Consolidation theory and retrograde amnesia in humans

Recent research on the cognitive dysfunctions experienced by human anmesic patients indicates that very long term (multidecade) changes may occur in memory.Flat retrograde amnesia (RA), consisting of a uniform memory deficit for information from all preamnesia time periods, indicates a simple, monolithic retrieval problem, whereasgraded RA, with greater memory deficits for information from recent as opposed to remote time periods, suggests the presence of a gradual long-term encoding, or consolidation, process. An evaluation of 247 outcomes from 61 articles provides strong evidence of graded RA across different cerebral injuries, materials, and test procedures, as well as in measures of both absolute and relative (patient vs. control) performance. Future conceptualizations of human memory should address the possibility that memories increase in resistance to forgetting, or reduction in trace fragility, across many decades.     

Measures of self-efficacy and optimism in older adults with generalized anxiety

This study provides initial psychometric data for the Self-Efficacy Scale (SES) and the Life Orientation Test (LOT) in a sample of older adults with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Participants included 76 adults, ages 60 to 80, who met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.) criteria for GAD. Self-efficacy and outcome expectancies were lower in older adults with GAD relative to published data from younger and older community samples. Both the SES and LOT demonstrated adequate internal consistency. Confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence for optimism and pessimism factors within the LOT and exploratory factor analysis of the SES suggested threefactors that overlap with previous findings. Overall, the data support the potential utility of these instruments in late-life GAD and set the stage forfuture investigations of generalized self-efficacy expectancies and outcome expectancies (or optimism) as they relate to the prediction of affect and behavior in this group.     

Processing Coordinate Structures

Coordination often involves syntactically like categories. Based on the results of four reading time studies, it is argued here that the syntactic like-category restriction is not grammatical. Coordination of unlike categories can be just as acceptable as coordination of like categories. However, syntactically like category coordination is processed faster than coordination of unlike categories even when the two sentence types are judged to be fully acceptable. Further, parallelism of conjuncts facilitates processing regardless of whether it is parallelism in the category of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar might regulate) or parallelism in the internal structure of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar does not regulate, on anyone's view). Parallelism did not facilitate processing when the structure of a subject and object were manipulated, implying that parallelism effects are largely limited to the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and not due simply to the repetition of a phrase with a particular shape.     

The relative contribution of trait and social influences to the links among perceived social support, affect, and self-esteem

Although perceived support is influenced by both the personality traits of support recipients as well as various social factors, it is unknown to what extent these two types of influences account for perceived support's link to mental health. We investigated these relations using multivariate generalizability analyses. In three samples, both the trait and social influence components of perceived support were related to favorable affect and to self-esteem. The magnitude of the correlations between perceived support and mental health was similar for both the trait and social influence components. Similar findings were obtained for social conflict, although the links between conflict and mental health varied somewhat depending upon the level of analysis. These findings suggest that social support theories and interventions should include both trait and social mechanisms to explain and modify perceived support and mental health.     

The Impact of Personality and Religion on Attitudes toward Alcohol among 16–18 Year Olds in Northern Ireland

Background: Previous research demonstrates a negative relationship between attitude toward alcohol and religiosity. However, what is less apparent is if this relationship may, at least in part, be a function of individual differences in personality, as previous research has demonstrated a relationship between certain measures of personality and both attitude toward alcohol and attitude toward religiosity. The aim of the present study was to explore the impact of personality and the relative efficacy of different markers of religiosity in predicting attitude toward alcohol among a sample of 16–18 year olds in Northern Ireland. Method: The Francis Scale of Attitude toward Alcohol (Francis, 1992c. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 31, 45–50) was administered alongside the Abbreviated Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Francis, Brown, & Philipchalk, 1992. Personality and Individual Differences, 13(4), 443–449), the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity (Francis & Stubbs, 1987. Personality and Individual Differences, 8, 741–743) and measures of frequency of personal prayer and church attendance among a sample of 243 16- to 18-year-old sixth-form students in Northern Ireland. Results and conclusion: The data demonstrate that a more prohibitive attitude toward alcohol was correlated with lower psychoticism scores (tendermindedness) and a more positive attitude toward Christianity. Multiple-regression analyses confirm the importance of attitude toward religion in predicting individual differences in attitude toward alcohol.     

Assessing aggression in adolescent romantic relationships: can we do it better?

Almost all research on aggression in adolescent romantic relationships makes use of 1-time, retrospective assessment methods. In the present research, the authors compared data on the experience of adolescent relationship aggression (physical aggression and threatening behavior) collected from 125 high school students via 2 methods: (a) a 1-time, 2-month retrospective assessment and (b) a cumulative method based on four 2-week retrospective assessments, each spaced 2 weeks apart. For the cumulative method, data from the 4 assessments were aggregated to cover the same time period as the single, 2-month retrospective assessment. A greater proportion of the sample (48.0%) reported experiencing physical aggression using the cumulative method compared with the single, 2-month retrospective method (27.0%). The prevalence of threatening behavior was also higher using the cumulative method (48.8% vs. 24.8%). Adolescent trauma and anxiety symptoms correlated more strongly with physical aggression data derived from the cumulative method than from the 1-time assessment method.     

Processing demands in belief‐desire reasoning: inhibition or general difficulty?

Most 4-year-olds can predict the behavior of a person who wants an object but is mistaken about its location. More difficult is predicting behavior when the person is mistaken about location and wants to avoid the object. We tested between two explanations for children's difficulties with avoidance false belief: the Selection Processing model of inhibitory processing and a General Difficulty account. Children were presented with a false belief task and a control task, in which belief attribution was as difficult as in the false belief task. Predicting behavior in light of the character's desire to avoid the object added more difficulty in the false belief task. This finding is consistent with the Selection Processing model, but not with the General Difficulty account.