Retrograde facilitation under midazolam: The role of general and specific interference

In a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment that usedmidazolam, a benzodiazepine that creates temporary amnesia, we compared acquisition and retention of paired associates of different types. Some word pairs were studied before the injection of saline or midazolam, and two lists of word pairs were studied after the injection. Critical comparisons involved retention of pairs that were practiced on all three lists, pairs studied on only one list, and pairs that involved recombining cue and response terms from one list to the next, as a function of drug condition. Previous research with benzodiazepines had found retrograde facilitation for material acquired prior to injection, compared with the control condition. One explanation for this facilitation is that the anterograde amnesia produced by the benzodiazepine frees up the hippocampus to better consolidate previously learned material (Wixted, 2004, 2005). We accounted for a rich data set using a simple computational model that incorporated interference effects (cue overload) at retrieval for both general (experimental context) interference and specific (stimulus term) interference without the need to postulate a role for consolidation. The computational model as an Excel spreadsheet may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Creating psychological tutorials on the World-Wide Web

The potential impact that the World-Wide Web (WWW) will have on psychology and psychological education extends far beyond serving as a resource for information acquisition. Particularly through the WWW there is the capability to develop interactive teaching resources with integrated multimedia. These resources can take the form of tutorials or quizzes. In the present paper, on-line examples illustrate how these resources can be developed and used.     

Complex Processes of Religion and Spirituality Among Midwestern LGBTQ Homeless Young Adults

The role of religion and spirituality in young people’s lives is diverse and multifaceted. Little research has examined how religion shapes the experiences of socially marginalized groups, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) homeless young adults. This study illustrates how Midwestern LGBTQ homeless young people interpret the role of religion and spirituality in their lives. Drawing from a sample of 22 LGBTQ homeless young people between the ages of 19 and 26 years, we qualitatively explore how they distinctively frame religion, spirituality and religious identity through an intersectional lens of their life experiences. Our findings demonstrate the complex ways that young adults from multiple marginalized social groups can interpret religion in the unique context of their social environments. Many young people highlighted the positive impact of religion and spirituality in their lives by constructing them as sources of resilience. Other LGBTQ young adults also discussed how religion was often a source of stigma that interacted with participants’ highly vulnerable social environments and backgrounds. Implications for service providers and policy improvements are discussed.     

Transformation of the discriminative and eliciting functions of generalized relational stimuli

In three experiments, match-to-sample procedures were used with undergraduates to establish arbitrary relational functions for three abstract visual stimuli. In the presence of samples A, B, and C, participants were trained to select the smallest, middle, and largest member, respectively, of a series of three-comparison arrays. In Experiment 1, the B (choose middle) stimulus was then used to train a steady rate of keyboard pressing before the A (choose smallest) and the C (choose largest) stimuli were presented. Participants pressed slower to A and faster to C than to B. Then B was paired with mild shock in a Pavlovian procedure with skin conductance change as the dependent variable. When presented with A and C, 6 of 8 experimental participants showed smaller skin conductance changes to A and larger skin conductance changes to C than to B. In Experiment 2, A was then used as a sample in a match-to-sample procedure to establish an arbitrary size ranking among four same-sized colored circle comparisons. One of the middle circles was then used to establish a steady rate of pressing before the other circles were presented. Five of 6 participants responded slower to the "smaller" circle and faster to the "larger" circle than they did to the "middle" circle. In Experiment 3, A, B, and C were then presented on a series of test trials requiring participants to pick the comparison that was less than, greater than, or equal to the sample. Novel stimuli were included on some trials. Results indicated that the relational training procedures produced derived relations among the stimuli used in training and that these allowed correct inferences of relative size ranking among novel stimuli.     

Priming as a way of understanding children’s mental representations of the social world

Priming is a well established tool for experimental examination of how mental representations drive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that has been widely used in adult research. Priming is also a well established technique in cognitive development research. Social development research, however, has rarely used priming as a research method despite evidence that this technique is promising for helping researchers untangle causal connections between children’s mental representations and children’s social development outcomes. This paper discusses how priming methods may yield important insights into the role that children’s mental representations of the social world play in children’s social functioning. We begin by discussing the theoretical conceptualization underlying priming and priming methods. We next review evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of priming techniques in child development research. We conclude by suggesting ways in which priming can inform future research in social development using research examining attachment, social-information-processing, gender development, and mood and mental health as examples.     

Two types of perseveration in the Dimension Change Card Sort task

In the Dimension Change Card Sort (DCCS) task, 3-year-olds can sort cards well by one dimension but have difficulty in switching to sort the same cards by another dimension when asked; that is, they perseverate on the first relevant information. What is the information that children perseverate on? Using a new version of the DCCS, the experiments in this article reveal that there are two types of perseverators: those who perseverate at the level of dimensions and those who perseverate at the level of values (stimulus features). This novel finding has implications for theories of perseveration.     

Selective attention and attention switching: towards a unified developmental approach

We review and relate two literatures on the development of attention in children: one concerning flexible attention switching and the other concerning selective attention. The first is a growing literature on preschool children’s performances in an attention‐switching task indicating that children become more flexible in their attentional control during the preschool years. The second literature encompasses a large and robust set of phenomena for the same developmental period that indicates a protracted course of development for selective attention in children. We ask whether developmental changes in processes of selective attention may contribute to more flexible attention switching. We consider the two sets of phenomena with respect to this question and propose an empirical agenda for their joint study that may lead ultimately to a unified account of the development of selective attention and attention switching.     

Body image dissatisfaction among adolescent schoolgirls in Jordan

The present study has investigated the occurrence of body image dissatisfaction among adolescent schoolgirls in Amman, Jordan, and the risk factors that are known to predispose it including individual, familial and social variables. A sample of 326 adolescent girls aged 10–16 years was recruited from public and private schools in Amman. Participants completed a socio-demographic data sheet, eating attitude test, and body shape questionnaire. Approximately, 21.2% of participants displayed body image dissatisfaction in which physical changes associated with puberty and exhibiting negative eating attitudes were associated with this dissatisfaction. Additionally, mass media messages, as well as peers and family pressures towards thinness were associated with participants’ preoccupation with their body image. In conclusion, negative body image perception was observed in the present sample. Therefore, well-controlled prospective studies and development of intervention programs on body image among adolescent girls in Jordan are needed.     

Assessment of Psychopathic Traits in an Incarcerated Adolescent Sample: A Methodological Comparison

Analyses of convergent validity and group assignment using self-report, caregiver-report and interview-based measures of adolescent psychopathy were conducted in a sample of 160 incarcerated adolescents. Results reveal significant convergent validity between caregiver-report measures of adolescent psychopathy, significant convergent validity between self-report measures of adolescent psychopathy and an interviewer rating scale, but not between the caregiver-report measures and their corresponding self-report measures nor between the caregiver-report measures and the interviewer rating scale. Analyses of group assignment were also poorer than expected among all the measures with none evidencing significant agreement with the expert-rated device (Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Youth Version; PCL-YV), the most common forensic instrument used in clinical practice. Part of the poor agreement may be related to the poor psychometric performance of the callous-unemotional subscale of most of these measures and the low response rates from caregivers (N?=?35). These findings suggest that the measures do not provide an interchangeable assessment of callous-unemotional traits and suggest that further refinement of the measurement of callous-unemotional traits in youth may be warranted.