Repressive coping and the recall of emotional material

Abstract

Individuals who possess a repressive coping style are known to have difficulty in retrieving negative autobiographical memories. We investigated whether these findings were specific to autobiographical memories. After learning a story containing positive and negative information about mothers and fathers, repressors remembered significantly fewer negative phrases than did controls, although there were no differences in the recall of positive material.     

Attitudes towards unions through a generational cohort lens

ABSTRACT

Studying a large American union, we report on findings from two studies investigating perceptions of and attitudes towards unions through a generational cohort lens. Study one explores the link between generational cohort and members’ perceptions of unions, employing qualitative analysis of 100 interviews: 30 Millennials, 35 Gen X, and 35 Baby Boomers. Analysis determined that union members focus on either ideological or instrumental explanations to support perceptions that their generation was either pro-union or anti-union. Themes identified in study one were further explored in a quantitative study which involved statistical analysis of survey data (n = 4717) to identify possible differences in pro and anti-union attitudes across three generational cohorts: baby boomer (n = 2857), Gen X (n = 1256), and millennials (n = 304). Data from both studies support the idea that pro-union perceptions and attitudes are more prevalent among those in the baby boomer cohort than Gen Xers, and millennials.     

Parieto-occipital areas involved in efficient filtering in search: A time course analysis of visual marking using behavioural and functional imaging procedures

Search for a colour-form conjunction target can be facilitated by presenting one set of distractors prior to the second set of distractors and the target: the preview benefit (Watson & Humphreys, 1997). The early presentation of one set of distractors enables them to be efficiently filtered from search. We report two studies investigating the time course of the preview benefit. In Experiment 1 we use a standard reaction time analysis to show that the benefit has a relatively slow time course; old items need to precede the new set by 600 ms or more in order to be fully filtered from search. Furthermore, the reductions in reaction time across time in the preview condition varied nonlinearly with the display size, suggesting that old items were discounted from search in parallel. In Experiment 2 we examined the neural locus of this filtering effect over time, using positron emission tomography (PET). We show that regions of parieto-occipital cortex are selectively activated in a preview search condition relative to a detection baseline. These regions also increase in activation as the preview interval increases (and search then becomes easier), consistent with them modulating the parallel filtering of distractors from targets in spatial search. Interestingly, the same areas as those activated in preview search were also active in conjunction search relative to its own detection baseline. Thus these regions either modulate parallel filtering in conjunction search too, or they modulate different behavioural functions according to task constraints.     

What are Physical Properties

This paper concerns an issue in the metaphysics of properties. The issue is: what are physical properties? What distinguishes physical properties from all other properties? My conclusions will be ‘downbeat’. I will argue that some major recent approaches to this issue prove unsatisfactory, and that the issue is much more intractable than has widely been supposed. The moral I draw is that there is no principled and well-defined distinction between physical properties and all other properties, and accordingly certain programmes in metaphysics should be abandoned because they mistakenly assume that there is such a distinction.     

Increasing set size breaks down sequential congruency: Evidence for an associative locus of cognitive control

In recent years, a number of studies have revealed that cognitive control is strongly context-dependent (e.g., Crump et al., 2006). Inspired by this, computational models have been formulated based on the idea that cognitive control processes are based on associative learning (Blais et al., 2007; Verguts & Notebaert, 2008). Here, we test a natural consequence of this idea, namely, that sequential congruency effects (Gratton et al., 1992) should gradually decrease with an increasing number of task-relevant features (e.g., stimuli). The effect is empirically observed and simulated in a computational model. Implications of our findings are discussed.