Biomedical subjects

W Hacker

Publications and source records attributed to W Hacker.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

[Memory performance and instruction effects in schizophrenia. A comparative study of chronic schizophrenic patients and healthy probands].

34 chronically schizophrenic persons were matched with 34 healthy control participants according to age, level of education, and sex and received memory tests (short-term, priming, working, prospective, episodic, source and semantic long-term memory) and tests of attention and intelligence. Patients performed worse on all tests. The patients' memory deficits compared with controls are nearly one standard deviation greater than the differences in attention and intelligence. The deficits are smaller for priming and semantic long-term memory than for short-term, working, prospective, episodic, and source memory. After one short instruction all patients and controls received a repeat administration of the tests. Patients showed a lower, but also significant improvement for short-term, working, and prospective memory. We conclude that schizophrenia patients might suffer from specific memory deficits (specific vulnerability of strategic and thus of interference- or context-sensitive memory tasks) not attributable to more general psychopathologic symptoms.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

[Decomposition studies on the core function of working memory].

By means of decomposition we investigated using an experimental design (n = 160) the impact of combinations of processing and retention requirements on performance. Retention-during-processing spans (i.e., dual task requirements with equal importance of both evaluated components) were compared with the "reading" (final word) span of read sentences. In a correlational design, the relationships of these intentional spans and a unintentional indicator of working memory (the pronoun inference distance) were compared with fluid intellectual performances. The effects of processing on the span may not be restricted to articulatory suppression of rehearsal. While the substitution of retention of an additional processing-independent item improved the span, this did not hold for items resulting from processing. Thus, the span is determined by coordination of retention with processing, but neither by an activity without retention nor by retention per se. Coordination requires resources in addition to those required by the activities to be coordinated. Strategies of coordination differing in their efficiency result in different spans. Both unintentional processes and intentional ones contribute to the dual task performance of the retention-during-processing type. The best predictors for fluid verbal and nonverbal intellectual performance are the unintentional (pronoun) inferences and the complex intentional retention-during-processing span. The results are in favor of a working memory model in terms of a set of functions.

Adult↗

PubMed1996

[Health promotion in the work environment--old and new challenges for public health].

Associations between work and health can be found at many different levels. Work itself can have health hazardous as well as health promoting effects. Work defines status and life-style as well as social security and occupies a large proportion of time in our lives. Until now the process to integrate issues of worksite prevention and health promotion into Public Health proceeds slowly in contrast to other countries e.g. the USA. Weak connections between occupational medicine and Public Health as well as relative few projects focussing on work site in the Public Health Research Associations reflect this trend. Work site public health research according to the guidelines of the Ottawa Charta (WHO) could enhance the transition of approaches justified now in terms of risk and legal liability towards an orientation on health resources and preventive potentials. This transition is promising in regard to the science of public health. However, bottleneck facilities can be identified: the development of appropriate health reports in companies, the implementation and further development of new steering models for worksite interventions (especially the organizational development) and the implementation and further development of appropriate form of quality assurance which can be evaluated.

Accidents, Occupational↗

PubMed1990

[From prevention to health promotion by job design].

The definition of health once again was extended from well-being to the competence necessary for a socially and economically active life. Thus prevention may not be limited on impairment and illness. Along with the interest in factors producing illness the interest in health entrancing factors should be intensified. Main issues of health entrancing job design are: (1) Essential approaches of prevention are to be reevaluated. Mainly the strain/stress approach should be replaced by the approach of coping actively with the demanding tasks. (2) The objectives of health entrancing job design are to be re-evaluated too. The task demands (job content) are of equal importance as the work conditions. Job design should be centred around the desired health entrancing task characteristics. (3) The corrective type of job design should be displaced by a prospective design of health entrancing tasks from the outset. A theoretically based limited set of task characteristics, defined in technological terms, proved to be valid for the design of tasks with desired efficient and health-entrancing characteristics.

Arousal↗

PubMed1987