First Year Post-Katrina: Changes in Occupational Performance and Emotional Responses

The purpose of this retrospective study was to determine whether Hurricane Katrina affected the occupational performance and emotional states of New Orleans area residents affected by the hurricane over the first year post-Katrina. A purposeful sample of 143 adults who lived in the New Orleans area just prior to Katrina completed a questionnaire one year after Katrina. Participants were asked to rate their satisfaction with their occupational performance and emotional states at four time periods: August 2005, before Katrina; September 2005, one month after Katrina; March 2006, six months post-Katrina; and September 2006, one year post-Katrina. The most notable findings were that both satisfaction with occupational performance and emotional states showed marked declines during the month immediately following Katrina, with some recovery six months post-Katrina, and further recovery a year after Katrina. At one year post-Katrina however, the recovery of satisfaction with occupational performance and emotional states approached, but did not quite reach pre-Katrina baseline responses. Further, women did not fare as well as men post-Katrina, on both variables. Limitations of the study, implications of findings for the theory and practice of occupational therapy in the area of disaster responses, and possible future research are discussed.     

The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama—Interpretation and Application

In this essay, Charles Marsh sketches a theological interpretation of the American civil rights movement. Marsh argues that interpretation must begin by reconsidering the theological legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., taking into account his deep, though largely overlooked, confessional convictions as well as his sympathy with the theology of Karl Barth, whose influence on King has been ignored. Marsh further argues that a theological interpretation of the civil rights movement should not be a matter of writing religious genealogies of moral actions, of civic piety or of representations of human goodness, but of understanding the detail of theological convictions in their lives particularity. Marsh thinks it is altogether appropriate for theologians to retell the story of the American civil rights movement as the story of the church.     

Evoking false beliefs about autobiographical experience

In two experiments, we demonstrate that laboratory procedures can evoke false beliefs about autobiographical experience. After shallowly processing photographs ofreal-world locations, participants returned 1 week (Experiments 1 and 2) or 3 weeks (Experiment 2) later to evaluate whether they had actually visited each of a series of new and old pictured locations. Mundane and unique scenes from an unfamiliar college campus (Duke or SMU) were shown zero, one, or two times in the first session. Prior exposure increased participants' beliefs that they had visited locations that they had never actually visited. Furthermore, participants gave higher visit ratings to mundane than to unique scenes, and this did not vary with exposure frequency or delay. This laboratory procedure for inducing autobiographical false beliefs may have implications for better understanding various illusions of recognition.     

The elusive importance effect: more failure for the Jamesian perspective on the importance of importance in shaping self-esteem

ABSTRACT Following William James (1890/1963) , many leading self‐esteem researchers continue to support the Individual‐importance hypothesis—that the relation between specific facets of self‐concept and global self‐esteem depends on the importance an individual places on each specific facet. However, empirical support for the hypothesis is surprisingly elusive, whether evaluated in terms of an importance‐weighted average model, a generalized multiple regression approach for testing self‐concept‐by‐importance interactions, or idiographic approaches. How can actual empirical support for such an intuitively appealing and widely cited psychological principle be so elusive? Hardy and Moriarty (2006) , acknowledging this previous failure of the Individual‐importance hypothesis, claim to have solved the conundrum, demonstrating an innovative idiographic approach that provides clear support for it. However, a critical evaluation of their new approach, coupled with a reanalysis of their data, undermines their claims. Indeed, their data provide compelling support against the Individual‐importance hypothesis, which remains as elusive as ever.     

Expertise effects in the Moses illusion: detecting contradictions with stored knowledge

People frequently miss contradictions with stored knowledge; for example, readers often fail to notice any problem with a reference to the Atlantic as the largest ocean. Critically, such effects occur even though participants later demonstrate knowing the Pacific is the largest ocean (the Moses Illusion) [Erickson, T. D., &; Mattson, M. E. (1981). From words to meaning: A semantic illusion. Journal of Verbal Learning &; Verbal Behavior, 20, 540–551]. We investigated whether such oversights disappear when erroneous references contradict information in one's expert domain, material which likely has been encountered many times and is particularly well-known. Biology and history graduate students monitored for errors while answering biology and history questions containing erroneous presuppositions (“In what US state were the forty-niners searching for oil?”). Expertise helped: participants were less susceptible to the illusion and less likely to later reproduce errors in their expert domain. However, expertise did not eliminate the illusion, even when errors were bolded and underlined, meaning that it was unlikely that people simply skipped over errors. The results support claims that people often use heuristics to judge truth, as opposed to directly retrieving information from memory, likely because such heuristics are adaptive and often lead to the correct answer. Even experts sometimes use such shortcuts, suggesting that overlearned and accessible knowledge does not guarantee retrieval of that information.     

Ironic effects of drawing attention to story errors

Readers learn errors embedded in fictional stories and use them to answer later general knowledge questions (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). Suggestibility is robust and occurs even when story errors contradict well-known facts. The current study evaluated whether suggestibility is linked to participants' inability to judge story content as correct versus incorrect. Specifically, participants read stories containing correct and misleading information about the world; some information was familiar (making error discovery possible), while some was more obscure. To improve participants' monitoring ability, we highlighted (in red font) a subset of story phrases requiring evaluation; readers no longer needed to find factual information. Rather, they simply needed to evaluate its correctness. Readers were more likely to answer questions with story errors if they were highlighted in red font, even if they contradicted well-known facts. Although highlighting to-be-evaluated information freed cognitive resources for monitoring, an ironic effect occurred: Drawing attention to specific errors increased rather than decreased later suggestibility. Failure to monitor for errors, not failure to identify the information requiring evaluation, leads to suggestibility.     

The influence of partial-match cues on event-based prospective memory

In event-based prospective memory tasks people form an intention to respond when an environmental cue signals that conditions are appropriate to fulfil an intended activity. In the ongoing activity the authors embedded partial-match cues that only partially, but not completely, satisfied the conditions required to make a prospective response. The consequence of encountering these partial-match cues was to increase responses to appropriate prospective memory cues encountered later. This outcome occurred both with semantic and orthographic cues, but only the former led to longer processing latencies of the partial-match cues. This asymmetry suggests that partial-match cues may not need to be processed consciously in order to benefit event-based prospective memory. A parametric manipulation of the number of partial-match cues resulted in numerically but not statistically better prospective memory. Consequently, partial-match cues may function as overt reminders of the intention to respond or they may serve to engage participants in self-initiated remindings of the intention.