Anpassung an Terror—ein Widerspruch in sich

This paper is the final product of free-floating associations during a piece of short self-analysis that was conducted as an answer to the question: How can we adapt to terror? Knowing that, due to our limitations, it is impossible to answer the question in what would be regarded as a scientific manner, I chose to see where I would be taken, using this well-known psychoanalytic tool (first used by Freud). Self-analysis took me to the Middle East where terror is almost an everyday event. Then I read two psychoanalyst’s impressions, one after September 11 (Strozier) and the other after the Holocaust (Ornstein). In both, the experience of a catastrophe in the civilized world was characterized by the dominance of the sense of smell. I then read Améry’s 1966 book and saw the parallel between torture and terror. In both, the background of safety is permanently broken. One consequence of this state of affairs is suggested: Since the exposure to terror, we have been living – in our inner world – in a state of “pristine homelessness” (Kertész).     

The predicament of masculinity: Towards understanding the male's experience of infertility treatments

Sex Roles - The commonsense notions that associate fertility and femininity are shared by the medical establishment, and have led to the concentration of research on women in the area of fertility....     

Response Time Measures as Supplementary Validity Indicators in Forced-Choice Recognition Memory Performance Validity Tests: A Systematic Review

Neuropsychology Review - Performance validity tests (PVTs) based on the forced-choice recognition memory (FCRM) paradigm are commonly used for the detection of noncredible performance....     

Interactions between top-down and bottom-up attention in barn owls (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Tyto alba</Emphasis>)

Selective attention, the prioritization of behaviorally relevant stimuli for behavioral control, is commonly divided into two processes: bottom-up, stimulus-driven selection and top-down, task-driven selection. Here, we tested two barn owls in a visual search task that examines attentional capture of the top-down task by bottom-up mechanisms. We trained barn owls to search for a vertical Gabor patch embedded in a circular array of differently oriented Gabor distractors (top-down guided search). To track the point of gaze, a lightweight wireless video camera was mounted on the owl’s head. Three experiments were conducted in which the owls were tested in the following conditions: (1) five distractors; (2) nine distractors; (3) five distractors with one distractor surrounded by a red circle; or (4) five distractors with a brief sound at the initiation of the stimulus. Search times and number of head saccades to reach the target were measured and compared between the different conditions. It was found that search time and number of saccades to the target increased when the number of distractors was larger (condition 2) and when an additional irrelevant salient stimulus, auditory or visual, was added to the scene (conditions 3 and 4). These results demonstrate that in barn owls, bottom-up attention interacts with top-down attention to shape behavior in ways similar to human attentional capture. The findings suggest similar attentional principles in taxa that have been evolutionarily separated for 300 million years.