When do visual and verbal memories conflict? The importance of working-memory load and retrieval

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel, 1997) combined with various verbal memory load conditions. Interference between tasks occurred if there was explicit retrieval of the verbal load during maintenance of a visual array. The effect was localized in the maintenance period of the visual task and was not the result of articulation per se. Interference also occurred when especially large silent verbal and visual loads were held concurrently. These results suggest central storage along with code-specific passive storage.     

Defensive Reactions to Masculinity Threat: More Negative Affect Toward Effeminate (but not Masculine) Gay Men

We examined whether, due to men’s desire to reject stereotypically feminine traits in themselves, a masculinity threat would elicit negative affect toward effeminate, but not masculine gay men. Fifty-three male undergraduates from the United States received bogus feedback that they had either a “masculine” or “feminine” personality before rating affect toward two “types” of gay men: effeminate and masculine. Results were consistent with the notion that defensive reactions target groups stereotyped as having the specific traits perceivers wish to deny in themselves: masculinity threat selectively increased negative affect toward effeminate, but not masculine, gay men. Thus, gay men who exhibit feminine traits may be at particular risk from men whose masculinity is threatened.     

Seven-year-olds allocate attention like adults unless working memory is overloaded

Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory performance increases with age in childhood, but it is not clear why. One main hypothesis has been that younger children are less efficient in their attention; specifically, they are less able to exclude irrelevant items from working memory to make room for relevant items. We examined this hypothesis by measuring visual working memory capacity under a continuum of five attention conditions. A recognition advantage was found for items to be attended as opposed to ignored. The size of this attention-related effect was adult-like in young children with small arrays, suggesting that their attention processes are efficient even though their working memory capacity is smaller than that of older children and adults. With a larger working memory load, this efficiency in young children was compromised. The efficiency of attention cannot be the sole explanation for the capacity difference.     

Visual working memory is disrupted by covert verbal retrieval

If working memory (WM) depends on a central resource—as is posited in some theories, but not in others—it should be possible to observe interference between tasks that share few features with each other. We investigated whether interference with WM for visual arrays would occur, even if the interfering task required neither visual processing nor overt responding. In an auditory-verbal interfering task, a response was to be made if a word was recognized as having come from one of two prelearned lists, but not from the other list. As compared with nonretrieval control conditions, even covert verbal memory retrieval disrupted the storage of visual items held in WM. A second experiment ruled out verbal recoding of the visual arrays as the basis of interference. The results indicate that visual WM and verbal long-term retrieval share a central resource (e.g., attention).     

Visual working memory depends on attentional filtering

Working memory holds information actively being used in cognitive performance. Two important aspects of working memory are how many items it can hold, and how efficiently it can be used. Recently, Vogel and colleagues used event-related brain potentials to show that these two things are related. People who could remember more objects from a spatial array also more efficiently excluded irrelevant objects. The results raise important questions about what aspect of working memory is most fundamental.     

Nipping psychopathy in the bud: an examination of the convergent, predictive, and theoretical utility of the PCL-YV among adolescent girls

Over the last decade rates of violence among adolescent girls have increased. Within high-risk contexts, urgent calls for assessment options have resulted in the extension of adult and male-based instruments to adolescent females in spite of the absence of strong empirical support. The current study evaluates the downward extension of psychopathy within a population of female juvenile offenders (N=125). The convergent and predictive validity of the Psychopathy Checklist-Youth Version (PCL-YV) were evaluated within a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework. Results indicated that while a specific component of psychopathy, deficient affective experience, was related to aggression, the effect was negated once victimization experiences were entered into the models. In addition, PCL-YV scores were not predictive of future offending, while victimization experiences significantly increased the odds of re-offending. Implications for research, policy, and clinical practice are discussed.     

Sexual and nonsexual marital aggression: Legal considerations, epidemiology, and an integrated typology of perpetrators

In this paper, the legal history of marital rape and the current status of “marital rape allowances” to sexual assault statutes are reviewed. The prevalence of marital rape and its comorbidity with nonsexual violence, as well as the physical and psychological sequelae found to be specifically associated with sexual aggression in marriage is reviewed. Our current limited theoretical understanding of the relationship between sexual and nonsexual violence in marriage is extended by integrating marital rape and marital violence batterer typology research. Specifically, we offer a four-type batterer typology integration (i.e., family-only, dysphoric/borderline, generally violent/antisocial, and sexually obsessive batterers) that fully describe husbands that are only nonsexually violent, both physically and sexually violent, or only sexually violent. Theoretical and practical implications of this integration are identified. Future research directions are outlined, and the need for greater clinical attention to the phenomena of sexual violence in marriage is highlighted.