Kreuzvalidierung der Kurzform des Kindheitsfragebogens

Objectives

Existing questionnaires about parent-child relationships usually assess love and control only. The childhood questionnaire (CQ) offers a more differentiating alternative.

Methods

In a sample of approximately 1,400 patients and more than 500 controls the CQ was reduced from 22 to 11 scales and the number of items of each scale was shortened to 5.

Results

The shortened scales of the CQ also showed good reliability and item characteristics, as well as plausible intercorrelations.

Conclusion

By the use of 66 out of the former 128 items, the shortened version of the CQ assesses three further important dimensions in the parent-child relationship of adults towards their parents in childhood besides love and control: punishment, ambition and role reversal. Beside this, parental separation, divorce and job status as well as various parameters of the socio-economic status (e.g. educational, occupational and financial) of the parents can be assessed.     

The mirror reflects both ways: Action influences perception of others

Substantial evidence links perception of others’ bodies and mental representation of the observer’s own body; however, the overwhelming majority of this evidence is unidirectional, showing influence from perception to action. It has been proposed that the influence also runs from action to perception, but to date the evidence is scant. Here we report that ordinary motor actions performed by the subject affect concurrent psychophysical judgments of human-body stimuli. Subjects remained unaware of the connection between the action and the main task. The results show that perception can change as a result of the observer’s ongoing actions.     

Event memory and moving in a well-known environment

Research in narrative comprehension has repeatedly shown that when people read about characters moving in well-known environments, the accessibility of object information follows a spatial gradient. That is, the accessibility of objects is best when they are in the same room as the protagonist, and it becomes worse the farther away they are see, e.g., Morrow, Greenspan, & Bower, (Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 165–187, 1987). In the present study, we assessed this finding using an interactive environment in which we had people memorize a map and navigate a virtual simulation of the area. During navigation, people were probed with pairs of object names and indicated whether both objects were in the same room. In contrast to the narrative studies described above, several experiments showed no evidence of a clear spatial gradient. Instead, memory for objects in currently occupied locations (e.g., the location room) was more accessible, especially after a small delay, but no clear decline was evident in the accessibility of information in memory with increased distance. Also, memory for objects along the pathway of movement (i.e., rooms that a person only passed through) showed a transitory suppression effect that was present immediately after movement, but attenuated over time. These results were interpreted in light of the event horizon model of event cognition.     

Beyond judgment bias: How students’ ethnicity and academic profile consistency influence teachers’ tracking judgments

Research on school tracking has provided evidence that students with immigrant backgrounds are overrepresented in the lower school tracks. As teachers are the main decision makers when it comes to tracking, we investigated whether teachers’ tracking judgments are biased by the immigrant backgrounds of the students and how teachers’ tracking judgments are affected by inconsistencies in students’ academic profiles. Drawing on dual process models of judgment formation, we conducted two experimental studies to investigate teachers’ judgments. The results of both studies showed less favorable teacher judgments of students with immigrant backgrounds than of students without immigrant backgrounds. Students with inconsistent academic profiles were also judged less favorably than students with consistent profiles. Think aloud data indicated careful processing of all information both for students with immigrant backgrounds and students with inconsistent profiles. Results are discussed with regard to their underlying mechanisms as well as with regard to their implications for teacher training.     

Emotion-induced modulation of recognition memory decisions in a Go/NoGo task: Response bias or memory bias?

In recognition memory tests for words, items with negative emotional meaning are more often classified as “old” compared to neutral items, whether or not they are in fact old. Two accounts for this bias have been offered: One proposes that emotions disrupt retrieval and response monitoring processes (executive control account), the other proposes that emotions cause illusory feelings of remembering (memory bias account). We addressed this issue by varying the target signal in a Go/NoGo variant of a recognition memory task for negative, neutral, and positive words and faces: One group of participants was asked to respond to old items whereas the other group was asked to respond to new items. Results showed that the “Go-for-old” group showed the typical emotion-induced response bias shift for both positive and negative words, while the “Go-for-new” group showed the opposite pattern. Results were nonsignificant for faces, but went into the same direction. The findings are clearly inconsistent with the executive control account and speak for a genuine memory illusion induced by emotional arousal.     

There is more than obeying display rules: Service employees’ motives for emotion regulation in customer interactions

Although research has focused on how service employees regulate their emotions, few studies have explored why they do so. In this article, we first described which kinds of motives for emotion regulation exist in customer interactions. Second, we investigated how the motives are related to four emotion regulation strategies. The application of an explorative approach resulted in a list of 10 motives, which could be classified into the three motive categories: pleasure, prevention, and instrumental. Hierarchical linear modelling of 421 reported service interactions from a diary study revealed that the motive categories were differently related to the emotion regulation strategies. Motives of the instrumental category were only significantly positively related to surface acting. Motives of the pleasure category were positively related to deep acting and automatic regulation as well as negatively related to surface acting and emotional deviance. Motives of the prevention category were positively related to deep acting, surface acting, and emotional deviance as well as negatively related to automatic regulation. These results can be used by organizations not only to enhance the motivation of employees towards emotion regulation, but also towards more authentic emotional expressions.     

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Adolescent Body Dysmorphic Disorder

The onset of appearance-related concerns associated with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) typically occurs in adolescence, and these concerns are often severe enough to interfere with normal development and psychosocial functioning. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for adults with BDD. However, no treatment studies focusing on adolescents with BDD have been conducted. The need for an effective treatment in this population led to the development of a brief CBT protocol with family involvement. The treatment focuses on enhancing an adolescent's quality of life through the reduction of maladaptive thoughts and behaviors, and incorporates skills training and parent training. Similar treatment packages have already been shown to be efficacious for children and adolescents with similar disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and social phobia. The following case illustrates the application of this brief CBT protocol for BDD in an adolescent, and highlights clinical considerations needed when adapting CBT for a pediatric population. Treatment was associated with clinically significant improvement in symptoms of BDD, self-esteem, depression, and quality of life. This report extends extant literature by suggesting that CBT may be a helpful treatment for adolescents with BDD.     

On anxiety-specific actions of tranquilizers

Abstract

This study examined the role of social support in the relationship between work demand and psychological distress (GHQ 12) in correctional officers (N=419), a high stress occupational group. Work demands were positively associated with strain. There was no evidence that social support buffered the negative impact of work demands. Rather, consistent with most previous research findings, support showed direct benefits and these were discussed in the context of worker participation and control. The hypothesis that officers high in negative affectivity, as measured by trait anxiety would show greater reactivity to work demands was not supported. However, trait anxiety appeared to inflate the relationship between work stressors (work demand and work support) and psychological distress supporting recent suggestions that the role of trait anxiety in occupational stress should not be disregarded. Trait anxiety combined additively with work demand to predict individual differences in psychological distress, however social support moderated the impact of trait anxiety on strain.     

Constructing Gender: A Lens-Model Inspired Gender Communication Approach

In this experiment (n=115), I followed a lens-model approach (Brunswik, 1956) to investigate the communicative construction of gender. For this purpose, a situation was created in which gender was not clearly visible and thus existed mainly as a gender-assumption in the eye of the beholder. The study featured the perception of a team leader during a team-meeting presented in a masked video-clip and either labeled as Mr. K or Mrs. K (Goldberg-paradigm study). Results suggested that the assumption of the leader's gender (gender-assumption) had a systematic impact on trait-ratings of the leader in the unexpected direction that “women” were rated higher on agentic traits than “men.” This was interpreted as an expectancy-based double-standard effect in leadership perception on the basis of nonverbal cue utilization. Furthermore, differences in the predictive values of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues were suggested in the analysis of verbal cue utilization. Overall, the lens-model perspective provides a useful framework by making perceptual and behavioral processes of gender construction more transparent.     

Volunteer work as a valuable leisure‐time activity: A day‐level study on volunteer work,non‐work experiences,and well‐being at work

In this 2‐week diary study, with 105 employees providing data on a total of 476 days, we examined relationships between the amount of time spent on volunteer work activities during leisure time, psychological non‐work experiences in the evening (i.e. recovery experiences of psychological detachment from work and mastery as well as need satisfaction), and work outcomes during the following working day (i.e. positive and negative affect, and active listening). Results confirmed the hypothesized positive relationships between the amount of time spent on volunteer work activities and psychological detachment from work, mastery experiences, and need satisfaction in the evening. Psychological detachment from work in the evening was positively related to active listening during the following working day. Need satisfaction in the evening was negatively related to negative affect and positively related to active listening during the following working day. The amount of time spent on volunteer work activities was negatively related to negative affect during the following working day. This relationship was mediated by need satisfaction in the evening.