The role of source memory in older adults' recollective experience

Younger adults' "remember" judgments are accompanied by better memory for the source of an item than "know" judgments. Furthermore, remember judgments are not merely associated with better memory for individual source features but also with bound memory for multiple source features. However, older adults, independent of their subjective memory experience, are generally less likely to "bind" source features to an item and to each other in memory (i.e., the associative deficit). In two experiments, we tested whether memory for perceptual source features, independently or bound, is also the basis for older adults' remember responses or if their associative deficit leads them to base their responses on other types of information. The results suggest that retrieval of perceptual source features, individually or bound, forms the basis for younger but not for older adults' remember judgments even when the overall level of memory for perceptual sources is closely equated (Experiment 1) and when attention is explicitly directed to the source information at encoding (Experiment 2).     

Work–family interface from a life and career stage perspective: The role of demands and resources

Work–family conflict and enrichment are experiences that occur daily and have substantial consequences for employees, their families, and the organizations that employ them. The aim of the current review is to make a link between life and career stage, work and family conditions, and the work–family interface. The basic proposition is that life stages partly determine career development, and consequently the specific working conditions (job demands and job resources) and family conditions (family demands and family resources) that individuals are exposed to. As a result, the specific demands and resources in the work and family domains determine to what extent individuals experience that work and family are conflicting or enriching life domains. In this review we suggest that individuals in early adulthood will experience high inter‐role conflict and low facilitation due to high demands and low resources in both life domains, while individuals in late adulthood will experience the opposite pattern; that is, low conflict and high facilitation due to low demands and high resources in both domains. Individuals in middle adulthood will experience high work–family conflict but also high family–work facilitation due to the presence of high job demands and resources in both life domains. Integrating life and career stage perspectives and the experience of work–family interface is of notable practical utility because it provides a mechanism to make more informed decisions about the relative need for and corresponding benefits of work–family programs.     

Metaphonological abilities of adult illiterates: New evidence of heterogeneity

Abstract

Adult illiterate and literate subjects with at most second-grade education, from the same poor settlement in Brazil, were tested on rhyme judgement, initial syllabic vowel deletion and initial consonant deletion. Corrective feedback was provided continuously throughout the tests. The literate subjects were proficient on all three tasks. Illiterates achieved non-negligible performance on vowel deletion and rhyme judgement, but performed poorly on consonant deletion. These results bring additional support to the notion that metaphonological competence involves separate components which obey different developmental mechanisms.     

Partnership longevity and personality congruence in couples

Evidence of assortative mating according to personality was reported in a previous SOEP-based study (Rammstedt & Schupp, 2008). Based on population representative data of almost 7000 couples, high levels of congruence between spouses were found, which increased with marriage duration. Almost 5000 of these couples were tracked over a five-year period with personality assessed at the beginning and end of this time, which allowed us to investigate the relationship between personality congruence and marriage duration longitudinally. Using this data, we investigated (a) whether personality congruence is predictive for partnership longevity and whether congruence therefore differs between subsequently stable and unstable couples, (b) if stable couples become more congruent, and (c) if separated couples become less congruent with regard to their personality over time. The results provide initial evidence of personality congruence as a predictor for partnership longevity: the more congruent couples are in the personality domain of Openness, the more stable their partnership. In addition, we found no indications of an increase in personality congruence over time within the stable couples; within the separated couples, however, a strong decrease in congruence was detectable.     

Performance predictions affect attentional processes of event-based prospective memory

To investigate whether making performance predictions affects prospective memory (PM) processing, we asked one group of participants to predict their performance in a PM task embedded in an ongoing task and compared their performance with a control group that made no predictions. A third group gave not only PM predictions but also ongoing-task predictions. Exclusive PM predictions resulted in slower ongoing-task responding both in a nonfocal (Experiment 1) and in a focal (Experiment 2) PM task. Only in the nonfocal task was the additional slowing accompanied by improved PM performance. Even in the nonfocal task, however, was the correlation between ongoing-task speed and PM performance reduced after predictions, suggesting that the slowing was not completely functional for PM. Prediction-induced changes could be avoided by asking participants to additionally predict their performance in the ongoing task. In sum, the present findings substantiate a role of metamemory for attention-allocation strategies of PM.     

A Comparison of the TAT,CAT and CAT-H among Second Grade Girls

The TAT, CAT and CAT-H were administered to second grade girls and compared in terms of psychological usefulness on four dependent measures. The dependent measures were (a) Transcendence Index, (b) Word Count, (c) Response Organization and (d) Response Creativity. The results indicated that the CAT and CAT-H were more useful instruments for this age group.     

Face processing in autistics: Evidence for a generalised deficit?

Several studies have recently highlighted specific impairments in face processing in autistic subjects (memory for faces, recognition of emotional expressions, identity recognition of familiar faces). The goal of the present study was to explore whether there was a generalised face processing deficit in this population. A variety of tasks examining different, and possibly dissociative, aspects of face processing was investigated. The results of autistic subjects were compared with data from (a) a group of children with Down syndrome and (b) two individually matched control groups. The study suggests that autistic subjects are impaired in the various face processing tasks, but not always to the same extent.     

The perception of emotions by ear and by eye

Emotions are expressed in the voice as well as on the face. As a first step to explore the question of their integration, we used a bimodal perception situation modelled after the McGurk paradigm, in which varying degrees of discordance can be created between the affects expressed in a face and in a tone of voice. Experiment 1 showed that subjects can effectively combine information from the two sources, in that identification of the emotion in the face is biased in the direction of the simultaneously presented tone of voice. Experiment 2 showed that this effect occurs also under instructions to base the judgement exclusively on the face. Experiment 3 showed the reverse effect, a bias from the emotion in the face on judgement of the emotion in the voice. These results strongly suggest the existence of mandatory bidirectional links between affect detection structures in vision and audition.