Starting over: a tentative theory exploring the effects of past relationships on postbereavement remarried couples

Using grounded theory methodology 24 participants were asked to discuss how the death of a previous spouse, either theirs or their partner's, was currently affecting their second marriage. Participants were interviewed individually and as a couple. The central category was memories of the deceased spouse. Six additional categories emerged from the data: past spouse on pedestal, current/past comparison, insecurity of current spouse, curiosity about past spouse/relationship, partner's response to curiosity, and impact on the current relationship. Existing literature, auditors, and participant feedback were all used to validate the results. Expanding on a tentative theory (Brimhall, Wampler, & Kimball, 2008), provisional hypotheses were developed, thus helping clinicians who work with complex issues involving remarried couples.     

Neuropsychological Impairment of Face Recognition Units

Despite the absence of “conscious”, overt identification, some patients with face recognition impairments continue covertly to process information regarding face familiarity. The fact that by no means all patients show these covert effects has led to the suggestion that indirect recogntion tasks may help in identifying different types of face recognition impairment. The present report describes a number of experiments with the patient NR, who, after a closed head injury, has been severely impaired at recognizing familiar faces. Investigations mostly failed to show overt or covert face recognition, but NR performed at an above-chance level in selecting the familiar face on a task requiring a forced-choice between a familiar and an unfamiliar face. This discrepancy between a degree of rudimentary overt recognition and absence of covert effects on most indirect tests was addressed using a cross-domaim identity priming paradigm. This examined separately the possibility of preserved recognition for faces that NR consistently chose correctly in a forced-choice familiarity decision and those on which he performed at chance level. Priming effects were apparent only for the faces that were consistently chosen as “familiar” in forced-choice. We suggest that NR's stored representations of familiar faces are degraded, so that face recognition is possible only via a limited set of relatively preserved representations able to support a rudimentary form of overt recognition and to facilitate performance in matching and priming tasks.     

Amnesics Have a Disproportionately Severe Memopry Deficit for Interactive Context

Two experiments were used to compare the recognition memory of amnesic and normal subjects for intentionally encoded words (targets) and for incidentally encoded words that were meaningfully related to the targets and presented at the same time (interactive context). In both experiments the target recognition of the two groups was matched at a high level by presenting the amnesics with much shorter lists of words to remember. Experiment 1 compared 20 amnesics and their matched controls and showed that whereas the amnesics' recognition of the target words did not benefit significantly when they were presented together with their interactive context words (relative to their recognition when the target words were presented alone), that of the controls did. Experiment 2 compared 14 amnesics and their matched controls and showed that when patients and their controls were matched on their target word recognition in isolation, then the patients still showed worse recognition for the interactive context words. These effects were not found only in Korsakoff patients, and their size did not correlate with behavioural measures of frontal-lobe damage. It is concluded that amnesics may be more impaired at recognizing incidentally encoded interactive context than they are at recognizing target material, and this deficit may be an essential feature of the syndrome.