Imagination inflation for action events: Repeated imaginings lead to illusory recollections

In two experiments, subjects heard simple action statements (e.g., “Break the toothpick”), and, in some conditions, they also performed the action or imagined performing the action. In a second session that occurred at a later point (10 min, 24 h, 1 week, or 2 weeks later), subjects imagined performing actions one, three, or five times. Some imagined actions represented statements heard, imagined, or performed in the first session, whereas other statements were new in the second session. During a third (test) phase, subjects were instructed to recognize statements only if they had occurred during the first session and, if recognized, to tell whether the action statement had been carried out, imagined, or merely heard. The primary finding was that increasing the number of imaginings during the second session caused subjects to remember later that they had performed an action during the first session when in fact they had not (imagination inflation). This outcome occurred both for statements that subjects had heard but not performed during the first session and for statements that had never been heard during the first session. The results are generally consistent with Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay’s (1993) source monitoring framework and reveal a powerful memory illusion: Imagining performance of an action can cause its recollection as actually having been carried out.     

Is this a question? Not for long. The statement bias

Four experiments demonstrate a fundamental ‘statement bias’: questions are more often misremembered as statements than vice versa. The bias increases with increasing item comprehensibility (Experiment 1) and is related to depth of processing at encoding (Experiment 2). When sentences are simply comprehended, the bias is not affected by the truth of the statement underlying the sentence (Experiment 3). The statement bias generalizes to contexts in which people have to express consent with the content of the sentence (Experiment 4) but is somewhat reduced when they are not sure what the correct answer is. Our findings are consistent with the idea that during processing of a sentence the content of the sentence is represented similar to a statement.     

What Do Medical Providers Need to Successfully Intervene with Intimate Partner Violence?

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, medical providers (physicians and mid-level providers) rely on research evidence to inform their medical practice. In order for medical providers to accept their role in diagnosing and intervening with IPV, they need clinical tools and institutional support. This paper explores the tools (prevalence rates, screening questions, intervention strategies) and support (educational, institutional, professional, research) needed to assist medical providers in successfully intervening with IPV. It also looks at the importance of guidelines and expert consensus panel statements to help establish best clinical practices when direct research evidence is lacking or conflicting.     

Judgment and Response Processes across Two Knowledge Domains

Wallsten and Gonzalez-Vallejo (1994) developed the Stochastic Judgment Model to account for true-false judgment and response processes in a single well-defined knowledge domain. This paper generalizes the model to a four-category rating task that encompasses two knowledge domains simultaneously. It then applies the model to an experiment in which Ph.D. students in history and English literature rated confidence in the truth of statements in both domains, and also decided which statement within a pair consisting of one from each domain was more likely true. Constrained versions of the general model fit the rating data very well and accurately predicted the pair-comparison (PC) choices. The results suggest that (a) the mean distance between the true and false statement distributions of confidence was greater in the better known domain; (b) judged confidence variability is greater in the domain of greater knowledge; while simultaneously (c) criterion variability is constant across domains; (d) the extreme response criteria are located symmetrically around the central one; which (e) is located to yield the usual bias to call statements true. Finally, cross-domain PC choices were very well predicted by assuming that respondents judged only the statement in the single domain they knew better and not well predicted by the more common assumption that they compare their levels of confidence in the two statements. Implications for the underlying cognitive processes are discussed including the effects of expertise.     

Schematic knowledge changes what judgments of learning predict in a source memory task

Source monitoring can be influenced by information that is external to the study context, such as beliefs and general knowledge (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). We investigated the extent to which metamnemonic judgments predict memory for items and sources when schematic information about the sources is or is not provided at encoding. Participants made judgments of learning (JOLs) to statements presented by two speakers and were informed of the occupation of each speaker either before or after the encoding session. Replicating earlier work, prior knowledge decreased participants’ tendency to erroneously attribute statements to schematically consistent but episodically incorrect speakers. The origin of this effect can be understood by examining the relationship between JOLs and performance: JOLs were equally predictive of item and source memory in the absence of prior knowledge, but were exclusively predictive of source memory when participants knew of the relationship between speakers and statements during study. Background knowledge determines the information that people solicit in service of metamnemonic judgments, suggesting that these judgments reflect control processes during encoding that reduce schematic errors.     

Deliberating Risks Under Uncertainty: Experience, Trust, and Attitudes in a Swiss Nanotechnology Stakeholder Discussion Group

Scientific knowledge has not stabilized in the current, early, phase of research and development of nanotechnologies creating a challenge to ‘upstream’ public engagement. Nevertheless, the idea that the public should be involved in deliberative discussions and assessments of emerging technologies at this early stage is widely shared among governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders. Many forums for public debate including focus groups, and citizen juries, have thus been organized to explore public opinions on nanotechnologies in a variety of countries over the past few years. In Switzerland the Centre for Technology Assessment (TA-Swiss) organized such a citizen panel in fall 2006. Drawing from an ethnographic study of this panel called ‘publifocus on nanotechnologies, health, and environment’ this paper looks at the ways members of a stakeholder group deal with the epistemic uncertainty in their deliberation of nanotechnologies. By exploring the statements of the participants in the stakeholder discussion group, this paper reconstructs the narratives that constitute the epistemic foundations of the participants’ evaluations of nanotechnologies.

Group decision making by experts: field study of panels evaluating medical technologies

Decision-making processes and their outcomes were investigated in six consensus development conferences at the National Institutes of Health in which panels of experts evaluated new medical technologies. One hundred seventy-seven self-administered questionnaires were obtained from participants in these conferences. Questionnaire data were analyzed along with data derived from content analyses of the six consensus statements (CS) produced by the conferences. Results of these analyses provide considerable support for the hypotheses that the quality of the outcome (i.e., the CS) is determined by the existence of an interaction process, a decision procedure, and a chairperson, which facilitate the exchange of relevant information. Strong disagreements among the panelists appear to inhibit such exchange and harm the quality of the CS. Personal satisfaction appears to be more strongly related to the quality of the process and of the information disseminated than to the quality of the outcome. A clear relation was found between the panelists' status and expertise, their participation in the process, and their contribution to the CS. The pattern of these findings is quite similar to that obtained in laboratory studies. The role of preconference organizational factors, such as the selection of conference questions, panel, and speakers, and the characteristics of the technology are discussed.     

Careful calculation or a leap of faith? A field study of the translation of CBCA ratings to final credibility judgements

This field experiment investigated the influence of Criteria‐Based Content Analysis (CBCA) ratings on ultimate decision accuracy regarding the credibility of children's statements of sexual abuse. Following a selection procedure, based on case facts independent of statement quality, 21 truthful accounts and 10 fabricated accounts of 6‐ to 17‐year olds were analysed. Two experts rated the presence of the CBCA criteria and made overall credibility judgements for each statement. Rater one achieved an overall hit rate of 84% (95% for truthful statements and 60% for fabricated statements) and rater two a hit rate of 81% (81% for both truthful and fabricated statements) but the raters did not always agree. The CBCA criteria appeared more often in the truthful statements compared to the fabricated statements. Additional factors that influenced raters' credibility judgements, besides CBCA scores, are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's representation of knowledge in verification

Thirty-two children aged 8–9 and 10–11 were asked to perform two statement verification tasks. Task 1 consisted of statements that were likely to elicit an affirmative knowledge representation,You have three eyes, is likely to elicit the representation,I have two eyes. Task 2 consisted of statements that were likely to elicit a negative knowledge of representation,You have a tail, is likely to elicit a negative representation,I do not have a tail. All statements varied in two dimensions, polarity (affirmative vs. negative) and truth value (true vs. false). Negative statements in Task 1 were found to be more difficult for children to verify than those in Task 2. This performance difference was used to infer the form of knowledge representation generated in verifying negative statements.     

Cross-linguistic contrasts of verification and answering among children

This review article examines how children verify a statement (e.g.,You are a child. Right or wrong?) and answer a corresponding question (e.g.,Are you a child? Yes or no?) in English, French, Japanese, and Korean. While people verify affirmative statements and answer affirmative questions similarly across the four languages, they answer negative questions differently across the four languages. In English, answering negative questions works in a way opposite to verification (e.g.,Are you not a child? Yes; You are not a child. Wrong). In French,si is used in the place of theyes response in English. In Japanese and Korean, answering negative questions works in a way similar to verification (e.g.,Are you not a child? No; You are not a child. Wrong). The effects of these linguistic characteristics are examined. Findings are: (1) All children across the four languages appear to start answering negative questions using the English system; (2) English-speaking children find verifying negative statements more difficult than answering the corresponding questions but Japanese-speaking children find it less difficult; and (3) while English-speaking and Korean-speaking children find true negative statements more difficult to verify than false negative statements, Japanese-speaking children find them less difficult. Language-universal and language-specific processes in verification and answering are discussed.     

Recommendations for Research Success: One Investigator’s Perspective

This article is a personal reflection by an investigator with over 25 years of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The article: (1) highlights research opportunities for psychologists at the NIH outside of the traditional mental health arena; (2) provides specific recommendations to individual investigators to enhance their likelihood of obtaining NIH funding; (3) specifies needed changes in psychology’s research education and training programs to prepare the next generation of psychologists for research success; and (4) asks the Association of Psychologists in Academic Health Centers to play a lead role in both research training and advocacy. This article is based on a presentation given at the 3rd national conference of the Association of Psychologists in Academic Health Centers in May of 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.     

“Typical Clinton: Brazen It Out”

Ten excerpts of both President Clinton's Grand Jury Testimony of August 17, 1998 and of each of two interviews with Hillary Rodham Clinton (Today Show, January 27, 1998; Good Morning America, January 28, 1998) were analyzed. In all of them, the topic under discussion was the President's insistence on his innocence in the Lewinsky case. Comparisons between the President and First Lady revealed long and short within-speaker pauses, respectively. His replies to questions average more than twice the length of hers. Comparisons were also made with other speech genres, including modern presidential inaugural rhetoric. In particular, President Clinton's statement of his innocence at the conclusion of an educational press conference on January 26, 1998 and his prepared statement at the beginning of his Grand Jury Testimony were found to vary notably from all the other corpora. Both are characterized by several of Ekman's (1985, p. 286) behavioral cues for the detection of deception.     

Placebos and the UK medical research council — and the consumer perspective

The UK Medical Research Council, in order to further its mission of maintaining and improving human health, supports a substantial number of clinical trials on a wide variety of medical questions; some of these trials involve the use of placebos as controls or to maintain blinding. Before providing support, proposed trials are carefully reviewed to assess scientific quality, and to determine whether a placebo is required and is ethical — in addition to ethics review by independent Research Ethics Committees. Some questions such as the choice of placebos in trials in developing countries, in surgical trials and those involving alternative medicine require consideration of additional, specific issues. Involvement of consumers in MRC work has been increasing and includes the establishment of a Consumer Liaison Group; members of this group comment on patient information leaflets for clinical trials, helping to improve patient understanding of trials and ensuring topics like placebo use are explained clearly. Views differ on the value of placebos in clinical care and on their mechanism of action; continuing research is helping to clarify the issues. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003.     

Automated verbal credibility assessment of intentions: The model statement technique and predictive modeling

Recently, verbal credibility assessment has been extended to the detection of deceptive intentions, the use of a model statement, and predictive modeling. The current investigation combines these 3 elements to detect deceptive intentions on a large scale. Participants read a model statement and wrote a truthful or deceptive statement about their planned weekend activities (Experiment 1). With the use of linguistic features for machine learning, more than 80% of the participants were classified correctly. Exploratory analyses suggested that liars included more person and location references than truth‐tellers. Experiment 2 examined whether these findings replicated on independent‐sample data. The classification accuracies remained well above chance level but dropped to 63%. Experiment 2 corroborated the finding that liars' statements are richer in location and person references than truth‐tellers' statements. Together, these findings suggest that liars may over‐prepare their statements. Predictive modeling shows promise as an automated veracity assessment approach but needs validation on independent data.     

Sharp Edges from Hedges: Fatalism, Vagueness and Epistemic Possibility

Mights plug gaps. If p lacks a truth-value, then ‘It might be that p’ should also lack truth-value. Yet epistemic hedges often turn an unassertible statement into an assertible one. The phenomenon is illustrated in detail for two kinds of statements that are frequently alleged to be counterexamples to the principle of bivalence: future contingents and statements that apply predicates to borderline cases. The paper concludes by exploring the prospects for generalizing this gap-plugging strategy.     

Ethical and legal aspects in teaching students of medicine

Due to the rapid advances in medical technology, medical students are now being faced with increasingly complex and unparalleled ethical and practical dilemmas during their training. The new and future challenges of high-tech medicine demand improvements in current medical education, not only by meeting the needs of students through humanized training programs, but also by involving them in finding solutions to the ethical and legal quandaries they encounter. Today’s students of medical universities must acquire knowledge and understanding of the ethical and legal issues relevant to the practice of medicine, and we have to do everything possible to introduce these students to the current discussions on more or less controversial ethical and legal topics. Although final answers may not be found, the very discussion, argumentation, and awakening of students’ interest should become an essential part of the core curriculum of every doctor. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “The Ethics of Intellectual Property Rights and Patents,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 23–24 April, 2004. The author is a student and member of the Senate Committee on Teaching.     

Category-specified Value Statements

A value statement such as “she is a good teacher” is categoryspecified, i.e., the criteria of evaluation are specified as those that are applicable to a given category, in this case the category of teachers. In this study of categoryspecified value statements, certain categories are identified that cannot be used to specify value aspects. Special attention is paid to categories that are constituted by functional characteristics. The logical properties of value statements that refer to such categories are shown to differ significantly from the corresponding properties in social choice theory.     

Repeated Interrogations –Stretching the Deception Detection Paradigm

In real life, suspects are often subjected to repeatedinterrogations. Psycho-legal research on deception has neglectedthis fact. To remedy this mismatch a series of studies wasconducted mapping how repeated interrogations affectlie-catchers' judgemental processes, deception detectionperformance, and meta-assessments. In two experiments we foundthat lie-catchers given access to consecutive statements from onesuspect did not perform better than lie-catchers given access toone statement only. In addition, access to repeatedinterrogations inflated the lie-catchers' confidence in thecorrectness of their veracity judgement, which had a detrimentaleffect on the accuracy-confidence relation. As the basis forassessing veracity was changed from one to several statements thelie-catchers, to a large extent, seemed to trust the `consistencyheuristic'. The assumption underlying this heuristic is thatinconsistency implies deception and consistency implies truth.The data show that (a) people tend to disagree as to whether aparticular set of consecutive statements is consistent or not,and (b) deceptive statements are at least equally consistent astruthful statements. In order to explain the latter finding a`repeat vs. reconstruct' hypothesis was suggested, assuming thatliars try to repeat their initial statement, whereastruth-tellers try to reconstruct a previously experienced event.The low predictive accuracy found for the `consistency heuristic'strongly questions beliefs held by professional lie-catchers,opinions expressed in the psycho-legal literature andrecommendations found in applied interrogation manuals.