Mitleids- und hilfsmüdigkeit bei humanitären krisen: Zum effekt übermäßigen medienkonsums

Drawing on social psychological theories of compassion fatigue, this paper develops a new research perspective that looks at the connection between excessive consumption of political media content on the one hand and compassion and aid fatigue on the other. The thesis is that media consumption that goes hand in hand with excessive confrontation with human suffering of others can lead to emotional deadening. Therefore, a less intensive but at the same time frequent media consumption contributes to the fact that citizens only feel limited compassion for and readiness to help the victims in humanitarian crises, among other things. They support their state's humanitarian aid and intervention measures to alleviate human suffering much less than citizens whose media consumption is less frequent or more intensive. This thesis of media-induced compassion and aid fatigue in humanitarian crises is developed theoretically in this article and empirically plausibilised based on data from a survey. This opens a new research perspective for the analysis of humanitarian aid policies of modern democracies (as well as their foreign policy in general). ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Auf sozialpsychologische Theorien der Compassion Fatigue zurückgreifend wird im vorliegenden Beitrag eine neue Forschungsperspektive entwickelt, die den Zusammenhang zwischen übermäßigem Konsum politischer Medieninhalte einerseits und Mitleids- und Hilfsmüdigkeit andererseits in den Blick nimmt. Die These ist, dass ein Medienkonsum, der mit einer übermäßigen Konfrontation mit menschlichen Leiderfahrungen einhergeht, zu emotionaler Abstumpfung führen kann. Deshalb trägt insbesondere ein wenig intensiver, zugleich aber häufiger Medienkonsum dazu bei, dass Bürger*innen unter anderem bei humanitären Krisen nur noch begrenzt Mitleid mit und Hilfsbereitschaft für die Opfer empfinden. Sie unterstützen humanitäre Hilfs- und Interventionsmaßnahmen ihres Staates zur Linderung des menschlichen Leids viel weniger als Bürger*innen deren Medienkonsum weniger häufig oder aber intensiver erfolgt. Diese These der medienbedingten Mitleids- und Hilfsmüdigkeit bei humanitären Krisen wird im vorliegenden Beitrag theoretisch entwickelt und gestützt auf Daten einer Umfrage empirisch plausibilisiert. Damit wird eine neue Forschungsperspektive für die Analyse humanitärer Hilfspolitiken moderner Demokratien (sowie ihrer Außenpolitik ganz allgemein) eröffnet.Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviou

Time-resolved single-crystal X-ray crystallography

In this chapter the development of time-resolved crystallography is traced from its beginnings more than 30 years ago. The importance of being able to “watch” chemical processes as they occur rather than just being limited to three-dimensional pictures of the reactant and final product is emphasised, and time-resolved crystallography provides the opportunity to bring the dimension of time into the crystallographic experiment. The technique has evolved in time with developments in technology: synchrotron radiation, cryoscopic techniques, tuneable lasers, increased computing power and vastly improved X-ray detectors. The shorter the lifetime of the species being studied, the more complex is the experiment. The chapter focusses on the results of solid-state reactions that are activated by light, since this process does not require the addition of a reagent to the crystalline material and the single-crystalline nature of the solid may be preserved. Because of this photoactivation, time-resolved crystallography is often described as “photocrystallography”. The initial photocrystallographic studies were carried out on molecular complexes that either underwent irreversible photoactivated processes where the conversion took hours or days. Structural snapshots were taken during the process. Materials that achieved a metastable state under photoactivation and the excited (metastable) state had a long enough lifetime for the data from the crystal to be collected and the structure solved. For systems with shorter lifetimes, the first time-resolved results were obtained for macromolecular structures, where pulsed lasers were used to pump up the short lifetime excited state species and their structures were probed by using synchronised X-ray pulses from a high-intensity source. Developments in molecular crystallography soon followed, initially with monochromatic X-ray radiation, and pump-probe techniques were used to establish the structures of photoactivated molecules with lifetimes in the micro- to millisecond range. For molecules with even shorter lifetimes in the sub-microsecond range, Laue diffraction methods (rather than using monochromatic radiation) were employed to speed up the data collections and reduce crystal damage. Future developments in time-resolved crystallography are likely to involve the use of XFELs to complete “single-shot” time-resolved diffraction studies that are already proving successful in the macromolecular crystallographic field.</p

Sound Symbolism Facilitates Word Learning in 14-Month-Olds

Sound symbolism, or the nonarbitrary link between linguistic sound and meaning, has often been discussed in connection with language evolution, where the oral imitation of external events links phonetic forms with their referents (e.g., Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may also facilitate synchronic language learning in human infants. Sound symbolism may be a useful cue particularly at the earliest developmental stages of word learning, because it potentially provides a way of bootstrapping word meaning from perceptual information. Using an associative word learning paradigm, we demonstrated that 14-month-old infants could detect Köhler-type (1947) shape-sound symbolism, and could use this sensitivity in their effort to establish a wordreferent association