Always look on the broad side of life: happiness increases the breadth of sensory memory

Research has shown that positive affect increases the breadth of information processing at several higher stages of information processing, such as attentional selection or knowledge activation. In the present study, we examined whether these affective influences are already present at the level of transiently storing incoming information in sensory memory, before attentional selection takes place. After inducing neutral, happy, or sad affect, participants performed an iconic memory task which measures visual sensory memory. In all conditions, iconic memory performance rapidly decreased with increasing delay between stimulus presentation and test, indicating that affect did not influence the decay of iconic memory. However, positive affect increased the amount of incoming information stored in iconic memory. In particular, our results showed that this occurs due to an elimination of the spatial bias typically observed in iconic memory. Whereas performance did not differ at positions where observers in the neutral and negative conditions showed the highest performance, positive affect enhanced performance at all positions where observers in the neutral and negative conditions were relatively "blind." These findings demonstrate that affect influences the breadth of information processing already at earliest processing stages, suggesting that affect may produce an even more fundamental shift in information processing than previously believed.     

Seelische Entwicklung in virtuellen Welten

Electronic screen media such as television, computers and video game consoles have to a large extent replaced the natural living human environment—and most evidently the world of children and teenagers in a measurable way. This impact is the result not only of the ubiquitous presence of screen media but also of the differing properties of the programs, which display a toxic potential that varies from case to case. It appears prudent, therefore, to classify electronic media as invasive or non-invasive according to their toxic potential. It is now possible to describe the clinical results of these cataclysmic changes in the lives of children and teenagers with a fair degree of precision even from a psychoanalytical perspective. The consequences in the form of educational and psychotherapeutic actions can be derived directly from these findings.     

Transformationsprozesse in der Traumatherapie und die Technik der Prozessdeutung

This article first describes some of the general principles by which according to the latest concepts mental processing is accomplished: a transformative, self-organizational approach driven by emotion and is intersubjective.From this the basic principles for the treatment technique can be derived, which systematically differentiates between content interpretation and process interpretation. Objects of process interpretation are observable transformation events of the traumatic material during consultations, their success and destruction. Process interpretations restore the blocked processing abilities of the patient and in this way also prepare for the possibility to work with content interpretation.