Ethnicity, education, and the temporal stability of personality traits in the East Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area study

We examined the influence of age, gender, Black vs. White ethnicity, and education on five indices of personality stability and change across an average interval of 8 years in the East Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area study. In the full sample (n = 505, aged 30–88), examination of structural, rank-order, ipsative, and mean level stability, as well as indices of reliable change suggested that NEO-PI-R personality traits showed moderate to high levels of stability over time. There were few age and gender effects on temporal stability but rank-order, ipsative, and mean level stability were lower among Blacks and individuals with lower education. Future research should explore additional demographic predictors of temporal plasticity in a diverse range of samples, and employ observer ratings to assess personality.     

Lexical selection is not by competition: a reinterpretation of semantic interference and facilitation effects in the picture-word interference paradigm

The dominant view in the field of lexical access in speech production maintains that selection of a word becomes more difficult as the levels of activation of nontarget words increase--selection by competition. The authors tested this prediction in two sets of experiments. First, the authors show that participants are faster to name pictures of objects (e.g., "bed") in the context of semantically related verb distractors (e.g., sleep) compared with unrelated verb distractors (e.g., shoot). In the second set of experiments, the authors show that target naming latencies (e.g., "horse") are, if anything, faster for within--category semantically close distractor words (e.g., zebra) than for within--category semantically far distractor words (e.g., whale). In the context of previous research, these data ground a new empirical generalization: As distractor words become semantically closer to the target concepts--all else being equal--target naming is facilitated. This fact means that lexical selection does not involve competition, and consequently, that the semantic interference effect does not reflect a lexical level process. This conclusion has important implications for models of lexical access and interpretations of Stroop-like interference effects.     

Depression, anxiety, and perceived hassles among entering medical students

This study investigated depression and anxiety among students who were entering medical school prior to the onset of their medical curriculum. Entering students reported financial, day-to-day, academic, and time hassles as concerns. Interestingly, the population characteristics of gender, marital status, and ethnicity impacted the type of self-reported hassles indicated by the students. Measurements of depression and anxiety indicated that entering medical school students' emotional status resembles that of the general population. The results suggest that it is the rigors of the medical curriculum that may play an important role in the increased prevalence of depression and anxiety for students during their medical education. Further, students who are entering medical field already have concerns about medical school and are in the process of anticipating the necessary adjustment to the challenges ahead of them. Preventative programming efforts should begin early in medical education and address a wide variety of concerns from academic, to interpersonal relationships and financial worries.     

Were you paying attention to where you looked? The role of executive working memory in visual search

Recent evidence has indicated that performing a working memory task that loads executive working memory leads to less efficient visual search (Han & Kim, 2004). We explored the role that executive functioning plays in visual search by examining the pattern of eye movements while participants performed a search task with or without a secondary executive working memory task. Results indicate that executive functioning plays two roles in visual search: the identification of objects and the control of the disengagement of attention.     

Enactment and retrieval

The enactment effect is one of a number of effects (e.g., bizarreness, generation, perceptual interference) that have been treated in common theoretical frameworks, most of them focusing on encoding processes. Recent results from McDaniel, Dornburg, and Guynn (2005) call into question whether bizarreness and, by association, related phenomena such as enactment are better conceptualized as arising due to retrieval processes. Four experiments investigated the degree to which retrieval processes are responsible for enhanced memory for enacted phrases. Participants were presented with two pure study lists and later recalled the lists separately (inducing pure retrieval sets) or recalled the lists together in a single test (inducing a combined or mixed retrieval set). Across all four experiments, the combined recall condition consistently failed to enhance the size of the enactment effect. The results provide no support for the retrieval account but are generally consistent with encoding accounts.     

A receiver operator characteristics analysis of treatment outcome in binge eating disorder to identify patterns of rapid response

The purpose of this study was to perform a receiver operator characteristics (ROC) analysis on a treatment sample from a randomized controlled treatment trial of participants with binge eating disorder (BED). An ROC analysis was completed with 179 adults in a 20-week treatment trial for BED to predict abstinence from binge eating at end of treatment. Percent reductions in binge eating episodes were examined following weeks 1 through 10 of treatment. The rate of percent decrease in binge eating episodes during treatment for BED was a significant predictor of clinical outcome at end of treatment. Participants who demonstrated a 15% reduction in binge eating episodes at week one were more likely to respond positively to treatment and achieve clinical remission. Findings from the current study suggest that a significant reduction in binge eating during the first week of treatment may be predictive of end of treatment remission in those with BED.     

Parental influences on memories of parents and friends

The authors evaluated the role parent-child relationship quality has on two types of memories, those of parents and those of friends. Participants were 198 Italian university students who recalled memories during 4 separate timed memory-fluency tasks about their preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school and university years. Half were instructed to recall memories involving parents and the remainder memories involving friends. Moreover, parent-child relationships were assessed by the Network of Relationships Inventory (NRI; W. Furman & D. Buhrmester, 1985) and Adolescents' Report of Parental Monitoring (D. M. Capaldi & G. R. Patterson, 1989). Results showed that men with positive parent-son relationships had more memories of parents and more affectively positive memories of friends, supporting a consistency model positing similarity between parent-child relationships and memories of friends. Women with positive parental relationship quality had more affectively positive memories of parents but for friends, positive relationship quality only predicted positive memories when young. At older ages, especially middle school-aged children, negative parent-daughter relationships predicted more positive memories of friends, supporting a compensatory model. The gender of parent also mattered, with fathers having a more influential role on affect for memories of friends.