Meta-dialogue

On the basis of recent developments in constructivism and social constructionism, the authors propose an approach that takes self-recursiveness seriously: Meta-dialogue, an extension of reflecting teams and reflecting positions. The authors see therapists as experts in interviewing (questioning, asking, and reflecting) and clients as experts for their different domains (their lives). Thus, the authors see it as crucial to express basic respect to the people who come to consult them in a cooperative way in order to enlarge the options of all the people taking part in the interview. The structure of meta-dialogue is described in detail and illustrated with a case example.We would like to thank Amanda Gorman (Kiel) for her sensitive help with the translation.     

Moral community and animal research in medicine

The invocation of moral rights in moral/social debate today is a recipe for deadlock in our consideration of substantive issues. How we treat animals and humans in part should derive from the value of their lives, which is a function of the quality of their lives, which in turn is a function of the richness of their lives. Consistency in argument requires that humans with a low quality of life should be chosen as experimental subjects over animals with a higher quality of life.     

Differences in the dissipation of the effect of adaptation to two kinds of field displacement during head movements

When Ss were simultaneously adapted to horizontal and to vertical target displacements of equal rate during head turning about a vertical axis, the adaptation effects measured by one-trial tests immediately after the adaptation period were about equal. But retests after a time lapse of 10 and 20 min, during which S sat immobile and with eyes closed, showed a greatly different rate of dissipation of the two adaptation effects. After a lapse of 20 min, the effect of adaptation to horizontal target displacements had been reduced to 37%, whereas the effect of adaptation to vertical displacements at this final test still stood at 80% of the initial measurement. The decline over 20 min in the latter case was so smail that it could readily be ascribed to an effect of the two tests that preceded the final test. These two tests represented an effective exposure to natural viewing conditions and hence caused an unlearning of the adaptation, an effect whose existence we had demonstrated in previous work with the one-trial test.     

Verstehen gegen Erklären

Journal for General Philosophy of Science - Es wird versucht (hermeneutisches) Verstehen psychologisch-prozessual zu artikulieren. Welche mentalen Prozesse sind bei einem Verstehen menschlichen...     

The cognitive representation of political personalities. A cross-cultural comparison(1)

The cognitive representation of salient political personalities was studied in a British and a German student sample, using a multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) procedure. Separate MDS analyses for the two samples yielded a readily interpetable three dimensional stimulus space in each case. These cognitive spaces for political figures were interpreted as reflecting the attributes of political potency, evaluation and intelligence in the case of the British sample, and evaluation, conservatism and political potency in the case of the German sample. An additional joint analysis of data from both subject groups indicated significant cross-cultural differences in the cognitive representations of political leaders. The results were discussed in terms of the socio-cultural differences between the two subsamples, and the utility of a multi-dimensional approach to political perception and behaviour.     

Information seeking of high- and low-anxiety subjects after receiving positive and negative self-relevant feedback

The present paper reports an experiment in which subjects received fictitious intelligence test feedback that was either negatively or positively discrepant with their self-evaluation. They were then given an opportunity to choose among several articles containing information that either derogated intelligence tests (test-disparaging information) or argued for their validity (test-supporting information). The main finding of this study consists of an interaction between the personality factor anxiety and the feedback variable: High-anxiety subjects prefer test-disparaging information significantly more in the negative feedback condition than in the positive feedback condition, whereas low-anxiety subjects show no difference in preference for test-related information as a function of the feedback condition. These results are in line with past theoretical reasoning and experimental findings showing that high-anxiety subjects feel more threatened by negative self-relevant feedback than do low-anxiety subjects.     

Reactions to success and failure in public and in private conditions

It was shown that the reaction to success and failure differs when it is communicated publicly or privately and when the reaction to success and failure is measured publicly or privately. Participants took an intelligence test and received fictitious results which were positively or negatively discrepant from the average. The dependent variable was the evaluation of the intelligence test. It was found that when the subject's evaluation of the test was private, the test was evaluated more positively under public than under private success. However, it was evaluated more negatively under public than under private failure. Under public success feedback the test was evaluated more positively under private than under public evaluation, whereas under public failure feedback the effect was reversed. The results are interpreted in terms of a self-presentation model and were discussed in the context of earlier research within the field of interpersonal relations.     

The acquisition of abstract letter codes

A modification of Posner's letter-matching paradigm proposed by Beller (1971) was employed to study the development of abstract visual and name codes for letters. Second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students (ages 8, 10, and 12 years, respectively) were presented in advance one of a pair of to-be-matched letters. Case agreement (upper- and lowercase) between the prime letter and the letter pair was manipulated to differentiate facilitation based on concrete features of the stimulus letter from that based on the letter's abstract visual code. For physical matches second graders showed greater facilitation from same-case primes than from different-case primes, whereas sixth graders benefited equally from both types of prime. For same-name and different conditions, no qualitative developmental differences were revealed as all subjects benefited from letter primes irrespective of case agreement. The acquisition and utilization of abstract visual codes for letters are a later acquisition than name codes, which were clearly operative at the lowest grade level in the present experiment.