?Psychische St?rung�� als Begr��ndung f��r staatliche Eingriffe in Grundrechte des Individuums

When dealing with ?old cases?? of preventive detention as well as retrospectively ordered preventive detention, a continuation of confinement should be possible if the offender involved suffers from a ??mental disorder?? which constitutes the danger of future serious violent or sexual crimes. In this psychiatric article it will be explained that the terms ??mental illness?? and also ??mental disorder?? must retain an empirical scientifically definable psychiatric content in order not to instigate deception. They must also be functionally defined in each judicial environment (police law, social law, civil law and criminal law) with respect to the capabilities of the individual which are impaired by the mental disorder. Such an approach could prevent a misuse of psychiatry for purely political security purposes.     

Continuous visual cues trigger automatic spatial target updating in dynamic scenes

Dynamic tasks often require fast adaptations to new viewpoints. It has been shown that automatic spatial updating is triggered by proprioceptive motion cues. Here, we demonstrate that purely visual cues are sufficient to trigger automatic updating. In five experiments, we examined spatial updating in a dynamic attention task in which participants had to track three objects across scene rotations that occurred while the objects were temporarily invisible. The objects moved on a floor plane acting as a reference frame and unpredictably either were relocated when reference frame rotations occurred or remained in place. Although participants were aware of this dissociation they were unable to ignore continuous visual cues about scene rotations (Experiments 1a and 1b). This even held when common rotations of floor plane and objects were less likely than a dissociated rotation (Experiments 2a and 2b). However, identifying only the spatial reference direction was not sufficient to trigger updating (Experiment 3). Thus we conclude that automatic spatial target updating occurs with pure visual information.     

Restructuring partitioned knowledge: the role of recoordination in category learning

Knowledge restructuring refers to changes in the strategy with which people solve a given problem. Two types of knowledge restructuring are supported by existing category learning models. The first is a relearning process, which involves incremental updating of knowledge as learning progresses. The second is a recoordination process, which involves novel changes in the way existing knowledge is applied to the task. Whereas relearning is supported by both single- and multiple-module models of category learning, only multiple-module models support recoordination. To date, only relearning has been directly supported empirically. We report two category learning experiments that provide direct evidence of recoordination. People can fluidly alternate between different categorization strategies, and moreover, can reinstate an old strategy even after prolonged use of an alternative. The knowledge restructuring data are not well fit by a single-module model (ALCOVE). By contrast, a multiple-module model (ATRIUM) quantitatively accounts for recoordination. Low-level changes in the distribution of dimensional attention are shown to subsequently affect how ATRIUM coordinates its modular knowledge. We argue that learning about complex tasks occurs at the level of the partial knowledge elements used to generate a response strategy.     

Das Wichtigste im Leben – aber nicht in der Psychotherapie?!

Mental health can be substantially impaired by a low partner-relationship quality and nearly all mental disorders are associated with distress. Additionally, couple’s interaction has an impact on parental behavior. Special attention must be paid to family violence. Based on this background, the reciprocity model and the theory of marital stability are described. Detailed suggestions are given for the assessment, treatment planning and couple-oriented as well as parent-orientated interventions. The suggestions are exemplified with a case vignette. Some legal and ethical standards as well as psychotherapeutic conditions may limit the application of these interventions.     

Leugnen der Tat und Tatbearbeitung in der prognostischen Begutachtung

The perpetrator’s examination of his own criminal actions seems to be very important for the risk assessment by the German criminal justice and psychological and psychiatric experts. At the same time other risk factors like general dissociality, the structure of the future neighbourhood, the patterns of social bindings, and personal core competencies seem to be more important for the prevention of criminal recidivism. Anyway the analysis of one’s own criminal offence may enlighten the individual attitudes and behavioral problems and thus may become an important domain of cognitive restructuring. If a convict still denies his deed this not necessarily makes a parole impossible. Denial may indicate a general hostility against the law, but in other cases it is caused by overwhelming shame and indicates positive bindings to social norms.     

How communication goals determine when audience tuning biases memory

After tuning their message to suit their audience's attitude, communicators' own memories for the original information (e.g., a target person's behaviors) often reflect the biased view expressed in their message--producing an audience-congruent memory bias. Exploring the motivational circumstances of message production, the authors investigated whether this bias depends on the goals driving audience tuning. In 4 experiments, the memory bias was found to a greater extent when audience tuning served the creation of a shared reality than when it served alternative, nonshared reality goals (being polite toward a stigmatized-group audience; obtaining incentives; being entertaining; complying with a blatant demand). In addition, the authors found that these effects were mediated by the epistemic trust in the audience-congruent view but not by the rehearsal or accurate retrieval of the original input information, the ability to discriminate between the original and the message information, or a contrast away from extremely tuned messages. The central role of epistemic trust, a measure of the communicators' experience of shared reality, was supported in meta-analyses across the experiments.     

Comparing elemental and configural associative theories in human causal learning: a case for attention

In two causal learning experiments with human participants, the authors compared various associative theories that assumed either elemental (unique cue, modified unique cue, replaced elements model, and Harris' model) or configural processing of stimuli (Pearce's theory and a modification of it). The authors used modified patterning problems initially suggested by Redhead and Pearce (1995). Predictions for all theories were generated by computer simulations. Both configural theories and the unique cue approach failed to account for the observations. The replaced elements model was able to account for part of the data, but only if the replacement parameters could vary across discrimination problems. The Harris model and the modified unique cue approach, assuming that the salience of stimuli decreases with an increasing number of stimuli in a compound, successfully accounted for all of our data. This success implies that attentional factors should be explicitly taken into account in associative learning theory.     

Intra-individual reaction time variability in schizophrenia, depression and borderline personality disorder

Intra-individual reaction time variability (IIV) in neuropsychological task performance reflects short term fluctuations in performance. Increased IIV has been reported in patients with schizophrenia and could be related to a deficient neural timing mechanism, but the role of IIV in adult patients with other psychiatric disorders has not been established. Therefore, we compared IIV measures obtained in a Go/Nogo task from patients with schizophrenia, major depression and borderline personality disorder. IIV was increased for patients with schizophrenia. When correcting for differences in mean reaction time, depressive and borderline patients also showed increased IIV. Importantly, all groups showed a strong association between IIV and accuracy of task performance. This suggests that increased IIV might be a sensitive marker for the efficiency of top-down attentional control in all diagnostic groups. Aside from these similarities, the complete results including measures of IIV, mean reaction time and accuracy show differential patterns for patients with schizophrenia compared to those with borderline personality disorder or depression. These results are discussed with respect to common versus disorder-specific neural mechanisms underlying increased IIV.     

The effect of spectral difference on auditory saltation

Auditory saltation is a spatiotemporal illusion in which the judged positions of sound stimuli are shifted toward subsequent stimuli that follow closely in time and space. In this study, the "reduced-rabbit" paradigm and a direct-location method were employed to investigate the effect of spectral sound content on the saltation illusion. Eighteen listeners were presented with sound sequences consisting of three high-pass or low-pass filtered noise bursts. Noise bursts within a sequence were either the same or differed in frequency. Listeners judged the position of the second sound using a hand pointer. When the time interval between the second and third sound was short, the target was shifted toward the location of the subsequent stimulus. This displacement effect did not depend on the spectral content of the first sound, but decreased substantially when the second and third sounds were different. The results indicated an effect of spectral difference on saltation that is discussed with regard to a recently proposed stimulus integration approach in which saltation was attributed to an interaction between perceptual processing of temporally proximate stimuli.     

Wurden schizophrene Maßregelpatienten zuvor in der Allgemeinpsychiatrie unzureichend behandelt?

Since 1996 we have had a marked increase in the number of admissions to special psychiatric hospitals for mentally ill offenders in Germany. Still higher was the increase in schizophrenic patients admitted to these facilities. The question arose whether deficits of the psychiatric health system are contributing to these changes. We studied the medical history of 50 schizophrenic patients, each of whom was hopitalized in the Berlin special hospital in the periods of 1985-1988 and 2002-2004. Surprisingly, there was no difference in the duration of former psychiatric hospitalizations and medical treatment. There was also no difference in the number of dubious releases from the general psychiatric hospital. But we found a marked increase of co-morbid drug abuse and of noncompliance to treatment.