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The methodological implications of a differential psychopharmacology are discussed. It is shown that the technique of stratifying subjects with personality scores depends on one basic assumption: the personality score is not affected by the other experimental factors. Two experiments are reported in which pre- and posttest (after the experiment) scores were measured. The pre-post-differences showed themselves to be affected by the medication. It is argued that in psychopharmacological experimentation an additional step must be included. All non-treatment factors must be examined for their stability in the course of the experiment. If they are stable, usual evaluation may take place. If changes are attributable to the treatment, personality scores must be regarded as dependent variables. They have to be evaluated together with the other observables with a multivariate model. Additionally, a procedure like this yields as "experimental differential psychology" a self-reliant contribution to the problems of differential psychology.
In an experimental analog of verbal examinations, the call-up situation, the effects of two dosages of a tranquillizing agent (lopirazepam) are compared to placebo treatment. 72 male and female, healthy, young volunteers have been randomly assigned to 12 groups of 6 subjects each. Pulse frequency and performance were registered. The results indicated differential drug effects which were interpreted according to the hypotheses of "differential effects of social stressors". If a situation was highly challenging for a subject, the application of a tranquillizer in an adequately high dosage enabled him to perform well in spite of or because of strong increases in pulse frequency.
Stability and Variability in Interactive Behavior as Measured by Methods of "Speech Chronemics"
(1988)
Dyadic interaction is modelled os an adaptive process between personality of the partners involved and the characteristics of the theme. The theme structure and the principles which control the adaptation process are referred to as "syntality". The material of the studies reported are the speech signals of the verbal interaction reduced to an on-off pattern. In a first study individual speech behavior was found to remain stable in dyads even if partners changed. The second study showed the stability of the speech patterns for different interaction themes even if dyads changed. These apparently contradictory results are reconciled by introducing the concept of "adaptive stability". Individual speech behavior does not happen at a stable activity level, but is characterized by a constant relationship (" less" or "more") to the respective activity of the other partner.
Mediators of Social Anxiety - External Social Threat-Cues vs. Self-Related Negative Cognitions
(2009)
Based on a review of models and empirical findings a working model is proposed, suggesting that self-related negative cognitions and biased processing of external social threat-cues are mediators of social anxiety. Hypotheses derived from this model were tested in three experiments. The first experiment examined whether levels of trait social anxiousness predicted fearful responding to external social threat-cues (angry vs. neutral and happy facial expressions) during social evaluation. Higher trait social anxiousness predisposes to an inward focus on one’s fear reaction to social threat. Using this strategy was expected to enhance fearful responding to angry facial expressions. A strategy of identifying with angry faces was expected to counteract fearful responding, but was expected to fail more often with increasing levels of trait social anxiousness. To examine these hypotheses, affective modulation of the startle eye-blink was assessed in forty-four undergraduate students. This measure served as a probe into the activation of brain structures involved in the automatic evaluation of environmental threat-cues. Trait and state anxiety as well as explicit emotional responding to the stimuli were assessed with questionnaires and ratings. Processing angry faces potentiated startle amplitudes as expected. Low arousal induced by the stimuli was a probable reason, why startle potentiation to happy faces emerged instead of attenuation. Trait social anxiousness and the cognitive strategies did not influence these effects. Yet, increased trait social anxiousness predicted decreased startle latency, indicating motor hyper-responsivity, which is part of the clinical representation of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Processing facial expressions and identifying with them disrupted this association. Previous studies support that similar strategies may enhance treatment of SAD. Individuals with SAD were expected to respond with increased arousal to external social threat-cues. Therefore, the second experiment examined whether nine individuals with SAD showed attentional (prepulse inhibition, PPI) or affective startle modulation to angry as compared to neutral and happy facial expressions. Corrugator supercilii activity was assessed as a behavioral indicator for effects of facial expressions. The remaining setup resembled the first experiment. Facial expressions did not modulate the startle reflex, but corrugator supercilii activity was sensitive to facial valence. However, the effects were not related to trait social anxiousness. Apparently, angry facial expressions do not act as phobic stimuli for individuals with SAD. The third experiment examined whether focusing on self-related negative cognitions or biased processing of external social threat-cues mediates relationships between trait social anxiety and anxious responding in a socially challenging situation. Inducing self-related negative cognitions vs. relaxation was expected to reveal a functional dependency on the supposed mediation in a multivariate assessment of criteria of the working model. Within this design, the impact of external social threat-cues (facial expressions and emotional words) was compared to control stimuli and context effects, using the startle paradigm. The findings provide first evidence for full statistical mediation of the associations between trait social anxiety and self-reported anxiety as well as parasympathetic withdrawal by self-related negative cognitions, when thirty-six undergraduate students anticipated public speaking. Apprehensive arousal, as indicated by increased skin conductance levels and heart rate, was present in all participants. Observer ratings of behavior during public speaking matched the self-rated quality of the performance. None of these measures were correlated with trait social anxiousness. Startle amplitude correlated with state and trait social anxiety, but was no mediator. Finally, there was no affective modulation of the startle amplitude by external social threat-cues. These studies advance both our current understanding of the factors that mediate social anxiety responses to situations and our knowledge of the physiological and anatomical mechanisms involved in social anxiety. Based on these findings a revised version of the working model on mediators of social anxiety is proposed in the hope it may aid further research for the ultimate goal of developing an empirically validated functional anatomical model of social anxiety.
The aim of the current work was to enhance the understanding of the relationship between goals and the self. More specifically, I wanted to achieve three things. First, I developed an implicit measure of self-activation (SA) based on response latencies to avoid the problems of traditional measures of self-activation (i.e., demand effects, self-presentation concerns). Therefore, two studies were conducted in which increased self-activation, induced by classic self-manipulations, was measured with a newly developed picture task. Thereby it was assumed that individuals would react faster to photographs of themselves when the self was activated than when it was not. Second, I aimed to demonstrate that there exists a close connection between personal goals and the self. Despite being inherent in several theories, this assumption has never been tested directly before. It was hypothesized that thinking about personal goals should activate the self, resulting in faster reactions in the newly developed measure of SA, i.e., quicker responses to the self-pictures. Third, it was investigated whether goals and the self are linked in a bidirectional fashion; according to the reported findings, it seems to be functional for individuals’ self-regulation and goal pursuit to develop such a link. To provide evidence for the bidirectionality of the relationship, it was hypothesized that in conditions of high SA, it should be more likely personal evaluations to be construed as goals; this goal activation should result in higher accessibility of goal-related knowledge, stronger approach motivational tendencies towards goal-related targets, and more goal-directed behavior. The obtained results endorse the applicability of the picture task as implicit method to measure increased SA and also corroborate the core hypothesis, namely that personal goals and the self are inherently connected and that they are linked in a bidirectional fashion.
This article describes a 2-systems model that explains social behavior as a joint function of reflective and impulsive processes. In particular, it is assumed that social behavior is controlled by 2 interacting systems that follow different operating principles. The reflective system generates behavioral decisions that are based on knowledge about facts and values, whereas the impulsive system elicits behavior through associative links and motivational orientations. The proposed model describes how the 2 systems interact at various stages of processing, and how their outputs may determine behavior in a synergistic or antagonistic fashion. It extends previous models by integrating motivational components that allow more precise predictions of behavior. The implications of this reflective–impulsive model are applied to various phenomena from social psychology and beyond. Extending previous dual-process accounts, this model is not limited to specific domains of mental functioning and attempts to integrate cognitive, motivational, and behavioral mechanisms.
The present approach highlights a procedural account of intuitive judgments. In intuitions of hidden semantic coherence, people can intuitively detect whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or not (incoherent) before, and independently from actually retrieving the common associate. The present fluency-affect intuition model (FAIM) maintains that semantic coherence increases the processing fluency for coherent compared to incoherent triads, and that this increased fluency triggers brief and subtle positive affect, which is the experiential basis of these intuitions. Published work concerning 25 experiments is reviewed that gathered empirical support for this model. Furthermore, the impact of fluency and affect was also generalized to intuitions of visual coherence, and intuitions of grammaticality in an artificial grammar learning paradigm.