Traumatische Trauer – ein eigenständiges Krankheitsbild?

Grief is a highly individualized process influenced by intrapsychic, interpersonal and social factors. The definition of normal and pathological grief is complicated by the variety of grief reactions. Empirical research indicates that pathological grief may be concerned considered as a separate entity. Two research groups developed empirically validated criteria with a special focus on the traumatic aspect of grief. The current state of research allows, however, in our opinion not the conclusion, that the proposed diagnostic criteria for complicated (Horowitz et al. 1997) or traumatic grief (Prigerson et al. 1999b) do not enclose all types of grief. Further empirical research on representative samples is necessary to validate previous findings and to differentiate specific subgroups of pathological grief.     

Measuring memory for source: Some theoretical assumptions and technical limitations

Henkel and Franklin (1998) present a series of well-designed experiments in support of the conclusion that memory for the source of an item is affected by the similarity between the item and other information in memory. Their principle analyses use an empirical measure of source memory that is a variant of a measure evaluated by Murnane and Bayen (1996). We point out an important assumption that underlies the use of this measure and question additional arguments and analyses that Henkel and Franklin offer in support of their conclusions. The problems discussed illustrate the need for careful consideration of the technical characteristics of measures and the theoretical assumptions on which measures rest when one is conducting research on source memory.     

An evaluation of empirical measures of source identification

Source identification refers to memory for the origin of information. A consistent nomenclature is introduced for empirical measures of source identification which are then mathematically analyzed and evaluated. The ability of the measures to assess source identification independently of identification of an item as old or new depends on assumptions made about how inconsistencies between the item and source components of a source-monitoring task may be resolved. In most circumstances, the empirical measure that is used most often when source identification is measured by collapsing across pairs of sources (sometimes called “the identification-of-origin score”) confounds item identification with source identification. Alternative empirical measures are identified that do not confound item and source identification in specified circumstances. None of the empirical measures examined provides a valid measure of source identification in all circumstances.     

Ambulante Psychotherapie bei Kindern und Jugendlichen

This paper presents the results of a study of the state of outpatient psychotherapy of children and juveniles in Germany after the PTG came into force. A total of 180 psychotherapists were questioned on certain issues. One result was that patients have to wait 4.5 months for psychotherapy and that every second patient asking for a diagnostic interview and possible treatment was refused.Of those who were given a diagnostic interview 43% were not taken into treatment, although disturbances were diagnosed such as addiction, bodily disabilities with psychic complications, enuresis/encopresis, anorexia nervosa, psychosomatic illnesses, developmental arrests which would normally demand psychotherapeutic treatment. Furthermore only 25% of those children and juveniles who Löcherbach et al. (2000, S.59 f.) considered needing and wanting psychotherapeutic treatment were actually in a G IV psychotherapy.Apart from this the possibility of getting psychotherapy as well as the kind of psychotherapy proved to be dependent on the kind of medical insurance. Differing payments by the insurance companies caused longer waiting times for patients and determined the choice of psychotherapy by the psychotherapists.     

Is the Motor or the Garage More Important to the Car? The Difference Between Semantic Associations in Single Word and Sentence Production

The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of part-whole (e.g., car-motor) and functional associations (e.g., car-garage) on single word (Experiment 1) and sentence production (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, a classical picture-word task was used. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli and distractors were embedded into a sentence. The relation between target and distractor was either part-whole, functional or unrelated. At single word level, part-whole and functional relations facilitate naming. Additionally, the facilitation effect was stronger for part-whole in comparison to functional associations. During sentence production, facilitation shifted to interference. The difference between both relations disappeared. The findings of the different effects between functional and part-whole associations depend on the length of utterances and highlight the divergent impact of associations. The differences between part-whole and functional associations in single word production might reflect a differential organization of associative links at the conceptual level. In contrast, during sentence production the syntactic processing at the lexical level seem to be more important than types of semantic associations at the conceptual level.     

Social judgment of aggressive language: Effects of target and sender sex on the evaluation of slurs

We investigated the influence of the sex of the target and the sex of the sender on the judgment of slurs (verbal derogation). From previous research, we selected and clustered slurs into seven categories and respondents rated their degree of perceived insult in two consecutive questionnaire surveys (N = 281 and N = 224, respectively). Results confirm that slurs are generally judged as being more insulting when directed towards females than towards males. In comparison, differences in sex of sender were small. When directed towards females, slurs referring to “being loose” were rated as the most insulting. For both target sexes, remarks referring to homosexuality and physical unattractiveness were among those rated as the most insulting. Least insulting were slurs referring to unethical acts, lack of intelligence and cowardliness. A sex of respondent effect was found, suggesting that women rated slurs generally more insulting than men. The pattern of results showed considerable stability across surveys attesting for the reliability of the method for measuring the social evaluation of slurs.     

Bizarreness effects in verbal tasks and subject-performed tasks

Abstract

Recognition and cued recall of ordinary action phrases (e.g. “open the book”) and bizarre ones (e.g. “plant the hammer”) were compared under two encoding conditions: in verbal tasks (VTs), subjects learned the phrases by simply listening to them; in subject-performed tasks (SPTs), subjects learned the phrases by performing the denoted actions (without real objects). Memory performance was better after SPTs than after VTs in recognition and cued recall. In addition to this already established finding, it was observed that recognition was better for bizarre phrases than for ordinary ones after VTs and that bizarreness was unrelated to recognition after SPTs. Cued recall, on the other hand, depended on bizarreness after VTs as well as after SPTs and, in contrast to the recognition findings, ordinary phrases were recalled better than bizarre phrases. This pattern of findings was explained by the assumptions that lexical and conceptual information is encoded after VTs and motor information is additionally encoded after SPTs, and that different kinds of information are used in recognition and cued recall, and after VTs and SPTs.     

A Tailored Policy‐capturing Study on PO Fit Perceptions: The ascendancy of attractive over aversive fit

Job‐seekers are attracted to organizations if they perceive fit between their personal values and those of an organization. It is often assumed that people's person–organization (PO) fit perceptions reflect an overall comparison between the person and the organization: fits on values that are personally attractive, aversive, or relatively neutral are weighed equally. In this study, we questioned this assumption. Based on regulatory focus theory and construal level theory, we proposed that fit on values that are personally attractive would especially contribute to the perception of PO fit. Four policy‐capturing studies indeed showed that job‐seekers do not weigh all value fits equally. Rather, they weigh fit on personally attractive values more heavily than fit on personally aversive and neutral values. Thus, job‐seekers perceive high PO fit particularly when information about a prospective organization supports values that are personally attractive to them. Theoretical implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Norms on the gender perception of role nouns in Czech,English, French,German, Italian,Norwegian, and Slovak

We collected norms on the gender stereotypicality of an extensive list of role nouns in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak, to be used as a basis for the selection of stimulus materials in future studies. We present a Web-based tool (available at https://www.unifr.ch/lcg/) that we developed to collect these norms and that we expect to be useful for other researchers, as well. In essence, we provide (a) gender stereotypicality norms across a number of languages and (b) a tool to facilitate cross-language as well as cross-cultural comparisons when researchers are interested in the investigation of the impact of stereotypicality on the processing of role nouns.