Correction to: Children’s Perspectives on Emotions Informing a Child-Reported Screening Instrument

Journal of Child and Family Studies -     

Working memory period: the endurance of mental representations.

Working memory span assesses the maximum number of items that can be remembered in the face of concurrent processing. Models of working memory differ on several dimensions, yet many rely exclusively on this span procedure for their evidence. Three experiments consider an alternative paradigm that attempts to capture the endurance limits for remembering a fixed number of items during concurrent processing. Eight-year-old children performed two versions of this working memory period measure--operation period and reading period. Period scores show healthy test-retest reliability and external validity for scholastic attainment, comparing well with span scores in these respects. In addition, period is highly correlated with span and shows similar effects of varying the order in which stimuli are presented. We conclude that the durability of representations is an important factor in both span and period.     

Suppressing thoughts of past events: Are repressive copers good suppressors?

We investigated the ability of individuals with a “repressive coping style” to strategically control thoughts of events from their past, which made them feel either proud or embarrassed, within the thought suppression paradigm. We examined whether (low) anxiety and (high) defensiveness interacts to influence suppression success over and above anxiety and defensiveness alone using low anxious, repressor, high anxious, and defensive high anxious groups. For the emotionally positive “proud event”, all groups avoided event‐related thoughts when instructed to suppress. For the emotionally negative “embarrassed event”, repressors reported fewer event‐related thoughts than all other groups, even when not instructed to suppress. Repressors also reported the lowest level of suppression effort and showed no “rebound”. We discuss repressors' memory performance in terms of their natural tendency to avoid negative self‐referent material, and thought and memory control in everyday life.