Voluntary Activities in an Ageing Society: East and West Germany

SOEP respondents have been asked about their participation in voluntary activities ever since the Survey started in 1984. Here we provide evidence about stability and change in levels of participation over the last twenty years. It is often suggested that an ageing society requires, or would benefit from more voluntary and caring activity. More people are in need of assistance and there may be more people, including the retired and semi-retired, with enough time to provide it. In April 2008 Federal Minister Ursula von der Leyen (Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth) announced a new initiative to foster the voluntary activities of Senior Citizens with a budget of 22 Million Euro.

Voluntary Activities in an Ageing Society : East and West Germany

SOEP respondents have been asked about their participation in voluntary activities ever since the Survey started in 1984. Here we provide evidence about stability and change in levels of participation over the last twenty years. It is often suggested that an ageing society requires, or would benefit from more voluntary and caring activity. More people are in need of assistance and there may be more people, including the retired and semi-retired, with enough time to provide it. In April 2008 Federal Minister Ursula von der Leyen (Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth) announced a new initiative to foster the voluntary activities of Senior Citizens with a budget of 22 Million Euro.

Konjunkturen des Ehrenamts: Diskurse und Empirie

Der Beitrag skizziert zentrale Entwicklungstendenzen des Diskurses um ehrenamtliche Tätigkeit in den letzten etwa 30 Jahren. Dabei werden die Probleme der empirischen Erfassung des Wandels der Ehrenamtlichkeit verdeutlicht. Im Anschluss an die konzeptionelle Diskussion erfolgen Analysen zu Verbreitung Entwicklung ehrenamtlichen Engagements anhand von Längsschnittdaten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP). Hinsichtlich der Engagementquoten in den alten Bundesländern über einen Zeitraum von 20 Jahren wurden vor allem im Bereich des "seltenen" Engagements Schwankungen festgestellt, ansonsten aber überwiegt eher Stabilität im Aggregat. So sind im Verlauf des Zeitraums von 1985 bis 2005 je zwischen sieben und neun Prozent der Bevölkerung wöchentlich, weitere sechs bis acht Prozent monatlich ehrenamtlich engagiert. Lediglich jene Aktivitäten, die seltener als monatlich ausgeübt werden, scheinen zugenommen zu haben - sie schwanken zwischen acht und 15 Prozent, mit Spitzenwerten 1996 und 2005. Insgesamt wurde festgestellt, dass über die letzten 20 Jahre - bei erheblichen Schwankungen vor allem Bereich sporadischen Engagements - kein signifikanter Zuwachs an kontinuierlich praktiziertem ehrenamtlichem Engagement identifiziert werden kann. Der Beitrag schließt mit mit einer Diskussion verbesserter Operationalisierungen ehrenamtlichen Engagements in bevölkerungsrepräsentativen Surveys.Unit labor costs, inflation, EMU, convergence

Private Versorgung und Betreuung von Pflegebedürftigen in Deutschland: überraschend hohes Pflegeengagement älterer Männer

Nach den Ergebnissen des vom DIW Berlin in Zusammenarbeit mit Infratest Sozialforschung erhobenen Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) beteiligten sich im Jahre 2003 rund 5 % aller erwachsenen Männer und knapp 8 % aller Frauen an der Versorgung Pflegebedürftiger. Der zeitliche Umfang an einem durchschnittlichen Wochentag betrug bei pflegenden Männern 2,5 Stunden und bei Frauen rund 3 Stunden. Männer pflegen damit zwar weniger häufig und in geringerem Umfang, beteiligen sich aber zu einem nicht unerheblichen Anteil ebenfalls aktiv an der Betreuung Hilfs- und Pflegebedürftiger.

The Implicit Nature of the Anti-Fat Bias

The stigmatization and discrimination of obese persons is pervasive in almost any domain of living. At the explicit level, obese people are associated with a wide range of negative characteristics. Furthermore, research with the implicit association test revealed the implicit nature of the anti-fat bias. Building upon these findings, the present study used event-related brain potential recordings in order to assess key features of implicit processes. Participants viewed a series of schematic portrayals of anorexic, medium, and obese body shapes and tools. In a passive viewing condition, participants were asked to simply look at the stimuli and, in a distraction condition, participants were asked to detect a specific tool. Viewing obese body images, as compared to medium or anorexic body images, elicited a positive potential shift over fronto-central sites and a relative negative potential over occipito-temporal regions in a time window from ∼190 to 250 ms. This evaluative brain response to obese body images was similarly pronounced while participants performed a distraction task. Thus, the findings suggest that the anti-fat bias may occur spontaneously, unintentionally, and independent of explicit processing goals. A troublesome picture is emerging in Western cultures suggesting that obese-ism may appear to be as inevitable as a reflex

Cognitive control modulates preferential sensory processing of affective stimuli

Adaptive human behavior crucially relies on the ability of the brain to allocate resources automatically to emotionally significant stimuli. This ability has consistently been demonstrated by studies showing preferential processing of affective stimuli in sensory cortical areas. It is still unclear, however, whether this putatively automatic mechanism can be modulated by cognitive control processes. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether preferential processing of an affective face distractor is suppressed when an affective distractor has previously elicited a response conflict in a word-face Stroop task. We analyzed this for three consecutive stages in the ventral stream of visual processing for which preferential processing of affective stimuli has previously been demonstrated: the striate area (BA 17), category-unspecific extrastriate areas (BA 18/19), and the fusiform face area (FFA). We found that response conflict led to a selective suppression of affective face processing in category-unspecific extrastriate areas and the FFA, and this effect was accompanied by changes in functional connectivity between these areas and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex. In contrast, preferential processing of affective face distractors was unaffected in the striate area. Our results indicate that cognitive control processes adaptively suppress preferential processing of affective stimuli under conditions where affective processing is detrimental because it elicits response conflict

Emotion Processing in the Visual Brain: A MEG Analysis

Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related brain potential (ERP) studies provide empirical support for the notion that emotional cues guide selective attention. Extending this line of research, whole head magneto-encephalogram (MEG) was measured while participants viewed in separate experimental blocks a continuous stream of either pleasant and neutral or unpleasant and neutral pictures, presented for 330ms each. Event-related magnetic fields (ERF) were analyzed after intersubject sensor coregistration, complemented by minimum norm estimates (MNE) to explore neural generator sources. Both streams of analysis converge by demonstrating the selective emotion processing in an early (120-170ms) and a late time interval (220-310ms). ERF analysis revealed that the polarity of the emotion difference fields was reversed across early and late intervals suggesting distinct patterns of activation in the visual processing stream. Source analysis revealed the amplified processing of emotional pictures in visual processing areas with more pronounced occipito-parieto-temporal activation in the early time interval, and a stronger engagement of more anterior, temporal, regions in the later interval. Confirming previous ERP studies showing facilitated emotion processing, the present data suggest that MEG provides a complementary look at the spread of activation in the visual processing strea

Digitale Spaltung in Deutschland: geringere Bildung - seltener am PC

Die Nutzung von Computern und dem Internet ist in Deutschland keineswegs gleichmäßig verbreitet. Daten aus dem Jahre 2005 lassen erkennen, dass Personen mit einem geringen Bildungsniveau wesentlich seltener den PC und das Internet nutzen als Personen mit höherem Bildungsniveau. Auch hinsichtlich der Art der Nutzung von Computer und Internet lassen sich sozio-demographische Unterschiede feststellen. Beispielsweise ist das Programmieren - unabhängig vom Alter - vorwiegend eine Männerdomäne. Während Menschen höherer Bildungsschichten den Computer häufiger zur Gestaltung der Arbeitswelt sowie zum Schreiben und Lernen verwenden, setzen Personen mit geringerer Bildung den Computer signifikant häufiger zum Spielen und Musikhören, also eher im unmittelbaren Freizeitbereich ein.

Thirst and the state-dependent representation of incentive stimulus value in human motive circuitry

Abstract Depletion imposes both need and desire to drink, and potentiates the response to need-relevant cues in the environment. The present fMRI study aimed to determine which neural structures selectively increase the incentive value of needrelevant stimuli in a thirst state. Towards this end, participants were scanned twice-either in a thirst or no-thirst statewhile viewing pictures of beverages and chairs. As expected, thirst led to a selective increase in self-reported pleasantness and arousal by beverages. Increased responses to beverage when compared with chair stimuli were observed in the cingulate cortex, insular cortex and the amygdala in the thirst state, which were absent in the no-thirst condition. Enhancing the incentive value of need-relevant cues in a thirst state is a key mechanism for motivating drinking behavior. Overall, distributed regions of the motive circuitry, which are also implicated in salience processing, craving and interoception, provide a dynamic body-state dependent representation of stimulus value

Explicit attention interferes with selective emotion processing in human extrastriate cortex

BACKGROUND: Brain imaging and event-related potential studies provide strong evidence that emotional stimuli guide selective attention in visual processing. A reflection of the emotional attention capture is the increased Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) for pleasant and unpleasant compared to neutral images (~150–300 ms poststimulus). The present study explored whether this early emotion discrimination reflects an automatic phenomenon or is subject to interference by competing processing demands. Thus, emotional processing was assessed while participants performed a concurrent feature-based attention task varying in processing demands. RESULTS: Participants successfully performed the primary visual attention task as revealed by behavioral performance and selected event-related potential components (Selection Negativity and P3b). Replicating previous results, emotional modulation of the EPN was observed in a task condition with low processing demands. In contrast, pleasant and unpleasant pictures failed to elicit increased EPN amplitudes compared to neutral images in more difficult explicit attention task conditions. Further analyses determined that even the processing of pleasant and unpleasant pictures high in emotional arousal is subject to interference in experimental conditions with high task demand. Taken together, performing demanding feature-based counting tasks interfered with differential emotion processing indexed by the EPN. CONCLUSION: The present findings demonstrate that taxing processing resources by a competing primary visual attention task markedly attenuated the early discrimination of emotional from neutral picture contents. Thus, these results provide further empirical support for an interference account of the emotion-attention interaction under conditions of competition. Previous studies revealed the interference of selective emotion processing when attentional resources were directed to locations of explicitly task-relevant stimuli. The present data suggest that interference of emotion processing by competing task demands is a more general phenomenon extending to the domain of feature-based attention. Furthermore, the results are inconsistent with the notion of effortlessness, i.e., early emotion discrimination despite concurrent task demands. These findings implicate to assess the presumed automatic nature of emotion processing at the level of specific aspects rather than considering automaticity as an all-or-none phenomenon