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The aim of terror is not (only) damage to individual people but the uncertainty and threat to society that also suffers considerable damage. This secondary damage is usually substantially greater than the primary damage. This objective of terror is not only pursued by extremist organizations and groups but also by lone terrorist fighters. In the last 100 years 4 people were known internationally as lone wolf terrorists in the western hemisphere: the highschool teacher Ernst August Wagner, the American “unabomber” Theodore John Kaczynski, the Austrian letter bomber Franz Fuchs and the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Franz Fuchs was examined by the author and the background to his actions can be taken from own professional experience. Information available about the other perpetrators also reveals similarities to the personality traits and developmental steps which seem to have been important for the terrorist actsand include long periods of a lack of social resonance, rejection and mortification, social withdrawal and autistic demarcation and development of a pseudopolitical ideas (of grandiosity). Each of these lone wolf terrorists tried to pursue their ideals through terror, threats and intimidation of the public, and their own importance grew by the wide public attention which was fueled by the insecurity of the public. The interest should not only be directed to those individual lone wolf terrorists of this caliber or to the terrorism of states, organizations and groups or to their structure and dynamics but also to the media and public reactions, and finally to the response of society, as they mutually reinforce actions of the terrorists and help the offenders to achieve their goals.     

Perspective taking and theory of mind in hide and seek

Does theory of mind play a significant role in where people choose to hide an item or where they search for an item that has been hidden? Adapting Anderson’s "Hide-Find Paradigm" Anderson et al. (Action, Perception and Performance, 76, 907–913, 2014) participants viewed homogenous or popout visual arrays on a touchscreen table. Their task was to indicate where in the array they would hide an item, or to search for an item that had been hidden, by either a friend or a foe. Critically, participants believed that their sitting location at the touchtable was the same as—or opposite to—their partner's location. Replicating Anderson et al., participants tended to (1) select items nearer to themselves on homogenous displays, and this bias was stronger for a friend than foe; and (2) select popout items, and again, more for a friend than foe. These biases were observed only when participants believed that they shared the same physical perspective as their partner. Collectively, the data indicate that theory of mind plays a significant role in hiding and finding, and demonstrate that the hide-find paradigm is a powerful tool for investigating theory of mind in adults.     

MLK Day and Racial Attitudes: Liking the Group More but Its Members Less

Intuition suggests that the Martin Luther King holiday (MLK Day) should improve racial attitudes toward African Americans. However, its influence may depend on whether African Americans are evaluated as a group or individually. In two studies, we assessed racial attitudes either on MLK Day or on a control day. As might be expected, participants had more sympathetic attitudes towards African Americans as a group on MLK Day compared to control days; however, they evaluated individual African American exemplars more negatively on MLK Day compared to control days, who presumably seemed worse by comparison to the eminent political figure.     

Emotion,cognition, and decision making

We examine two explanations of the subliminal affective priming effect. The feelings-as-information model (Schwarz &; Clore, 1988) holds that judgements are based on perceptible feelings. Hence, affective influences depend on the source to which feelings are (mis)attributed. In contrast, the affective primary hypothesis (Zajonc, 1980) suggests that affective influences should resist attributional interventions. This is because the affective system responsible for preferences is separate from the cognitive system responsible for inferences; because early affective processes are automatic and therefore inaccessible to higher-order interventions; and because early affective responses are not represented as conscious feelings. We tested these explanations in two experiments that crossed subliminal affective priming with (mis)attribution manipulations. Both studies found reliable shifts in judgements of neutral stimuli as a result of primes even when subjects were aware that their feelings might not be diagnostic for the judgement at hand. Subjects did not report experiencing any feelings in response to the primes. The obtained affective priming effect was independent of response times and subjective reports of engaging in judgemental corrections. However, the priming effect did prove sensitive to the experimental instructions. We discuss the implications of these findings for the affective primacy hypothesis and the feelings-as-information model.     

Short review and book note

G. J. Cuming and D. Baker, ed. Studies in church history, vol. 8: Popular belief and practice. Cambridge University Press, pp. xii and 331. £6.40.

James E. Wood, Jnr. (Ed.), Jewish-Christian relations in today's world (The Markham Press Fund of Baylor University Press, Waco, Texas, 1971) pp. 164.

Stern, S. M. and Walzer, Sofie, Three unknown Buddhist stories in an Arabic version, introduction, text and translation. Oxford, Cassirer, 1971, 38 pp. £2.00

Brown, Peter, Religion and society in the age of Saint Augustine, Faber and Faber, 1972, pp. 352. £3.25; MACINTYRE, ALASDAIR, Against the Self‐Images of the Age, Duckworth, 1871, pp. vi‐284. E3.45; WINCH, PETER, Ethics and Action, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, pp. 231. £2.75.

Woodcock, George. Gandhi. Fontana, Collins (London), 1972. 108 pp., paperback 35p.

Masunaga, R. A primer of Soto Zen: A translation of Dogen's shobogenzo zuimonki. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. 126 pp., £1.25.

Swanton, Michael (Ed.). The dream of the road. Manchester University Press, 1970. ix + 146 pp. £1.20 (paperback 60p).     

Differential roles of the frontal and parietal cortices in the control of saccades

Although externally as well as internally-guided eye movements allow us to flexibly explore the visual environment, their differential neural mechanisms remain elusive. A better understanding of these neural mechanisms will help us to understand the control of action and to elucidate the nature of cognitive deficits in certain psychiatric populations (e.g. schizophrenia) that show increased latencies in volitional but not visually-guided saccades. Both the superior precentral sulcus (sPCS) and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) are implicated in the control of eye movements. However, it remains unknown what differential contributions the two areas make to the programming of visually-guided and internally-guided saccades. In this study we tested the hypotheses that sPCS and IPS distinctly encode internally-guided saccades and visually-guided saccades. We scanned subjects with fMRI while they generated visually-guided and internally-guided delayed saccades. We used multi-voxel pattern analysis to test whether patterns of cue related, preparatory and saccade related activation could be used to predict the direction of the planned eye movement. Results indicate that patterns in the human sPCS predicted internally-guided saccades but not visually-guided saccades in all trial periods and patterns in the IPS predicted internally-guided saccades and visually-guided saccades equally well. The results support the hypothesis that the human sPCS and IPS make distinct contributions to the control of volitional eye movements.     

Efficacy of a Post-modern Group Career Assessment Intervention of Disadvantaged High School Learners

The study used a post-modern group assessment procedure to explore career perceptions of 11 Grade 11 learners (6= males; 5= females; mean age = 17 years) from disadvantaged communities. A qualitative process of thematic content analysis was used to analyse the data. The results suggest that narrative career assessment in a group setting may provide a viable alternative to career counselling and assessment with disadvantaged learners.     

Working conditions,well-being,and job-related attitudes among call centre agents

A comparison of 234 call centre agents with 572 workers in traditional jobs with long lasting training revealed lower job control and task complexity/variety and higher uncertainty among call agents. However, time pressure, concentration demands, and work interruptions were lower in call agents. Within the call agent sample, controlling for negative affectivity and other working conditions, job control predicted intention to quit, and job complexity/variety predicted job satisfaction and affective commitment. Social stressors and task-related stressors predicted uniquely indicators of well-being and job-related attitudes. Furthermore, data confirm the role of emotional dissonance as a stressor in its own right, as it explained variance in irritated reactions and psychosomatic complaints beyond other working conditions. Results indicate that strong division of labour may be a rather general phenomenon in call centres. Therefore, working conditions of call agents require a redesign by means of job enrichment or—better—organization development. Moreover, measures of social stressors and emotional dissonance should be integrated routinely into stress-related job analyses in service jobs.     

Essener Evaluation der Unterbringung in der Entziehungsanstalt

Over the past 20 years various studies have yielded findings regarding the treatment of offenders in forensic addiction treatment centers in Germany (section 64 of the Penal Code). For a number of reasons these studies hardly allow quantification of the assessment of the rehabilitative success of treatment. In 2009 the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry at the University of Essen, Germany was commissioned to engage in a long-term evaluation study that will be completed in 2017. The project is supported by the Ministry of Health of the State of North-Rhine Westphalia. The present paper summarizes the methodology of the study and draws up an interim balance of the data collection. The study involves the follow-up of 300 patients from 16 forensic mental hospitals from entry into the institution to discharge and further on to living in the community including a“time at risk of at least 2 years. A number of these patients will drop out of treatment by being sent back to prison. The rate of criminal recidivism in the complete group of subjects will be compared to a matched control group of 300 offenders serving a prison sentence only. Potential error sources related to the data collection are discussed in the paper.