Maternal structure and autonomy support in conversations about the past: contributions to children's autobiographical memory

The authors examined the contributions of maternal structure and autonomy support to children's collaborative and independent reminiscing. Fifty mother-child dyads discussed past experiences when the children were 40 and 65 months old. Children also discussed past events with an experimenter at each age. Maternal structure and autonomy support appeared as 2 distinct and separable components of mothers' reminiscing style and acted in an additive fashion to predict children's memory. Children whose mothers demonstrated both high structure and high autonomy support provided the greatest memory in these conversations, whereas children whose mothers were low on both dimensions provided minimal memory. The authors discuss the implications of these effects for children's autobiographical memory development.     

Nothing Persuades Like Success: Reflections on Partially and Over-Successful Persuasion. A Reply to Debowska-Kozlowska

In this brief commentary of Kamila Debowska-Kozlowska’s insightful analysis of persuasive outcomes (Processing topics from the Beneficial Cognitive Model in partially and over-successful persuasion dialogues. Argumentation, 2014), I articulate some suggestions for future development of her ideas. My main claim is that, while instances of partially and over-successful persuasion are indeed worthy of further theoretical inquiry, the topical analysis proposed by Debowska-Kozlowska may benefit from integration with other approaches.     

Modeling the conscious correlates of recognition memory: Reflections on the remember-know paradigm

Understanding how memory processes contribute to the conscious experience of memory is central to contemporary cognitive psychology. Recently, many investigators (e.g., Gardiner, 1988) have examined theremember-know paradigm to understand the conscious correlates of recognition memory. A variety of studies have demonstrated that variables have different effects on remember and know responses, and these findings have been interpreted in the context of dual-process models of recognition memory. This paper presents a single-process model of the remember-know paradigm, emphasizing the dependence of remember and know judgments on a set of common underlying processes (e.g., criterion setting). We use this model to demonstrate how a single-process model can give rise to the functional dissociations presented in the remember-know literature. We close by detailing procedures for testing our model and describing how those tests may facilitate the development of dual-process models.     

Health,Luck and Moral Fallacies of the Second Best

Individuals who become ill as a result of personal lifestyle choices often shift the monetary costs of their healthcare needs to the taxpaying public or to fellow members of a private insurance pool. Some argue that policies permitting such cost shifting are unfair. Arguments for this view may seem to draw support from luck egalitarian accounts of distributive justice. This essay argues that the luck egalitarian framework provides no such support. To allocate healthcare costs on the basis of personal responsibility would arbitrarily and publicly burden socially detectable risk-takers while undetectable risk-takers continue to get a free ride. That problem is unavoidable even on the assumption that distributive institutions outside the healthcare sector are fully just. In actual, farfrom-just societies, imposing personal liability for the costs of voluntary risk taking would be wrong for an additional reason. Doing so would tend to magnify existing distributive injustices. These conclusions draw attention to two common ‘moral fallacies of the second best’ that can arise when applying ideal normative theory to matters of institutional design and in real-world policy contexts.     

Integrated memory for objects, places, and temporal order: evidence for episodic-like memory in mice

Human episodic memory refers to the recollection of an unique past experience in terms of what happened, and where and when it happened. Factoring out the issue of conscious recollection, episodic memory, even at the behavioral level, has been difficult to demonstrate in non-human mammals. Although, it was previously shown that rodents can associate what and when or what and where information given on unique trials, it proved to be difficult to demonstrate memory for what, where, and when simultaneously in mammals, without using extensive training procedures, which might induce semantic rather than episodic memory recall. Towards the goal of an animal model of human episodic memory we designed an three-trial object exploration task in which different versions of the novelty-preference paradigm were combined to subsume (a) object recognition memory, (b) the memory for locations in which objects were explored, and (c) the temporal order memory for object presented at distinct time points. We found that mice spent more time exploring two "old familiar" objects relative to two "recent familiar" objects, reflecting memory for what and when and concomitantly directed more exploration at a spatially displaced "old familiar" object relative to a stationary "old familiar" object, reflecting memory for what and where. These results suggest that during a single test trial the mice were able to (a) recognize previously explored objects, (b) remember the location in which particular objects were previously encountered, and (c) to discriminate the relative recency in which different objects were presented. According to the currently discussed behavioral criteria for episodic-like memory in animals, our results suggest that mice are capable to form such higher order memories.     

Longing for the Feminine: Reflections on Love,Sexual Orientation,Individuation, and the Soul

This article is a collaboration that represents several years of dialogue about our topic, alongside the individual depth work done by each of us to overcome the negativities that often poison collaborations and feeling connections: envy, enmeshment, and passivity. It is the unique expression of two women working together in a co-creative process pulsed by feminine principles. Diane is a Jungian analyst and has spent her life close to the unconscious. Fran is a writer, educator, and lifelong student of mystical paths. The article gives an account of Diane's longing for the divine feminine and the particular meaning it has for her as a lesbian in this time of global upheaval. In particular, her story highlights the psychic suffering that individuals go through when their same-sex attractions and love orientation are judged as psychologically “immature” or religiously “sinful.” Neither Christian-based “conversion therapy” nor Jungian analysis turned Diane into a heterosexual woman. Her story reveals the benefit of Jung's depth psychology even as it underscores the singularity of every person's individuation process. The article's unusual format is a tandem of Diane's first-person sharing of her soul's journey and Fran's witnessing of the journey's profound significance. We found that both voices were needed. Truth requires not only the one who lives a journey with courage but also the one who witnesses it with a loving heart. Ultimately, we see the personal journeys of gays and lesbians as significant to the larger context of the evolution of human consciousness.     

Hostile masculinity,sexual aggresion,and gender-biased domineeringness in conversations

This study assessed the ability of certain variables to predict which men would be more domineering in conversations with a woman and/or with a man. The variables included men's self-reported sexually aggressive behavior and several components comprising a personality profile labeled “Hostile Masculinity.” As expected, these variables successfully predicted domineering behavior toward the female but not toward the male. These findings supported theories hypothesizing that men's desire to control women and men's antisocial behavior toward them are due to specific rather than to general factors (i. e., evolutionary and feminist theorizing). © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

The ease-of-processing heuristic and the stability bias: dissociating memory, memory beliefs, and memory judgments

Judgments about memory are essential in promoting knowledge; they help identify trustworthy memories and predict what information will be retained in the future. In the three experiments reported here, we investigated the mechanisms underlying predictions about memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, single words were presented once or multiple times, in large or small type. There was a double dissociation between actual memory and predicted memory: Type size affected predicted but not actual memory, and future study opportunities affected actual memory but scarcely affected predicted memory. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that beliefs and judgments are largely independent, and neither consistently resembles actual memory. Participants' underestimation of future learning-a stability bias-stemmed from an overreliance on their current memory state in making predictions about future memory states. The overreliance on type size highlights the fundamental importance of the ease-of-processing heuristic: Information that is easy to process is judged to have been learned well.     

Gender, gender relations, and the social dynamics of children's conversations

The authors investigated the effects of gender on the social dynamics and outcomes of conversations involving 120 children (mean age = 8 years 7 months). Children were taught particular values for different shaped counters and placed in same-gender or mixed-gender pairs with children who were taught different values. Pairs were asked to add the counters together to make a total of 100. Conversations were coded in terms of communication acts and simultaneous speech acts. Boys used more controlling acts overall and more negative interruptions in mixed-gender pairs. Girls used more affiliating acts. All children used more collaborative communication in same-gender pairings. Children whose perspective dominated used more controlling and comparatively fewer affiliating acts. When children reached a compromise, conversations were more collaborative.