Wolfgang Ellermeier - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Wolfgang Ellermeier

Psychologie in Erziehung und Unterricht

Mit dem Ziel, die Suizidprävention an Schulen zu verbessern, wurden Lehrkräfte und Schulsozialarb... more Mit dem Ziel, die Suizidprävention an Schulen zu verbessern, wurden Lehrkräfte und Schulsozialarbeiter*innen als Gatekeeper ausgebildet. Während bisherige Studien zeigen, dass Gatekeeper-Trainings regelmäßig zu einer Zunahme suizidbezogenen Wissens führen, ist noch nicht erwiesen, wie dieses theoretische Wissen in handlungsbezogenes Wissen umgesetzt werden kann und ob es sich auch auf das Verhalten auswirkt. Deshalb wurden N = 150 Lehrkräfte und in Schulen beratend Tätige zufällig einer Wartelisten-Kontrollgruppe oder einer Trainingsgruppe (12 Stunden) zugewiesen. Handlungsbezogenes Wissen wurde anhand der Reaktionen auf eine fiktive Situation gemessen. Die Anzahl geführter Gespräche wurde vor und nach der Intervention erfasst. Die Teilnehmenden verfügten nach der Gatekeeper-Fortbildung nicht nur über signifikant mehr suizidbezogenes Wissen, sondern schnitten auch in ihrem handlungsbezogenen Wissen besser ab als die Kontrollgruppe. Vor allem aber initiierten sie signifikant mehr Krisengespräche. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sich durch ein intensives, aktives Üben betonendes und längerdauerndes Training nicht nur das suizidbezogene Wissen zukünftiger Gatekeeper, sondern auch das reale Krisenmanagement verbessern lässt.

Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspsychologie und Pädagogische Psychologie

Zusammenfassung. Um die Suizidprävention an Schulen zu verbessern, wurden psychoedukative Worksho... more Zusammenfassung. Um die Suizidprävention an Schulen zu verbessern, wurden psychoedukative Workshops für Schüler_innen implementiert und angeboten. N=200 Schüler_innen der 8.–10. Jahrgangsstufe wurden zufällig einer Experimental- oder Kontrollgruppe zugewiesen. Vor und nach dem Training sowie nach drei Monaten wurden sie zu ihrem hilfesuchenden und hilfegebendem Verhalten sowie ihrer depressiven Symptomatik befragt. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass besonders die als stärker suizidgefährdet eingestuften Jugendlichen von dem Training durch eine Abnahme ihrer depressiven Symptomatik profitierten. Schüler_innen der Kontrollgruppe verbesserten sich demgegenüber nicht signifikant in ihrer depressiven Symptomatik. Für das hilfesuchende ebenso wie das hilfegebende Verhalten zeigten sich positive Trends, die jedoch nicht statistisch signifikant wurden. Diese Ergebnisse zeigen – wenn auch mit Limitationen aufgrund von Ausfällen durch die Coronapandemie 2020 und durch ein restriktives Vor...

Proceedings of the ICA congress, 2019

In order to study noise annoyance in the laboratory, a total of N=59 participants were exposed to... more In order to study noise annoyance in the laboratory, a total of N=59 participants were exposed to short 5-s segments of pass-by recordings of motor vehicles presented at levels ranging from 50 to 70 dB(A). In Experiment 1, they just rated the annoyance due to sounds on a visual-analogue scale, in Experiment 2, they had to simultaneously perform a visual multiple-object tracking task. Annoyance was judged to be lower when participants were engaged in the cognitively demanding task (in Experiment 2). Presenting sounds spanning two different decibel ranges in separate blocks (in Experiment 1) did not affect the function relating level to perceived annoyance very much, suggesting the judgments to be robust with respect to stimulus range effects. Across both experiments, the magnitude of simultaneously recorded phasic skin conductance responses increased significantly with the sound pressure level of the annoying vehicle sounds. Finally, annoyance ratings tended to be elevated in participants describing themselves as noise sensitive, as assessed using a 52-item questionnaire completed after they had judged the sounds. Observing such systematic relations between noise sensitivity, annoyance, task load during exposure, and psychophysiological responses in the laboratory might contribute to enhancing our understanding of noise annoyance.

In noise-control engineering, one is often faced with the task of identifying the most problemati... more In noise-control engineering, one is often faced with the task of identifying the most problematic of several simultaneous sound sources. Traditionally, this has been done by deriving sound pressure (or intensity) maps by means of a microphone array. This approach does not, however, take psychoacoustic attributes into account. Therefore, a method for deriving loudness maps was developed in an earlier study [Song, Internoise2004, paper 271]. In this study two experiments were done to investigate to which extent perceived loudness depends on the distribution of individual sound sources. Three loudspeakers were positioned 1.5 m from the centre of the listener’s head, one straight ahead, and two 10 degrees to the right and left, respectively. Six participants matched the loudness of either one, or two simultaneous sounds (narrow-band noises with 1-kHz, and 3.15-kHz centre frequencies) to a 2-kHz, 60-dB SPL narrow-band noise placed in the frontal loudspeaker. The two sounds were either o...

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine how the intelligibility of spoken sentenc... more The purpose of the present investigation was to examine how the intelligibility of spoken sentences in Chinese, English, German, and Japanese changes as the duration of segments locally reversed in time increases. Thirty-five or eighteen sentences spoken by both a male and a female speaker in each language were extracted from a database (NTT-AT, Multilingual Speech Database 2002). The sentences were divided into segments of equal duration (20-170 ms); each segment was shaped with 7.5-ms cosine ramps, reversed in time, and subsequently joined with the other segments in the original order. The resulting utterances were presented diotically to 28 native speakers through headphones. The participants were instructed to write down what they heard without guessing. Percentage of correct syllables or morae was measured as an index of intelligibility. Intelligibility was above 90% when segment duration was 45 ms, but dropped with increasing segment duration to below 15% at 120 ms. The 50% in...

Getriebegeräusche werden wegen immer leiserer Motoren häufig nicht mehr von diesen maskiert und t... more Getriebegeräusche werden wegen immer leiserer Motoren häufig nicht mehr von diesen maskiert und tragen deshalb wesentlich zum Klangbild bei. Damit rückt auch die durch sie hervorgerufene Lästigkeit ins Interesse. Zwar gibt es bereits mehrere Studien zur psychoakustischen Lästigkeit (im Folgenden nur ” Lästigkeit“) im Allgemeinen, v.a. [1, 2], typischerweise interessiert aber immer der konkrete Anwendungsfall, welcher sehr speziell sein kann, so zum Beispiel Geräusche von Gebläsen [3] oder Solarzellenwechselrichter [4]. Da es nach unserem Wissen noch keine psychoakustischen Untersuchungen dieser Art speziell für Getriebe gibt, wird in der vorliegenden Studie in einem Hörversuch der Fragstellung nachgegangen, welche Faktoren zur Lästigkeit von Industriegetrieben beitragen.

The fact that immediate serial recall of verbal, or phonologically encoded material from working ... more The fact that immediate serial recall of verbal, or phonologically encoded material from working memory is impaired while listening to sound with no relevance for the task at hand is termed the irrelevant sound effect. It is particularly strong with background speech (hence the term irrelevant speech effect) but it also occurs with other stimuli containing variations in frequency or spectral content. It is practically absent when stationary sounds such as white noise are used as distractors, or when the irrelevant sound merely contains amplitude variations (for a review, see [1]).

Wechselrichter, wie sie in Photovoltaik-Anlagen Verwendung finden, emittieren Geräusche im gesamt... more Wechselrichter, wie sie in Photovoltaik-Anlagen Verwendung finden, emittieren Geräusche im gesamten hörbaren Spektrum, oftmals mit besonders prominenten Pegelspitzen im Bereich von 16–18 kHz. Die Akustik – und die subjektive Auswirkung – dieser Geräusche wird sowohl von Kunden als auch von Entwicklern häufig als problematisch angesehen. Allerdings gibt es noch kaum publizierte Messungen und unseres Wissens keine systematisch erhobenen subjektiven Bewertungen dieser Geräuschquellen. Deshalb wurden sowohl aufwändige akustische Messungen (siehe [1]) als auch psychoakustische Analysen von Wechselrichter-Geräuschen durchgeführt, um zu ermitteln, ob sich der subjektive Klangeindruck durch geeignete objektive oder psychoakustische Parameter vorhersagen lässt.

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2021

Psychophysiology, 2019

To study whether psychophysiological indicators are suitable measures of user experience in a dig... more To study whether psychophysiological indicators are suitable measures of user experience in a digital exercise game (exergame), a laboratory study employing both psychophysiological and self-report measures was conducted. 66 participants cycled for ten minutes on an ergometer while pupil diameter, skin conductance and heart rate were measured; afterwards they completed a user experience questionnaire. The participants performed under three experimental conditions varying between subjects: active gaming (participants controlled the altitude of a digital bird by varying their pedal rate in order to catch letters flying across the screen), observing a game (they observed a replay of another participant's game) and no game (blank screen). Only the gaming condition showed evidence for statistically significant pupil dilations-indicating emotional arousal-in response to game events (catching a letter) or corresponding points in time. The observational condition did not differ statistically from the no-game control condition. Self-reports also indicated that the gaming condition was rated most fun and least demanding. Other psychophysiological indicators (heart rate, skin conductance) showed no systematic effects in response to game events, rather they steadily increased during training. Thus pupil responses were shown to be suitable indicators of positive emotional reactions to game events and user experience in a (training) game.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2018

Task-irrelevant speech and other temporally changing sounds are known to interfere with the short... more Task-irrelevant speech and other temporally changing sounds are known to interfere with the short-term memorization of ordered verbal materials, as compared to silence or stationary sounds. It has been argued that this disruption of short-term memory (STM) may be due to (a) interference of automatically encoded acoustical fluctuations with the process of serial rehearsal or (b) attentional capture by salient task-irrelevant information. To disentangle the contributions of these 2 processes, the authors investigated whether the disruption of serial recall is due to the semantic or acoustical properties of task-irrelevant speech (Experiment 1). They found that performance was affected by the prosody (emotional intonation), but not by the semantics (word meaning), of irrelevant speech, suggesting that the disruption of serial recall is due to interference of precategorically encoded changing-state sound (with higher fluctuation strength of emotionally intonated speech). The authors further demonstrated a functional distinction between this form of distraction and attentional capture by contrasting the effect of (a) speech prosody and (b) sudden prosody deviations on both serial and nonserial STM tasks (Experiment 2). Although serial recall was again sensitive to the emotional prosody of irrelevant speech, performance on a nonserial missing-item task was unaffected by the presence of neutral or emotionally intonated speech sounds. In contrast, sudden prosody changes tended to impair performance on both tasks, suggesting an independent effect of attentional capture.

Proceedings of Fechner Day, 2012

Stevens' direct scaling methods have been widely used in basic and applied psychophysical researc... more Stevens' direct scaling methods have been widely used in basic and applied psychophysical research. They rest on the assumption that observers are capable of processing ratios on a subjective intensity scale. Axioms fundamental to this assumption have only recently been formulated, and empirically tested for a limited number of sensory continua, most notably loudness. The present study attempts to extend this line of research to the perception of pitch. N=13 participants were asked to adjust pitch intervals defined by pure tones in a frequency range between 264 and 699 Hz to specific ratios (e.g., 1/2 or 2/3) of a standard interval. Whereas most participants' adjustments were in accordance with the axiom of monotonicity, there were a few significant violations of commutativity and multiplicativity, particularly if the standard interval exceeded an octave. In contrast to what has been found for loudness, however, multiplicativity still held for most observers. Systematic effects of stimulus range and musical training appear to distinguish pitch scaling from other quantifiable sensations. In a typical application of direct psychophysical scaling, the observer is asked to assign numbers to the intensities of sensations (Stevens, 1956, 1975). That is, the participant is either responding with a numeral to the intensity of stimulus that is being presented (magnitude estimation), or the numerical values are presented and the participant is asked to adjust the stimulus intensity accordingly (magnitude production). In order to obtain valid estimates of sensations by these direct scaling methods, the estimated or adjusted magnitudes must be meaningful on a ratio scale. Fundamental conditions (axioms) to allow the interpretation of an observer's scaling behavior have been formulated by Narens (1996). Some of these axioms-monotonicity, commutativity, and multiplicativity-are empirically testable. An extension of the axiomatization formulated by Narens (1996) is inherent to Luce's theory of psychophysical scaling, and it allows to fractionate magnitudes of sensations. According to Narens (1996) and Luce (2002), magnitude estimates or productions are valid only if the commutativity property (or threshold proportion commutativity Luce, 2002) can be proven empirically. Commutativity holds if the outcome of two successive adjustments (e.g., 2× as loud and 3× as loud) is independent of the order in which these adjustments are

Torgerson's (1961) conjecture that subjects cannot meaningfully distinguish perceptual ratios and... more Torgerson's (1961) conjecture that subjects cannot meaningfully distinguish perceptual ratios and differences has triggered a continuing debate in psychophysics on what constitutes adequate scaling methodology. It is shown that an axiomatic theory of magnitude estimation proposed by Narens (1996, 1997) sheds new light on this problem by dropping the assumption that subjects can report sensation magnitudes veridically. Furthermore, this theory provides qualitative predictions suited to test Torgerson's conjecture, by checking whether ratio and difference productions may be combined commutatively, which through the theory implies that the same psychological operation underlies both tasks. A loudness production experiment in which six subjects were instructed to double, or triple loudness, and to add a small, or a large loudness difference to a standard revealed that the two kinds of instructions were indeed commutative in most instances, consistent with Torgerson (1961) and other empirical results. Only two subjects showed small, but significant violations of commutativity. These results, when interpreted in the context of Narens' (1997) axiomatic theory, suggest that most individuals' ratio and difference adjustments can be simultaneously represented as ratios. This conclusion, which implies Torgerson's conjecture, is derived using methods that are more rigorous than those employed previously to tackle the problem.

Proceedings of the Forum …, 2005

While the literature stresses the importance of expert panels and of training in evaluating sound... more While the literature stresses the importance of expert panels and of training in evaluating sound-quality attributes, the abilities of experts have typically only been investigated for a very limited range of tasks (eg naming timbral qualities). It is therefore the aim of this study ...

ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop …, 2003

One of the major goals of current sound-quality research has been to develop automated, objective... more One of the major goals of current sound-quality research has been to develop automated, objective metrics of perceptual attributes. These metrics have to be validated against subjective measures of the attributes which they claim to capture. To that end, typically, ...

Noise Control Engineering Journal, 2003

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2004

Fluctuation strength is one of the major psychoacoustic variables considered in sound-quality eva... more Fluctuation strength is one of the major psychoacoustic variables considered in sound-quality evaluation. Zwicker and Fastl [Psychoacoustics (Springer, Berlin, 1999)] summarize recommendations for its computation, which have already been implemented in various software applications, even though the data basis is rather limited. In particular, the dependency of fluctuation strength on modulation frequency and modulation depth has seemingly never been tested in a factorial design. Therefore, in experiment I both of these factors were varied simultaneously in order to create 54 different frequency-modulated sinusoids. The task of the subjects was to directly estimate the perceived magnitude of fluctuation strength. The results do not conform well with the prevalent model of fluctuation strength. In experiment II this finding was further investigated by varying only one factor at a time. The results show that large individual differences, particularly in the effect of modulation frequen...

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1987

Henning [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 42, 1325–1334 (1967)] proposed a modified energy-detector model of a... more Henning [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 42, 1325–1334 (1967)] proposed a modified energy-detector model of auditory discrimination and detection. This model, as well as several other models, predicts that random variations of the amplitudes of the signals to be discriminated in a frequency-discrimination experiment should make the task much harder. However, Henning [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 39, 336–339 (1966)] reported that, for signal frequencies less than 4000 Hz, variations in amplitude did not lead to the expected impairment on the frequency-discrimination task. A reexamination of this question indicates that when the appropriate control comparisons are made, subjects do in fact show the predicted impairment. Nevertheless a second experiment suggests that this result may not provide a good test of Henning's (1967) energy detection model since variations in pitch with intensity, which are not considered in the model, are likely to be involved. For this reason, a third experiment was conducte...

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1998

A discrete tone is defined as ‘‘prominent’’ if the level of the tone exceeds the level of the noi... more A discrete tone is defined as ‘‘prominent’’ if the level of the tone exceeds the level of the noise contained in its critical band by 6 dB. Tonal or narrow-band noise components of tire sounds often fall short of this level, but are nevertheless rated as prominent by test drivers. Tonality is closely related to the sensation of pitch strength, which depends upon the sensation level, bandwidth, duration, and frequency of the tonal components present. In order to compare a number of computational procedures for calculating the tonality of sounds, a broad range of tire noises, synthesized tire sounds, and artificial tone–noise mixtures in which the level and bandwidth of the tonal components was varied, were subjectively assessed using (a) a paired-comparison technique, and (b) categorical judgments collected from about 60 listeners. They were objectively assessed by tone-to-noise and prominence-ratio measurements, and by a new method based on a model of pitch sensation which accounts ...