Living in History: How War, Terrorism, and Natural Disaster Affect the Organization of Autobiographical Memory

ABSTRACT— Memories of war, terrorism, and natural disaster play a critical role in the construction of group identity and the persistence of group conflict. Here, we argue that personal memory and knowledge of the collective past become entwined only when public events have a direct, forceful, and prolonged impact on a population. Support for this position comes from a cross-national study in which participants thought aloud as they dated mundane autobiographical events. We found that Bosnians often mentioned their civil war and that Izmit Turks made frequent reference to the 1999 earthquake in their country. In contrast, public events were rarely mentioned by Serbs, Montenegrins, Ankara Turks, Canadians, Danes, or Israelis. Surprisingly, historical references were absent from (post–September 11) protocols collected in New York City and elsewhere in the United States. Taken together, these findings indicate that it is personal significance, not historical importance, that determines whether public events play a role in organizing autobiographical memory.     

Evidence for attenuated affective processing in obesity

Attenuated affective processing is hypothesized to play a role in the development and maintenance of obesity. Using an affective priming task measuring automatic affective processing of verbal stimuli, a group of 30 obese participants in a weight-loss program at the Psychosomatic University Clinic Bonn (M age = 48.3, SD = 10.7) was compared with a group of 25 participants of normal weight (M age = 43.6, SD = 12.5). A smaller affective priming effect was observed for participants with obesity, indicating less pronounced reactions to valenced adjectives. The generally reduced affective processing in obese participants was discussed as a possible factor in the etiology of obesity. Individuals who generally show less pronounced affective reactions to a given stimulus may also react with less negative affect when confronted with weight gain or less positive affect when weight is lost. Consequently, they could be expected to be less motivated to stop overeating or to engage in dieting and will have a higher risk of becoming or staying obese.     

Adolescent Report of Interparental Conflict: The Role of Threat and Self-blame Appraisal on Adaptive Outcome

Research consistently shows that children exposed to interparental conflict are at-risk for experiencing psychopathology. Establishing a link, however, between interparental conflict and maladjustment is not the same as understanding how specific outcomes manifest. Therefore, we examined the relation of interparental conflict and appraisal with adolescent outcome with 169 high school students (ages 14–19 years). Specifically, threat and self-blame appraisals were hypothesized to mediate the relation between interparental conflict and both adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. Results suggest that threat partially mediated the relation between interparental conflict and externalizing problems, interparental conflict and internalizing problems, and interparental conflict and adaptive behaviors. Additionally, self-blame appears to partially mediate the relation between interparental conflict and internalizing problems. Implications of the current findings are discussed.     

Influence of chronic corticosterone and glucocorticoid receptor antagonism in the amygdala on fear conditioning

Glucocorticoid receptor activation within the basolateral amygdala (BLA) during fear conditioning may mediate enhancement in rats chronically exposed to stress levels of corticosterone. Male Sprague-Dawley rats received corticosterone (400 microg/ml) in their drinking water (days 1-21), a manipulation that was previously shown to cause hippocampal CA3 dendritic retraction. Subsequently, rats were adapted to the fear conditioning chamber (day 22), then trained (day 23), and tested for conditioned fear to context and tone (day 25). Training consisted of two tone (20s) and footshock (500 ms, 0.25 mA) pairings. In Experiment 1, muscimol (4.4 nmol/0.5 microl/side), a GABAergic agonist, was microinfused to temporarily inactivate the BLA during training. Rats given chronic corticosterone showed enhanced freezing to context, but not tone, compared to vehicle-supplemented rats. Moreover, BLA inactivation impaired contextual and tone conditioning, regardless of corticosterone treatment. In Experiment 2, RU486 (0, 0.3, and 3.0 ng/0.2 microl/side) was infused on training day to antagonize glucocorticoid receptors in the BLA. Corticosterone treatment enhanced fear conditioning to context and tone when analyzed together, but not separately. Moreover, RU486 (3.0 ng/side) selectively exacerbated freezing to context in chronic corticosterone-exposed rats only, but failed to alter tone conditioning. Serum corticosterone levels were negatively correlated with contextual, not tone, conditioning. Altogether, these suggest that chronic corticosterone influences fear conditioning differently than chronic stress as shown previously. Moreover, chronic exposure to corticosteroids alters BLA functioning in a non-linear fashion and that contextual conditioning is influenced more than tone conditioning by chronic corticosterone and BLA glucocorticoid receptor stimulation.     

Sex differences in spatial and non-spatial Y-maze performance after chronic stress

Chronic restraint is known to alter hippocampal CA3 dendritic morphology and spatial memory in male rats. The present study examined whether female rats, which exhibit different anatomical adaptations to chronic stress than those of males, would also show spatial memory impairments. Male and female Sprague-Dawley rats were restrained for 6 h/day for 21 days, a time frame previously demonstrated to cause hippocampal CA3 dendritic atrophy. The day after the last restraint session, rats were tested on a Y-maze, a habituation task that can be used to assess spatial memory. Chronic stress impaired Y-maze performance in both sexes without affecting levels of locomotion as measured by total arm entries in the first minute. However, Y-maze performance of stressed females improved in 2-5 min when chronically stressed males continued to show poor Y-maze performance. The enhanced Y-maze performance of chronically stressed females occurred when total arm entries were higher compared to the entries made by males. Therefore, correlations were performed between total arm entries and spatial memory in 1 and 2-5 min. In the first minute when control females demonstrated functional spatial memory, female controls with the lowest locomotor levels exhibited the best performance. The correlations for stressed females were not significant, and neither were the correlations for any group in 2-5 min. Overall, these results show important sex differences in response to chronic stress with females exhibiting an ability to recover quickly from deficits in Y-maze performance.     

Associated or dissociated effects of syllable frequency in lexical decision and naming

Most empirical work investigating the role of syllable frequency in visual word recognition has focused on the Spanish language, in which syllable frequency seems to produce a classic dissociation: inhibition in lexical decision tasks but facilitation in naming. In the present study, two experiments were run in German, using identical stimulus materials, in a lexical decision task and a naming task. In both tasks, there was an inhibitory effect for words with a high-frequency first syllable. This pattern of results, suggesting a stronger weight of lexical access in the naming process in German than in Spanish, is discussed with regard to the issue of stress assignment in the two languages and within the framework of word production models. Items, mean response latencies, and accuracy rates per item for both experiments can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Frequency effects with visual words and syllables in a dyslexic reader

The present study investigated the nature of the inhibitory syllable frequency effect, recently reported for normal readers, in a German-speaking dyslexic patient. The reading impairment was characterized as a severe deficit in naming single letters or words in the presence of spared lexical processing of visual word forms. Three visual lexical decision experiments were conducted with the dyslexic patient, an unimpaired control person matched to the patient and a control group: Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of words and word-initial syllables and demonstrated systematic effects of both factors in normal readers and in the dyslexic patient. The syllable frequency effect was replicated in a second experiment with a more strictly controlled stimulus set. Experiment 3 confirmed the patient's deficit in activating phonological forms from written words by demonstrating that a pseudohomophone effect as observed in the unimpaired control participants was absent in the dyslexic patient.     

Metyrapone reveals that previous chronic stress differentially impairs hippocampal-dependent memory

Chronic stress facilitates fear conditioning in rats with hippocampal neuronal atrophy and in rats in which the atrophy is prevented with tianeptine, a serotonin re-uptake enhancer. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the lack of dissociation between fear conditioning performance and hippocampal integrity was masked by the presence of endogenous corticosteroids during training. As in previous studies, rats were stressed by daily restraint (6 h/day for 21 days), trained in the conditioning chamber (day 23), and then assessed for conditioned fear (day 25) at a time when hippocampal dendritic atrophy persists. On the training day, half of the control and stressed rats were. injected with metyrapone to reduce corticosterone release. Two hours later, two paired or unpaired presentations of tone and footshock were delivered. Although metyrapone reduced conditioned fear in all rats, only stressed rats showed dissociated fear conditioning (i.e. tone conditioning was reduced while contextual conditioning was eliminated). Chronically stressed rats, regardless of metyrapone treatment displayed more rearing in the open field when tested immediately after the completion of fear conditioning. These data support the hypothesis that increased emotionality and enhanced fear conditioning exhibited by chronically stressed rats maybe due to endogenous corticosterone secretion at the time of fear conditioned training. Moreover,these data suggest that chronic stress impairs hippocampal-dependent processes more robustly than hippocampal-independent processes after metyrapone to reduce corticosterone secretion during aversive training.     

Haiti Chérie

I travel a lot.

As I teach and move about through many different cities, come in contact with many kinds of people, see many shapes of mountains, cross many rivers, I carry a certain dust clinging to the hem of my skirt. That dust is from Haiti. And I will never shake it from me.