss the historical and continuing conditions of women of African descent, and to offer elements for a clearer understanding of the lives of women of African descent in Protestant churches in Brazil.     

Specificity of Postural Control: Comparing Expert and Intermediate Dancers

The expert–novice approach is inappropriate for studying postural control in sport and dance when novices are completely unable to perform relevant postural tasks and experts cannot demonstrate specific skills on everyday postural tasks. We tested expertise-specific differences on 6 static everyday and 5 dynamic dance-like postural tasks of varying difficulty in 13 professional and 12 intermediate nonprofessional dancers. Results showed a clear expert advantage on sway area for dance-like postural tasks, but not for static everyday tasks. This effect was also found for the control parameter of root mean square (RMS) velocity and partly for RMS amplitude of the difference signal between CoP and CoG line location. Results indicate that the expert advantage is task-specific and deliver new insights into the specificity of experts' postural performance.     

Controlling for Response Bias in Self-Ratings of Personality: A Comparison of Impression Management Scales and the Overclaiming Technique

Self-serving response distortions pose a threat to the validity of personality scales. A common approach to deal with this issue is to rely on impression management (IM) scales. More recently, the overclaiming technique (OCT) has been proposed as an alternative and arguably superior measure of such biases. In this study (N = 162), we tested these approaches in the context of self- and other-ratings using the HEXACO personality inventory. To the extent that the OCT and IM scales can be considered valid measures of response distortions, they are expected to account for inflated self-ratings in particular for those personality dimensions that are prone to socially desirable responding. However, the results show that neither the OCT nor IM account for overly favorable self-ratings. The validity of IM as a measure of response biases was further scrutinized by a substantial correlation with other-rated honesty-humility. As such, this study questions the use of both the OCT and IM to assess self-serving response distortions.     

Meat on the menu? How the menu structure can stimulate vegetarian choices in restaurants

Excessive meat consumption has a negative impact on people's health, animal welfare, and the environment in general. Remarkably, however, despite the growing number of flexitarians, only a small number of people choose a vegetarian dish at a restaurant. Therefore, in the current study, we tested how vegetarian dishes need to be presented in order to stimulate the choice for these dishes. In an online study, participants were presented with one of four different menus: Either an all vegetarian menu, an all vegetarian menu with the possibility to add meat to each dish, a menu with increased offer on vegetarian dishes with explicit indication, and a menu with increased offer on vegetarian dishes without explicit indication. Subsequently, participants indicated how likely it was that they would eat in this restaurant and which dish they would choose (i.e., vegetarian or not). Additionally, they completed a reactance questionnaire. Results show that when people get the option to add meat to the vegetarian dishes on a menu this increases the choice for a vegetarian dish. No effect of menus on reactance and willingness to eat at a restaurant was found. These findings suggest that presenting meat as an alternative or additive option can help to change behavior toward a flexitarian lifestyle.     

Reasoning and normative beliefs: not too sophisticated

Does reasoning to a certain conclusion necessarily involve a normative belief in support of that conclusion? In many recent discussions of the nature of reasoning, such a normative belief condition is rejected. One main objection is that it requires too much conceptual sophistication and thereby excludes certain reasoners, such as small children. I argue that this objection is mistaken. Its advocates overestimate what is necessary for grasping the normative concepts required by the condition, while seriously underestimating the importance of such concepts for our most fundamental agential capacities. Underlying the objection is the observation that normative thoughts do not necessarily cross our minds during reasoning. I show that proponents of the normative belief condition can accommodate this observation by taking the required normative belief to guide the reasoning process and offer a novel account of what such guidance consists in.