Reminiscence Functions Across Adulthood: A Replication and Extension

Reminiscence, a naturally occurring process of recalling personally experienced events from our past, has been investigated primarily from a clinical, gerontological perspective. A total of 268 participants (100 male, 168 female) ranging in age from 17 to 88 years (M age = 40.02, SD = 20.32) completed the Reminiscence Functions Scale (RFS), the Memorial University of Newfoundland Scale of Happiness (MUNSH), and a single-item question assessing the perceived importance of shared family memories. Results indicated neither age nor gender differences on the total RFS score, indicating that men and women of all ages reminisce equally frequently. However, there were gender and age differences on specific dimensions of reminiscence. Specifically, women scored higher on the RFS factor of Identity (Idn) and lower on Bitterness Revival (BiR). Younger adults tended to score higher on the RFS factors of Boredom Reduction (BoR), BiR, Problem-Solving (PS), and Idn compared to older adults. In contrast, older adults tended to score higher on the RFS factors of Teach/Inform (T/I) and Death Preparation (DP). BoR, BiR, and PS correlated negatively with happiness, whereas Conversation (C) and T/I correlated positively with happiness. Finally, T/I, Intimacy Maintenance (IM), Idn, and C all correlated positively with the measure of the perceived importance of shared family memories. The results replicate earlier work with the RFS and suggest that examining reminiscence from a contextual, lifespan perspective is an important research area.     

Sex of respondent and credit attitudes as predictors of credit card use and debt payment

Researchers have suggested there may be sex differences in attitudes towards credit card possession and use. Undergraduates, 41 men and 41 women, completed a survey regarding their attitudes towards credit, credit card use, and repayment. Analysis indicated sex played a significant moderating role between number of credit cards used and the importance of paying off monthly balances. Women possessed more credit cards than men and engaged in more frequent shopping. Number of credit cards increased with paying off of monthly balances. Data are discussed in terms of the importance of managing credit card debt in an increasingly cashless society.     

Observational versus feedback training in rule-based and information-integration category learning

The effects of two different kinds of categorization training were investigated. In observational training, observers are presented with a category label and then shown an exemplar from that category. In feedback training, they are shown an exemplar, asked to assign it to a category, and then given feedback about the accuracy of their response. These two types of training were compared as observers learned two types of category structures--those in which optimal accuracy could be achieved via some explicit rule-based strategy, and those in which optimal accuracy required integrating information from separate perceptual dimensions at some predecisional stage. There was an overall advantage for feedback training over observational training, but most importantly, type of training interacted strongly with type of category structure. With rule-based structures, the effects of training type were small, but with information-integration structures, accuracy was substantially higher with feedback training, and people were less likely to use suboptimal rule-based strategies. The implications of these results for current theories of category learning are discussed.     

Hypoglycemia-induced suppression of luteinizing hormone (LH) secretion in intact female rhesus macaques: role of vasopressin and endogenous opioids

The first objective of this study was to determine whether insulin-induced hypoglycemia (IIH) inhibits LH secretion in unrestrained female macaques during the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle. There was a consistent inhibitory effect of hypoglycemia on LH secretion within 3 h in these females. This inhibition was likely an indirect effect since low glucose levels did not inhibit GnRH secretion from GT1-1 neurones in vitro. We next investigated whether administration of a vasopressin antagonist (AVPa) either alone, or with naloxone could reverse the IIH-induced inhibition of LH release. Females were studied in the follicular phase during 10 h periods with blood samples collected every 10 min. Experimental groups were IIH (n=6), IIH+AVPa (n=5) and IIH+AVPa+naloxone (n=4). The first 5 h of each study served as a control and hypoglycemia was then induced with insulin. The AVPa was given as a bolus (180 microg) just before the insulin and was followed by a continuous infusion (180 microg/h) for 5 h. Naloxone (5 mg/kg) was given with the AVPa and followed by a continuous infusion (5 mg/kg/h) for 5 h. In the IIH group, LH reached its lowest value 3-4 h after insulin. Neither AVPa nor AVPa+naloxone infusion reversed the inhibitory action of hypoglycemia on LH release. These data suggest that if there are inhibitory actions of vasopressin and endogenous opioids on GnRH release induced by hypoglycemia, they are not sufficient to explain the suppression of GnRH/LH release in intact female primates.     

Promoting Generalization of Oral Reading Fluency: Providing Drill versus Practice Opportunities

Extensive evidence exists demonstrating the benefits of repeated readings (RR) interventions at increasing students’ fluency on intervention passages. Few studies however have examined the extent to which repeatedly reading one passage improves students’ reading fluency on similar passages. Using an alternating treatment design, we examined the extent to which two interventions resulted in improvements in students’ fluency on generalization passages. While both interventions incorporated RR, one intervention involved students reading one passage four times and the other involved students reading two similar passages each twice. Intervention effects were evaluated by having students read a generalization passage prior to and following intervention implementation. Results indicate that both interventions were effective in increasing students reading fluency on generalization passages. For 3 participants the RR intervention produced greater gains in fluency on the generalization passages, while data for the remaining 3 participants are inconclusive. Implications of these findings for practice and for better understanding application of the instructional hierarchy to the development of reading interventions are discussed.

Anxiety-related threat bias in recognition memory: the moderating effect of list composition and semantic-similarity effects

Individuals with high anxiety show bias for threatening information, but it is unclear whether this bias affects memory. Recognition memory studies have shown biases for recognising and rejecting threatening items in anxiety, prompting the need to identify moderating factors of this effect. This study focuses on the role of semantic similarity: the use of many semantically related threatening words could increase familiarity for those items and obscure anxiety-related differences in memory. To test this, two recognition memory experiments varied the proportion of threatening words in lists to manipulate the semantic-similarity effects. When similarity effects were reduced, participants with high trait anxiety were biased to respond “new” to threatening words, whereas when similarity effects were strong there was no effect of anxiety on memory bias. Analysis of the data with the drift diffusion model showed that the bias was due to differences in processing of the threatening stimuli rather than a simple response bias. These data suggest that the semantic similarity of the threatening words significantly affects the presence or absence of anxiety-related threat bias in recognition memory. The results indicate that trait anxiety is associated with a bias to decide that threatening stimuli were not previously studied, but only when semantic-similarity effects are controlled. Implications for theories of anxiety and future studies in this domain are discussed.     

Materialism in the mainstream of early German philosophy

ABSTRACT

Discussions of the reception of materialist thought in Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century tend to focus, naturally enough, upon the homegrown freethinkers who advanced the cause of Lucretius, Hobbes, and Spinoza in clandestine publications and frequently courted the ire of the state for doing so. If the philosophers belonging to the mainstream of German intellectual life in that period are accorded a place in the story, it is only insofar as they actively set themselves against the materialist threat and, in the course of working to undermine it, actually only succeeded in inadvertently drawing more popular attention to it. By contrast, in this paper I will show that it was not just insofar as the thinkers of the early eighteenth century played the role of the diligent critic and unwittingly propagated the views of their opponents that materialism can be said to have penetrated into the very mainstream of the German Enlightenment. Rather, as I will argue, there was a striking degree of uptake of distinctively materialist claims even among its most vociferous mainstream critics, and that this is the case for thinkers in both the Wolffian and the Thomasian traditions.     

Assessing Children’s Implicit Attitudes Using the Affect Misattribution Procedure

In the current research, we examined whether the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) could be successfully adapted as an implicit measure of children’s attitudes. We tested this possibility in 3 studies with 5- to 10-year-old children. In Study 1, we found evidence that children misattribute affect elicited by attitudinally positive (e.g., cute animals) and negative (e.g., aggressive animals) primes to neutral stimuli (inkblots). In Study 2, we found that, as expected, children’s responses following flower and insect primes were moderated by gender. Girls (but not boys) were more likely to judge inkblots as pleasant when they followed flower primes. Children in Study 3 showed predicted affect misattribution following happy-face compared with sad-face primes. In addition, children’s responses on this child-friendly AMP predicted their self-reported empathy: The greater children’s spontaneous misattribution of affect following happy and sad primes, the more children reported feeling the joy and pain of others. These studies provide evidence that the AMP can be adapted as an implicit measure of children’s attitudes, and the results of Study 3 offer novel insight into individual differences in children’s affective responses to the emotional expressions of others.