Kombination von Settings und Verfahren in der Psychotherapie

Literature research and own clinical experiences confirm the significance of a combined use of settings and methods in the area of inpatient and outpatient psychotherapy. For inpatient treatment, the combined use of methods, such as individual psychotherapy, group therapy, creative therapies, and sport, are an essential part of the treatment. In outpatient treatment, the regulations of the German insurance do not permit such combinations. Nevertheless, they occur and are often proactively initiated by the patients. The various combined use of psychotherapy and psychotropics is very well studied, but also the combination of settings, i.e. supplementary inpatient treatment, day treatment, and outpatient treatment have to be considered. While administering their therapies, psychotherapists should keep in mind possibly concurrently ongoing treatments as well as former therapies and their effects on the patients. With the exception of combinations with psychotropic treatment, there exist almost no empirical data in this important field.     

Implicit prejudice toward injecting drug users predicts intentions to change jobs among drug and alcohol nurses

The meaning and importance of implicit prejudice is a source of considerable debate. One way to advance this debate is to assess whether implicit prejudice can predict independent variance, beyond that predicted by explicit prejudice, in meaningful and unambiguous behaviors or behavioral intentions. In the current research, drug and alcohol nurses reported their level of stress working with injecting drug users, their job satisfaction, their explicit prejudice toward injecting drug users, and their intentions to leave drug and alcohol nursing. The nurses also completed the Single Category Implicit Association Test, which measured their implicit prejudice toward injecting drug users. Analyses revealed that implicit prejudice was a significant mediator, beyond explicit prejudice and job satisfaction, of the relation between job stress and intention to change jobs.     

Hindsight bias doesn't always come easy: causal models, cognitive effort, and creeping determinism

Creeping determinism, a form of hindsight bias, refers to people's hindsight perceptions of events as being determined or inevitable. This article proposes, on the basis of a causal-model theory of creeping determinism, that the underlying processes are effortful, and hence creeping determinism should disappear when individuals lack the cognitive resources to make sense of an outcome. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked to read a scenario while they were under either low or high processing load. Participants who had the cognitive resources to make sense of the outcome perceived it as more probable and necessary than did participants under high processing load or participants who did not receive outcome information. Experiment 3 was designed to separate 2 postulated subprocesses and showed that the attenuating effect of processing load on hindsight bias is not due to a disruption of the retrieval of potential causal antecedents but to a disruption of their evaluation. Together the 3 experiments show that the processes underlying creeping determinism are effortful, and they highlight the crucial role of causal reasoning in the perception of past events.     

Perisaccadic parietal and occipital gamma power in light and in complete darkness

Our objective was to determine perisaccadic gamma range oscillations in the EEG during voluntary saccades in humans. We evaluated occipital perisaccadic gamma activity both in the presence and absence of visual input, when the observer was blindfolded. We quantified gamma power in the time periods before, during, and after horizontal saccades. The corresponding EEG was evaluated for individual saccades and the wavelet transformed EEG averaged for each time window, without averaging the EEG first. We found that, in both dark and light, parietal and occipital gamma power increased during the saccade and peaked prior to reaching new fixation. We show that this is not the result of muscle activity and not the result of visual input during saccades. Saccade direction affects the laterality of gamma power over posterior electrodes. Gamma power recorded over the posterior scalp increases during a saccade. The phasic modulation of gamma by saccades in darkness--when occipital activity is decoupled from visual input--provides electrophysiological evidence that voluntary saccades affect ongoing EEG. We suggest that saccade-phasic gamma modulation may contribute to short-term plasticity required to realign the visual space to the intended fixation point of a saccade and provides a mechanism for neuronal assembly formation prior to achieving the intended saccadic goal. The wavelet-transformed perisaccadic EEG could provide an electrophysiological tool applicable in humans for the purpose of fine analysis and potential separation of stages of 'planning' and 'action'.     

Severity of dysfluency correlates with basal ganglia activity in persistent developmental stuttering

Previous studies suggest that anatomical anomalies [Foundas, A. L., Bollich, A. M., Corey, D. M., Hurley, M., & Heilman, K. M. (2001). Anomalous anatomy of speech-language areas in adults with persistent developmental stuttering. Neurology, 57, 207-215; Foundas, A. L., Corey, D. M., Angeles, V., Bollich, A. M., Crabtree-Hartman, E., & Heilman, K. M. (2003). Atypical cerebral laterality in adults with persistent developmental stuttering. Neurology, 61, 1378-1385; Foundas, A. L., Bollich, A. M., Feldman, J., Corey, D. M., Hurley, M., & Lemen, L. C. et al., (2004). Aberrant auditory processing and atypical planum temporale in developmental stuttering. Neurology, 63, 1640-1646; Jancke, L., Hanggi, J., & Steinmetz, H. (2004). Morphological brain differences between adult stutterers and non-stutterers. BMC Neurology, 4, 23], in particular a reduction of the white matter anisotropy underlying the left sensorimotor cortex [Sommer, M., Koch, M. A., Paulus, W., Weiller, C., & Buchel, C. (2002). Disconnection of speech-relevant brain areas in persistent developmental stuttering. Lancet, 360, 380-383] could be at the origin of persistent developmental stuttering (PDS). Because neural connections between the motor cortex and basal ganglia are implicated in speech motor functions, PDS could also be associated with a dysfunction in basal ganglia activity [Alm, P. (2004). Stuttering and the basal ganglia circuits: a critical review of possible relations. Journal of Communication Disorders, 37, 325-369]. This fMRI study reports a correlation between severity of stuttering and activity in the basal ganglia and shows that this activity is modified by fluency shaping therapy through long-term therapy effects that reflect speech production improvement. A model of dysfunction in stuttering and possible repair modes is proposed that accommodates the data presented here and observations previously made by us and by others.     

The mapping model: a cognitive theory of quantitative estimation

How do people make quantitative estimations, such as estimating a car's selling price? Traditionally, linear-regression-type models have been used to answer this question. These models assume that people weight and integrate all information available to estimate a criterion. The authors propose an alternative cognitive theory for quantitative estimation. The mapping model, inspired by the work of N. R. Brown and R. S. Siegler (1993) on metrics and mappings, offers a heuristic approach to decision making. The authors test this model against established alternative models of estimation, namely, linear regression, an exemplar model, and a simple estimation heuristic. With 4 experimental studies the authors compare the models under different environmental conditions. The mapping model proves to be a valid model to predict people's estimates.     

Genetic effects on male sexual coercion

The genetic and environmental influences on sexual coercion, and to what extent its associations with alcohol use and psychopathy depend on shared genetic and environmental effects, were explored in a Finnish population-based sample of 938 men, aged 33-43 years, using the classical twin study design. All three phenotypes were associated positively and affected by genes (sexual coercion 28%, alcohol use 60%, psychopathy 54%), with 46% of the correlation between sexual coercion and psychopathy, 89% of the correlation between alcohol use and psychopathy and 100% of the correlation between sexual coercion and alcohol use being explained by shared genetic effects. Further, the results showed that a proportion of the variance in sexual coercion was derived from a highly genetic source that was common with alcohol use and psychopathy. This latent factor was hypothesized to reflect a general tendency for antisocial behavior that is pervasive across different situations. Relevant theories on sexual coercion were discussed in light of the results.     

Skolem's Discovery of Gödel-Dummett Logic

Attention is drawn to the fact that what is alternatively known as Dummett logic, Gödel logic, or Gödel-Dummett logic, was actually introduced by Skolem already in 1913. A related work of 1919 introduces implicative lattices, or Heyting algebras in today's terminology.     

Age, Race, and Implicit Prejudice: Using Process Dissociation to Separate the Underlying Components

ABSTRACT— Older adults express greater prejudice than younger adults, but it is not clear why. In a community-based sample, we found that older White adults demonstrated more racial prejudice on an implicit measure, the race Implicit Association Test, than did younger adults. Process-dissociation procedures indicated that this difference in implicit prejudice was due to older adults having less control of their automatic prejudicial associations rather than stronger automatic prejudicial associations. Furthermore, this age difference in control was mediated by age-related deficits in inhibitory ability. White participants showed stronger automatic prejudicial associations than did Black participants.     

How to like yourself better, or chocolate less: Changing implicit attitudes with one IAT task

The current paper introduces a novel feature of implicit association tests (IATs) by demonstrating their potential to change implicit attitudes. We assume that such changes are driven by associative learning mechanisms caused by carrying out an IAT task. Currently, evaluative conditioning appears to be the only widespread paradigm for changing implicit attitudes. An IAT task could provide an alternative. In two experiments, participants initially reacted to only one IAT task. Implicit preferences subsequently assessed with different implicit measures depended on the initial IAT task. This was shown for implicit self-esteem and for implicit attitudes towards well-known candy brands. Findings are discussed in relation to task-order effects in IATs.