Reaction time as a function of stimulus intensity for the monkey

Monkeys were trained to release a telegraph key in response to a visual or auditory stimulus. The latency of the key release response was measured for different stimulus intensities. In general, the relation between latency and intensity is inverse and exponential with greater variability of latency at the lower intensities. Some preliminary data involving differential reinforcement of short latencies are presented.     

Sometimes,often, and always: Exploring the vague meanings of frequency expressions

The article describes a general two-step procedure for the numerical translation of vague linguistic terms (LTs). The suggested procedure consists of empirical and model components, including (1) participants’ estimates of numerical values corresponding to verbal terms and (2) modeling of the empirical data using fuzzy membership functions (MFs), respectively. The procedure is outlined in two studies for data from N = 89 and N = 109 participants, who were asked to estimate numbers corresponding to 11 verbal frequency expressions (e.g., sometimes). Positions and shapes of the resulting MFs varied considerably in symmetry, vagueness, and overlap and are indicative of the different meanings of the vague frequency expressions. Words were not distributed equidistantly across the numerical scale. This has important implications for the many questionnaires that use verbal rating scales, which consist of frequency expressions and operate on the premise of equidistance. These results are discussed for an exemplar questionnaire (COPSOQ). Furthermore, the variation of the number of prompted LTs (5 vs. 11) showed no influence on the words’ interpretations.     

Qualifizierung und Qualitätskontrolle in der forensischen Psychiatrie – die aktuelle Situation in der Schweiz

The practice of civil expert opinions in Switzerland is in a period of upheaval due to fundamental alterations regarding the legal foundations which were implemented on 1 January 2013. The new civil code displaces the authority to order measures which restrict people’s liberty based on an endangerment to themselves or third parties from a lay institution to a newly created expert committee. Moreover, patient’s rights are greatly enhanced. The subsequent consequences for expert opinion activities are not yet appraisable. The development in the practice of insurance legal expert opinion is influenced by new legal measures which aim at reducing the growing number of new disability retirements most notably due to psychiatric disorders. In contrast to the civil area there are already clearly defined standards for the insurance legal area which were established by the Swiss Society of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in 2012. The legal foundations as well as the practice of expert opinions in the context of the Swiss civil and insurance law are comparable with the German situation but there are still some important differences related to the content and terminology. This paper outlines the current situation and recent developments in Switzerland as well as pointing out differences in comparison to Germany.     

Salient stimuli capture attention and action

Reaction times in a visual search task increase when an irrelevant but salient stimulus is presented. Recently, the hypothesis that the increase in reaction times was due to attentional capture by the salient distractor has been disputed. We devised a task in which a search display was shown after observers had initiated a reaching movement toward a touch screen. In a display of vertical bars, observers had to touch the oblique target while ignoring a salient color singleton. Because the hand was moving when the display appeared, reach trajectories revealed the current selection for action. We observed that salient but irrelevant stimuli changed the reach trajectory at the same time as the target was selected, about 270 ms after movement onset. The change in direction was corrected after another 160 ms. In a second experiment, we compared manual selection of color and orientation targets and observed that selection occurred earlier for color than for orientation targets. Salient stimuli support faster selection than do less salient stimuli. Under the assumption that attentional selection for action and perception are based on a common mechanism, our results suggest that attention is indeed captured by salient stimuli.     

Counterfactual reasoning: From childhood to adulthood

The objective of this study was to describe the developmental progression of counterfactual reasoning from childhood to adulthood. In contrast to the traditional view, it was recently reported by Rafetseder and colleagues that even a majority of 6-year-old children do not engage in counterfactual reasoning when asked counterfactual questions (Child Development, 2010, Vol. 81, pp. 376–389). By continuing to use the same method, the main result of the current Study 1 was that performance of the 9- to 11-year-olds was comparable to that of the 6-year-olds, whereas the 12- to 14-year-olds approximated adult performance. Study 2, using an intuitively simpler task based on Harris and colleagues (Cognition, 1996, Vol. 61, pp. 233–259), resulted in a similar conclusion, specifically that the ability to apply counterfactual reasoning is not fully developed in all children before 12 years of age. We conclude that children who failed our tasks seem to lack an understanding of what needs to be changed (events that are causally dependent on the counterfactual assumption) and what needs to be left unchanged and so needs to be kept as it actually happened. Alternative explanations, particularly executive functioning, are discussed in detail.     

Konzept der Mentalisierung

Mentalization is the fundamental human capacity to relate to each other as minded beings. We mentalize when we are aware of mental states in others or ourselves as persons with feelings, wishes and beliefs. That is what makes the behavior of other people meaningful to us. Fonagy and colleagues based their mentalization concept on the attachment theory and on hypotheses about the development of the self. Mentalization-based treatment relies on this concept and has been manualized and evaluated for the treatment of borderline personality disorders. Psychotherapy research supports this to some extent. The authors claim that all psychotherapeutic treatment will benefit from the understanding of mentalization and its practical applications (Allen et al. 2008). Although the concept of mentalization is not new, the integration of different theories with empirically informed knowledge into a coherent concept is new.