Neurobiological and cognitive models of unconscious information processing suggest that subconscious threat detection can lead to cognitive misinterpretations and false alarms, while conscious processing is assumed to be perceptually and conceptually accurate and unambiguous. Furthermore, clinical theories suggest that pathological anxiety results from a crude preattentive warning system predominating over more sophisticated and controlled modes of processing. We investigated the hypothesis that subconscious detection of threat in a cognitive task is reflected by enhanced ''false signal'' detection rather than by selectively (...) enhanced discrimination of threat items in 30 patients with panic disorder and 30 healthy controls. We presented a tachistoscopic word-nonword discrimination task and a subsequent recognition task and analyzed the data by means of process-dissociation procedures. In line with our expectations, subjects of both groups showed more false signal detection to threat than to neutral stimuli as indicated by an enhanced response bias, whereas indices of discriminative sensitivity did not show this effect. In addition, patients with panic disorder showed a generally enhanced response bias in comparison to healthy controls. They also seemed to have processed the stimuli less elaborately and less differentially. Results are consistent with the assumption that subconscious threat detection can lead to misrepresentations of stimulus significance and that pathological anxiety is characterized by a hyperactive preattentive alarm system that is insufficiently controlled by higher cognitive processes. (shrink)

There exists a tension between the categorical prohibition of killing in the Decalogue and the claim for or toleration of homicide, and of killing animals, in other passages of the Old Testament. This tension can be made understandable if we see in the Decalogue an attempt to formulate the ethical foundations of given legal bases. The ethica/ dictate of not killing seems to have given an impulse to the development of the law to Iimit bloodshed as much as possible. The (...) conviction that bloodshed can only be ))atoned for« by renewed bloodshed expresses a >>reverence for Iife« which sets free and, at the same time, restricts the tendency to avoid bloodshed in the ethics and laws of the Old Testament. (shrink)

Most of the nearly innumerable attempts to provide for a sound understanding of the gedanken experiment of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) contain additional ideas, notions or features imposed on pioneer or traditional quantum mechanics (TQM). In the present paper the problem is analyzed without employing any new or philosophically contested concept. We do even without referring to the probability calculus, and we especially avoid any admixture of realistic ideas. Neither entanglement nor special features of “states” are used. Instead, formulating (...) strictly within the framework of TQM and using an ensemble approach, the crucial point is boiled down to the decision between separability and non-separability. The corresponding second-order correlation functions Δs and Δn−s, resp., which predict the experimental outcome, may differ by a factor of 2 if certain operator pairs are maximally non-commuting. Even in the case of commuting pairs, an experimentally relevant difference between the Δ-functions might exist. Taking into account the experimental evidence, it is unavoidable to accept that the sub-ensembles involved in EPR-type experiments are in fact non-separable. This result has been obtained without resort to Bell's inequality. (shrink)