ON THE ONTOGENETIC DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL CRITERIA

Changes in the dimensionality of the moral criteria, i.e. of those aspects of an action-sequence to which a person pays attention when judging how good/bad (nice/naughty) the agent is, were studied with 7-, 10-, and 13-year-old girls and adult subjects. Action sequences varying in respect to potential moral criteria were presented as cartoons. A proximity setting technique and Kruskal's (1964) method of analysis were used. In the younger age groups a remorse-spite-dimension was obtained, the motive criterion becoming more dominant and differentiated with age. Methodological problems are discussed.     

Meinungsänderung durch eigenes Handeln Die Rückwirkung einstellungskonträrer Agitation

Zusammenfassung Zur Klärung der Frage, ob und unter welchen Umständen einstellungskonträre Agitation auf den Agitator zurückwirkt, wurden Gruppen- und Einzelversuche durchgeführt. Als Versuchspersonen dienten insgesamt 409 männliche und weibliche Oberschüler und Studenten. In allen Versuchen mußten die Versuchspersonen Reden erfinden und halten. Die Messung der Meinungsänderung und einiger hypothetischer Variablen wurde mit Fragebogen vorgenommen, zum Teil wurden nach den Versuchen Interviews durchgeführt.Wir erhielten folgende Hauptergebnisse: Erfinden und Vortragen von Argumenten für einen zudiktierten Standpunkt führen, unabhängig voneinander und von der im Vortrag enthaltenen Argumentation, zu einer Meinungsänderung. Ihre Richtung und ihr Ausmaß sind außerdem abhängig vom Verhältnis der zudiktierten Stellungnahme zu anderen, bereits vorhandenen psychischen Inhalten — starke Verankerung der ursprünglichen Meinung führt zur Meinungsänderung im Gegensinne der Agitation (Bumerang-Effekt) — sowie vom Grad der Willentlichkeit der Handlung: bereits die Entscheidung, einen einstellungskonträren Standpunkt nach außen zu vertreten, kann zu einer Meinungsänderung führen. Das Lernen der Argumente, die Bewertung der eigenen Leistung, des Versuchs und Versuchsleiters sowie Eigenschaften eines Themas für sich erweisen sich nicht als alleinige Bedingungen der Meinungsänderung.Diese und andere, weniger wichtige Ergebnisse werden diskutiert. Die Theorie der kognitiven Dissonanz wird als beste einheitliche Erklärungsgrundlage der empirischen Befunde angesehen.

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Summary Experiments with groups and single persons were conducted to test the effect of persuasive behaviour on the communicator. 409 male and female high-school and university students served as subjects. In all experiments the subjects had to invent and verbalize speeches contradicting their own opinion. Opinion change and some hypothetical variables were measured by questionnaires, the sessions were partially followed by interviews.Main results: Inventing or speaking of arguments in favour of an appointed opinion lead, independently of each other and of the informational content of the arguments, to opinion change the direction and magnitude of which are, in addition, dependent on the relation of the argument to previously existent mental contents (if the original opinion is strongly anchored, the persuasive behaviour results in a boomerang effect), as well as the degree of volition of the subject's persuasive behaviour. (Already the decision to defend a point of view contrary to one's own may lead to opinion change). Learning of arguments and evaluation of own achievement, of the experiment and the experimenter as well as the qualities of a topic in itself cannot be shown to be the only conditions of opinion change.These and other, less important results are discussed; the theory of cognitive dissonance is considered the best uniform explanation of these empirical results.

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Diese Arbeit wurde von der philosophischen Fakultät der Ludwig Maximilians-Universität in München als Dissertation angenommen.Die referierten Versuche wurden durch das Yale Communication and Attitude Change Programme und die Gesellschaftder Freunde der Wirtschaftshochschule Mannheim e.V. finanziell gefördert. Der Verfasser dankt den genannten Institutionen für ihre Unterstützung.     

A computerized system for monitoring and controlling intracranial electrical self-stimulation behavior

An automated system for measuring intracranial self-stimulation behavior is described. The system consists of two Commodore 6502 microcomputers interfaced with a constant-current generator and a standard operant chamber. The system hardware allows sine- and square-wave stimulation. Stimulus intensity can be varied in 256 steps between 0 and 100, 0 and 500, or 0 and 1,000 /µA. The system programs, which are written in machine language, allow the control of various schedules of reinforcement, the counting of operant responses and reinforcements, the measurement of interresponse intervals, and the storage of the data on disk. The software is designed for the determination of the threshold of reinforcement, on the basis of the titration of postreinforcement pauses caused by changeover in schedule control between concurrent continuous reinforcement and fixed ratio schedules.     

Endogenous and symptomatic schizophrenia. Wherein lies the difference?

It is the opinion of the present writer that endogenous and symptomatic schizophrenia are two completely different matters. By classical symptomatology it is impossible to establish the distinction in every individual case. Nevertheless, in not one of the published cases known to us did Bonhoeffer err in his diagnosis of the one or the other. Evidently he made use of additional characteristica gathered in practice, about which he himself may not always have been quite clear.     

A kinematic analysis of anticipatory coarticulation in the speech of anterior aphasic subjects using electromagnetic articulography

An investigation was made into the extent and time course of anticipatory coarticulation in the speech of two normal and two anterior aphasic, German-speaking subjects. Both labial and velar coarticulation gestures were investigated. Subjects produced sentences containing target words contrasting in postconsonantal vowel rounding (e.g., [geli:ge]/[gely:gel]) and in nasality (e.g., [ti:de]/[ti:ne]). Speech kinematics were monitored by means of electromagnetic articulography. The data revealed that for correct productions, aphasic speakers' coarticulatory patterns were more highly variable than those of control subjects. These differences, however, were found chiefly for spatial displacement characteristics, while the temporal aspects of articulator movement necessary for anticipatory coarticulation appeared largely intact. Articulator mistiming did not appear to explain a small corpus of stop/nasal substitution errors produced by one of the aphasic speakers.     

The neurocognitive basis of autism

The cognitive study of the underlying mental abnormalities in autism has advanced rapidly, while the biological study of the underlying brain abnormalities and of putative genetic mechanisms is lagging somewhat behind. However, the linking of cognitive and biological studies has become a real possibility. Developmental cognitive neuroscience has transformed our understanding of this enigmatic disorder, which was once misguidedly thought to be caused by maternal rejection. The hypothesis of a specific theory of mind deficit was a crucial step in this process. It explains the puzzle of the characteristic social and communication impairments of autism and allows for the fact that they can coexist with good general abilities. This hypothesis has been widely accepted and a start has been made at pinpointing the brain basis of theory of mind. The non-social impairments of autism have now become a major focus for cognitive research. One theory proposes dysfunction in executive processes, in an attempt to explain repetitive behaviour and inflexibility. Another theory proposes weak information integration, in an attempt to explain narrow interests and special talents. Autism research has thus stimulated ideas on important mind-brain systems that may be dedicated to the development of social awareness, executive functions and integrative processing.     

On “knowing your partner”: Dangerous illusions in the age of AIDS?

We identified two characteristics of the impression formation process that may cause people to underestimate the riskiness of potential sexual partners. In Study 1, participants were quite confident that they could determine whether someone was lying to them about risk-related behavior when, in reality, they could not. Particularly troubling was a “truth bias” that resulted in relatively high rates of truth detection, but poor lie detection. In Study 2, increased familiarity with a target person (who actually was HIV+) caused participants to lower their estimates of the target's riskiness, despite the fact that we explicitly warned them that the target might be HIV+. We suggest that such processes may foster the illusion of knowing one's partner when one does not.     

Persistent crying and parenting: Search for a butterfly in a dynamic system

The risks and causes of persistent crying in early infancy are discussed on the basis of a study of 61 infants referred to the Munich Interdisciplinary Research and Intervention Program for Fussy Babies for persistent crying between 1 and 6 months of age, and of a community sample of 51 infants of the same age. Particular attention was paid to pre-verbal parent-infant communication, the development of which was interpreted in terms of a dynamic interactional system including both regulatory and communicative predispositions in infants and intuitive competence for supporting infant predispositions in parents. Neither a gut problem nor any other single causal factor was identified for persistent crying in the majority of cases. In contrast, persistent crying was significantly associated with multiple biological and psychosocial risk factors for both parents and infants. Neurological immaturity, difficult temperament and sleep problems in infants, and impaired psychological conditions, limited resources and failures of intuitive competences in mothers were found to threaten the developmental process in infants and give rise to ‘vicious circles’ which were destabilizing the interactional systems. Increased attention to intuitive parental competences is recommended as one effective model for therapeutic interventions.     

Orienting the finger opposition space during prehension movements

Two experiments are reported that examined the act of prehension when subjects were asked to grasp with their thumb and index finger pads an elongated object resting horizontally on a surface and placed at different orientations with respect to the subject. In Experiment 1, the pad opposition preferences were determined for the six angles of orientation examined. For angles of 90 degrees (object parallel to frontal plane) or less, no rotation of the wrist (pronation) was used; for angles 110 degrees or greater, pronation was systematically employed to reorient the finger opposition space. Only one angle, 100 degrees , produced any evidence of ambiguity in how to grasp the object: Approximately 60% of these grasps involved pronation and 40% did not. Using the foregoing grasp preference data, in Experiment 2 we examined the kinematics of the wrist and elbow trajectories during prehension movements directed at an object in different orientations. Movement time, time to peak acceleration, velocity, and deceleration were measured. No kinematic differences were observed when the object orientation either required (110 degrees ) or did not require (80 degrees ) a pronation. By contrast, if the orientation was changed at the onset of the movement, such that an unpredicted pronation had to be introduced to achieve the grasp, kinematics were affected: Movement time was increased, and the time devoted to deceleration was lengthened. These data are interpreted as evidence that when natural prehension occurs, pronation can be included in the motor plan without affecting the movement kinematics. When constraints are imposed on the movement execution as a consequence of a perturbation, however, the introduction of a pronation component requires kinematic rearrangement.