Letter-detection patterns in German: A window to the early extraction of sentential structure during reading

Letters are more difficult to detect in function words than in content words, presumably because function words serve to cue sentential structure but recede to the background as meaning unfolds. This function disadvantage was found for the definite article in German for all three genders and all four cases, but it was more pronounced when the article appeared in a nominative noun phrase than in an object noun phrase. It was also more pronounced for the typical subject-predicate-object sentential format than for the object-predicate-subject sentential format and also when the definite article unequivocally specified the case of a phrase than when it was ambiguous. The results suggest that the structural frames established on line in reading are finely tuned to both phrase-level and sentence-level organization.     

Academic career intention beyond the PhD: can the theory of planned behavior explain gender differences?

Are women less interested in becoming professors than men? We applied the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to investigate the intention to pursue an academic career. Postdocs who recently finished their PhD at a German university participated in an online survey (N = 380, mean age: 33; 45% women). Women reported lower academic career intentions (d = 0.40); TPB variables (attitude, subjective norm, self‐efficacy) explained 87% of this gender difference. At an 8 month follow‐up, we found no gender difference in the intention to continue in an academic career among the postdocs who were still working in academia (n = 129). Addressing TPB constructs early in women's academic careers could encourage them to remain in academia and strive for a professorship.     

Nostalgia for Communist Times and Autobiographical Memory: Negative Present or Positive Past?

Twenty‐five years after the fall of communism in Poland, a considerable number of citizens manifest nostalgia for the communist times. In this article, we approach this phenomenon within the framework of autobiographical memory and decide between two sets of hypotheses, one predicting that postcommunist nostalgia is experienced mostly by people who are dissatisfied with the present time (transformation “losers”) and the other predicting that it is the memory of the happy and most recollected past, and memories of particular decades of communism, that mostly trigger nostalgia. The study, carried out on a representative sample of Poles who remembered communism, provided stronger confirmation of the “negative present” hypothesis, but the positive past is also shown to matter. The decade of communism whose memory turned out to predict nostalgia the best was the 1980s and not, as predicted, the 1970s.     

Sexist Behavior Undermines Women’s Performance in a Job Application Situation

Can sexist behavior in a job application context threaten women and cause them to underperform on a subsequent cognitive ability test? In a simulated job interview, 46 women and 46 men -- undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Heidelberg, Germany -- were confronted with either sexist (dominant and physically close) behavior by a male interviewer or non-sexist (friendly and neutral) behavior by the same confederate. Participants then solved math items and language-related items from a German standard intelligence test. In accordance with our hypothesis, the results indicated that female participants in the sexist condition performed significantly worse on the mathematical test than female participants in the control condition. The performance of female participants on the language-related test and male participants on both the math and language-related tests did not differ by experimental condition. After the sexist job interview, women’s impaired performance, occurring on the math items only (i.e., specific to the domain in which women are negatively stereotyped), suggests an influence of psychological and interpersonal processes on seemingly objective test outcomes.     

Emotion Dysregulation,Mentalization and Romantic Attachment in the Nonclinical Adolescent Female Sample

The main goal of the current study is to verify the relationships between emotion dysregulation, mentalization, and romantic attachment in late adolescent girls (N = 120). Adolescence is a very dynamic and sensitive period, in which many changes occur in attachment and emotion regulation. The role of the primary attachment figures is gradually taken over by peers, and the beginnings of the development of romantic attachment are seen. In summary, this study was able to determine that the level of dysregulation of emotions in girls during late adolescence can be partially explained by mentalization and levels of anxiety (though not of avoidance) regarding a romantic partner, though attachment anxiety is more important for explaining emotion dysregulation than the level of mentalization. Only two aspects of emotion dysregulation show relationships with mentalization: nonacceptance of emotional responses and lack of emotional clarity. Adolescence is considered to be a critical period for interventions to protect against the onset of psychopathology. Confirmation of these relationships appears to be important for the design of therapeutic interventions. Our findings may suggest that attachment patterns, mentalization and emotion dysregulation may be good targets for therapeutic intervention in adolescence.     

Reversal negativity and bistable stimuli: Attention,awareness, or something else?

Ambiguous (or bistable) figures are visual stimuli that have two mutually exclusive perceptual interpretations that spontaneously alternate with each other. Perceptual reversals, as compared with non-reversals, typically elicit a negative difference called reversal negativity (RN), peaking around 250 ms from stimulus onset. The cognitive interpretation of RN remains unclear: it may reflect either bottom-up processes, attentional processes that select between the alternative views of the stimulus, or it may reflect the change in the contents of subjective awareness. In the present study, event-related potentials in response to endogenous unilateral and bilateral reversals of two Necker lattices were compared with exogenously induced reversals of unambiguous lattices. The RN neither resembled the attention-related N2pc response, nor did it correlate with the content of subjective visual awareness. Thus, we conclude that RN is a non-attentional ERP correlate of the changes in the perceptual configuration of the presented object.     

The influence of violent and nonviolent computer games on implicit measures of aggressiveness

We examined the causal relationship between playing violent video games and increases in aggressiveness by using implicit measures of aggressiveness, which have become important for accurately predicting impulsive behavioral tendencies. Ninety‐six adults were randomly assigned to play one of three versions of a computer game that differed only with regard to game content (violent, peaceful, or abstract game), or to work on a reading task. In the games the environmental context, mouse gestures, and physiological arousal—as indicated by heart rate and skin conductance—were kept constant. In the violent game soldiers had to be shot, in the peaceful game sunflowers had to be watered, and the abstract game simply required clicking colored triangles. Five minutes of play did not alter trait aggressiveness, yet an Implicit Association Test detected a change in implicit aggressive self‐concept. Playing a violent game produced a significant increase in implicit aggressive self‐concept relative to playing a peaceful game. The well‐controlled study closes a gap in the research on the causality of the link between violence exposure in computer games and aggressiveness with specific regard to implicit measures. We discuss the significance of importing recent social–cognitive theory into aggression research and stress the need for further development of aggression‐related implicit measures. Aggr. Behav. 36:1–13, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.