Subliminal priming of autobiographical memories

The current research examined subliminal priming of autobiographical memories. In Experiment 1 the subliminal primes consisted of affect-associated words (positive vs negative) and were presented just before the participants retrieved specific experiences to cue-words. The subliminal primes produced an inhibitory effect on autobiographical memory retrieval, with significantly lower positive ratings given to the emotional content of experiences retrieved after positive primes than given to experiences retrieved after negative primes. The subliminal primes for the second experiment consisted of words that related to specific lifetime periods (early childhood vs late childhood/early adulthood). A negative priming effect resulted again, with earlier life experiences retrieved after the presentation of late childhood/early adulthood primes. We believe the negative priming effects obtained in both experiments are consistent with predictions based on the self-memory system model of autobiographical memory. The results of this research may also explain mood-incongruent recall.     

Extending the revelation effect to faces: Haven't we met before?

The revelation effect is an episodic memory phenomenon where participants are more likely to report that they recognise an item when it is judged after an interpolated task than when it is not. Although this effect is very robust, nearly all of the extant research has used verbal or readily verbalisable stimuli. The present two experiments examined whether a revelation effect could be produced with non‐verbal stimuli such as faces. A revelation effect was found in both experiments, for both targets and lures, using faces as stimuli. The findings are integrated into the prevailing empirical frameworks for the revelation effect and face recognition memory.     

Book Reviews

The Cambridge Companion to Marx Edited by Terrell Carver Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 357. ISBN 0–521–36625–9 £40.00 hbk.

Paul Ricoeur By Stephen H. Clark Routledge, 1990. Pp. 216. ISBN 0–415–02309–2. £30.00 hbk. £9.99 pbk.

The Analysis of Political Structure By David Easton Routledge, 1990. Pp. xv + 336 ISBN 0–415–90310–6. £35.00 hbk.

Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism By Owen Flanagan Harvard University Press, 1991. Pp. 393. ISBN 0–674–93218–8. £27.95.

God and Greek Philosophy By L. P. Gerson Routledge, 1990. Pp. xi + 340. ISBN 0–415–02219–3. £35.00.

Scepticism By Christopher Hookway Routledge, 1990. Pp. xii + 251. ISBN 0–415–03396–9. £35.00 hbk.

Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy By Peter Hylton Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. 420. ISBN 0–19–824626–9. £50 hbk. £15.95 pbk

The Poetics of Imagining: from Husserl to Lyotard By Richard Kearney Harper Collins, 1991. Pp. xiii + 234. ISBN 04–445–4503. £30.00.

The Language of Art History Edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 255. ISBN 0–521–35384‐X. £32.50.

Newman After a Hundred Years Edited by Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 470. ISBN 0–19–812–8916 £45.00

Inference to the Best Explanation By Peter Lipton Routledge, 1991. Pp. x + 194. ISBN 0–415–05886–4. £35.00 hbk.

Dretske and His Critics Edited by Brian McLaughlin Blackwell, 1991. Pp. xvii + 231. ISBN 1–55786–198–6. £40.00.

A History and Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel By Giacomo Rinaldi The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Pp. 525. $99.95 hbk.

The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume By Galen Strawson Clarendon Press, 1989 (1992 issued in paperback with corrections). Pp. xiv + 291. ISBN 0–19–824038–4. £14.95 pbk.

Analysis and Metaphysics By P. F. Strawson Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. 152. ISBN 0–19–875517–6. £22.50 hbk; £7.95 pbk.

Physics and Metaphysics: Theories of Space and Time By Jennifer Trusted Routledge, 1991. Pp. xii + 210. ISBN 0–415–05948–8. £30.00.

Political Theory and Postmodernism By Stephen K. White Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 153. ISBN 0–521–40122–4. £25.00 hbk. ISBN 0–521–40948–9. £9.95 pbk.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art By Julian Young Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 170. ISBN 0–521–51124–6. £27.95.     

The durability of beneficial health effects associated with expressive writing

Abstract

This study examined the durability of benefits associated with expressive writing. Sixty-eight college undergraduates completed measures of physical and psychological health at the beginning of their first year and were then randomized to either an expressive writing or a control writing condition. Changes in physical health, psychological health (i.e., depression, stress, and anxiety), and academic performance were assessed two, four, and six months later. Findings indicated that participants assigned to the expressive writing condition reported less depression symptom severity at the two-month follow-up assessment relative to participants assigned to the control condition. However, these symptom reductions were not observed at any of the subsequent follow-up assessments. No significant changes were reported for physical health complaints, stress symptoms, anxiety symptoms, or academic performance. These findings suggest that, among first-year college students, expressive writing may provide some short-term relief for certain symptoms.     

Main and interactive effects of social support in predicting mental health symptoms in men and women following military stressor exposure

Abstract

Evidence across a multitude of contexts indicates that social support is associated with reduced risk for mental health symptoms. More information is needed on the effectiveness of different sources of support, as well as sex differences in support. Associations between social support from two sources – the military unit and friends and family – and mental health symptoms were examined in a study of 1571 Marine recruits assessed at the beginning and end of a highly stressful 13-week training program. Military social support buffered the stressor exposure–posttraumatic stress symptomatology (PTSS) relationship, whereas the relationship between stressor exposure and PTSS was highest when civilian social support was high. Further inspection of the interactions revealed that military support was most important at high levels of stressor exposure. Sex differences in the relationship between social support and symptoms were found, such that support from military peers was associated with lower levels of PTSS for men, whereas civilian support was associated with lower PTSS for women. While civilian social support was associated with lower levels of depression symptom severity in both women and men, the relationship was stronger for women. Reviewed implications focus on the importance of considering the recipient, source, and context of social support.     

Pediatric Symptom Checklist Ratings by Mothers with a Recent History of Intimate Partner Violence: A Primary Care Study

Screening for psychosocial problems is an effective way to identify children who need further evaluation, and many brief, psychometrically strong measures exist for this purpose. More research is needed, however, about the performance of these measures in special populations who are familiar to primary care settings. The purpose of this study was to examine and compare maternal ratings on the Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) between low-income, urban mothers who had suffered intimate partner violence (IPV) in the past year (n = 23) and a demographically-matched comparison group of mothers (n = 23). Victims of violence rated their children as having significantly more problems in a number of categories (Total PSC Score, Externalizing, and Internalizing) than did mothers in the comparison group. The PSC shows promise as an adequate screening tool for psychosocial problems in the children of women who have suffered IPV, but more research is needed.     

How to Individuate Universals—Or Not

In a recent article in this journal, J. P. Moreland (2013) extends his theory of individuation to include universals. In this note, I show how Moreland’s novel proposal leads to the unwanted conclusion that every concrete particular exists of necessity and has but a single essential property.     

Attenuated Change Blindness for Exogenously Attended Items in a Flicker Paradigm

When two scenes are alternately displayed, separated by a mask, even large, repeated changes between the scenes often go unnoticed for surprisingly long durations. Change blindness of this sort is attenuated at “centres of interest” in the scenes, however, supporting a theory of change blindness in which attention is necessary to perceive such changes (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). Problems with this measure of attentional selection - via verbally described “centres of interest” - are discussed, including worries about describability and explanatory impotence. Other forms of attentional selection, not subject to these problems, are employed in a “flicker” experiment to test the attention-based theory of change detection. Attenuated change blindness is observed at attended items when attentional selection is realized via involuntary exogenous capture of visual attention - to late-onset items and colour singletons - even when these manipulations are uncorrelated with the loci of the changes, and are thus irrelevant to the change detection task. These demonstrations ground the attention-based theory of change blindness in a type of attentional selection which is understood more rigorously than are “centres of interest”. At the same time, these results have important implications concerning the nature of exogenous attentional capture.     

Are objects required for object-files? Roles of segmentation and spatiotemporal continuity in computing object persistence

Two central tasks of visual processing are (1) to segment undifferentiated retinal images into discrete objects, and (2) to represent those objects as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Here we explore the interaction of these two types of processing in the context of object files—mid-level visual representations that “stick” to moving objects on the basis of spatiotemporal properties. Object files can be revealed by object-specific preview benefits (OSPBs), wherein a “preview” of information on a moving object speeds the recognition of that information at a later point when it appears again on the same object (compared to when it reappears on a different moving object), beyond display-wide priming. Here we explore the degree of segmentation required to establish object files in the first place. Surprisingly, we find that no explicit segmentation is required until after the previews disappear, when using purely motion-defined objects (consisting of random elements on a random background). Moreover, OSPBs are observed in such displays even after moderate (but not long) delays between the offset of the preview information and the onset of the motion. These effects indicate that object files can be established without initial static segmentation cues, so long as there is spatiotemporal continuity between the previews and the eventual appearance of the objects. We also find that top-down strategies can sometimes mimic OSPBs, but that these strategies can be eliminated by novel manipulations. We discuss how these results alter our understanding of the nature of object files, and also why researchers must take care to distinguish “true OSPBs” from “illusory OSPBs”.