Relevant Preconditions Research Articles

Preventing Hate Crimes

How can local communities deal with hate crimes? The article argues that the traditional focus on the offender and on the reactions of the criminal-justice system neglects the deeper roots of hate crimes. These roots are seen in a relatively widespread sympathy for racist and inhuman propaganda. Thus, a promising prevention approach to hate crimes must include the strengthening of democratic and humanistic norms and values. For the discussion of this issue, the notion of positive general prevention is employed. A theoretical model based on qualitative research in two East-German towns names relevant preconditions for positive general prevention. Important aspects like the framing of the problem and the establishment of an effective cooperation network are discussed in detail.

Theory and practice: Requirements for adhesive bonding in marine structures

The use of adhesive bonding in ship structures has been slow compared to other industries. For high-speed craft adhesives are used for the panes, seat rails, the rudder bearings in the housing and propulsion shafts. Adhesives are used for the connection of rotor blades of a wind turbine. This paper describes specialities of the design of adhesive bonds, rules and guidelines as well as approval aspects for adhesives and manufacturing requirements. For panes of a cruise vessel a calculation method is compared with full-scale test results and finite element results. The authors of this paper want to show that adhesive bonding is a suitable way of joining elements, assuming that all relevant pre-conditions are fulfilled.

Operationalized psychodynamic diagnostics (OPD) in patients with central serous chorioretinopathy

Central Serous Chorioretinopathy (CSC) is a degenerative retinal disease still considered within ophthalmology as being of psychosomatic origin. Psychotherapeutic treatment of CSC patients has been demanded by several authors who, however, have failed to investigate the relevant preconditions. The present study examined subjective illness experience, treatment preconditions, and psychodynamic conflicts in 31 patients with CSC by means of axes I and III of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics (OPD). Illness experience, psychological symptoms, capacity for insight into psychodynamic contexts and motivation towards psychotherapy were but slight. The conflicts of one half of the patients was evaluated as important. Predominant conflicts were dependency vs. autonomy, submission vs. control, providing vs. autarchy and self-esteem conflicts. All in all, the patients examined were more or less clinically inconspicuous, giving rather few reasons for psychotherapy. In order to control the results, further studies with higher case numbers are required.

The importance of normative beliefs to the self-prophecy effect.

Asking people to predict whether they will undertake a target behavior increases their probability of performing that behavior. Now referred to as the self-prophecy effect, this phenomenon has been demonstrated across several contexts. Although theoretical explanations for the effect have been offered, empirical evidence for proposed accounts is sparse. The current research tests the theoretically relevant precondition for the effect that normative beliefs--evaluations of what is socially desirable or appropriate--underlie manifestation of the self-prophecy effect. Results of 2 experiments for different behaviors indicate that the act of making a prediction is most effective when normative beliefs are strong. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to theoretical explanations for the effect and successful use of self-prophecy to promote socially desirable behaviors.

Conduction aphasia-11 classic cases

Eleven cases of conduction aphasia derived from a survey of the literature of the classic period of German aphasiology are reviewed. They were published between 1885 and 1934. Only those case reports were included that presented sufficient data concerning spontaneous speech, repetition and comprehension and gave examples of the patients' verbal behaviour. In summary, conduction aphasia was characterized by; (1) phonemic paraphasia with conduite d'approche, (2) preserved auditory and reading comprehension, (3) a repetition impairment that depended upon word length, (4) paragraphia with writing to dictation, and (5) a tendency in some patients to produce the unusual symptom of form-related semantic paraphasias. As anatomical explanations, it was proposed that there existed two routes, a phonological and a semantic, for repetition and that the right hemisphere may contribute to comprehension performance. Functionally, a dissociation between phonemic components of words, a disorder of the generation of the temporal sequence of speech sounds or deficient transcription of speech sound images into speech motor images, an impaired production of the single phoneme, a disorder of the associative basis for phonemes, impaired phoneme perception (incomplete sound deafness), an impairment of word sound control and the contribution of a memory deficit were assumed as relevant preconditions. The theories of the classical writers are compared with modern accounts of the pathogenesis of conduction aphasia.