Testing protects against proactive interference in face–name learning

Learning face–name pairings at a social function becomes increasingly more difficult the more individuals one meets. This phenomenon is attributable to proactive interference—the negative influence of prior learning on subsequent learning. Recent evidence suggests that taking a memory test can alleviate proactive interference in verbal list learning paradigms. We apply this technique to face–name pair learning. Participants studied four lists of 12 face–name pairings and either attempted to name the 12 faces just studied after every list or did not. Recall attempts after every list improved learning of the fourth list by over 100%. Moreover, no reduction in learning of face–name pairings occurred from list 1 to list 4 for participants who attempted to name studied faces between lists. These results suggest that testing oneself on the names of a group of new acquaintances before moving on to the next group is an effective mnemonic technique for social functions.     

Is smoking automatic? Demands of smoking behavior on attentional resources

The role of attention in the production of smoking behavior was investigated. Experienced and novice smokers were asked to perform a reaction time (RT) task under 4 conditions: while smoking (smoking), while mimicking all aspects of smoking except inhaling (pseudosmoking), while simply holding a cigarette (holding), and while not smoking (baseline). Experienced smokers' RTs increased during the pseudosmoking and holding conditions compared with baseline but did not differ between the smoking and baseline conditions, suggesting that attentional resources were not required for typical smoking behavior but were required to alter or inhibit smoking behavior. Novice smokers' RTs were slower during both the smoking and pseudosmoking conditions but not the holding condition, suggesting that novice smokers require the use of resources to smoke. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the differences in RT across conditions could not be explained by differences in urges.     

Does cigarette smoking cause stress?

Smokers often report that cigarettes help relieve feelings of stress. However, the stress levels of adult smokers are slightly higher than those of nonsmokers, adolescent smokers report increasing levels of stress as they develop regular patterns of smoking, and smoking cessation leads to reduced stress. Far from acting as an aid for mood control, nicotine dependency seems to exacerbate stress. This is confirmed in the daily mood patterns described by smokers, with normal moods during smoking and worsening moods between cigarettes. Thus, the apparent relaxant effect of smoking only reflects the reversal of the tension and irritability that develop during nicotine depletion. Dependent smokers need nicotine to remain feeling normal. The message that tobacco use does not alleviate stress but actually increases it needs to be far more widely known. It could help those adult smokers who wish to quit and might prevent some schoolchildren from starting.     

Mental context reinstatement or drawing: Which better enhances children's recall of witnessed events and protects against suggestive questions?

The aim of this experiment was to examine the effectiveness of two techniques in enhancing children's recall of an event that they experienced approximately a week earlier. Younger (5–6 years) and older (8–9 years) children were interviewed about a magic show event in one of three conditions. Before recalling the event, some children were instructed to mentally reinstate the context of the event (MCR group), others were asked to draw the context of the event (DCR group), and others received no reinstatement instructions (NCR). Results showed that these instructions had no impact on children's free recall or responses to open‐ended prompts. However, reinstatement instructions impacted children's responses to suggestive questions: those in the DCR group gave more accurate responses than those in the NCR group. These findings provide preliminary support for the use of drawing as a potentially protective exercise that lessens the impact of biased questions with child witnesses.     

Does heightened affect make smoking cues more salient?

Negative affect (NA) states are robustly related to relapse. However, the mechanisms for this relationship are not well understood. Whereas most models have proposed that NA directly promotes lapsing, some models suggest that NA may promote lapses indirectly by increasing reactivity to smoking cues. This hypothesis was tested in secondary analyses of a study in which 248 smokers used ecological momentary assessment to self-monitor affective valence, smoking cues, and lapses during an attempt to quit smoking. The smoking cues the authors examined were others' smoking and consumption of alcohol or coffee. The odds of lapsing when exposed to smoking cues were compared across conditions of positive affect, neutral affect, and NA. Consistent main effects of affective valence were seen but not the hypothesized interaction. Indeed, analyses showed that the effect of cues was typically diminished under conditions of NA. No evidence was found to support the hypothesis that smoking cues and lapsing are more closely linked under NA conditions.     

Is alcoholism a disease?

Commentators have repeatedly attacked the traditional view that alcoholism is a disease. Their arguments that alcoholism is a central aspect of life, a deviant life style, or a form of learned behavior are examined in the light of the history and philosophy of medicine as well as current bio-behavioral research. Our conclusion is that alcoholism, as a lawful pattern of observable signs and symptoms that deviate significantly from a norm of health, is a bio-psychosocial disease.     

Simple reaction time and predictive tracking in Parkinson's disease: do they converge on a single, fixed impairment of preparation?

Patients with Parkinson's disease exhibit a number. of abnormalities that seem more marked in circumstances in which stimulus and response are predictable in advance. In this article, we consider the prolonged movement onset latencies exhibited by Parkinsonian subjects in the tracking of predictable targets and in the simple reaction time (RT) task. It has been suggested that the performance impairments on both these tasks stem from a common planning deficit. We argue that the Parkinsonian tendency to refrain from predictive tracking cannot be ascribed to an inability to anticipate due to a planning deficit. The data are better accommodated by our alternative thesis that when Parkinsonians' response initiation lags behind that of normal subjects, this is a result of a strategic adaptation to an impairment of the accuracy of movements guided by an internal representation of the target. Our conclusion, that the primary impairment of predictive tracking is one of inaccurate movement execution rather than delayed response initiation, precludes postulation of the same deficit as a source of the selective prolongation of simple RT sometimes found in Parkinson's disease. Moreover, an analysis of the processing demands of the two tasks shows that the predictability that characterizes each of them is quite different in nature. Hence, the impairments in predictive tracking and simple RT tasks are unlikely to stem from a single mechanism that is defective in Parkinson's disease.     

Do smokers have a negative implicit attitude toward smoking?

Swanson, Rudman, and Greenwald (2001 Swanson, J. E., Rudman, L. A. and Greenwald, A. G. 2001. Using the Implicit Association Test to investigate attitude-behavior consistency for stigmatised behaviour. Cognition and Emotion, 15: 207–230. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) used an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure attitudes toward smoking and found that smokers have negative implicit attitudes toward smoking. In a first experiment, we replicated the results of Swanson et al. but showed that scores on an attitude IAT do discriminate between smokers and nonsmokers to the same extent than scores on an IAT that is designed to measure associations between smoking and approach or avoidance. In a second experiment, we did find positive implicit attitudes toward smoking in smokers when we used a personalised version of the IAT that was designed to be less susceptible to effects of societal views. Our results indicate that implicit attitudes should not be dismissed as a causal factor in the maintenance of smoking behaviour.     

Social representations and intergroup conflicts: Who's smoking here?

We studied the influence of explicitating a social conflict between smokers and nonsmokers on the social representations held about tobacco. Two representations were found: a psychological' representation which was defined by psychological explanations of the causes of beginning to smoke, a characterization of smokers as psychologically disturbed, and negative feelings towards smokers; a second defensive representation which attributes smoking to social factors, and hold both a positive stereotype of smokers and positive feelings towards smokers. The percentage of smokers who adhere to the defensive representation increased significantly when the conflict was made salient. Non-smokers were not influenced by the explicitation of the social conflict. The structure of each representation was analyzed. It was found that in the psychological' representation the structuring element was the negative stereotype of smokers. By contrast, the structuring element in the defensive representation was identification with smokers. The implicatlons of this data for theories of both intergroup relations and social representations are discussed.     

Do smokers devaluate smoking cues after go/no-go training?

Objective: Smoking is one of the leading public health problems worldwide. The inability to quit smoking may be the result of the amplified value of smoking-related cues and inhibitory control deficits. Previous research has shown that pairing substance-related cues with no-go trials in go/no-go training reduces the value of these cues, an effect known as devaluation. The current experiment investigated the devaluation effect of go/no-go training on smoking-related cues, and compared this effect between smokers and nonsmokers.

Design and Main Outcome Measures: 39 smokers and 43 nonsmokers were trained to respond immediately to neutral stimuli, but inhibit their reaction when smoking stimuli were presented. Before and after training, participants evaluated smoking and neutral stimuli, where part of these stimuli were subsequently presented in the training, and the other part was not used in training.

Results: Not responding to smoking stimuli in go/no-go training decreased subsequent evaluations of trained smoking stimuli compared to untrained smoking stimuli, thereby replicating food and alcohol studies and extending the devaluation effect to smoking-related cues. This devaluation effect was found for both smokers and non-smokers.

Conclusion: Smoking-related cues can be devaluated in smokers and non-smokers, thereby showing the potential for Go/No-Go training in smoking cessation interventions.     

How does coping help people resist lapses during smoking cessation?

OBJECTIVES: To determine whether types of coping strategies have differential effects on preventing lapses and lowering urge levels and to investigate mechanisms by which coping strategies prevent lapses during smoking cessation. DESIGN: Sixty-one respondents performed ecological momentary assessment using palm-top computers and tape recorders to report their coping strategies and urge levels before and after temptations to smoke. Multilevel linear regression models were used to compare the effects of individual strategy types with the average strategy. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Lapses versus resisted temptations and changes in urge levels. RESULTS: Number of strategies significantly predicted resisting smoking and change in urge levels. Compared with the effect of the average strategy, movement/exercise was marginally worse at preventing lapses, and food/drink was marginally related to higher postcoping urge levels. CONCLUSION: Although using multiple coping strategies helps people resist the urge to smoke, no particular coping strategy works better than any other. Coping strategies prevent lapses by reducing high urge levels during temptations.