Creating new memories that are quickly accessed and confidently held

In two experiments involving a total of 542 subjects, a series of slides depicting a burglary was shown. After the initial event, subjects were exposed to one or more narratives about the event that contained some misinformation or neutral information about four critical details. Finally, subjects were tested on their memories of what they saw, and their reaction times and confidence levels were measured. When subjects took a standard test in which the misinformation item was a possible response option, they responded very quickly and confidently when making this incorrect choice. Misled subjects responded as quickly and confidently to these "unreal" memories as they did to their genuine memories. It does not seem, then, that the misinformation effect arises from a large proportion of subjects who must resolve a conflict between two memories when they are tested, a conflict that would be expected to take time. When subjects took a modified test in which the misinformation item was not a possible response, misled subjects were as accurate as were controls, but they responded more slowly, regardless of whether they ultimately chose the right or wrong option. These findings indicate that misinformation does introduce some form of interference not detected by a simple test of accuracy.     

Hugs or shrugs: Parental and peer influence on continuity of involvement in sport by female adolescents

The study was designed to examine the influence of significant others (mothers, fathers, and male and female peers) on continuing involvement in sport by adolescent females. Survey data were collected from 376 girls using a forced-choice, self-administered questionnaire. Maintenance of involvement was measured by the proportion of possible years in which the respondents were involved in physical activity within each of three participation contexts (intramural, interschool, and community sport). Several indicators of significant other influence were used. The degree to which involvement in physical activity is maintained is positively related to the source, amount and type of influence received from significant others, and varied by the participation context. Overall, the socializing influence of significant others was able to account for 11% of the variance in intramural activity, 20% of the variance in interschool sport, and 10% of the variance in community-based activity.This study was funded by a grant from Fitness Canada.     

Reliability of job evaluation: Differences across sex-typed jobs

Recent work has questioned whether a single job evaluation instrument can reliably measure jobs from different job families. To test this, a generalizability study was done to determine the reliability of three job evaluation instruments: one for male-dominated jobs, MIMA-Shop, one for female-dominated jobs, MIMA-office and one which evaluated both types, FES. Initial results indicated that the latter instrument suffered no loss in reliability, and that all three instruments were equally highly reliable. A second analysis evaluated the reliability of the FES for male-dominated jobs separately from the reliability of the FES for female-dominated jobs. These results indicated no significant difference in reliability for male-dominated jobs and for female-dominated jobs. Implications of these findings were discussed.A previous version of this paper was presented at the 95th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association at New York City, August 1987.     

Dependency, self-criticism, and depressive attributional style

Dependency and self-criticism have been proposed as independent factors in depression. Investigated whether depressive individuals characterized by dependency and self-criticism, respectively, differ with regard to internality of causal attributions for negative events. Sixty psychiatric outpatients completed the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory, the semantic differential, and the Attributional Style Questionnaire. Dependency and self-criticism correlated positively with internality and with each other (p less than .0001). Findings did not support the specificity of dependency and self-criticism as subtypes of depression.     

Sex differences on the revised Beck Depression Inventory for outpatients with affective disorders

The revised Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was administered to 174 male and 276 female psychiatric outpatients diagnosed with affective disorders. The mean BDI scores, mean number of symptoms claimed, and corrected item-total correlations were comparable for both sexes, and the coefficient alpha for each sex was .88. Principal components analyses found four dimensions of depression underlying both sexes' BDI item-intercorrelation matrices. Although men and women had comparable dimensions with respect to weight loss, self-blame, and somatic-performance symptoms, men had affective and performance symptoms loading on the same factor, whereas women had affective and cognitive symptoms loading on the same dimension.     

Interfacing Apple and IBM computers for the analysis of clinical biofeedback

This paper demonstrates a method of transferring research data from a remote clinic to a large university mainframe for data manipulation and statistical analysis. Data collected by an Apple //e computer were transferred to an IBM 3031 mainframe by sending data files to an IBM PC by telephone modem or by direct hardwire connection to the PC. The IMB PC performed data-formatting routines and then uploaded the files to the mainframe for storage. Advantages and disadvantages of sending data over telephone lines via a modem are discussed.