Die Destruktivität in der psychoanalytischen Ausbildung

In this study, a survey of all criticism of psychoanalytic training and of the from its beginnings formulated problems is given. Doing so, the presented literature covering the issue is discussed from four perspectives: the candidate’s perspective, the socio-political perspective, the perspective of power and the perspective of professionalization. The latter perspective involves historical aspects too and thus shows the resistance towards change, proposes solutions and therefore may be deemed to be especially relevant. In order to summarize the criticism regarding psychoanalytic training, a systemic model was developed including its systemic structure, organizational aspects and its content. Furthermore, ten hypotheses are developed as to why psychoanalytic training proves to be to a large extent resistant to change. Against the background of the existing situation in training, current job-political conditions and changes for present trainees are presented and existing exacerbations are pointed out. Ignoring these aggravated conditions and simultaneously tightening and regimenting training guidelines are understood as a destructive process for psychoanalysis and its training by the author. At the same time it is pointed out that the presented problems are not related to one single psychoanalytic society, but have been developed over decades throughout different psychoanalytic societies and countries and therefore seems to be an international problem of psychoanalytic organizations. Finally, preexisting propositions for changes are discussed, and fourteen solutions, which could help to renew future psychoanalytic training, are shown; this may also serve as a plea for a basic reform in training and organization. Regarding a reform of the training, the author deems all three issues to be relevant: the systemic-structural aspect, the content and the organizational aspect.     

Stress on the dance floor: the cortisol stress response to social-evaluative threat in competitive ballroom dancers

The social self-preservation theory states that humans have a fundamental motivation to preserve the social self and that threats to the social self perturb biological markers such as cortisol. Five studies were designed to examine the cortisol response to competitive ballroom dancing as a paradigm for real-life social-evaluative threat. Competitive dancing produced substantial increases in cortisol compared to a control day. These increases were not due to the physical strain of dancing and were greater than those found during social-evaluative laboratory stressors. Responses did not habituate across competitions and were mostly elevated under highly focused conditions of threat (couple vs. group competition). These findings support the notion of a social self-preservation system that is physiologically responsive to threats to the social self.     

Bending rules: the shape of the perceptual generalisation gradient is sensitive to inference rules

Generalising what is learned about one stimulus to other but perceptually related stimuli is a basic behavioural phenomenon. We evaluated whether a rule learning mechanism may serve to explain such generalisation. To this end, we assessed whether inference rules communicated through verbal instructions affect generalisation. Expectancy ratings, but not valence ratings, proved sensitive to this manipulation. In addition to revealing a role for inference rules in generalisation, our study has clinical implications as well. More specifically, we argue that targeting inference rules might prove to be an effective strategy to affect the excessive generalisation that is often observed in psychopathology.     

Short- and long-term consequences in decision-making under risk: immediate feedback about long-term prospects benefits people tending to impulsive processing

Many decisions in everyday life involve weighing up immediate and expected future outcomes that may be conflictive. Yet, it is still unclear which cognitive functions may affect decision-making in such situations. We examined 150 healthy subjects using a new decision-making task that measures people’s ability at handling short- and long-term consequences under objective risk. Two task versions were developed to investigate the effects of feedback about long-term consequences on decision-making. One version includes feedback about changes in long-term prospects while the other does not. Both groups revealed that advantageous decision-making correlated with reasoning and working-memory abilities, however, no correlations with executive functions were found. The effect of feedback on decision-making performance was moderated by impulsivity and need for cognition. Our findings contribute to recent dual-system approaches for risky decision-making by showing that individuals with predispositions towards impulsive rather than reflective information processing could profit from feedback about long-term prospects.     

Category and perceptual interference in second-language phoneme learning: an examination of English /w/-/v/ learning by Sinhala, German, and Dutch speakers

The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural recordings, their degree of spoken accent, their relative use of place and manner cues, the assimilation of these phonemes into native-language categories, and their perceptual maps (i.e., multidimensional scaling solutions) for these phonemes. Most Sinhala speakers had near-chance identification accuracy, Germans ranged from chance to 100% correct, and Dutch speakers had uniformly high accuracy. The results suggest that these learning differences were caused more by perceptual interference than by category assimilation; Sinhala and German speakers both have a single native-language phoneme that is similar to English /w/ and /v/, but the auditory sensitivities of Sinhala speakers make it harder for them to discern the acoustic cues that are critical to /w/-/v/ categorization.     

Eye movements and behavioral responses to threatening and nonthreatening stimuli during visual search in phobic and nonphobic subjects

Spider-phobic and nonphobic subjects searched for a feared/fear-relevant (spider) or neutral target (mushroom) presented in visual matrices of neutral objects (flowers). In half of the displays, the mushroom target was paired with a spider distractor, or a spider target was paired with a mushroom distractor. Although all subjects responded faster to the neutral target than to the feared/fear-relevant target, phobics were slower to respond than nonphobics when a mushroom target was presented with a spider distractor. Their eyes appeared to be drawn to the feared distractor before fixating neutral targets. A further experiment indicated no group differences when subjects merely judged the homogeneity of matrices. Thus, threat seems to capture the attention of phobics only when it is part of a background that subjects are explicitly instructed to ignore.     

The role of structural prediction in rapid syntactic analysis

A number of recent electrophysiological studies of sentence processing have shown that a subclass of syntactic violations elicits very rapid ERP responses, occurring within around 200 ms of the onset of the violation. Such findings raise the question of how it is possible to diagnose violations so quickly. This paper suggests that very rapid diagnosis of errors is possible specifically in situations where the diagnosis problem is tightly constrained by specific expectations generated before the critical word is presented. In an event-related potentials (ERP) study of visual sentence reading participants encountered violations of a word order constraint (...Max's of...) that has elicited early ERP responses in previous studies. Across conditions the illicit sequence was held constant, while sentence context was used to manipulate the expectation for a noun following the possessor Max's, by manipulating the possibility of ellipsis of the head noun. Results showed that the anterior negativity elicited by the word category violation was attenuated when the availability of ellipsis reduced the expectation for a noun in the position of the offending preposition of, with divergence between conditions starting around 200 ms after the onset of the violation. This suggests a role for structural expectations in accounting for very fast syntactic diagnosis processes.