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‘Hasty observations’?
(2018)
This article examines geographical field research in Albania and Montenegro under Austro-Hungarian occupation, which lasted from 1916 to 1918. It focusses on one of the most important German-speaking geographers of the early 20 th century, Eugen Oberhummer (1859–1944), a pupil of Friedrich Ratzel, the founder of German geo-politics. In 1917 and 1918, Oberhummer went on two expeditions to Montenegro and Albania during the First World War. He already had travelled in four continents and vaguely knew the Western Balkans from an expedition in 1907. It will be argued that the actual situation in Albania and Montenegro did not alter, but did rather reinforce Oberhummer’s attitudes and opinions on the ‘other’ he encountered. Thus, the two war expeditions – Oberhummer primarily met high-ranking Austro-Hungarian officials and only few locals – confirmed his expectations basing on his ‘Ratzelian’ theoretical conceptions. It will further be argued that – in contrast to the much younger and less experienced ‘scholars-at-arms’ of the expedition of 1916 – war and violence were of secondary relevance for the well-travelled and renowned professor of geography in his late 50s. Neither in Oberhummer’s articles nor in his diaries the war and the occupation of Albania and Montenegro made up an important part. In Oberhummer’s ‘Ratzelian’ view, humans could not change or over-come the basic features of geography, as humans were clearly subordinated to the elemental forces of geography. People, over generations, adapted to geography, not the other way round. The on-going First World War was an opportunity for Oberhummer to travel to Albania and Montenegro, but the guerrilla warfare in large parts of Montenegro, the violence against the civilian population, and the fighting at the Albanian front were of secondary relevance and interest for him. Nevertheless, what Oberhummer observed offers great insights into the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Montenegro and Albania from the perspective of a renowned and – given the general circumstances – pleasantly relaxed Ratzelian geographer at the height of his academic career.
Yiddish in the Andes
(2019)
This article elucidates the efforts of Chilean-Jewish activists to create, manage and protect Chilean Yiddish culture. It illuminates how Yiddish cultural leaders in small diasporas, such as Chile, worked to maintain dialogue with other Jewish centers. Chilean culturists maintained that a unique Latin American Jewish culture existed and needed to be strengthened through the joint efforts of all Yiddish actors on the continent. Chilean activists envisioned a modern Jewish culture informed by both Eastern European influences and local Jewish cultural production, as well as by exchanges with non-Jewish Latin American majority cultures.
Previous research informs us about facilitators of employees’ promotive voice. Yet little is known about what determines whether a specific idea for constructive change brought up by an employee will be approved or rejected by a supervisor. Drawing on interactionist theories of motivation and personality, we propose that a supervisor will be least likely to support an idea when it threatens the supervisor’s power motive, and when it is perceived to serve the employee’s own striving for power. The prosocial versus egoistic intentions attributed to the idea presenter are proposed to mediate the latter effect. We conducted three scenario-based studies in which supervisors evaluated fictitious ideas voiced by employees that – if implemented – would have power-related consequences for them as a supervisor. Results show that the higher a supervisors’ explicit power motive was, the less likely they were to support a power-threatening idea (Study 1, N = 60). Moreover, idea support was less likely when this idea was proposed by an employee that was described as high (rather than low) on power motivation (Study 2, N = 79); attributed prosocial intentions mediated this effect. Study 3 (N = 260) replicates these results.
Using behavioral observation for the longitudinal study of anger regulation in middle childhood
(2017)
Assessing anger regulation via self-reports is fraught with problems, especially among children. Behavioral observation provides an ecologically valid alternative for measuring anger regulation. The present study uses data from two waves of a longitudinal study to present a behavioral observation approach for measuring anger regulation in middle childhood. At T1, 599 children from Germany (6–10 years old) were observed during an anger eliciting task, and the use of anger regulation strategies was coded. At T2, 3 years later, the observation was repeated with an age-appropriate version of the same task. Partial metric measurement invariance over time demonstrated the structural equivalence of the two versions. Maladaptive anger regulation between the two time points showed moderate stability. Validity was established by showing correlations with aggressive behavior, peer problems, and conduct problems (concurrent and predictive criterion validity). The study presents an ecologically valid and economic approach to assessing anger regulation strategies in situations.
Do properties of individual languages shape the mechanisms by which they are processed? By virtue of their non-concatenative morphological structure, the recognition of complex words in Semitic languages has been argued to rely strongly on morphological information and on decomposition into root and pattern constituents. Here, we report results from a masked priming experiment in Hebrew in which we contrasted verb forms belonging to two morphological classes, Paal and Piel, which display similar properties, but crucially differ on whether they are extended to novel verbs. Verbs from the open-class Piel elicited familiar root priming effects, but verbs from the closed-class Paal did not. Our findings indicate that, similarly to other (e.g., Indo-European) languages, down-to-the-root decomposition in Hebrew does not apply to stems of non-productive verbal classes. We conclude that the Semitic word processor is less unique than previously thought: Although it operates on morphological units that are combined in a non-linear way, it engages the same universal mechanisms of storage and computation as those seen in other languages.
Previous research offers equivocal results regarding the effect of
social networking site use on individuals’ self-esteem. We con-
duct a systematic literature review to examine the existing litera-
ture and develop a theoretical framework in order to classify the
results. The framework proposes that self-esteem is affected by
three distinct processes that incorporate self-evaluative informa-
tion: social comparison processes, social feedback processing,
and self-reflective processes. Due to particularities of the social
networking site environment, the accessibility and quality of self-
evaluative information is altered, which leads to online-specific
effects on users’ self-esteem. Results of the reviewed studies
suggest that when a social networking site is used to compare
oneself with others, it mostly results in decreases in users’ self-
esteem. On the other hand, receiving positive social feedback
from others or using these platforms to reflect on one’s own self is
mainly associated with benefits for users’ self-esteem.
Nevertheless, inter-individual differences and the specific activ-
ities performed by users on these platforms should be considered
when predicting individual effects.
Undisclosed desires
(2019)
Following decades of quality management featuring in higher education settings, questions regarding its implementation, impact and outcomes remain. Indeed, leaving aside anecdotal case studies and value-laden documentaries of best practice, current research still knows very little about the implementation of quality management in teaching and learning within higher education institutions. Referring to data collected from German higher education institutions in which a quality management department or functional equivalent was present, this article theorises and provides evidence for the supposition that the implementation of quality management follows two implicit logics. Specifically, it tends either towards the logic of appropriateness or, contrastingly, towards the logic of consequentialism. This study’s results also suggest that quality managers’ socialisation is related to these logics and that it influences their views on quality management in teaching and learning.
Swets et al. (2008. Underspecification of syntactic ambiguities: Evidence from self-paced reading. Memory and Cognition, 36(1), 201–216) presented evidence that the so-called ambiguity advantage [Traxler et al. (1998). Adjunct attachment is not a form of lexical ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 39(4), 558–592], which has been explained in terms of the Unrestricted Race Model, can equally well be explained by assuming underspecification in ambiguous conditions driven by task-demands. Specifically, if comprehension questions require that ambiguities be resolved, the parser tends to make an attachment: when questions are about superficial aspects of the target sentence, readers tend to pursue an underspecification strategy. It is reasonable to assume that individual differences in strategy will play a significant role in the application of such strategies, so that studying average behaviour may not be informative. In order to study the predictions of the good-enough processing theory, we implemented two versions of underspecification: the partial specification model (PSM), which is an implementation of the Swets et al. proposal, and a more parsimonious version, the non-specification model (NSM). We evaluate the relative fit of these two kinds of underspecification to Swets et al.’s data; as a baseline, we also fitted three models that assume no underspecification. We find that a model without underspecification provides a somewhat better fit than both underspecification models, while the NSM model provides a better fit than the PSM. We interpret the results as lack of unambiguous evidence in favour of underspecification; however, given that there is considerable existing evidence for good-enough processing in the literature, it is reasonable to assume that some underspecification might occur. Under this assumption, the results can be interpreted as tentative evidence for NSM over PSM. More generally, our work provides a method for choosing between models of real-time processes in sentence comprehension that make qualitative predictions about the relationship between several dependent variables. We believe that sentence processing research will greatly benefit from a wider use of such methods.
The molecular ability to selectively and efficiently convert sunlight into other forms of energy like heat, bond change, or charge separation is truly remarkable. The decisive steps in these transformations often happen on a femtosecond timescale and require transitions among different electronic states that violate the Born-Oppenheimer approximation (BOA). Non-BOA transitions pose challenges to both theory and experiment. From a theoretical point of view, excited state dynamics and nonadiabatic transitions both are difficult problems (see Figure 1(a)). However, the theory on non-BOA dynamics has advanced significantly over the last two decades. Full dynamical simulations for molecules of the size of nucleobases have been possible for a couple of years and allow predictions of experimental observables like photoelectron energy or ion yield. The availability of these calculations for isolated molecules has spurred new experimental efforts to develop methods that are sufficiently different from all optical techniques. For determination of transient molecular structure, femtosecond X-ray diffraction and electron diffraction have been implemented on optically excited molecules.
Exploring generalisation following treatment of language deficits in aphasia can provide insights into the functional relation of the cognitive processing systems involved. In the present study, we first review treatment outcomes of interventions targeting sentence processing deficits and, second report a treatment study examining the occurrence of practice effects and generalisation in sentence comprehension and production. In order to explore the potential linkage between processing systems involved in comprehending and producing sentences, we investigated whether improvements generalise within (i.e., uni-modal generalisation in comprehension or in production) and/or across modalities (i.e., cross-modal generalisation from comprehension to production or vice versa). Two individuals with aphasia displaying co-occurring deficits in sentence comprehension and production were trained on complex, non-canonical sentences in both modalities. Two evidence-based treatment protocols were applied in a crossover intervention study with sequence of treatment phases being randomly allocated. Both participants benefited significantly from treatment, leading to uni-modal generalisation in both comprehension and production. However, cross-modal generalisation did not occur. The magnitude of uni-modal generalisation in sentence production was related to participants’ sentence comprehension performance prior to treatment. These findings support the assumption of modality-specific sub-systems for sentence comprehension and production, being linked uni-directionally from comprehension to production.