A developmental study of relations between free recall, cued recall, and recall of incidental material

Six-, 9-, 17–19-, 45–55-, and 65-year-old subjects were shown 16 slides depicting one colored object and two uncolored context objects in a common setting, the task being to learn the names of the colored objects. Free and cued recall of both colored and context items were tested, the context objects being used as retrieval cues for the colored ones, and vice versa. The relative superiority of cued recall to free recall decreased regularly with increasing age. In the oldest subjects the level of free recall of TBR-objects was still fairly high, the level of recall of context objects being very low. The results support the hypothesis that adults encode nominally irrelevant context materials to a decreasing extent with increasing age, and that memory traces of young people in this sense are "richer", i.e., contain a greater number/variety of potential retrieval cues, than those of the elderly.     

The construction of risk in relationships: The role of framing in decisions about intimate relationships

Two studies examined the applicability of Kahneman and Tversky's (1979) notion of “framing” to decision making in romantic relationships. Using scenarios about hypothetical relationships, the results of Study 1 demonstrated that framing objectively identical alternatives in terms of losses versus gains affected participants' preferences for risky versus cautious actions. Furthermore, adult attachment style was found to moderate the impact of this framing effect. Study 2 examined individual differences in people's spontaneous tendencies to frame their feelings about their actual relationships in terms of losses or gains. Consistent with the findings of Study 1, attachment style was reliably associated with spontaneous framing. Secure individuals were most likely to represent their feelings in terms of a “gains frame” whereas fearful individuals were most likely to represent their feelings in terms of a “loss frame.”     

Distress in Clients and Significant Others: The Question of Causality

Previous research documenting the association between the level of client disturbance and distress in a significant other has generated two competing causal models. Investigators measuring the level of family burden have suggested that it is the discharged patient who causes distress in the family. Investigators of family factors in patient relapse have suggested that it is the family who disturbs the patient. In this study the relative strengths of these two causal models are compared in a sample of outpatients over a six-month period of time. The data indicate that the significant other is causally predominant in the exacerbation of client disturbance.