The Expanding World of Edward Tronick

Edward Tronick operates at the interface of empirical analysis of mother–infant communication, systems theories, and psychoanalysis. He has been a leader in the articulation of the implications of systems views for child development research. Systems views of mother–infant interaction, and of development more broadly, increasingly provide one theoretical underpinning for psychoanalysis. His work has enriched our understanding of interactive models of the dyad, of development, and of the mind. He has made a pivotal contribution to the development of a relational systems approach to infant research and its implications for adult treatment.     

Distinct and shared cognitive functions mediate event- and time-based prospective memory impairment in normal ageing

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform an action at a specific point in the future. Regarded as multidimensional, PM involves several cognitive functions that are known to be impaired in normal ageing. In the present study we set out to investigate the cognitive correlates of PM impairment in normal ageing. Manipulating cognitive load, we assessed event- and time-based PM, as well as several cognitive functions, including executive functions, working memory, and retrospective episodic memory, in healthy participants covering the entire adulthood. We found that normal ageing was characterised by PM decline in all conditions and that event-based PM was more sensitive to the effects of ageing than time-based PM. Whatever the conditions, PM was linked to inhibition and processing speed. However, while event-based PM was mainly mediated by binding and retrospective memory processes, time-based PM was mainly related to inhibition. The only distinction between high- and low-load PM cognitive correlates lies in an additional, but marginal, correlation between updating and the high-load PM condition. The association of distinct cognitive functions, as well as shared mechanisms with event- and time-based PM, confirm that each type of PM relies on a different set of processes.     

Mediator-based encoding strategies in source monitoring in young and older adults

Past research has examined the contribution of mediator-based encoding strategies (interactive imagery and sentence generation) to individual (particularly age-related) differences in associative memory exclusively in the paired-associates paradigm. In the present study, we examined young and older adults' mediator-based strategy use on source-monitoring tasks. Participants spontaneously used mediator-based strategies to encode about 30% to 40% of word-source pairs and were able to follow instructions to use the specific mediator-based strategy of interactive imagery; mediator-based strategy use was associated with higher source memory and explained variance in source memory. There were no age-related differences in the patterns of mediator-based strategy production and utilization. Age-related differences in source memory were explained by age-related declines in the ability to bind information in memory (incidental memory for digit-symbol associations) but not by encoding strategy production. Results underscore the importance of assessing encoding strategy use for understanding individual differences in source memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Emotional information in body and background hampers recognition memory for faces

Emotional influences on memory for events have long been documented yet surprisingly little is known about how emotional signals conveyed by contextual cues influence memory for face identity. This study investigated how positively and negatively valenced contextual emotion cues conveyed by body expressions or background scenes influence face memory. The results provide evidence of emotional context influence on face recognition memory and show that faces encoded in emotional (either fearful or happy) contexts (either the body or background scene) are less well recognized than faces encoded in neutral contexts and this effect is larger for body context than for scene context. The findings are compatible with the hypothesis that emotional signals in visual scenes trigger orienting responses which may lead to a less elaborate processing of featural details like the identity of a face, in turn resulting in a decreased facial recognition memory.     

Specificity of autobiographical memory and mood disturbance in adolescents

The combined perception of affective information provided by seeing a facial expression and hearing a tone of voice presents us with a phenomenon that has received little systematic attention in the laboratory. We argue that although the FLMP appears good at modelling the presently available data, more complex theoretical questions must be raised. We discuss the theoretical shortcomings of the FLMP and envisage two other theoretical frameworks that could guide future research.     

The influence of social interaction on the dynamics of employees’ psychological contracting in digitally transforming organizations

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a process perspective in exploring the influence of social interaction on the dynamics of psychological contracting throughout organizational change. Although social interaction is a key focus in social exchange theory, this aspect is largely overlooked in the current psychological contract literature. In this qualitative study, we adopt a retrospective design, asking change recipients to recollect events over time in the context of digital transformation in Dutch travel organizations. Our data reveal a sequence of different kinds of social interactions over the course of a change process, from collective-focused interactions (i.e., kindness and sharing) in stable contracts to transactional interactions (i.e., “what is in it for me”) following psychological contract disruption, to relational interactions (i.e., vigilance about equity in social exchange) in psychological contract repair, and to a final return to resonance and alignment with others and a return to psychological contract maintenance. Our results suggest that social interactions play a more potent role in the dynamics of psychological contracting than is currently recognized in the literature. Finally, we discuss a number of implications for dynamic models of psychological contracting.     

Residues in the Secular: Whale Bones and Other Theological Relics1

This article develops the concept of the “theological relic”: a facet of secular life and culture that maintains traces of (and so remains bound in some way to) its genealogy in the theological. The theological relic, then, is something that fails to be either robustly religious or properly secular. It is, instead, a product of the relations between these social spaces. The article illustrates this concept by examining a cultural history of the whale, highlighting this creature's complex bonds with the theological. The whale, in other words, is figured as a theological relic: a creature of the secular that remains shrouded enough by traces of the theological that these vestiges of divinity are implicated in the whale's powerful late‐twentieth‐century cultural reconfiguration.