Task preparation and stimulus-evoked competition

The authors investigated how task competition evoked by a stimulus that affords both a currently relevant and a temporarily irrelevant task is affected by invalid preparation, i.e., preparation for the irrelevant task. Although invalid preparation was associated with a general performance cost, effects of stimulus-cued task competition were not enhanced on invalidly prepared trials. This result suggests that either preparation activates representations different from the ones by which stimulus cuing is mediated or that stimulus processing is postponed until invalid preparation has been corrected. In addition, invalid preparation resulted in impaired performance of the respective task when it became relevant on a subsequent trial. This result is consistent with the idea that competition due to invalid preparation is countered by task-specific inhibition.     

Thin slices of behavior as cues of personality and intelligence

Self-reports, peer reports, intelligence tests, and ratings of personality and intelligence from 15 videotaped episodes were collected for 600 participants. The average cross-situational consistency of trait impressions across the 15 episodes was .43. Shared stereotypes related to gender and age were mostly accurate and contributed little to agreement among judges. Agreement was limited mainly by nonshared meaning systems and by nonoverlapping information. Personality inferences from thin slices of behavior were significantly associated with reports by knowledgeable informants. This association became stronger when more episodes were included, but gains in prediction were low beyond 6 episodes. Inferences of intelligence from thin slices of behavior strongly predicted intelligence test scores. A particularly strong single predictor was how persons read short sentences.     

Sociability and positive emotionality: genetic and environmental contributions to the covariation between different facets of extraversion

The relation between sociability and positive affect is one of the most often replicated results of research on personality and subjective well-being. It is shown how behavior genetics can contribute to our understanding of the covariance between sociability and positive emotionality. The results of a multimethod behavior-genetic study with 158 monozygotic and 120 dizygotic twins are reported. In this study, sociability and two components of positive emotionality (positive affect, energy) were assessed by self-report and other report. Additionally, positive state affect was assessed in five situations and aggregated across situations. The results showed that there are strong genetic correlations between all variables. Furthermore, there are substantive correlations between the nonshared environmental components of the different variables. Shared environmental influences, however, seemed to be unimportant for explaining the correlations between sociability and the different components of positive emotionality. The results are discussed with respect to their implications for future research on sociability and positive emotionality.     

Gender differences on the WPPSI,the WISC-R,and the WPPSI-R

The WPPSI, WISC-R, and WPPSI-R were administered in a counterbalanced design to 72 children between the ages of 5 years, 10 months, 16 days, and 6 years, 7 months, and 15 days to test the hypothesis that mean verbal IQs on these scales would be higher for boys than for girls. Results indicated that the mean verbal IQs for boys were significantly (p<.05) higher than those for girls on all three scales. Also, significant (p<.05) differences favoring boys were found onVocabulary andComprehension subtests on all three scales. These differences are probably a peculiarity of these scales and may not need any elaborate theoretical explanation. However, clinical uses of verbal and performance IQ discrepancies may not justifiably ignore the examinees’ gender.     

Gender differences in reasoning ability measured by letter series items

Letter series and number series tests, consisting of items based on identical rules, were administered in a counterbalanced design to 320 (160 female and 160 male) undergraduates in order to investigate the gender differences in inductive reasoning ability measured by letter and number series tests. Results indicated that female college students obtained significantly higher (p<.05) means on letter series tests, but showed no such superiority on number series.     

Vocal cues in emotion encoding and decoding

This research examines the correspondence between theoretical predictions on vocal expression patterns in naturally occurring emotions (as based on the component process theory of emotion; Scherer, 1986) and empirical data on the acoustic characteristics of actors' portrayals. Two male and two female professional radio actors portrayed anger, sadness, joy, fear, and disgust based on realistic scenarios of emotion-eliciting events. A series of judgment studies was conducted to assess the degree to which judges are able to recognize the intended emotion expressions. Disgust was relatively poorly recognized; average recognition accuracy for the other emotions attained 62.8% across studies. A set of portrayals reaching a satisfactory level of recognition accuracy underwent digital acoustic analysis. The results for the acoustic parameters extracted from the speech signal show a number of significant differences between emotions, generally confirming the theoretical predictions.This research was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Sche 156/8-5). The authors acknowledge collaboration of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, in producing professional versions of actor emotion portrayals, and thank Kurt Balser, Theodor Gehm, Christoph Gierschner, Judy Hall, Ursula Hess, Alice Isen, and one anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and contributions.     

Social Concepts and Judgments: A Semantic Differential Analysis of the Concepts Feminist, Man, and Woman

Male and female participants  ( N = 274)  made judgments about the social concepts of feminist , man , and woman on 63 semantic differential items. Factor analysis identified three basic dimensions termed evaluative, potency, and activity as well as two secondary factors called expressiveness and sexuality. Results for the evaluative dimension showed that the concept feminist was rated negatively with male participants rating feminist more negatively than female participants. In terms of potency, feminist was judged higher than man whereas the concept woman was rated low on this dimension. Participants also judged the concept feminist as low in expressiveness and rated woman as the most expressive. Feminist received low ratings on the erotic-sexual dimension (sexuality) by female participants and negative sexuality ratings by men. These results are discussed in terms of social role theory, gender stereotypes, and the changes in women's roles and behavior.     

Nichtspezifische,funktionelle und somatoforme Körperbeschwerden

In the S3 guidelines on non-specific, functional and somatoform bodily complaints, a broad group of medical and psychological societies as well as patient representatives have for the first time achieved an evidence-based consensus on terminology and care of these patients. This paper summarizes the main background information and recommendations for psychotherapists. For mild courses treatment by the general practitioner with establishment of a biopsychosocial explanatory model and physical as well as social activation is usually sufficient. More severe courses call for cooperative, coordinated management, including regular appointments with the general practitioner, graded activation and psychotherapy, especially cognitive behavioral, in addition to psychodynamic interpersonal or hypnotherapeutic imaginative psychotherapy. In particularly severe courses multimodal and if necessary day clinic or inpatient treatment is needed. Additionally the patient guidelines for affected people and their relatives are presented.