Equivalent irrelevant-sound effects for old and young adults

Three experiments are reported in which a total of 182 old and 193 young adults recalled sequences of digits presented visually in silence or accompanied by office noise. In each experiment, an effect of irrelevant sound was found-that is, a reduction of serial recall due to auditory distraction. Old adults exhibited poorer serial recall than did young adults, but the irrelevant-sound effect was equivalent in both age groups. This was true even though the sound level of the irrelevant sound was adjusted to each individual's hearing capability, and the effect remained whether or not the difficulty of the serial recall task was equated across age groups. These results are problematic for the inhibitory deficit theory of cognitive aging, which predicts that old adults should be more susceptible to auditory distraction than are young adults.     

What setting limits may mean: a feminist critique of Daniel Callahan's Setting Limits

In Setting Limits, Daniel Callahan advances the provocative thesis that age be a limiting factor in decisions to allocate certain kinds of health services to the elderly. However, when one looks at available data, one discovers that there are many more elderly women than there are elderly men, and these older women are poorer, more apt to live alone, and less likely to have informal social and personal supports than their male counterparts. Older women, therefore, will make the heaviest demand on health care resources. If age were to become a limiting factor, as Dr. Callahan sug-gests it should, the limits that will be set are limits that will affect women more dras” tically than they affect men. This review essay examines the implications of Callahan's thesis for elderly women.     

Attitudes toward sexual abuse: Sex differences and construct validity

An “Attitudes toward Sexual Abuse” scale is introduced, and its reliability and validity in a study of university students is described. Attitudes supportive of sexual contact with children were associated with variables previously linked to sexual interest in children: male gender, use of pornography, greater numbers of sex partners, and greater endorsement of a scale measuring acceptance of sexual aggression against women. Such beliefs predicted both male and female university students' self-reported interest in having sex with a child, given the absence of detection or punishment, suggesting the potential importance of socially transmitted attitudes in the etiology of sexually abusive behavior.     

Face recognition memory: The effects of exposure duration and encoding instruction

Two experiments test the effects of exposure duration and encoding instruction on the relative memory for five facial features. Participants viewed slides of Identi-kit faces and were later given a recognition test with same or changed versions of each face. Each changed test face involved a change in one facial feature: hair, eyes, chin, nose or mouth. In both experiments the upper-face features of hair and eyes were better recognized than the lower-face features of nose, mouth, and chin, as measured by false alarm rates. In Experiment 1, participants in the 20-second exposure duration condition remembered faces significantly better than participants in the 3-second exposure duration condition; however, memory for all five facial features improved at a similar rate with the increased duration. In Experiment 2, participants directed to use feature scanning encoding instructions remembered faces significantly better than participants following age judgement instructions; however, the size of the memory advantage for upper facial features was less with feature scanning instructions than with age judgement instructions. The results are discussed in terms of a quantitative difference in processing faces with longer exposure duration, versus a qualitative difference in processing faces with various encoding instructions. These results are related to conditions that affect the accuracy of eyewitness identification.     

Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotion by Children with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Interpreting and responding appropriately to facial expressions of emotion are important aspects of social skills. Some children, adolescents, and adults with various psychological and psychiatric disorders recognize facial expressions less proficiently than their peers in the general population. We wished to determine if such deficits existed in a group of 133 children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). The subjects were receiving in-patient psychiatric services for at least one of substance-related disorders, adjustment disorders, anxiety disorders, mood disorders or disruptive behavior disorders. After being read stories describing various emotional reactions, all subjects were tested for their ability to recognize the 6 basic facial expressions of emotion depicted in Ekman and Friesen's (1976) normed photographs. Overall, they performed well on this task at levels comparable to those occurring in the general population. Accuracy increased with age, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, or clinical diagnosis. After adjusting for age effects, the subjects diagnosed with either adjustment disorders, mood disorders, or disruptive behavior disorders were significantly more accurate at identifying anger than those without those diagnoses. In addition, subjects with mood disorders identified sadness significantly more accurately than those without this diagnosis, although the effect was greatest with younger children.