TY - JOUR A1 - von Hecker, Ulrich A1 - Sedek, Grzegorz T1 - Uncontrollability, depression, and mental models in the social domain N2 - Three studies examined the processes of mental model generation after pre-exposure to uncontrollability and in a depressive state. The main purpose of the experiments was to test the implications of the cognitive exhaustion model applying an explicit conceptualization of social mental models and a process tracing method developed by von Hecker (1997). An experimental situation was created for observation of consecutive, rule-based construction steps as a function of input diagnosticity, and for the quality assessment of the constructed mental model. The findings showed that participants pre-exposed to uncontrollability, as well as depressed students, were able as were controls, to identify rule-relevant information needed for model construction. However, they were less able than controls to engage in more cognitively demanding and generative step of processing , i.e. in integrating the pieces of input information into a coherent mental model of sentiment relations. Y1 - 1999 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Feger, Hubert A1 - von Hecker, Ulrich T1 - Reciprocity as an interaction principle N2 - Flament and Apfelbaum observed that differences in resource possession lead to group structure in the form of exchange coalitions and hierarchical structure in sociometric choices. We showed that these effects occur even with a uniform distribution of resources. However, knowing the initial distribution of the resources is useful for predicting the final distribution of positive messages received during the expreriment. the two tests we performed indicate that participants in the early part ofthe experiment either react at random or intentionally create a uniform distribution of the positive messages they send to the other positions. Ordered exchange behavior depends on a certain minimum amount of information about the behavior of the others being available to (almost) all participants. We report formal analyses of the reciprocity and the debtor principles. Row reciprocity assumes the return of positive messages to senders without further consideration. Under optimal conditions, it leads within few trials to fixed exchange coalitions. Relative reciprocity uses the information on the amount of positive messages received from the other participants as well. Y1 - 1998 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - von Hecker, Ulrich T1 - How do logical inference rules help construct social mental models? N2 - Starting from recent approaches in mental model research, it is argued that (1) logical inference rules are used in order to construct mental cliques from learned sentiment relations, and (2) social context cues (operationalized as primes) play a crucial role in activating such rules. Transitivity and Anti- transitivity are taken as examples, and are shown as core constituents of such models. In a first experiment, priming was achieved by announcing the sorting of fictitious persons in either TWO or THREE cliques. Thirty-one subjects studied eight sets of sentiment relations among these persons that either did or did not satisfy their primed clique expectations. They showed longer study times and more requests for additional information in the case of inconsistent fits between prime and set. Their sorting solutions also showed clear priming effects. A second experiment (n = 30) showed that when undergoing a recognition test after seeing the relation sets, subjects tended to confuse model-consistent distractors with information they had actually seen. In a third experiment (n=30) the results from Experiment 1 were replicated using more realistic learning materials. Y1 - 1997 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Brzezicka, Aneta A1 - Krejtz, Izabela A1 - von Hecker, Ulrich A1 - Laubrock, Jochen T1 - Eye movement evidence for defocused attention in dysphoria - A perceptual span analysis JF - International journal of psychophysiology N2 - The defocused attention hypothesis (von Hecker and Meiser, 2005) assumes that negative mood broadens attention, whereas the analytical rumination hypothesis (Andrews and Thompson, 2009) suggests a narrowing of the attentional focus with depression. We tested these conflicting hypotheses by directly measuring the perceptual span in groups of dysphoric and control subjects, using eye tracking. In the moving window paradigm, information outside of a variable-width gaze-contingent window was masked during reading of sentences. In measures of sentence reading time and mean fixation duration, dysphoric subjects were more pronouncedly affected than controls by a reduced window size. This difference supports the defocused attention hypothesis and seems hard to reconcile with a narrowing of attentional focus. KW - Dysphoria KW - Defocused attention KW - Eye tracking KW - Moving window paradigm KW - Perceptual span Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2011.09.022 SN - 0167-8760 VL - 85 IS - 1 SP - 129 EP - 133 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -