Zeitschrift Fur Psychologie-Journal of Psychology最新文献

One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of the peer review process is gender bias. In this study we evaluated the grant peer review process (external reviewers' ratings, and board of trustees' final decision: approval or no approval for funding) at the Austrian Science Fund with respect to gender. The data consisted of 8,496 research proposals (census) across all disciplines from 1999 to 2009, which were rated on a scale from 1 to 100 (poor to excellent) by 18,357 external reviewers in 23,977 reviews. In line with the current state of research, we found that the final decision was not associated with applicant's gender or with any correspondence between gender of applicants and reviewers. However, the decisions on the grant applications showed a robust female reviewer salience effect. The approval probability decreases (up to 10%), when there is parity or a majority of women in the group of reviewers. Our results confirm an overall gender null hypothesis for the peer review process of men's and women's grant applications in contrast to claims that women's grants are systematically downrated.

Torture has been defined most precisely in legal contexts. Practitioners who work with torture survivors and researchers who study torture have frequently cited legal definitions, particularly those in the United States' Torture Victims Relief Act, the United Nations Convention against Torture, or the World Medical Association's Declaration of Tokyo. Few practitioners have operationalized these definitions and applied them in their practice. We describe how a New York City torture treatment clinic used a coding checklist that operationalizes the definitions, and present results. We found that in practice these definitions were nested; that using guidelines for applying the definitions in practice altered the number of cases meeting criteria for these definitions; and that the severity of psychological symptoms did not differ between those who were tortured and those who were not under any definition. We propose theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Dehumanized perception, a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person, may be a psychological mechanism facilitating inhumane acts like torture. Social cognition - considering someone's mind - recognizes the other as a human being subject to moral treatment. Social neuroscience has reliably shown that participants normally activate a social-cognition neural network to pictures and thoughts of other people; our previous work shows that parts of this network uniquely fail to engage for traditionally dehumanized targets (homeless persons or drug addicts; see Harris & Fiske, 2009, for review). This suggests participants may not consider these dehumanized groups' minds. Study 1 demonstrates that participants do fail to spontaneously think about the contents of these targets' minds when imagining a day in their life, and rate them differently on a number of human-perception dimensions. Study 2 shows that these human-perception dimension ratings correlate with activation in brain regions beyond the social-cognition network, including areas implicated in disgust, attention, and cognitive control. These results suggest that disengaging social cognition affects a number of other brain processes and hints at some of the complex psychological mechanisms potentially involved in atrocities against humanity.

After 9-11, the United States began interrogating detainees at settings such as Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo. The American Psychological Association (APA) supported psychologists' involvement in interrogations, adopted formal policies, and made an array of public assurances. This article's purpose is to highlight key APA decisions, policies, procedures, documents, and public statements in urgent need of rethinking and to suggest questions that may be useful in a serious assessment, such as, "However well intended, were APA's interrogation policies ethically sound?"; "Were they valid, realistic, and able to achieve their purpose?"; "Were other approaches available that would address interrogation issues more directly, comprehensively, and actively, that were more ethically and scientifically based, and that would have had a greater likelihood of success?"; and "Should APA continue to endorse its post-9-11 detainee interrogation policies?"

Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform an action in the future. The current study applies a multinomial model to investigate the contribution of individual differences in personality, as well as individual differences in working memory span, to performance in an event-based PM task. The model includes a parameter P that measures the prospective component, or remembering that something is to be done. The model also includes a parameter M that measures the ability to discriminate between target and non-target events, part of the retrospective component of PM tasks. The model has been applied to investigate the effects of working memory variability in just one prior study, but has not been used in previous investigations of personality and PM. Working memory span and the personality dimension of conscientiousness showed differences between the higher and lower groups in PM performance. Modeling results showed that individuals higher in conscientiousness had higher estimated of M relative to individuals lower on the conscientiousness dimension. Conscientiousness did not affect the P parameter. In contrast, individuals with higher working memory span scores had higher estimates of P relative to individuals with lower span scores, but the two working memory groups did not differ in terms of parameter M.