Anxiety patients exhibit attentional biases toward threat, which have often been demonstrated as increased distractibility by threatening stimuli. In contrast, speeded detection of threat has rarely been shown. Therefore, the authors studied both phenomena in 3 versions of a visual search task while eye movements were recorded continuously. Spider-fearful individuals and nonanxious control participants participated in a target search task, an odd-one-out search task, and a category search task. Evidence for disorder-specific increased distraction by threat was found in all tasks, whereas speeded threat detection did not occur in the target search task. The implications of these findings for cognitive theories of anxiety are discussed, particularly in relation to the concept of disengagement from threat.

Zusammenfassung. Es wird über die Gütekriterien und Faktorenstrukturen dreier Instrumente zur Messung von Angst vor Spinnen berichtet. Der “Spinnenphobie-Fragebogen (SPF)“ und der “Fragebogen zur Angst vor Spinnen (FAS)“ sind Übersetzungen englischsprachiger, mehrfaktorieller Fragebögen. Beim “Spinnenangst-Screening (SAS)“ handelt es sich um eine Neuentwicklung mit nur vier Items zum möglichst ökonomischen Screening großer Stichproben. Alle drei Instrumente zeigten gute bis sehr gute Reliabilitätswerte, sowohl bezüglich der internen Konsistenz als auch der Retest-Reliabilität. Auch die Konstruktvaliditäten und die Kriteriumsvaliditäten erwiesen sich als sehr gut. Verwendungsempfehlungen für das Screening und die beiden Fragebögen werden gegeben.

No abstract

Information overload (IO) indicates the exchange of too much low-quality information in virtual teams. When being overloaded with information, teams need to adapt and to change communication behaviour. This study introduces and tests a structured online team adaptation (STROTA) procedure that enables virtual teams to reduce IO by improving their team mental model quality. STROTA, built from team adaptation models, is a moderated intervention consisting of three stages: (1) individual situation awareness, (2) team situation awareness, and (3) plan formulation. STROTA was tested in the context of an experimental problem-solving task. Participants (N = 363) worked in virtual teams of three and were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: no STROTA, incomplete STROTA (step 1, steps 1-2), and complete STROTA (steps 1-2-3). We found teams that followed a complete STROTA procedure experienced lessened IO over time. Teams with complete STROTA showed the largest development of TMM immediately after STROTA. Finally, multilevel mediation analyses showed that TMM are mediators that explain the influence of STROTA on IO.

We investigated memory impairment and mood-congruent memory bias in depression, using an explicit memory test and an implicit one. Thirty-six severely depressed inpatients that fulfilled DSM-IV criteria for major depressive disorder and 36 healthy controls matched for sex, age, and educational level participated in the study. Explicit memory was assessed with a free recall task and implicit memory with an anagram solution task. Results showed that depressed and controls differed in explicit memory performance, depending on the amount of cognitive distraction between incidental learning and testing. Implicit memory was not affected. In addition, severely depressed patients showed a mood-congruent memory bias in implicit memory but not in explicit memory. The complex pattern of results is discussed with regard to relevant theories of depression.