Estimation of Excess Mortality in Germany During 2020-2022.

Background This study estimates the burden of COVID-19 on mortality in Germany. It is expected that many people have died because of the new COVID-19 virus who otherwise would not have died. Estimating the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality by the number of officially reported COVID-19-related deaths has been proven to be difficult due to several reasons. Because of this, a better approach, which has been used in many studies, is to estimate the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic by calculating the excess mortality for the pandemic years. An advantage of such an approach is that additional negative impacts of a pandemic on mortality are covered as well, such as a possible pandemic-induced strain on the healthcare system. Methods To calculate the excess mortality in Germany for the pandemic years 2020 to 2022, we compare the reported number of all-cause deaths (i.e., the number of deaths independently of underlying causes) with the number of statistically expected all-cause deaths. For this, the state-of-the-art method of actuarial science, based on population tables, life tables, and longevity trends, is used to estimate the expected number of all-cause deaths from 2020 to 2022 if there had been no pandemic. Results The results show that the observed number of deaths in 2020 was close to the expected number with respect to the empirical standard deviation; approximately 4,000 excess deaths occurred. By contrast, in 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number and even more than four times the empirical standard deviation in 2022. In total, the number of excess deaths in the year 2021 is about 34,000 and in 2022 about 66,000 deaths, yielding a cumulated 100,000 excess deaths in both years. The high excess mortality in 2021 and 2022 was mainly due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 years and started to accumulate only from April 2021 onward. A similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths with an increase of about 9.4% in the second quarter and 19.4% in the fourth quarter of the year 2021 compared to previous years. Conclusions These findings indicate that something must have happened in spring 2021 that led to a sudden and sustained increase in mortality, although no such effects on mortality had been observed during the early COVID-19 pandemic so far. Possible influencing factors are explored in the discussion.

Re-examining the testing effect as a learning strategy: the advantage of retrieval practice over concept mapping as a methodological artifact.

Several previous studies appear to have demonstrated that studying with retrieval practice produces more learning than studying with concept mapping, a finding based on which an extended use of retrieval practice in educational practice was recommended. However, a closer examination of the methods used in these previous studies reveals a crucial confounding variable: Whereas participants in the concept mapping conditions performed a concept mapping task without any subsequent memorizing of the learning material, participants in the retrieval practice conditions performed not only retrieval practice but also an additional memorization task, which doubled the total memorization time. The present preregistered study examined whether the advantage observed in the retrieval practice condition over the concept mapping condition in previous studies was actually driven by additional memorization rather than by retrieval practice. While we replicated the previous finding that retrieval practice in combination with additional memorizing produces more learning than concept mapping without additional memorizing, this advantage of retrieval practice over concept mapping vanished when participants in the concept mapping condition, too, memorized the learning material after having created a concept map. These findings demonstrate that the assumed advantage of retrieval practice over concept mapping in fact represents a methodological artifact. Besides serving as a reminder of the importance of a solid methodology, the present study also illustrates the importance of using of an adequate terminology. Depicting a learning strategy condition as "retrieval practice" when the condition actually encompasses not only retrieval practice but also additional memorizing obfuscates the possibility that observed memory advantages may not be fueled by retrieval practice, i.e., the learning strategy as such. We conclude by giving an outlook on the ramifications of our findings for cognitive and educational psychology.

The promotion of functional expected teaching-related emotions through expressive writing.

The aim of the present preregistered study was to examine whether expressive writing can help teacher students to develop functional expected teaching-related emotions. In a variation of James W. Pennebaker´s expressive writing paradigm, 129 teacher students were randomly assigned to write on three consecutive days either about the future teaching-related events that personally trigger the greatest fear and joy (treatment group: n = 67) or about a walk in a forest and a city park (control group: n = 62). In both groups, expected teaching-related positive emotions increased and expected teaching-related negative emotions decreased with increased writing sessions. After the writing sessions, the treatment group reported a stronger change in their view about their future professional life as a teacher, a more active personal involvement with their future professional life, and an increased motivation to use expressive writing in the future. These results demonstrate that expressive writing is a promising tool to promote teacher students' expected teaching-related emotions.

Teacher Well-Being: Teachers' Goals and Emotions for Students Showing Undesirable Behaviors Count More Than That for Students Showing Desirable Behaviors.

Previous findings indicate that the goals of teachers and their experienced emotions when interacting with students play an important role for their well-being. However, studies on the psychological impact of events have shown that the impact of bad events is stronger than the impact of good events. Thus, it may be that teachers' goals and emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors (e.g., students who disrupt the class, do not finish their work, and have a negative attitude to learning) contribute more to their well-being than teachers' goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors (e.g., students who pay attention in class, do their work on time, and have a positive attitude to learning), a distinction that has not been made in previous research. To examine this question, we measured teachers' goals and emotions for students showing desirable and undesirable behaviors, and their affective, evaluative, occupational, and psychological well-being (N = 250). The results showed that teachers' well-being was relatively strongly related to their goals and emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors: The higher the goals and the more positive the emotions, the higher the reported well-being. By contrast, the goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors were unrelated to teachers' well-being. These results demonstrate that the principle of "bad is stronger than good" holds also for the influence of teachers' goals and emotions on their well-being.

Are Student Teachers' Overall Expected Emotions Regarding Their Future Life as a Teacher Biased Toward Their Expected Peak Emotions?

Having functional expected emotions regarding one's future life as a teacher is important for student teachers to maintain their motivation to choose a career as a teacher. However, humans show several biases when judging their emotional experiences. One famous bias is the so-called peak-end effect which describes the phenomenon that overall affective judgments do not reflect the average of the involved emotional experiences but the most intense and the most recent of the involved emotional experiences. Regarding student teachers' expected positive emotions, such a bias would be functional since their motivation to become a teacher is enhanced. However, regarding student teachers' expected negative emotions, such a bias would be dysfunctional since their motivation to become a teacher would be decreased. The aim of the present preregistered study was to examine whether student teachers' expected future teaching-related emotions show a peak-end effect. Student teachers viewed 14 common events that could part of a typical everyday routine of a teacher and rated their expected emotional pleasure and discomfort for each of the events. Afterward, they were asked to rate their overall expected emotional pleasure and discomfort when looking at their future professional life as a whole. Results showed that expected pleasure was much larger than expected discomfort regarding both overall, peak, and average ratings. No peak-end effect was observed for overall expected discomfort which reflected the average expected discomfort across events. By contrast, overall expected pleasure was biased toward expected peak pleasure experiences. These findings indicate that student teachers judge their expected overall affect in a functional way: realistically when dealing with negative emotions but through rose-colored glasses when dealing with positive emotions.

Evaluation of a Humor Training for Patients with Chronic Pain: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

BACKGROUND: Humor and laughter are positively associated with psychological as well as with physical well-being. As there is little research examining to what extent patients suffering from chronic pain could benefit from a humor intervention, the goal of this study was to develop a pain-specific humor training and to evaluate its feasibility and effectiveness as component of regular, multimodal pain therapy. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Patients from inpatient treatment groups for chronic pain in a German hospital were randomly assigned to the training group (final n = 62) and the control group (final n = 65). The training consisted of four sessions that were implemented in the usual therapy throughout two weeks. Outcomes were divided into primary (perceived current pain intensity and depression) and secondary ones (quality of life impairment by pain, cheerfulness, and self-enhancing humor) and were assessed prior to and after intervention. RESULTS: Results showed improvements in all outcomes for both groups. For primary outcomes, a trend for a greater reduction in current pain intensity was found for the training group compared to the control group (p = 0.060, η 2 p = 0.02), as well as, for secondary outcomes, a trend for greater reduction of quality of life impairment by pain (p = 0.079, η 2 p = 0.02) and a trend for greater increase in self-enhancing humor (p = 0.086, η 2 p = 0.02). Depression and cheerfulness remained unaffected. Feedback indicated feasibility of the training within multimodal therapy, showing overall acceptance as well as providing specific suggestions for improvement. CONCLUSION: As the first study evaluating a specific humor training for patients with chronic pain within a randomized controlled trial, its results are promising regarding an additional contribution that humor interventions can make towards multimodal pain therapy.

Reminiscing and the Passage of Years: Investigating the Role of Affective Autobiographical Memories in Passage of Time Judgments.

Previous research has shown that judgments of the experienced velocity of recent years passing by vary depending on the number of autobiographical memories being activated in the moment of judging. While a body of evidence shows affect to have an impact on both prospective and retrospective judgments on the experience of time for short periods, the effect of valence of memories on the experience of the passage of long intervals has not been examined yet. Thus, we asked 282 people to retrieve five either emotionally positive or negative memories from the last 5years before judging the subjectively experienced passage of time of these years. However, positive and negative events differ in some ways beyond valence, e.g., the ascribed impact on the participants' subsequent lives as well as the stability of ascribed affective intensity: The latter decreased over time for negative but not for positive memories while ascribed impact was markedly higher for positive memories. Results indicate no significant differences between the two conditions, even after controlling for the aforementioned differences. However, exploratory analyses show that participants rate time to have passed faster, the longer the activated memories dated back on average, a result that seems in line with contextual-change hypothesis.

Does the Attentional Boost Effect Depend on the Intentionality of Encoding? Investigating the Mechanisms Underlying Memory for Visual Objects Presented at Behaviorally Relevant Moments in Time.

Pictures in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream are better remembered when they are simultaneously presented with targets of an unrelated detection task than when they are presented with distractors. However, it is unclear whether this so-called "attentional boost effect" depends on the intentionality of encoding. While there are studies suggesting that the attentional boost effect even occurs when encoding is incidental, there are several methodological issues with these studies, which may have undermined the incidental encoding instructions. The present study (N = 141) investigated the role of the intentionality of encoding with an improved experimental design. Specifically, to prevent a spill-over of intentional resources to the pictures in the RSVP stream, the speed of the stream was increased (to four pictures per second) and each picture was presented only once during the course of the experiment. An attentional boost effect was only found when encoding was intentional but not when encoding was incidental. Interestingly, memory performance for incidentally encoded pictures was nevertheless substantially above chance, independently of whether images were presented with search-relevant targets or distractors. These results suggest that the attentional boost effect is a memory advantage that occurs only under intentional encoding conditions, and that perceptual long-term memory representations are formed as a natural product of perception, independently of the presence of behaviorally relevant events.

Long-Lasting Verbatim Memory for the Words of Books After a Single Reading Without Any Learning Intention.

The present study reveals an intriguing ability of our human memory: when reading a book once without any intention of learning, we store long-lasting verbatim memories of the words written in the book without being aware of it. Participants read a book chapter consisting of 32 pages (3,772 words) once without knowing that their memory would be tested later. In memory tests immediately after reading and 1 week after reading, they were asked to remember exactly which word was written at a specific position in the book chapter. Only memory for words was tested that were theme-unrelated and non-central. To measure memory, a two-alternative forced choice recognition test was used where a page was shown either as read before or with the replacement of one single word by a synonym. For each response, participants indicated whether the response was based on phenomenal memory experience (recollection or familiarity) or guessing. In the immediate test, participants claimed to have phenomenal memory experience for about a quarter of the tested positions, truly remembering the word in about half of cases. In the 1-week-delayed test, phenomenal memory experience was nearly entirely absent and completely uninformative. When claiming to have no phenomenal memory experience, participants still truly remembered the word for about 10% of the tested positions in both the immediate test and the 1-week-delayed test, without any forgetting. These findings demonstrate that we store more from read texts in memory than commonly believed.

The Practice of Experimental Psychology: An Inevitably Postmodern Endeavor.

The aim of psychology is to understand the human mind and behavior. In contemporary psychology, the method of choice to accomplish this incredibly complex endeavor is the experiment. This dominance has shaped the whole discipline from the self-concept as an empirical science and its very epistemological and theoretical foundations, via research practice and the scientific discourse to teaching. Experimental psychology is grounded in the scientific method and positivism, and these principles, which are characteristic for modern thinking, are still upheld. Despite this apparently stalwart adherence to modern principles, experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are hardly acknowledged as such. Many psychologists take pride in being "real natural scientists" because they conduct experiments, but it is particularly difficult for psychologists to evade certain elements of postmodern thinking in view of the specific nature of their subject matter. Postmodernism as a philosophy emerged in the 20th century as a response to the perceived inadequacy of the modern approach and as a means to understand the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the times. Therefore, postmodernism offers both valuable insights into the very nature of experimental psychology and fruitful ideas on improving experimental practice to better reflect the complexities and ambiguities of human mind and behavior. Analyzing experimental psychology along postmodern lines begins by discussing the implications of transferring the scientific method from fields with rather narrowly defined phenomena-the natural sciences-to a much broader and more heterogeneous class of complex phenomena, namely the human mind and behavior. This ostensibly modern experimental approach is, however, per se riddled with postmodern elements: (re-)creating phenomena in an experimental setting, including the hermeneutic processes of generating hypotheses and interpreting results, is no carbon copy of "reality" but rather an active construction which reflects irrevocably the pre-existing ideas of the investigator. These aspects, analyzed by using postmodern concepts like hyperreality and simulacra, did not seep in gradually but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology, and they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science. We illustrate this theoretical analysis with the help of two examples, namely experiments on free will and visual working memory. The postmodern perspective reveals some pitfalls in the practice of experimental psychology. Furthermore, we suggest that accepting the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs in psychology and thinking more along postmodern lines would actually clarify many theoretical problems in experimental psychology.

Detailed long-term memory for unattended, irrelevant, and incidentally encoded auditory information.

At any moment, a myriad of information reaches our senses, of which only a small fraction is attentively processed. A long-held belief is that unattended information is only weakly processed if attentional demands are high and the unattended information is irrelevant, leaving no recognizable trace in long-term memory. The present study challenges this assumption. Participants (N = 51) were simultaneously presented with a rapid visual stream of words and an auditory stream of everyday sounds, with the instruction to attend to the visual stream and detect word repetitions, and to avoid distraction by the irrelevant sounds. No mention was made that their memory would be tested later. Memory for the sounds was tested in a surprise two-alternative forced choice recognition test with similar foil sounds. Half of the sounds were tested immediately after encoding, the other half after a delay of 24 hr. Memory performance was substantially above chance in both the immediate and the 24-hr delayed test, without significant forgetting across time. These results demonstrate that detailed and durable long-term memory representations are formed for unattended and irrelevant information that is incidentally encoded in a different sensory modality than the attended information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Do students really prefer repeated rereading over testing when studying textbooks? A reexamination.

Experimental studies have shown that testing promotes better long-term retention than repeated rereading. Regarding implications for educational practice, based on a survey study seemingly showing that students prefer repeated rereading over testing when studying [Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17, 471-479. doi: 10.1080/09658210802647009 ], it has been concluded that increasing the number of tests may boost students' achievement. However, a closer look at the survey study reveals that "repeated rereading" has been operationalised in terms of "restudying" which represents a term that may subsume a variety of study strategies. We reexamined the study behaviour of students in a more fine-grained way by surveying both their hypothetical (Study 1) and real (Study 2) study behaviour when restudying texts. Results showed that rereading is preferred only by few students early in the learning process, with almost all shifting to testing late in the learning process, and that rereading is mainly performed in terms of "rereading not understood parts", and rarely in terms of "repeated rereading". These results indicate that the implications of the testing effect for educational practice may have to be reconsidered.

Tests improve memory - no matter if you feel good or bad while taking them.

Based on studies demonstrating that testing promotes better long-term retention than restudying (i.e., the testing effect), testing has been recommended as a powerful tool to boost knowledge acquisition in educational settings. However, a factor ubiquitous in real-life learning contexts has been ignored to date: the learner's affective state. To examine whether the learner's affective state influences the testing effect, we conducted two experiments. We employed a standard testing-effect paradigm consisting of an initial study phase and a subsequent restudy/testing phase, and induced negative, neutral, or positive affective states either before participants initially studied short expository texts (Experiment 1) or before they restudied or were tested on them (Experiment 2). After one week, memory for the texts was tested. In both experiments, previously tested material was better remembered than previously restudied material. However, in none of the experiments, did the memory advantage of testing over restudying vary as a function of affect condition. Hence, the present results suggest that testing seems to benefit long-term retention independently of the learner's affective state.

Time passes too fast? Then recall the past! - Evidence for a reminiscence heuristic in passage of time judgments.

Memory-based approaches suggest that retrospective judgments concerning the passage of lifetime are based on available meaningful experiences. However, an open question is whether passage of time judgments reflect the objective amount of important experiences or rather the amount of memories that are currently activated in the moment of judging. To examine this issue, we asked 473 participants to judge the passage of the last five years either before or after recalling as many important autobiographical events as possible from the last five years. Activating memories before the judgment slowed the experienced passage of time, but only if participants recalled at least four memories. For participants recalling less than four memories, the opposite effect was found: few activated memories had even an accelerating effect. Interestingly, the experienced speed of time did not continuously decrease with a rising number of memories activated: Below and above the threshold of four memories, passage of time judgments were unrelated to the number of activated memories. These results indicate that passage of time judgments are based on currently activated memories, suggesting that the common phenomenon of time flying reflects the effect of a reminiscence heuristic.

Long-Term Memory for Haptically Explored Objects: Fidelity, Durability, Incidental Encoding, and Cross-Modal Transfer.

The question of how many of our perceptual experiences are stored in long-term memory has received considerable attention. The present study examined long-term memory for haptic experiences. Blindfolded participants haptically explored 168 everyday objects (e.g., a pen) for 10 s each. In a blindfolded memory test, they indicated which of two objects from the same basic-level category (e.g., two different pens) had been touched before. As shown in Experiment 1 (N = 26), memory was nearly perfect when tested immediately after exploration (94%) and still high when tested after 1 week (85%). As shown in Experiment 2 (N = 43), when participants explored the objects without the intention to memorize them, memory in a 1-week delayed surprise test was still high (79%), even when assessed with a cross-modal visual memory test (73%). These results indicate that detailed, durable, long-term memory representations are stored as a natural product of haptic perception.

Testing Memories of Personally Experienced Events: The Testing Effect Seems Not to Persist in Autobiographical Memory.

Numerous studies have shown that retrieving contents from memory in a test improves long-term retention for those contents, even when compared to restudying (i.e., the "testing effect"). The beneficial effect of retrieval practice has been demonstrated for many different types of memory representations; however, one particularly important memory system has not been addressed in previous testing effect research: autobiographical memory. The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of retrieving memories for personally experienced events on long-term memory for those events. In an initial elicitation session, participants described memories for personally experienced events in response to a variety of cue words. In a retrieval practice/restudy session the following day, they repeatedly practiced retrieval for half of their memories by recalling and writing down the previously described events; the other half of memories was restudied by rereading and copying the event descriptions. Long-term retention of all previously collected memories was assessed at two different retention intervals (2 weeks and 13 weeks). In the retrieval practice session, a hypermnesic effect emerged, with memory performance increasing across the practice cycles. Long-term memory performance significantly dropped from the 2-weeks to the 13-weeks retention interval, but no significant difference in memory performance was observed between previously repeatedly retrieved and previously repeatedly restudied memories. Thus, in autobiographical memory, retrieval practice seems to be no more beneficial for long-term retention than repeated re-exposure.

Testing emotional memories: does negative emotional significance influence the benefit received from testing?

A large body of research shows that emotionally significant stimuli are better stored in memory. One question that has received much less attention is how emotional memories are influenced by factors that influence memories after the initial encoding of stimuli. Intriguingly, several recent studies suggest that post-encoding factors do not differ in their effects on emotional and neutral memories. However, to date, only detrimental factors have been addressed. In the present study, we examined whether emotionally negative memories are differentially influenced by a well-known beneficial factor: the testing of memories. We employed a standard cued recall testing-effect paradigm where participants studied cue-target pairs for negative and neutral target pictures. In a subsequent post-encoding phase, one third of the cue-target pairs were tested and one third restudied; the remaining third served as control pairs. After one week, memory for all cue-target pairs was tested. While replicating both the testing effect and the emotional enhancement effect, no differences between negative and neutral memories in the benefits received from testing and restudying were observed. Thus, it seems to be true that post-encoding factors do not influence emotional memories in any other way than neutral memories, even when they are beneficial.

High-Fidelity Visual Long-Term Memory within an Unattended Blink of an Eye.

What is stored in long-term memory from current sensations is a question that has attracted considerable interest. Over time, several prominent theories have consistently proposed that only attended sensory information leaves a durable memory trace whereas unattended information is not stored beyond the current moment, an assumption that seems to be supported by abundant empirical evidence. Here we show, by using a more sensitive memory test than in previous studies, that this is actually not true. Observers viewed a rapid stream of real-world object pictures overlapped by words (presentation duration per stimulus: 500 ms, interstimulus interval: 200 ms), with the instruction to attend to the words and detect word repetitions, without knowing that their memory would be tested later. In a surprise two-alternative forced-choice recognition test, memory for the unattended object pictures was tested. Memory performance was substantially above chance, even when detailed feature knowledge was necessary for correct recognition, even when tested 24 h later, and even although participants reported that they do not have any memories. These findings suggests that humans have the ability to store at high speed detailed copies of current visual stimulations in long-term memory independently of current intentions and the current attentional focus.