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- selektive Aufmerksamkeit (2) (entfernen)
Es wird eine Personenbezogene (differenzielle) Kontinuitätshypothese formuliert, in der angenommen wird, dass Personen, die kognitive Defizite als Folge massiven Alkoholkonsums erleiden, drei aufeinanderfolgende Schädigungsstufen durchlaufen. Ziel der vorliegenden Untersuchung war es, eine Prävalenzrate von Störungen der (selektiven) Aufmerksamkeit und der nonverbalen Intelligenzfunktionen als Maße für exekutive Funktionsstörungen und der Gedächtnisleistungen bei alkoholabhängigen Patienten zu Beginn einer medizinischen Rehamaßnahme zu ermitteln. Zudem wurde zu einem zweiten Messzeitpunkt eine Remissionsrate festgestellt. Im Zeitraum von November 2005 bis Ende April 2006 wurden in den Kliniken Wied 87 konsekutiv aufgenommene Patienten mit einer neuropsychologischen Testbatterie untersucht. Es zeigte sich eine Prävalenzrate von 49.4% für Beeinträchtigungen nicht sprachlicher Intelligenzfunktionen und von 43.7% für Störungen der selektiven Aufmerksamkeit. Gedächtnisdefizite traten lediglich bei 15% auf. Nach fünf Wochen fanden sich deutliche Verbesserungen der selektiven Aufmerksamkeit, während sich die Gedächtnisleistungen kaum verbesserten.
Attitudes are "the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology" (Allport, 1935, p. 798). This outstanding position of the attitude concept in social cognitive research is not only reflected in the innumerous studies focusing on this concept but also in the huge number of theoretical approaches that have been put forth since then. Yet, it is still an open question, what attitudes actually are. That is, the question of how attitude objects are represented in memory cannot be unequivocally answered until now (e.g., Barsalou, 1999; Gawronski, 2007; Pratkanis, 1989, Chapter 4). In particular, researchers strongly differ with respect to their assumptions on the content, format and structural nature of attitude representations (Ferguson & Fukukura, 2012). This prevailing uncertainty on what actually constitutes our likes and dislikes is strongly dovetailed with the question of which processes result in the formation of these representations. In recent years, this issue has mainly been addressed in evaluative conditioning research (EC). In a standard EC-paradigm a neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS) is repeatedly paired with an affective stimulus (unconditioned stimulus, US). The pairing of stimuli then typically results in changes in the evaluation of the CS corresponding to the evaluative response of the US (De Houwer, Baeyens, & Field, 2005). This experimental approach on the formation of attitudes has primarily been concerned with the question of how the representations underlying our attitudes are formed. However, which processes operate on the formation of such an attitude representation is not yet understood (Jones, Olson, & Fazio, 2010; Walther, Nagengast, & Trasselli, 2005). Indeed, there are several ideas on how CS-US pairs might be encoded in memory. Notwithstanding the importance of these theoretical ideas, looking at the existing empirical work within the research area of EC (for reviews see Hofmann, De Houwer, Perugini, Baeyens, & Crombez, 2010; De Houwer, Thomas, & Baeyens, 2001) leaves one with the impression that scientists have skipped the basic processes. Basic processes hereby especially refer to the attentional processes being involved in the encoding of CSs and USs as well as the relation between them. Against the background of this huge gap in current research on attitude formation, the focus of this thesis will be to highlight the contribution of selective attention processes to a better understanding of the representation underlying our likes and dislikes. In particular, the present thesis considers the role of selective attention processes for the solution of the representation issue from three different perspectives. Before illustrating these different perspectives, Chapter 1 is meant to envision the omnipresence of the representation problem in current theoretical as well as empirical work on evaluative conditioning. Likewise, it emphasizes the critical role of selective attention processes for the representation question in classical conditioning and how this knowledge might be used to put forth the uniqueness of evaluative conditioning as compared to classical conditioning. Chapter 2 then considers the differential influence of attentional resources and goal-directed attention on attitude learning. The primary objective of the presented experiment was thereby to investigate whether attentional resources and goal-directed attention exert their influence on EC via changes in the encoding of CS-US relations in memory (i.e., contingency memory). Taking the findings from this experiment into account, Chapter 3 focuses on the selective processing of the US relative to the CS. In particular, the two experiments presented in this chapter were meant to explore the moderating influence of the selective processing of the US in its relation to the CS on EC. In Chapter 4 the important role of the encoding of the US in relation to the CS, as outlined in Chapter 3, is illuminated in the context of different retrieval processes. Against the background of the findings from the two presented experiments, the interplay between the encoding of CS-US contingencies and the moderation of EC via different retrieval processes will be discussed. Finally, a general discussion of the findings, their theoretical implications and future research lines will be outlined in Chapter 5.