The hypercorrection effect persists over a week, but high-confidence errors return

People’s knowledge about the world often contains misconceptions that are well-learned and firmly believed. Although such misconceptions seem hard to correct, recent research has demonstrated that errors made with higher confidence are more likely to be corrected with feedback, a finding called the hypercorrection effect. We investigated whether this effect persists over a 1-week delay. Subjects answered general-knowledge questions about science, rated their confidence in each response, and received correct answer feedback. Half of the subjects reanswered the same questions immediately, while the other half reanswered them after a 1-week delay. The hypercorrection effect occurred on both the immediate and delayed final tests, but error correction decreased on the delayed test. When subjects failed to correct an error on the delayed test, they sometimes reproduced the same error from the initial test. Interestingly, high-confidence errors were more likely than low-confidence errors to be reproduced on the delayed test. These findings help to contextualize the hypercorrection effect within the broader memory literature by showing that high-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected, but they are also more likely to be reproduced if the correct answer is forgotten.     

The causes and consequences of transient epileptic amnesia

Transient epileptic amnesia (TEA) is a recently recognised syndrome of epilepsy in which the principle manifestation of seizures is recurrent episodes of isolated memory loss. In this article, we describe the clinical and cognitive profile of this emerging syndrome, and present new data that provide at most weak support for its proposed relationship to cerebrovascular disease. TEA is often associated with two unusual forms of interictal memory impairment: accelerated long-term forgetting and remote memory impairment. We discuss the clinical and theoretical implications of these relatively novel cognitive deficits.     

Recognizing famous people

In daily life, face identification requires that the observer select a single representation from hundreds if not thousands in memory. This breadth of choice is nearly impossible to replicate in the laboratory using newly learned faces, especially in the context of a Bubbles experiment (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001). In this study, we obviated this concern by studying the performance of observers in a face-naming task using 210 faces of celebrities. On each trial, we presented a face randomly sampled with Bubbles. We performed least-square multiple linear regressions on the location of the samples and on accuracy to pinpoint the facial features that were used effectively in this task. Correct face identification relied primarily on the eye areas in spatial frequency bands ranging from 4.37 to 70 cycles per face (cpf) and on the mouth and the nose in a spatial frequency band ranging from 8.75 to 17.5 cpf. A comparison with other studies (Caldara et al., 2005; Schyns, Bonnar, & Gosselin, 2002) in which Bubbles was used with a set of 10 newly learned faces revealed that although the eye areas were useful across studies, the mouth area and higher spatial frequencies gained in importance when few newly learned faces were used.     

The Future of Psychotherapy: Visions and Recommendations

Using a roundtable discussion format, the editor and new members of the editorial board for the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy exchange ideas about how they envision the future of psychotherapy, anticipate likely positive and negative outcomes, identify key issues to be confronted today in order to maximize future success, and clarify the role of the individual psychotherapist in protecting psychotherapy as a viable field of study and practice. The discussion closes with recommendations for the next generation of psychotherapists and general conclusions about the future of psychotherapy.     

When additional multiple‐choice lures aid versus hinder later memory

Three experiments were conducted to investigate whether increasing the number of lures on a multiple‐choice test helps, hinders or has no effect on later memory. All three patterns have been reported in the literature. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were unrelated word lists, and increasing the number of lures on an initial multiple‐choice test led to better performance on later free recall and cued recall tasks. In contrast, in Experiments 2 and 3, stimuli were facts from prose materials, and increasing the number of multiple‐choice lures led to robust costs in cued recall and smaller costs in free recall. The results indicate that performance on the initial multiple‐choice test is a critical factor. When initial multiple‐choice performance was near ceiling, testing with additional lures led to superior performance on subsequent tests. However, at lower levels of multiple‐choice performance, testing with additional lures produced costs on later tests. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Daily affective reactivity as a prospective predictor of depressive symptoms

Daily affective reactivity refers to the within-subject relationship between daily stress and daily mood. Most stress researchers have conceptualized daily affective reactivity as a dependent variable to be predicted by individual difference variables such as personality and psychopathology. In contrast, in our recent research, we have conceptualized daily affective reactivity as an independent variable that can predict depressive symptoms. In this article, we summarize three studies that relied on a daily process methodology and multilevel modeling to assess affective reactivity in the context of daily stressful events. Two of the studies (Cohen, Butler, Gunthert, & Beck, 2005; Gunthert, Cohen, Butler, & Beck, 2005) sampled adult outpatients in cognitive therapy and evaluated the predictive role of daily affective reactivity in treatment outcome (depression reduction). A third study (O'Neill, Cohen, Tolpin, & Gunthert, 2004) evaluated the predictive role of college students' daily affective reactivity in the development of depressive symptoms. We consider the strengths and weaknesses of a daily process methodology for research on depression in both clinical and nonclinical samples.