Die Entwicklung wissenschaftlich begründeter Leitlinien

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

A post-fission perspective of the discovery of nuclear fission

Why was nuclear fission discovered under the repressive conditions of the Third Reich and not in one of the other leading countries in science? The attempts to answer this question leads to the formulation of the hypothesis that under the very special constellation of the working relations between Hahn and Meitner, the forced emigration of Meitner was advantageous insofar as it emancipated Hahn from the physical guardianship of Meitner, and liberated his chemical competence. This was a prerequisite to recognizing the presence of Barium in the debris of Uranium decay. At the same time it liberated Meitner so that she could break with the old physicalconcepts of knowledge when accepting Hahn's chemical results, and find the correct interpretation of the experiment. Moreover, Hahn's and Strassmann's inner emigration which kept them away from participating in political activities and engagements, as well as their abstinence from competing in fashionable research (which was stimulated by the increasing political isolation of Germany) helped them to concentrate on their more restricted investigations following unfashionable lines of thinking and were among the favourable conditions for making their great discovery.Based in a contribution to an International Workshop on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Discovery of Nuclear Fission, Institute of Advanced Studies, Berlin, March 1989.     

An investigation of the diagnostic processing of contradictory information

In three parallel experiments, subjects rated their impressions of hypothetical 20-year-old males described by means of single or combined personality trait adjectives on 36 bipolar (Semantic Differential) scales. These ratings were a) intercorrelated across the scales (Q-technique) and factor analyzed separately for each subject, and b) submitted to an analysis of variance separately for each scale. It was shown that 1) when contradictory adjectives were combined the major portion of the variance of judgments fell on dimensions independent of that which characterized the contradiction; 2) there were substantial inter-individual consistencies in the direction of the deviation from that dimension; and 3) the utility of a linear model for the prediction of judgments of combined adjectives increases with increases in the extent to which the subject experiences the combination as consistent. However, the utility of the linear model decreases considerably and consistently if the combined adjectives are experienced as non-consistent.     

Organization of and access to semantic memory in aphasia

Previous experiments with picture sorting and matching tasks have shown aphasics to give more deviant responses than controls when decisions require the identification of single features of concepts, whereas their responses are close to normal whenever decisions have to be based on the relative overlap of broad associative fields. The present experiment was designed to compare picture matching based on single features (property verification) with picture matching based on category membership (category verification). Fifty-five aphasics (14 amnesics, 18 Brocas, 13 Wernickes, 10 global aphasics) and 29 right-brain-damaged control patients served as subjects. Aphasics were poorer than right hemisphere controls on property as well as on category sortings, especially when the sorting criterion was not a dominant property of the object or when the object in question was not a typical member of the criterion category. Contrary to other studies, the "semantic distance" variable did not differentially affect Brocas as compared to Wernickes aphasics. Verbal labels denoting the sorting criterion and added to the picture presentation did not affect the performance of the right hemisphere controls but significantly improved that of the aphasics.     

Children of parents with unipolar depression: A controlled 1-year follow-up

An earlier cross-sectional study indicated that children's health and adjustment is at risk when their parents are depressed. Here, we report the associated longitudinal changes in children and families when parental depression either remits or continues. Comparisons are made among three groups established at a 1-year follow-up: previously depressed parents whose symptoms have remitted (N = 34 remitted parents), previously depressed parents who continue to be depressed (N = 23 nonremitted parents), and sociodemographically matched control families (N = 95). Although remitted parents and their family social environments improved, their children were still functioning more poorly than children of controls. Both the children and the families of nonremitted parents continued to function more poorly than controls. A social-environmental framework indicates that parents' functioning as well as family stressors and resources are concurrently and predictively linked to children's health.