Kurzarbeit - Kosten und Finanzierung

"Durch das Instrument der Kurzarbeit sollen den Arbeitnehmern bei vorübergehendem Arbeitsausfall die Arbeitsplätze und den Betrieben die eingarbeiteten Arbeitskräfte erhalten werden. Den Unternehmen wird die Möglichkeit gegeben, bei vorübergehendem Arbeitsmangel ihre Personalkosten nicht durch Entlassungen, sondern durch Arbeitszeitverkürzungen anzupassen. Die Arbeitnehmer erhalten für die Ausfallstunden von der Bundesanstalt Kurzarbeitergeld (Kug) in Höhe von 68% des Nettolohnes. In dem Beitrag wird beispielhaft für das Jahr 1977 untersucht, welche Kosten und finanziellen Wirkungen durch die Institution der Kurzarbeit ausgelöst werden. Der durchschnittlichen Zahl von 231 000 Kurzarbeitern (555 000 Fälle) und den durch Kurzarbeit ausgefallenen Arbeitsstunden entsprechen 1977 gesamte Personalkosten in Höhe von 1524 Mio DM. Die Finanzierung dieser Kurzarbeitskosten wird in einer Modellrechnung ermittelt." (Autorenreferat, IAB-Doku)Kurzarbeit - Finanzierung, Betriebskosten, Kostenträger

Kurzarbeit - Strukturen und Beschäftigungswirkung

"Die Studie zeigt, daß die Kurzarbeit erst in den 1970er Jahren erhebliche Bedeutung erlangte und daß sich ihre Verbreitung, im Gegensatz zur Arbeitslosigkeit vor allem auf das Warenproduzierende Gewerbe konzentriert. Bergbau, Verarbeitendes Gewerbe und Baugewerbe verzeichneten in den letzten Jahren über 90% der Kurzarbeiter, jedoch nur 50% der Beschäftigten. Aufgrund dieser Branchenstruktur und des Vorherrschens in den Bereichen der Produktion und Fabrikation ist auch der überdurchschnittlich hohe Anteil (78%) männlicher Arbeitskräfte unter den Kurzarbeitern zu erklären. Für 1978 errechnet sich aus der Statistik der Ausfallzeiten wie auch aus den Haushaltszahlen der Bundesanstalt ein Kurzarbeitsvolumen von 86 Millionen Ausfallstunden. Dem entspricht bei einer durchschnittlichen Jahresarbeitszeit von 1700 Stunden eine äquivalente Arbeitsleistung von 50 000 Personen. In dieser Größenordnung wurde also durch die Kurzarbeit ein weiterer Beschäftigungsrückgang vermieden. Die Entlastungswirkung auf die Arbeitslosenzahl kann für 1978 auf 33 000 Personen veranschlagt werden. Die Beschäftigungswirkung dieses Instruments wird am Beispiel des Maschinenbaus in Baden-Württemberg, in den letzten Jahren ein Branchenschwerpunkt der Kurzarbeit, verdeutlich." (Autorenreferat, IAB-Doku)Kurzarbeit, Beschäftigungseffekte, Kurzarbeitergeld, Wirtschaftszweige

Threat induction biases processing of emotional expressions

Threats can derive from our physical or social surroundings and bias the way we perceive and interpret a given situation. They can be signaled by peers through facial expressions, as expressed anger or fear can represent the source of perceived threat. The current study seeks to investigate enhanced attentional state and defensive reflexes associated with contextual threat induced through aversive sounds presented in an emotion recognition paradigm. In a sample of 120 healthy participants, response and gaze behavior revealed differences in perceiving emotional facial expressions between threat and safety conditions: Responses were slower under threat and less accurate. Happy and neutral facial expressions were classified correctly more often in a safety context and misclassified more often as fearful under threat. This unidirectional misclassification suggests that threat applies a negative filter to the perception of neutral and positive information. Eye movements were initiated later under threat, but fixation changes were more frequent and dwell times shorter compared to a safety context. These findings demonstrate that such experimental paradigms are capable of providing insight into how context alters emotion processing at cognitive, physiological, and behavioral levels. Such alterations may derive from evolutionary adaptations necessary for biasing cognitive processing to survive disadvantageous situations. This perspective sets up new testable hypotheses regarding how such levels of explanation may be dysfunctional in patient populations

Oxytocin and social learning in socially anxious men and women

Objective: This study extended a classic self-referential learning paradigm by investigating the effects of intranasally-administered oxytocin in high and low socially anxious participants during social learning, as a function of social anxiety levels and sex. Methods: In a randomized double-blinded design, 160 participants were either given intranasal oxytocin (24 I.U.) or placebo. Subsequently, while lying in an MR scanner, participants were shown neutral faces that were paired with positively, neutrally, or negatively valenced self-referential sentences, during which we measured selfreported arousal and sympathy of the facial stimuli, pupil dilation, and changes in the brain-oxygen-level dependent signal. Four-factor mixed analyses of variance with the between-subjects factors group (high socially anxious vs. low socially anxious), substance (oxytocin vs. placebo), and sex (male vs. female) and the within-subjects factor sentence valence (positive vs. neutral vs. negative) were conducted for each measure, respectively. Results: Administration of intranasal oxytocin yielded an increase in sympathy ratings in high socially anxious compared to low socially anxious individuals and decreased arousal ratings for positively-conditioned faces in low socially anxious participants. As an objective physiological measure of arousal, pupil dilation mirrored the behavioral results. Oxytocin effects on neural activation in the insula interacted with anxiety levels and sex: low socially anxious individuals yielded lower activation under oxytocin than placebo; the converse was observed in high socially anxious individuals. This interaction also differed between sexes, as men yielded higher activation levels than women. These findings were more prominent for positively- and negatively-conditioned faces. Within the amygdala, high socially anxious men yielded higher activation than high socially anxious women in the left hemisphere, and low socially anxious men yielded higher activation than low socially anxious women from positively- and negatively-conditioned faces, though no influence of oxytocin was detected. Conclusion: These results suggest oxytocin-induced behavioral, physiological, and neural changes as a function of social learning in socially low and high anxious individuals. These findings challenge the amygdalocentric view of the role of emotions in social learning, instead contributing to the growing body of findings implicating the insula therein, revealing an interaction between oxytocin, sex, and emotional valence. Such discoveries raise an interesting set of questions regarding the computational goals of regions such as the insula in emotional learning and how neural activity can play a diagnostic or prognostic role in social anxiety, potentially leading to new treatment opportunities that may combine oxytocin and neurofeedback differentially for men and women

Don't Make Me Angry: Frustration-Induced Anger and Its Link to Aggression in Women With Borderline Personality Disorder

Aggression is a prominent interpersonal dysfunction of individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD). In BPD aggression is predominantly reactive in nature, often triggered by frustration, provocation, or social threat and is associated with intense anger and an inability to regulate this strong, negative emotion. Building on previous research, we were interested in investigating negative emotionality in general and anger in particular in women with BPD before and after frustration induction. To achieve this, 60 medication-free women with BPD and 32 healthy women rated the intensity of negative emotions (angry, frustrated, upset, embarrassed, nervous) before and after performing a Titrated Mirror Tracing Task, which reliably induces frustration and distress. As expected, women with BPD reported significantly greater intensity of negative emotions before and after frustration than healthy women. Specifically, they showed a significantly stronger frustration-induced increase in anger, while other negative emotions remained unaffected by frustration induction. This anger increase was significantly related to aggressive behavior reported in the 2 weeks prior to the experiment, as well as to the level of frustration experienced in the experiment itself, but not with emotion dysregulation. The current data confirm the important role of frustration-induced anger independent of emotion dysregulation in BPD, in particular with regard to aggression, a prominent interpersonal dysfunction of this disorder. These findings underline the importance of interventions with particular focus on anger

The Influences of Context on Emotion Recognition

Threats can derive from our physical or social surroundings and bias the way in which we perceive and interpret a given situation. They can be signaled by peers through facial expressions, while expressed anger or fear can also represent the source of perceived threat. The current study aims at investigating enhanced attentional state and defensive reflexes associated with contextual threat induced through aversive sounds presented in an emotion recognition paradigm, as a first step toward understanding social processing under different circumstances. In a sample of 120 healthy participants, response and gaze behavior revealed differences in perceiving emotional facial expressions between threat and safety conditions