Flashbacks,intrusions, mind-wandering – Instances of an involuntary memory spectrum: A commentary on Takarangi,Strange, and Lindsay (2014)

In their paper, Takarangi, Strange, and Lindsay (2014) showed in two experiments that participants who had witnessed a shocking film frequently “mind-wandered without awareness” about the content of the film. More importantly, they equated this effect with the occurrence of traumatic intrusions. In this commentary, we argue that the authors adhered to conceptually ambiguous terms, and thereby unintentionally contribute to an already existing conceptual blur in the trauma-memory field. We postulate that clear definitions are urgently needed for phenomena such as intrusions, flashbacks, and mind-wandering, when using them in the context of trauma memory. Furthermore, our proposal is that these phenomena can fall under a spectrum of different involuntary memory instances. We propose that by adopting stricter definitions and viewing them as separate, but interrelated phenomena, different lines of trauma-memory research can be reconciled, which would considerably advance the field.     

Witnessing: The Axis of Group

We enter the group and, to some degree make choices in what we observe and focus on, and how we participate and make our presence known. Unavoidably, and with limited control, we are thrust into a public position of witness and witnessed. Witnessing deals with the impact of embracing experience beyond observing and participating–the uncertain consequence of coming to know and becoming known. It is specifically the axis of personal growth and transformation around which a dynamically oriented group process rotates with our leadership. Discussion and two case examples illustrate its key features and the role members and therapist play in fostering this process.     

Contextual overlap and eyewitness suggestibility

Studies of eyewitness suggestibility have traditionally used a paradigm that maximizes the extent to which the postevent interview overlaps with the witnessed event in terms of narrative content, narrative structure, and environmental context. The present study explored whether these dimensions of overlap contribute to people's tendency to confuse suggested details for those they have actually witnessed. We systematically manipulated the extent to which the postevent questionnaire overlapped with the witnessed event. Across two experiments, overlap in narrative content, narrative structure, or environmental context was not found to increase suggestibility effects, even though the manipulation did have other memory effects (e.g., it improved cued recall of the actual source of the suggestions, Experiment 2). These findings suggest that understanding the interaction between the structure and content of the objective context in which misinformation is encountered and various remembering contexts (e.g., recognition vs. recall) is important for advancing our understanding of source confusion in an eyewitness situation.     

Circulating emotions,beliefs and fantasies: The Middle East and the West1

Abstract

Much ink has been spilt analysing racism, ethnicity and ‘otherness’. These analyses are frequently sophisticated, nuanced and committed to delivering improved ethical, emotional and political relationships. As we have witnessed recently, however, emotions, beliefs and fantasies remain stubborn. We are all diminished (no matter our history) by these troublesome psychic processes, entrenched beliefs and unthinking assumptions that pulse away unchecked. Feelings of fear and hatred sit alongside complex identifications and disavowal of self and other. This contemporary political and social context is loaded with discourses of a ‘clash of civilization’, the otherness of Muslims and Islam and a dominant view which asserts that Western societies have to be protected from potential explosions of terrorism and the corrosion of Western values. These discourses impact on citizens and erode the possibilities of inter-connectedness and a sense of shared communality. This paper is an exploration of a specific example of intransigence.     

Witnessed inclusion improves identification of Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles

Social exclusion threatens a person's need to belong and prompts them to behave in ways that often facilitate reaffiliation. For adults, direct exclusion increases attention to social information and facial cues, including an enhanced identification of Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles. Furthermore, inclusion can buffer or mitigate the effects of exclusion. This study investigated children's (N = 44) and adults’ (N = 52) sensitivity to perceptual changes in smiles following witnessed inclusion and exclusion and inclusion's mitigating and buffering effects on perceptual abilities. Contrary to our predictions, participants in our study demonstrated improved accuracy after witnessing inclusion, rather than exclusion, and showed no buffering or mitigating effects of inclusion. This contradiction with previous findings points to a further need to explore the effects of witnessed versus direct inclusion and exclusion, especially if witnessed inclusion and exclusion have the ability to impact perception and shape our behavior.     

The Counterintuitive Relationship between Conceptual and Perceptual Similarities and Eyewitness Suggestibility

The tendency to confuse witnessed and suggested information can result in inaccurate eyewitness testimonies and convictions of innocent people. Studies that tested how similarities between witnessed and suggested information affect the tendency to confuse them reached inconsistent results. Here, we claim that there is a more complex and not necessarily linear relationship between similarity and memory distortions. Participants (164) viewed two subsequent stories, which varied in the conceptual and perceptual similarities between them. We found a significant interaction between conceptual and perceptual similarities. When we presented two conceptually different stories, perceptual similarity increased the suggestibility effect compared with perceptual dissimilarity. Conversely, when we presented two conceptually similar stories, perceptual similarity decreased suggestibility compared with perceptual dissimilarity. Accordingly, we suggest that similarity between two events may increase the suggestibility effect. However, counter‐intuitively, once similarity reaches a certain threshold, the coherence level between the events reduces the tendency to confuse them. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fracturing drive or fracturing connections—relational considerations commentary on paper by Paul Williams

We tend to conceive of mourning primarily in intrapsychic terms. In this commentary I highlight how Harvey Peskin’s paper (this issue) helps us to appreciate that grief is not only the product of the individual mind but is also constituted relationally. Both what we experience in our grieving and how we express it is shaped by and through those around us whose grief we bear witness to, as we ourselves grieve and are witnessed by them.

I elaborate further on Peskin’s view of the role of witnessing during grieving and mine another profound implication in his discourse by pointing to the bidirectional influence between mourning and relationality. Not only is mourning fostered through relational engagement, but our grieving together can provide the mortar for the building and sustaining of community.     

The ABC’s of LGM: An Introductory Guide to Latent Variable Growth Curve Modeling

In recent years, we have witnessed an increase in the complexity of theoretical models that attempt to explain behavior from both contextual and developmental perspectives. This increase in the complexity of our theoretical propositions regarding behavior parallels recent methodological advances for the analysis of change. These new analysis techniques have fundamentally altered how we conceptualize and study change. Researchers have begun to identify larger frameworks to integrate our knowledge regarding the analysis of change. One such framework is latent growth modeling, perhaps the most important and influential statistical revolution to have recently occurred in the social and behavioral sciences. This study presents a basic introduction to a latent growth modeling approach for analyzing repeated measures data. Included is the specification and interpretation of the growth factors, primary extensions such as the analysis of growth in multiple populations, and structural models including both precursors of growth, and subsequent outcomes hypothesized to be influenced by the growth functions.     

��I��ll Get That for You��: The Relationship Between Benevolent Sexism and Body Self-Perceptions

Benevolent sexism has been shown to have negative consequences for women. In the present study, we investigated whether there were differences in reports of body self-perceptions between 93 college women in the southeastern United States who either witnessed or did not witness a staged act of benevolent sexism. Because we believed that benevolent sexism could make beauty norms more salient, we hypothesized that women who witnessed benevolent sexism would report higher levels of self-objectification, body surveillance, and body shame. Women who witnessed benevolent sexism did report higher levels of surveillance and shame, constructs associated with self-objectification, but not higher general levels of self-objectification. This research provides more evidence of the negative effects benevolent sexism has on women.     

Amalgamations of memories: intrusion of information from one event into reports of another

Numerous researchers have reported that exposure to misleading postevent information (MPI) regarding details in a witnessed event can lead people to report false details from the MPI when asked to report the witnessed event. In such studies, the MPI is presented to participants in the context of information about the witnessed event. This experiment tests the hypothesis that postevent exposure to information that participants know is not about the witnessed event can, nonetheless, affect performance on tests of memory for that event. As predicted, when asked to report details of an event depicted in a slide show, participants tended to intrude details mentioned in a recent postevent narrative that described a different event. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bring Race to the Center: The Importance of Race in Racially Diverse Religious Organizations

In recent decades we have witnessed increased interest in racially diverse religious organizations. Similar trends are occuring in other institutions, like education and business. In this article I discuss the importance of understanding the role that race, as a system that advantages whites, plays in the congregational life of racially integrated churches. Drawing upon the critical race literature, I propose that because race is central to how our society is organized, interracial chruches will need to placate white members' and affirm their religiocultural preferences and interests in order to sustain a racially diverse congregation. I offer some evidence supporting this claim. I also discuss the strengths and limitations of other perspectives used to explain racially diverse religious organizations.     

A multi‐level mediation model of the relationships between team autonomy,individual task design and psychological well‐being

The past decade and a half witnessed a global trend towards the use of participatory team‐based interventions. In the present contribution, we address the widespread idea that the resulting increase in team autonomy fosters employee psychological well‐being. Specifically, we address the common but mostly implicit rationale for this widespread idea that the well‐being effect occurs because the increase in team autonomy is reflected in individual task design. We collected survey data from 733 members of 76 healthcare teams. The results of multi‐level mediation analyses were supportive of our theoretical framework. The higher the team autonomy, the more active learning behaviour and the less emotional exhaustion team members reported. These relationships were mediated by the individual job characteristics of autonomy, variety and demands. These results draw attention to individual task design in a team context.     

Misleading postevent information and memory for events: arguments and evidence against memory impairment hypotheses

The claim that a person's memory for an event may be altered by information encountered after the event has been influential in shaping current conceptions of memory. The basis for the claim is a series of studies showing that subjects who are given false or misleading information about a previously witnessed event perform more poorly on tests of memory for the event than subjects who are not misled. In this article we argue that the available evidence does not imply that misleading postevent information impairs memory for the original event, because the procedure used in previous studies is inappropriate for assessing effects of misleading information on memory. We then introduce a more appropriate procedure and report six experiments using this procedure. We conclude from the results that misleading postevent information has no effect on memory for the original event. We then review several recent studies that seem to contradict this conclusion, showing that the studies do not pose problems for our position. Finally, we discuss the implications of our conclusions for broader issues concerning memory.     

Support for the Populist Radical Right: Between Uncertainty Avoidance and Risky Choice

The last several decades have witnessed a structural change in politics toward cultural and identity conflicts, accompanied by the rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties. However, we know surprisingly little about the psychological or cognitive-motivational factors underlying PRR support. We claim that uncertainty avoidance (UA)—an epistemic avoidance motivation—represents a central motive because UA resonates with the PRR platform and precedes common predictors of PRR voting. Using data from the 2017 Austrian National Election Study, we found that UA was indeed indirectly associated with a higher likelihood of PRR voting. This association is because greater UA fostered right-wing sociocultural views, whereas associations with populist attitudes or expected government competence were more ambiguous. PRR parties appear to offer “certainty,” but as extreme parties, they also remain a “risky choice.” We conclude by discussing the contribution of a cognitive-motivational account to explain PRR voting.     

Workplace Spirituality and the Selling Organization: A Conceptual Framework and Research Propositions

The past few years have witnessed a proliferation of articles on spirituality and its relevance for business. A growing trend in spirituality research is an emphasis on spirituality in the workplace. Theoretical and empirical support is emerging on how workplace spirituality infl uences both employee and organizational outcomes. However, the sales literature has not yet integrated the dimensions of workplace spirituality into its frameworks. Therefore, drawing on existing theoretical foundations, we propose a conceptual framework that illustrates the role of workplace spirituality in selling organizations. We present relevant testable research propositions, guidelines for future research, and implications for practice.     

Proportionality,Terminal Suffering and the Restorative Goals of Medicine

Recent years have witnessed a growing concern that terminally ill patients are needlessly suffering in the dying process. This has led to demands that physicians become more attentive in the assessment of suffering and that they treat their patients as 'whole persons.' For the most part, these demands have not fallen on deaf ears. It is now widely accepted that the relief of suffering is one of the fundamental goals of medicine. Without question this is a positive development. However, while the importance of treating suffering has generally been acknowledged, insufficient attention has been paid to the question of whether different types of terminal suffering require different responses from health care professionals. In this paper we introduce a distinction between two types of suffering likely to be present at the end of life, and we argue that physicians must distinguish between these types if they are to respond appropriately to the suffering of their terminally ill patients. After introducing this distinction and explaining its basis, we further argue that the distinction informs a (novel) principle of proportionality, one that should guide physicians in balancing their competing obligations in responding to terminal suffering. As we explain, this principle is justified by reference to the interests terminally ill patients have in restoration, as well as in the relief of suffering, at the end of life.     

Research Ethics Education in the STEM Disciplines: The Promises and Challenges of a Gaming Approach

While education in ethics and the responsible conduct of research (RCR) is widely acknowledged as an essential component of graduate education, particularly in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math), little consensus exists on how best to accomplish this goal. Recent years have witnessed a turn toward the use of games in this context. Drawing from two NSF-funded grants (one completed and one on-going), this paper takes a critical look at the use of games in ethics and RCR education. It does so by: (a) setting the development of research and engineering ethics games in wider historical and theoretical contexts, which highlights their promise to solve important pedagogical problems; (b) reporting on some initial results from our own efforts to develop a game; and (c) reflecting on the challenges that arise in using games for ethics education. In our discussion of the challenges, we draw out lessons to improve this nascent approach to ethics education in the STEM disciplines.     

Integrating the study of conformity and culture in humans and nonhuman animals

Conformity--defined here by the fact that an individual displays a particular behavior because it is the most frequent the individual witnessed in others--has long been recognized by social psychologists as one of the main categories of social influence. Surprisingly, it is only recently that conformity has become an active topic in animal and comparative biology. As in any new and rapidly growing field, however, definitions, hypotheses, and protocols are diverse, not easy to organize in a coherent way, and sometimes seriously in conflict with one another. Here we pursue greater coherence by reviewing the newer literature on conformity in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology in light of the foundational work in social psychology. We suggest that the knowledge accumulated in social psychology can be exploited by behavioral ecologists and evolutionary biologists to bring conceptual clarity to the field, avoid some experimental pitfalls, and help design new and challenging experiments. In particular, we propose that the notions of informational and normative conformity that, until now, have been little recognized in recent literature can resolve some important controversies. In turn, research on animal culture should be of great interest to social scientists, because understanding human culture and human uniqueness requires an evolutionary analysis of our cognitive capacities and their evolutionary origins. Our review suggests excellent opportunities for social and natural scientists to join forces in building an interdisciplinary and integrative approach to the pervasive phenomenon of conformity.     

Adult Eyewitness Memory for Single Versus Repeated Traumatic Events

Reports from individuals who have witnessed multiple, similar emotional events may differ from reports from witnesses of only a single event. To test this, we had participants (N = 65) view a video of a road traffic accident. Half of the participants saw two additional (similar) aversive films. Afterwards, participants filled out the Self‐Administered Interview on the target film twice with an interval of 1 week. Participants who saw multiple similar films were less accurate in recalling details from the target film than participants in the control condition. On their second report, participants were less complete but more accurate compared with their first report. These results indicate that adults who have witnessed multiple repeated events may appear less reliable in their reports than adults who have witnessed a single event. These findings are relevant when evaluating eyewitness evidence and call for new approaches to questioning witnesses about repeated events.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.