Zeitschrift fur Psychologie mit Zeitschrift fur angewandte Psychologie最新文献

The present work concerns the relation between the need for social approval (assessed as social desirability) and bulimia with respect to gender-differences. Since bulimia is mainly a female issue, a relationship was predicted between the development of bulimia and the internalization of a socially desired feminine sex-stereotype with respect to the self-concept. The need for approval was assessed for male subjects, female subjects not suffering from eating-disorders, and female bulimic subjects. The results show that bulimic women have significant higher self-ratings concerning the need for approval. Without neglecting multicausal explications, the results suggest that social desirability as an expression of social approval should receive more attention as a facilitating factor in the development of bulimia.

A formal theory is proposed that accounts for the motivational architecture underlying the spontaneous smiling response in its most salient varieties (i.e., smiling due to security, relief, embarrassment, fear, amazement, submission, and triumph). The theory is based on a single assumption according to which the smiling response, in all instances named, is due to a reduction of "autonomy claim" as defined within the framework of the Zurich Model of Social Motivation. The theory's consistency is evinced by way of computer simulation, its phenomenological plausibility can be demonstrated by animation based on Ekman's Facial Action Coding System.

Two experiments are conducted to assess the involvement of the visouspatial sketchpad of working memeory in propositional and spatial reasoning, using a dual-task methodology. While a concurrent tracking task was found to interfere with spatial reasoning, no such interference was found with propositional reasoning. The results are discussed with respect to the mental-models theory of reasoning.

In two experiments the process dissociation procedure (Jacoby, 1991) was used to examine the effects of mood on automatic and consciously controlled processes in a fame judgment task. Thirty nonfamous names were presented once in a study phase to the subjects. After a mood manipulation subjects performed a fame judgment task. The old nonfamous names were presented together with new nonfamous and famous names. Subjects got either the hint that names repeated from the study phase were all famous (inclusion test) or that they were all nonfamous (exclusion test). Results, especially the comparison of the inclusion and the exclusion test, indicated that subjects under negative mood based their judgments more on consciously controlled processes, i.e. recollection of names from the study phase. There was only a weak impact on good mood on controlled processes. In respect to automatic consequences of the study phase (familiarity of names) there was no difference between the three mood conditions.

Personality psychologists' attempts to explain human diversity have traditionally focused upon processes of person-situation interaction, and genotype-environment interaction. The great variability of genotypes and environments within cultures has remained unexplained in these efforts. Which processes may be responsible for the genetic and environmental variability within cultures? Answers to this question are sought in processes of genetic-cultural coevolution: mutation and sexual recombination of genes, innovation and synthesis of memes (units of cultural transmission), genotype-->environment and meme-->environment effects, and frequency-dependent natural and cultural selection. This twofold evolutionary explanation of personality differences within cultures suggests that a solid foundation of personality psychology requires bridging biology and cultural science.

The issue of our study is the flexibility of high level adjustments for the process of relating events. Our assumptions are based on the Mannheim Regulation Theory of Speech Production, in which three modes of central control are distinguished: stimulus control, schema control, and ad hoc control. Our first experiment shows that verbal accounts of an event (due to selection and construction processes) as well as the interindividual variability of this accounts (due to the control mode being less or more restricted) are strongly determined by the situational characteristics in which they are produced. In our second experiment, pressure of time is introduced into the speech production task as a disturbance factor to put some load on the attentional resources thus uncovering the flexibility vs. automaticity of the speech production process. A comparison of the results favors the assumption of verbal accounts of an event being produced by strong schematic control in a highly institutionalized situation, whereas verbal accounts of the same event in an unofficial, private situation are produced by more ad hoc planning. The results permit to psychologically reconstruct the narrating of events and the reporting of events as speech production processes which are guided by different control modes with respect to their flexibility and to their attentional demands.

Data from a recent project concerned with adult age differences in associative learning were reanalyzed to identify the processes involved in the age-related differences in trial-by-trial performance in this task. A measure reflecting the failure to retain feedback relevant to one's previous response accounted for a large proportion of the age differences in the early trials of associative learning. The speed with which individuals completed simple processing operations also contributed to the age differences both in measures of accuracy (percentage correct) and in measures of feedback retention.

Starting with a discussion on the coordination problem from different points of view within cognition the question is raised whether there is a dissociation of coordination demand of a task and the mental load for executing mental procedures. Three investigations are carried out with the paradigm of sequential mental transformations of patterns. Results of the first experiment show that coordination really requires additional mental effort beside the time necessary for mental transformation. In a further study the transfer of a coordination mechanism is proved. The influence of segmented information presentation demonstrates that amount of coordination is related to the stability and clarity of mental representations. Plans for further experiments are presented. The results are related to the current literature on working memory research.

Flexibility is an important design criterion for user interfaces of interactive computer systems. Flexibility should allow an adaptation of the system to inter- and intra-individual differences in users. Flexible design requires to know how users base their decisions when they select one of the various options for interaction offered by the system. This problem has been studied in a psychophysiological experiment. In the experiment subjects were required to create graphics on a screen. Independent variables were: experience of the subjects (varied by training sessions), dialogue technique (menues vs. command language) and tasks. Tasks were constructed and analyzed by Cognitive Complexity Theory in order to have tasks suited for either menue or command techniques. Mental effort was registered by P300-amplitude of evoked potentials in the preparation stage of interaction and by 0.10 Hz-component of heart rate variability during the execution stage. It was possible to identify decision strategies based on anticipations of cognitive effort by considering the technique preferences shown in the training sessions and the time subjects spent on the task analysis.

One shortcoming of traditional memory research with older adults is that the scope of memory tasks and memory materials used has been rather narrow. The studies to be presented in this paper, assessing memory for self-performed action events, were designed to answer the question whether the well-documented age-related memory decline indicates a global characteristic of the aging memory system or if this decline is specific to the verbal memory system. It could be demonstrated that memory deficits older adults show when learning and remembering self-performed action events are similar to those that have been found many times for verbal materials. Thus, the age effect in memory is not limited to verbal materials.