Imagination and memory: Does imagining implausible events lead to false autobiographical memories?

Previous studies have reported that imagination can induce false autobiographical memories. This finding has been used to suggest that psychotherapists who have clients imagine suspected repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse may, in fact, be inducing false memories for the imagined events. In this study, at Time 1 and then, 2 weeks later, at Time 2, 145 subjects rated each of 20 events on the Life Events Inventory as to whether each had occurred to them in childhood. One week after Time 1, the subjects were told that 2 target events were plausible and 2 were implausible. They were then asked to imagine 1 plausible and 1 implausible target event. Plausibility and imagining interacted to affect occurrence ratings; whereas imagining plausible events increased the change in occurrence ratings, imagining implausible events had no effect on occurrence ratings.     

A Theory of Hypermodal Logics: Mode Shifting in Modal Logic

A hypermodality is a connective whose meaning depends on where in the formula it occurs. The paper motivates the notion and shows that hypermodal logics are much more expressive than traditional modal logics. In fact we show that logics with very simple K hypermodalities are not complete for any neighbourhood frames.     

Optimizing well-being: the empirical encounter of two traditions

Subjective well-being (SWB) is evaluation of life in terms of satisfaction and balance between positive and negative affect; psychological well-being (PWB) entails perception of engagement with existential challenges of life. The authors hypothesized that these research streams are conceptually related but empirically distinct and that combinations of them relate differentially to sociodemographics and personality. Data are from a national sample of 3,032 Americans aged 25-74. Factor analyses confirmed the related-but-distinct status of SWB and PWB. The probability of optimal well-being (high SWB and PWB) increased as age, education, extraversion, and conscientiousness increased and as neuroticism decreased. Compared with adults with higher SWB than PWB. adults with higher PWB than SWB were younger, had more education, and showed more openness to experience.     

As seen by the other...: Perspectives on the self in the memories and emotional perceptions of Easterners and Westerners

The experiment reported investigated the phenomenological consequences of Easterners' and Westerners' perspectives on the self. Two findings are consistent with the notion that Asians are more likely than Westerners to experience the self from the perspective of the generalized other. First, Eastern participants were more likely than Western participants to have third-person (as opposed to first-person) memories when they thought about situations in which they would be at the center of a scene. Second, Easterners and Westerners engaged in different sorts of projections when they read the emotional expressions of other people. Westerners were more biased than Easterners toward egocentric projection of their own emotions onto others, whereas Easterners were more biased than Westerners toward relational projection, in which they projected onto others the emotions that the generalized other would feel in relation to the participant. Implications for how phenomenological experiences could reinforce different Eastern and Western ideologies about the self and the group are discussed.     

Culture, memory, and the self: An analysis of the personal and collective self in long-term memory

We used a memory paradigm to test whether the nature of representations of the self within long-term memory differed as a function of cultural background. In Western samples words encoded in relation to the self are typically remembered better, and Euro-Canadian participants here showed this standard self-reference effect. However, Asian-Canadian participants were slower to recognize personal traits (as opposed to collective traits) when these traits had been encoded in reference to the self, suggesting a more elaborate representation of the collective self than the personal self in long-term memory. Further, memory was actually inhibited for Asian-Canadians when personal traits were encoded in reference to the self (vs. encoded with other referents). Differences in long-term memory trace strength for self-related data may emerge even as differences in the working self do not, and implications of this difference are discussed.