Lexical and semantic influences on item and order memory in immediate serial recognition: evidence from a novel task

Previous studies have reported that, in contrast to the effect on immediate serial recall, lexical/semantic factors have little effect on immediate serial recognition. This has been taken as evidence that linguistic knowledge contributes to verbal short-term memory in a redintegrative process at recall. Contrary to this view, we found that lexicality, frequency, and imageability all influenced matching span. The standard matching span task, requiring changes in item order to be detected, was less susceptible to lexical/semantic factors than was a novel task involving the detection of phoneme order and hence item identity changes. Therefore, in both immediate recognition and immediate serial recall, lexical/semantic knowledge makes a greater contribution to item identity than to item order memory. Task sensitivity, and not the absence of overt recall, may have underpinned previous failures to show effects of these variables in immediate recognition. We also compared matching span for pure and unpredictable mixed lists of words and nonwords. Lexicality had a larger impact on immediate recognition for pure than for mixed lists, in line with findings for immediate serial recall. List composition affected the detection of phoneme but not item order changes in matching span; similarly, in recall, mixed lists produce more frequent word phoneme migrations but not migrations of entire items. These results point to strong similarities between immediate serial recall and recognition. Lexical/semantic knowledge may contribute to phonological stability in both tasks.     

The Relationship of Religiosity and Spirituality to Quality of Life Among Cancer Patients

Most quality of life (QOL) assessments measure patients’ emotional well-being, functional well-being, interpersonal/social well-being, and satisfaction with treatment. Little attention has been given to patients’ spirituality or religiosity. Further, studies that have examined the impact of spirituality or religiosity on QOL have not differentiated between the constructs. The purpose of this study was to examine religiosity and spirituality as separate variables, and to define their relationship to QOL for 61 persons with cancer. Regression analyses indicated that, while spirituality and religiosity are moderately intercorrelated, spirituality has a stronger relationship with QOL than religiosity. When attempting to understand a person's spiritual life and its impact on QOL, there is a need for clear distinction between and separate assessment of spirituality and religiosity.     

Attributional style in psychosis--the role of affect and belief type

People holding persecutory beliefs have been hypothesised to show a self-serving attributional style, which functions to protect self-esteem Bentall, Corcoran, Howard, Blackwood, and Kinderman (2001). Experimental support for this has been mixed. Freeman et al. (1998) suggested depressed and grandiose subgroups of those with persecutory beliefs might explain events differently. In this study, 71 participants completed measures of delusional beliefs, depression and attributional style. We hypothesised that those with persecutory beliefs would form grandiose and depressed subgroups, and that a self-serving attributional style would characterise only the grandiose subgroup. Hypotheses were partially confirmed. Clear subgroups were evident and only those with both persecutory and grandiose beliefs showed an externalising attributional style for negative events. Depression, irrespective of co-occurring persecutory beliefs, was related to a reduced self-serving bias and an externalising attributional style for positive events. On their own, persecutory beliefs were not related to any particular attributional style. Depressed and grandiose subgroups of those with persecutory beliefs might account for some of the inconsistencies in the attribution literature. Even within a single symptom group, care should be taken in both research and therapy to consider individual symptom patterns.     

Suicidal ideation among adolescents in relation to recalled exposure to violence

The relationship between exposure to violence and vulnerability to suicide among adolescents was examined. The topic was initiated by the rapid increase in adolescent's exposure to violence and the sparse systematic research available on its relationship to attitudes about life and death. The study's main hypothesis is that high levels of exposure to violence are associated with high suicide risk according to two conceptual paradigms-Fear of Death and Attraction and Repulsion to Life. Eighty-five adolescents were administered three self report questionnaires. The questionnaires assessed levels of exposure to violence, fear of death, and attitudes towards life and death. Those who had been exposed to a high level of violence reported attitudes synonymous with the profile of an individual at risk for suicide (low fear of death, low repulsion to death, and low attraction to life; high repulsion to life and high attraction to death).     

Retrieval-induced forgetting: Evidence for a recall-specific mechanism

Previous work has shown that recalling information from long-term memory can impair the long-term retention of related representations—a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). We report an experiment in which the question of whether retrieval is necessary to induce this form of impairment was examined. All the subjects studied six members from each of eight taxonomic categories (e.g.,fruit orange). In the competitive practice condition, the subjects practiced recalling three of the six members, using category-stem cues (e.g.,fruit or____). In the noncompetitive practice condition, the subjects were reexposed to these same members for the same number of repetitions but were asked to recall the category name by using the exemplar and a stem as cues (e.g.,fr____orange). Despite significant and comparable facilitation of practiced items in both conditions, only the competitive practice subjects were impaired in their ability to recall the nonpracticed members on a delayed cued-recall test. These findings argue that retrieval-induced forgetting is not caused by increased competition arising from the strengthening of practiced items, but by inhibitory processes specific to the situation of recall.     

Encouraging People With Mood Disorders to Attend a Self‐Help Group1

Using an intervention based on referent power, self‐help sponsors sought to encourage attendance at self‐help meetings. They encouraged patients with major depression or bipolar disorder to attend self‐help meetings following their hospitalizations. The intervention successfully increased the attendance of the experimental group compared to those in the control group. Implications for practice are discussed.     

Object representation and predictive action in infancy

Previous research has shown that 6‐month‐old infants extrapolate object motion on linear paths when they act predictively on fully visible moving objects but not when they observe partly occluded moving objects. The present research probed whether differences in the tasks presented to infants or in the visibility of the objects account for these findings, by investigating infants’ predictive head tracking of a visible object that moves behind a small occluder. Six‐month‐old infants were presented with an object that moved repeatedly on linear or nonlinear paths, with an occluder covering the place where all the paths intersected. The first time infants viewed an object’s motion, their head movements did not anticipate either linear or nonlinear motion, but they quickly learned to anticipate linear motion on successive trials. Infants also learned to anticipate nonlinear motion, but this learning was slower and less consistent. Learning in all cases concerned the trajectory of the object, not the specific locations at which the object appeared. These findings suggest that infants form object representations that are weakly biased toward inertial motion and that are influenced by learning. The findings accord with the thesis that a single system of representation underlies both predictive action and perception of object motion, and that occlusion reduces the precision of object representations.     

Adolescent Perception of Peer Success: A Gendered Perspective over Time

Adolescent males and females (grades 6–12) (n = 552) were presented with nine brief vignettes from the Teen Apperception Scale, describing high-achieving hypothetical female (or male) peers, across nine domains: leadership, academics, athleticism (two), musicianship, art, popularity, humor, and multitalentedness. Teens rated likability, popularity, and attractiveness of vignette subjects in each domain. The sample was roughly evenly divided by gender (47% male and 53% female); students ranged in age from 11 to 18 years. The sample was ethnically diverse, and the socioeconomic status of the students' families ranged from lower middle to upper middle class. MANOVA analyses showed female vignette subjects to be rated significantly higher than male subjects by both genders and all grade groupings, at p < .0001 overall, and at values ranging from p < .05 to p < .0001 for six of nine subscales. Results are contrasted with those from highly similar studies 30 years ago, and used to reflect a possible shift in attitudes toward high achievement in women.     

Extending the psychological profile of market mavenism

• This paper describes a study in the psychology of market mavenism, the consumer tendency to become especially involved in the marketplace. The purpose was to investigate empirically associations with the important consumer characteristics of innovativeness, status consumption, and need for uniqueness. The findings support the notion that market mavenism is due less to the demographic characteristics of consumers as it is more a socially constructed phenomenon. Global innovativeness, status consumption, and creative choice counterconformity explained more variance in market mavenism than did demographics. Theoretically, these findings enrich our knowledge of the psychology of market mavens by suggesting some motivations for their behavior. Practically, marketing strategies can be fine‐tuned to appeal more effectively to this important segment of consumers by appealing to mavens' willingness to try new things, to their need for uniqueness, and to their willingness to seek social status through consumption.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Construct validity of parent ratings of inhibitory control.

Recent literature has emphasized the need to examine executive functions (EF) in children using multiple sources, including both parent rating and performance-based measures. Computerized Go/No-Go tests, including commercially available continuous performance tests (CPTs), represent one of the most commonly used methods of assessing inhibitory control - a variable central to the executive function construct. We examined the relationship between parent ratings of inhibitory control and CPT performance in two mixed clinical samples. Experiment 1 examined 109 children ages 6-18 using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF; Gioia, Isquith, Guy, & Kenworthy, 2000) and the Conners' CPT-II (Conners, 2000). In this sample, ratings on the BRIEF Inhibit scale (mean T-score = 62.3) were significantly higher than the CPT-II commissions score (mean T-score = 50.7; p < .0001); and the BRIEF and CPT-II scores were not highly correlated (r = - .12). Experiment 2 examined a sample of 131 children ages 7-18 using the BRIEF and the Tests of Variables of Attention (TOVA; Greenberg, 1996). In this sample, parent ratings on the BRIEF Inhibit scale (mean T-score = 56.8) were similar to TOVA commissions scores (mean T-score = 58.6; p = .33), although still poorly correlated (r = -.02). Factor analyses exploring covariance between BRIEF scales CPT-II variables (Experiment 1) and between BRIEF and TOVA (Experiment 2) yielded similar findings. In both experiments, all eight BRIEF scales loaded on a single factor, with no overlap with either the CPT-II or the TOVA. In mixed outpatient clinical samples, the BRIEF appears to measure different elements of inhibitory control than those assessed by computerized continuous performance tests.