Evaluating characteristics of false memories: Remember/know judgments and memory characteristics questionnaire compared

Subjects hearing a list of associates to a nonpresented lure word later often claim to have heard the lure (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). To examine the characteristics of such false memories, subjects completed a memory characteristics questionnaire (MCQ; Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) or made remember/know (RK; Gardiner & Java, 1993) judgments for previously heard theme associates and nonpresented lures. MCQ ratings indicated that false memories for lures had less auditory detail and less remembered feelings and reactions than memories for presented words. In addition, rates of false recognition for lures were significantly lower than rates of correct recognition when items from various themes were intermixed instead of blocked at acquisition and subjects made MCQ ratings instead of RK judgments. This demonstrates that false memories can be affected both by how they are acquired and by how extensively they are examined at retrieval.     

Deliver us from evil: the effects of mortality salience and reminders of 9/11 on support for President George W. Bush

According to terror management theory, heightened concerns about mortality should intensify the appeal of charismatic leaders. To assess this idea, we investigated how thoughts about death and the 9/11 terrorist attacks influence Americans' attitudes toward current U.S. President George W. Bush. Study 1 found that reminding people of their own mortality (mortality salience) increased support for Bush and his counterterrorism policies. Study 2 demonstrated that subliminal exposure to 9/11-related stimuli brought death-related thoughts closer to consciousness. Study 3 showed that reminders of both mortality and 9/11 increased support for Bush. In Study 4, mortality salience led participants to become more favorable toward Bush and voting for him in the upcoming election but less favorable toward Presidential candidate John Kerry and voting for him. Discussion focused on the role of terror management processes in allegiance to charismatic leaders and political decision making.     

The modulation of lexical competition by segment duration

In an eye-tracking study, we examined how fine-grained phonetic detail, such as segment duration, influences the lexical competition process during spoken word recognition. Dutch listeners’ eye movements to pictures of four objects were monitored as they heard sentences in which a stop-initial target word (e.g.,pijp “pipe”) was preceded by an [s]. The participants made more fixations to pictures of cluster-initial words (e.g.,spijker “nail”) when they heard a long [s] (mean duration, 103 msec) than when they heard a short [s] (mean duration, 73 msec). Conversely, the participants made more fixations to pictures of the stop-initial words when they heard a short [s] than when they heard a long [s]. Lexical competition between stop- and cluster-initial words, therefore, is modulated by segment duration differences of only 30 msec.     

The Relationship Between Racial Identity and Perceived Significance of the Election of President Barack Obama Among African American Mothers

African American women’s racial identity is a major determinant for how they interpret the world around them, yet there is little research examining how specific aspects of racial identity are linked with attitudes about an event that has been highly significant for African Americans: the election of President Barack Obama. The present study examines the relationship between African American mothers’ racial identity and their perceived significance of the election of President Barack Obama as an indicator of reduced systemic and actual racism for African Americans, using a sample of 110 African American mothers residing in a Northeastern metropolitan area. Results revealed that racial centrality and assimilation positively predicted perceived significance of President Obama’s election for diminishing racism. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

Memories of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: a study of the consistency and phenomenal characteristics of flashbulb memories

In this study, I investigated students' memories of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, carried out by Al Qaeda terrorists against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Participants completed on two occasions (2 weeks and 8 months after the events took place) a memory questionnaire that included an assessment of the phenomenal richness of their memories. The results showed that the participants remembered very well the circumstances in which they first heard about the terrorist attacks, that they were very confident about this information, and that these memories were characterized by a high phenomenal richness. Over time, there was a decrease in all of these variables, but people's ratings of phenomenology and confidence were still very high.     

Perceived Risk and Worry: The Effects of 9/11 on Willingness to Fly1

Most decision-making models rely on affect-free variables to understand the decisions that people make. We tested an affectively-loaded variable—worry—as a predictor of decision making in an affectively laden context: willingness to fly after 9/11. College students rated their willingness to fly to New York City or Washington, DC, in a study conducted 34 days after 9/11. They also recorded their beliefs about the likelihood that more terrorist attacks would occur, the severity of such attacks if they were to occur, and how much they worried about flying. Finally, they made these estimates for similar others. Results showed that worry was the most powerful predictor of one's own and similar others' willingness to fly. These findings suggest that models of how people make decisions may sometimes need to take feelings into account.     

Interpreting President Barack Obama's Facial Displays of Emotion: Revisiting the Dartmouth Group

Charismatic presidents like John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and now Barack Obama have been able to overcome stereotype‐based barriers to political power by connecting emotionally with viewers, particularly through their nonverbal skills. In this study we focus on the facial displays of emotion by President Obama and how participants interpret them. This study builds upon the pioneering research of the Dartmouth Group concerning response to displays of happiness‐reassurance by political leaders. It will first replicate and extend upon existing research by using Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to characterize facial displays by President Obama, specifically three neutral displays and three different types of smiles. Second, this study replicates research carried out over two decades ago concerning individual differences in sex, ethnicity, and age cohort on response to political candidates culturally defined as Black. Video focusing on the head and torso were FACS coded and presented in a web‐based experiment to 79 participants working at a southern institution of higher education. The participants identified the emotions felt by President Obama on a scale ranging from “not at all” to “extremely” focusing on the basic emotion terms of: “Happy” and “Playful” (happiness‐reassurance) and “Angry” and “Disgusted” (anger‐threat). Findings suggest participants differentiate between subtle facial‐display differences and that there are differences based upon ethnicity and support for President Obama when they interpret his facial displays of emotion.     

How do generic statements impact performance? Evidence for entity beliefs

Generic statements about the abilities of children's social groups (e.g. ‘Girls/Boys are good at this game’) negatively impact children's performance – even if the statements are favorable towards children's own social groups. We explored the mechanism by which generic language impairs children's performance. Across three studies, our findings suggest that generic statements influence children's performance by creating an entity belief (i.e. a belief that a fixed ability determines performance). Children who were exposed to a generic statement about their social group's ability performed worse than children in control conditions. This effect hurt children's performance even when the person who made the generic statement was no longer present and a new person not privy to the statement replaced them. However, when children heard a generic statement paired with an effort explanation (i.e. ‘Girls/Boys are good at this game because they try really hard when they draw’) they performed better than children who heard the generic statement with no explanation (i.e. just ‘Girls/Boys are good at this game’) and children who heard the generic statement paired with a trait explanation (i.e. ‘Girls/Boys are good at this game because they are smart and really good at drawing’). This work uncovers when and how generic statements that refer to the ability of one's social group hinder performance, informing the development of practices to improve student motivation and learning.     

Effects of age on flashbulb memories

The authors investigated the effect of aging on flashbulb (FB) memories. In 1996, elderly Turks recalled how they had heard about 2 remote events--the death of the first president of Turkey (in 1938) and another event involving a change in the national borders of the country (in 1939)--and both elderly and younger adults recalled how they heard about the recent death of the 8th president of Turkey (in 1993). Seventy percent of the elderly had FB memories for the 1938 death; critical variables for the formation of FB memories were personal importance attached to the event and rehearsal. Ninety percent of younger Turks and 72% of elderly Turks had FB memories for the 1993 death; the only variable that differed between the 2 groups was rehearsal.     

Popular Politics and the Clinton/Lewinsky Affair: The Implications for Leadership

The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal unfolded in an era of "new media" politics that presented fresh and often unanticipated challenges for presidential leadership. New media actors, such as call-in talk radio and TV hosts, tabloid journalists, and Internet gossip columnists, played a significant role in scandal politics. They influenced the framework within which stories were reported and perceived by the public. New media channels, in particular, framed the events leading up to the presidential impeachment in terms of dramatic, prime time–style entertainment. This entertainment news frame allowed citizens to compartmentalize their perceptions of President Clinton as a leader versus a private individual involved in a sex scandal. Media Politics can explain, at least in part, President Clinton's strong job performance evaluations in the midst of one of the most publicized political scandals of the century.     

How should we question young children's understanding of aspectuality?

In two experiments, we investigated whether 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children's ability to demonstrate their understanding of aspectuality was influenced by how the test question was phrased. In Experiment 1, 60 children chose whether to look or feel to gain information about a hidden object (identifiable by sight or touch). Test questions referred either to the perceptual aspect of the hidden object (e.g., whether it was red or blue), the modality dimension (e.g., what colour it was), or the object's identity (e.g., which one it was). Children who heard the identity question performed worse than those who heard the aspect or dimension question. Further investigation in Experiment 2 (N= 23) established that children's difficulty with the identity question was not due to a problem recalling the objects. We discuss how the results of these methodological investigations impact on researchers’ assessment of the development of aspectuality understanding.     

“It would have been worse under Saddam:” Implications of counterfactual thinking for beliefs regarding the ethical treatment of prisoners of war

In response to criticism following news of the mistreatment of Iraqis at the US prison in Abu Ghraib, some media personalities and politicians suggested that the treatment of these prisoners “would have been even worse” had former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein still been in power. It was hypothesized that the contemplation of this argument has undesirable consequences because counterfactual thinking can elicit both contrastive and assimilative effects. In the reported study, participants considered how the prisoners at Abu Ghraib would have been worse off under Saddam. The results revealed that generating downward counterfactuals made participants feel better about Abu Ghraib (thereby evidencing contrast), and also lowered ethical standards regarding how the US should treat prisoners of war in the future (thereby evidencing assimilation).     

Hearing Spaces

In this paper I argue that empty space can be heard. This position contrasts with the generally held view that the only things that can be heard are sounds, their properties, echoes, and perhaps sound sources. Specifically, I suggest that when sounds reverberate in enclosed environments we auditorily represent the volume of space surrounding us. Clearly, we can learn the approximate size of an enclosed space through hearing a sound reverberate within it, and so any account that denies that we hear empty space must instead show how beliefs about volumes of space can be derived indirectly from what is heard. That is, if space is not auditorily represented when we hear sounds reverberate, what is? I consider whether hearing reverberation can be thought of as hearing a distinct sound, hearing echoes, or hearing a property of a sound. I argue that experiences of reverberation cannot be reduced to the perception of any of these types and that therefore empty space is represented in auditory perceptual content. In the final section I outline two ways in which space might be represented.     

Judging familiarity and emotion from very brief musical excerpts

In the present study, the gating paradigm was used to measure how much perceptual information that was extracted from musical excerpts needs to be heard to provide judgments of familiarity and of emotionality. Nonmusicians heard segments of increasing duration (250, 500, 1,000 msec, etc.). The stimuli were segments from familiar and unfamiliar musical excerpts in Experiment 1 and from very moving and emotionally neutral musical excerpts in Experiment 2. Participants judged how familiar (Experiment 1) or how moving (Experiment 2) the excerpt was to them. Results show that a feeling of familiarity can be triggered by 500-msec segments, and that the distinction between moving and neutral can be made for 250-msec segments. This finding extends the observation of fast-acting cognitive and emotional processes from face and voice perception to music perception.     

Alliteration and the Sacred: A Study of 'Be Fertile and Increase'

The Hebrew Bible is a richly crafted text, teeming with wonderful examples of narrative artistry, not only of how it arranges words, but how it arranges sounds. If the structure of the narrative can help us interpret possible meanings, then it would seem that the phonetic elements of the text can also assist us in the larger task of interpretation (an underexploited resource for the biblical scholar). This article gives an example of how the rhythmic repetition of sound elements contribute to interpretation through the example of the richly alliterative phrase, peru urbu umil'u . The article examines its occurrences in Genesis. It is found ten times (in several grammatical forms), five in the Primeval History, five in the Patriarchal History. Close readings of these occurrences are used to show how the rhythmic arrangement of sounds contributes to the development of the themes at critical junctures of the narrative. When the phrase 'be fruitful and multiply' is found in direct speech by God to a human, the phrase is endowed with a tremendous amount of alliteration; when the phrase is found in human speech there is a great deal less. In this example, then, it would seem alliteration is being used to distinguish human from divine speech. As modern readers, it is very easy for us to forget the oral context in which these stories emerged, that most people heard, rather than read, them. So it seems completely reasonable to suggest that, in this one example, phonetic artistry is being used to make it easier for the listener of the text to understand that he has just heard the voice of God.     

Flashbulb memories

Flashbulb Memories are memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event. Hearing the news that President John Kennedy had been shot is the prototype case. Almost everyone can remember, with an almost perceptual clarity, where he was when he heard, what he was doing at the time, who told him, what was the immediate aftermath, how he felt about it, and also one or more totally idiosyncratic and often trivial concomitants. The present paper reports a questionnaire inquiry into the determinants of such memories by asking about other assassinations, highly newsworthy events, and personally significant events. It is shown that while the Kennedy assassination created an extraordinarily powerful and widely shared flashbulb memory, it is not the only event that has created such memories. The principal two determinants appear to be a high level of surprise, a high level of consequentiality, or perhaps emotional arousal (assessed by both rating scales and ethnic group membership). If these two variables do not attain sufficiently high levels, no flashbulb memory occurs. If they do attain high levels, they seem, most directly, to affect the frequency of rehearsal, covert and overt, which, in turn, affects the degree of elaboration in the narrative of the memory that can be elicited experimentally. Parallels are made explicit between the behavioral theory and a less elaborated, speculative neuro-physiological theory of which R. B. Livingston (1967) is the proponent Finally, an argument is made that a permanent memory for incidental concomitants of a surprising and consequential (in the sense of biologically significant) event would have high selection value and so could account for the evolution of an innate base for such a memory mechanism.     

Cognitive-Behavior Therapy for Vietnamese Refugees With PTSD and Comorbid Panic Attacks

For Vietnamese refugees, we describe (a) how headache- and orthostasis-focused panic attacks are generated, (b) a culturally sensitive treatment for PTSD with comorbid headache- and orthostasis-focused panic attacks, and (c) the outcome of a treatment series. In a multiple-baseline, across-subjects design (N = 3), all patients demonstrated treatment-related improvement of headache- and orthostasis-associated panic attacks; and in the repeated-measures, within-subjects design, all patients greatly improved across treatment on measures of psychopathology. One treatment case is presented.     

Haptics of the heart: The sense of touch in American religion and culture

This essay undertakes a tactile exploration of the sense of touch in contemporary American culture and religion. After briefly recalling the denigration of tactility in Western thought, I consider the usefulness of the work of two theorists, Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin, in recovering the sense of touch—the intimate caress, the violent shock—as deep background for tracking basic modes of religious tactility. By paying attention to sensory media and metaphors, I hope to suggest some features of religious tactility that are not necessarily seen or heard but nevertheless pervade contemporary religion and culture. Schematically, I proceed from cutaneous binding and burning, through kinaesthetic moving, to haptic handling in order to enter this field of tactile meaning and power. Along the way, I touch on specific cases of religious tactility—sometimes caressing, more often striking—that include US President Bill Clinton, firewalking, flag burning, alien abduction, global capitalism, and cellular microbiology. Although this exploratory essay replicates a tactile experience by renouncing visual mapping and verbal argumentation, it points to the presence of a tactile politics of perception that operates at the intersections between human subjectivity and the social collectivity.     

If Freud Were a Woman: Gender,Uncertainty, and the Psychology of Being Human

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationships among gender, uncertainty, and the experience of being human by imagining how psychoanalysis might have evolved had Freud been born female. Since the uncertainty heard in many women’s voices goes hand in hand with their relational focus, I suggest that Freud, the woman, would have developed a trauma-centered theory with an ethical foundation reflecting our human relational longings.     

Silent voices: Notes from a young Muslim woman on acculturation in the United States

This paper examines the gap between a researcher's positionality and theory building; seeing research through the lens of women of color in academia. Drawing on the autobiographical approach in feminist geography, I argue how a researcher's background and life events influence how we produce knowledge in the field by sharing my personal journey. Specifically, I share what it means to be a Middle Eastern Muslim academic conducting research on female immigrants' cultural adaptation process in the U.S. I urge readers to uncover the power of self-reflection, embodied subjectivity and emotions in expanding geographic research and conclude how the future research will benefit from the motives behind each study, as well as giving a reflexive researcher a platform to be heard.