Longitudinal effects of egoistic and fraternal relative deprivation on well-being and protest

According to the social justice literature, fraternal relative deprivation causes protest, but has little impact on well-being. We consider this view incomplete and predict that fraternal relative deprivation can impair well-being if it is enduring and difficult to ameliorate. As part of a longitudinal study of the German unification process, measures of egoistic relative deprivation, fraternal relative deprivation, life satisfaction, mental health, and protest were obtained on three occasions of measurement (1996, 1998, 2000) from a demographically heterogeneous sample of 1276 East German citizens. Model tests and parameter estimation were performed with LISREL. In line with our predictions, unique longitudinal effects of fraternal relative deprivation on well-being were identified. No longitudinal effect of fraternal relative deprivation on protest was identified.     

Neural circuitry of the bilingual mental lexicon: Effect of age of second language acquisition

Numerous studies have proposed that changes of the human language faculty caused by neural maturation can explain the substantial differences in ultimate attainment of grammatical competences between first language (L1) acquirers and second language (L2) learners. However, little evidence on the effect of neural maturation on the attainment of lexical knowledge in L2 is available. The present functional magnetic resonance study addresses this question via a cross-linguistic neural adaptation paradigm. Age of acquisition (AoA) of L2 was systematically manipulated. Concrete nouns were repeated across language (e.g., French–German, valise^suitcase–Koffer^suitcase). Whereas early bilinguals (AoA of L2 < 3 years) showed larger repetition enhancement (RE) effects in the left superior temporal gyrus, the bilateral superior frontal gyrus and the right posterior insula, late bilinguals (AoA of L2 > 10 years) showed larger RE effects in the middle portion of the left insula and in the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG). We suggest that, as for grammatical knowledge, the attainment of lexical knowledge in L2 is affected by neural maturation. The present findings lend support to neurocognitive models of bilingual word recognition postulating that, for both early and late bilinguals, the two languages are interconnected at the conceptual level.     

Employee-oriented leadership and quality of working life: mediating roles of idiosyncratic deals

Leader consideration has long been suggested to be conducive to quality of working life experienced by employees. The present study links this classic leadership dimension with more recent research on idiosyncratic deals, referring to personalized conditions workers negotiate in their employment relationships. A two-wave survey study (N = 159/142) among German hospital physicians suggests that authorizing idiosyncratic deals is a manifestation of employee-oriented leader behavior. Consideration had consistent positive effects on idiosyncratic deals regarding both professional development and working time flexibility. These two types had differential effects on two indicators of the quality of working life. Development related positively to work engagement, flexibility related negatively to work-family conflict. Cross-lagged correlations supported the proposed direction of influence between consideration and idiosyncratic deals in a subsample of repeating responders (n=91). The relation between development and engagement appeared to be reciprocal. Longitudinal results for the association between flexibility and work-family conflict were inconclusive.     

Intelligence and individual differences in becoming neurally efficient

Physiological approaches to human psychometric intelligence have shown a higher neural efficiency (i.e. less cortical activation) during cognitive performance in brighter subjects. The main aim of this study was to explore the relationship between intelligence and cortical activation patterns in the framework of the learning test concept. In 27 participants we assessed the topography and extent of cortical activation by means of event-related desynchronization (ERD) during reasoning tests in a pre-test--training--post-test design and related it to psychometric intelligence (measured by the German Leistungs-Prüf-System, LPS). Significant associations between intelligence and cortical activation patterns were exclusively found at anterior (frontal) recording sites, which corroborates the central role of the frontal lobe for higher-order cognitive functions. The hypothesized negative intelligence-activation correlation was observed only after the training, i.e. in the post-test, but not in the pre-test. More important, the decrease in cortical investment from pre-test to post-test correlated negatively with intelligence, indicating that the higher the subjects' general mental ability the larger the decrease in the amount of cortical activation. These findings suggest intelligence-related individual differences in becoming neurally efficient.     

A neural network approach to movement pattern analysis

Movements are time-dependent processes and so can be modelled by time-series of coordinates: E.g., each articulation has geometric coordinates; the set of the coordinates of the relevant articulations build a high-dimensional configuration. These configurations--or "patterns"--give reason for analysing movements by means of neural networks: The Kohonen Feature Map (KFM) is a special type of neural network, which (after having been coined by training with appropriate pattern samples) is able to recognize single patterns as members of pattern clusters. This way, for example, the particular configurations of a given movement can be identified as belonging to respective configuration clusters, where the sequence of clusters to which the time-depending configurations belong, characterizes the process as a 2-dimensional trajectory. The advantages of this method are that: the high dimensionality of the original processes is reduced to two dimensional trajectories, the clusters are automatically determined by the network, and all data for further analyses can automatically be transferred into a data base. Thus, the processes can either be visualized and analysed by an expert or again processed by further automatic analysing tools, as has been done with similarity matrices. The disadvantage is that a KFM-training needs a huge amount of information, which normally is not available from experiments. However, the Dynamically Controlled Network DyCoN (a special type of KFM) makes it possible to reduce the amount of original training data substantially--e.g., by adding stochastically generated ones. Currently, DyCoN is used in several projects in order to generally support analyses of processes in sport. It should be emphasized that the presented approach is not meant to improve the understanding or to develop models of human movement but to give a survey of the advantages and methodological aspects of net-based movement analysis.     

Popular or unpopular? Therapists' use of structured interviews and their estimation of patient acceptance

An accurate diagnosis is an important precondition for effective psychotherapeutic treatment. The use of structured interviews provides the gold standard for reliable diagnosis. Suppiger et al. (2009) showed that structured interviews have a high acceptance among patients. On a scale from 0 (not at all satisfied) to 100 (totally satisfied) patients rated overall satisfaction with a structured interview at M = 86.55. Nevertheless, therapists rarely seem to use structured interviews in clinical practice. The aim of this study was to assess how frequently therapists use structured interviews in daily practice. Secondly, we hypothesized that therapists underestimate patient acceptance of structured interviews. As a third goal, we explored further reasons why therapists choose not to use structured interviews. We conducted an online survey of 1,927 psychiatrists and psychotherapists in Switzerland and asked them how frequently they used structured interviews and how they estimated patient satisfaction with these interviews. Furthermore, we asked therapists why they chose to use or not use structured interviews. Therapists reported using structured interviews on average with about 15% of their patients. Furthermore, therapists estimated significantly lower patient acceptance than patients themselves indicated (M_therapist = 49.41, M_patient = 86.55). Our data suggest lack of familiarity with these instruments as well as an overestimation of the utility of open clinical interviews as further reasons for not using structured interviews.     

Distributed skill functions and the meshing of knowledge structures

The scope of knowledge space theory was extended by bringing into the picture the underlying skills and capabilities that are relevant to solving the problems in a knowledge domain. A major challenge to this approach comes from the need to aggregate distributed information on (partially) overlapping domains and skill sets. The notion of a distributed skill function is introduced for formalizing the integration of several skill functions that represent the assignment of skills to problems. It is shown that their consistency is captured by the meshability of the delineated knowledge structures. This result draws upon a characterization of the meshing of finite or infinite collections of knowledge structures, which extends and generalizes previous results on the binary case. The discussion covers implications for knowledge assessment and for practical applications, such as integrating skill assignments coming from different experts or distributed resources in technology-enhanced learning.