Schlafstörung

A 41 year-old woman presented with restlessness and constricting and pressing dysesthesia in both calves and feet. These symptoms bother her especially in the evening while watching TV and later while lying in bed. She has to stand up repeatedly and walk around in her flat to obtain some temporary relief of her symptoms, which first appeared during her pregnancy 6 years ago and have become gradually worse over time. The patient complains that nowadays she lies awake in bed for up to 2 h until she can go to sleep several times a week. She wakes up 2–3 times a night only to find herself fighting to go back to sleep. During the day she noticed difficulties concentrating during work and frequently reacts angrily towards her husband and her daughter.     

Managing Pandemics—Demands,Resources, and Effective Behaviors Within Crisis Management Teams

Pandemics, such as the COVID-19 crisis, are very complex emergencies that can neither be handled by individuals nor by any single municipality, organization or even country alone. Such situations require multidisciplinary crisis management teams (CMTs) at different administrative levels. However, most existing CMTs are trained for rather local and temporary emergencies but not for international and long-lasting crises. Moreover, CMT members in a pandemic face additional demands due to unknown characteristics of the disease and a highly volatile environment. To support and ensure the effectiveness of CMTs, we need to understand how CMT members can successfully cope with these multiple demands. Connecting teamwork research with the job demands and resources approach as starting framework, we conducted structured interviews and critical incident analyses with 144 members of various CMTs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Content analyses revealed both perceived demands as well as perceived resources in CMTs. Moreover, structuring work processes, open, precise and regular communication, and anticipatory, goal-oriented and fast problem solving were described as particularly effective behaviors in CMTs. We illustrate our findings in an integrated model and derive practical recommendations for the work and future training of CMTs.     

Self‐Compassion as a Facet of Neuroticism? A Reply to the Comments of Neff,Tóth‐Király,and Colosimo (2018)

In this paper, we respond to comments by Neff et al. (2018) made about our finding that the negative dimensions of self‐compassion were redundant with facets of neuroticism (rs ≥ 0.85; Pfattheicher et al., 2017) and not incrementally valid. We first provide epistemological guidance for establishing psychological constructs, namely, three hurdles that new constructs must pass: theoretically and empirically sound measurement, discriminant validity, and incremental validity—and then apply these guidelines to the self‐compassion scale. We then outline that the critique of Neff et al. (2018) is contestable. We question their decisions concerning data‐analytic methods that help them to circumvent instead of passing the outlined hurdles. In a reanalysis of the data provided by Neff et al. (2018), we point to several conceptual and psychometric problems and conclude that self‐compassion does not overcome the outlined hurdles. Instead, we show that our initial critique of the self‐compassion scale holds and that its dimensions are best considered facets of neuroticism. © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Building blocks for a cognitive science-led epistemology of arithmetic

Philosophical Studies - In recent years philosophers have used results from cognitive science to formulate epistemologies of arithmetic (e.g. Giaquinto in J Philos 98(1):5–18, 2001). Such...     

Active hippocampus during nonconscious memories

The hippocampal formation is known for its importance in conscious, declarative memory. Here, we report neuroimaging evidence in humans for an additional role of the hippocampal formation in nonconscious memory. We maskedly presented combinations of faces and written professions such that subjects were not aware of them. Nevertheless, the masked presentations activated many of the brain regions that unmasked presentations of these stimuli did. To induce a nonconscious retrieval of the faces and face-associated occupational information, subjects were instructed to view the previously masked faces and to guess the professional category of each person--academic, artist, and workman. Guessing the professional category of previously masked versus new faces activated the left and right hippocampal formation and right perirhinal cortex as well as bilateral fusiform areas and fronto-temporal areas known to mediate the retrieval of semantic information. These activations within the semantic processing system suggest that conceptual knowledge acquired during masking was nonconsciously retrieved. Our data provide clues to an analogous role of the hippocampus in conscious and nonconscious memory.     

Climbing the cortical ladder from sensation to perception

A recent study using displays that are ambiguous for motion direction demonstrates that the current perceptual interpretation of such a stimulus is encoded in the highest areas of visual cortex whereas earlier areas encode only its sensory properties. This finding implies that cortical processing pathways perform a transition from a sensory representation to a representation that emphasizes the input's perceptual interpretation and ultimately the organism's behavioral state.     

Efficacy of Attention Bias Modification Using Threat and Appetitive Stimuli: A Meta-Analytic Review

Attention bias modification (ABM) protocols aim to modify attentional biases underlying many forms of pathology. Our objective was to conduct an effect size analysis of ABM across a wide range of samples and psychological problems. We conducted a literature search using PubMed, PsycInfo, and author searches to identify randomized studies that examined the effects of ABM on attention and subjective experiences. We identified 37 studies (41 experiments) totaling 2,135 participants who were randomized to training toward neutral, positive, threat, or appetitive stimuli or to a control condition. The effect size estimate for changes in attentional bias was large for the neutral versus threat comparisons (g = 1.06), neutral versus appetitive (g = 1.41), and neutral versus control comparisons (g = 0.80), and small for positive versus control (g = 0.24). The effects of ABM on attention bias were moderated by stimulus type (words vs. pictures) and sample characteristics (healthy vs. high symptomatology). Effect sizes of ABM on subjective experiences ranged from 0.03 to 0.60 for postchallenge outcomes, –0.31 to 0.51 for posttreatment, and were moderated by number of training sessions, stimulus type, and stimulus orientation (top/bottom vs. left/right). Fail-safe N calculations suggested that the effect size estimates were robust for the training effects on attentional biases, but not for the effect on subjective experiences. ABM studies using threat stimuli produced significant effects on attention bias across comparison conditions, whereas appetitive stimuli produced changes in attention only when comparing appetitive versus neutral conditions. ABM has a moderate and robust effect on attention bias when using threat stimuli. Further studies are needed to determine whether these effects are also robust when using appetitive stimuli and for affecting subjective experiences.     

Assertoric Semantics and the Computational Power of Self-Referential Truth

There is no consensus as to whether a Liar sentence is meaningful or not. Still, a widespread conviction with respect to Liar sentences (and other ungrounded sentences) is that, whether or not they are meaningful, they are useless. The philosophical contribution of this paper is to put this conviction into question. Using the framework of assertoric semantics, which is a semantic valuation method for languages of self-referential truth that has been developed by the author, we show that certain computational problems, called query structures, can be solved more efficiently by an agent who has self-referential resources (amongst which are Liar sentences) than by an agent who has only classical resources; we establish the computational power of self-referential truth. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the implications of the established result for deflationary accounts of truth.     

Low perceived control as a risk factor for episodic memory: the mediational role of anxiety and task interference

Low perceived control is considered a risk factor for poor cognitive functioning, but the mechanisms are unclear. The goal of the present study was to analyze anxiety and task interference as sequential mediators of the association between control beliefs and episodic memory. Cognitive-specific control beliefs were assessed prior to the lab session. State anxiety was assessed in the lab, followed by a word list recall task. The frequency of intrusive thoughts during the memory task was reported by the participants as a measure of task interference after the completion of the cognitive testing. The results for 152 participants from the ages of 22 to 84 years supported the predicted three-path mediation model. Lower levels of control beliefs were associated with higher state anxiety, which in turn affected episodic memory performance by increasing the likelihood of task interference, with age, sex, and verbal abilities as covariates. The implications of the results for developing interventions to improve memory performance are considered.