Memory conformity: Disentangling the steps toward influence during a discussion

When two people see the same event and discuss it, one person’s memory report can influence what the other person subsequently claims to remember. We refer to this asmemory conformity. In the present article, two factors underlying the memory conformity effect are investigated. First, are there any characteristics of the dialogue that predict memory conformity? Second, is memory conformity differentially affected when information is encountered that omits, adds to, or contradicts originally encoded items? Participants were tested in pairs. The two members of each pair encoded slightly different versions of complex scenes and discussed them prior to an individual free recall test. The discussions were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed. Our most striking finding was that the witness initiating the discussion was most likely to influence the other witness’s memory report. Furthermore, witnesses were most likely to be influenced when an additional (previously unseen) item of information was encountered in the discussion.     

The portrayal of black people in UK television advertising: perception and reality

• Since the early 1990s, the UK advertising industry has been criticised for the relative absence of non‐whites, and for the ways ethnic minorities are depicted when they are used. Using interviews with advertising professionals and focus groups with black consumers, information on the perceptions of black people in advertising was gathered. The overwhelming message to advertisers was a simple one: ‘it isn't about quotas; it's about the way we are portrayed’. A content analysis of all advertisements shown during prime time on the three terrestrial channels over 2 weeks was then conducted. Results revealed that black people are actually over‐represented in UK television advertisements, although this is not the case for all sectors. However, the role type given to black spokespersons was found to be limited. Implications for marketing and advertising are discussed.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Primacy of functional knowledge in semantic representations: the case of living and nonliving things

In 3 experiments, participants decided whether sensory and functional features were true of living and nonliving concepts. In Experiments 1 and 2, concepts were presented twice: test phase followed study phase after either 3 min (Experiment 1) or 3 s (Experiment 2). At test, concepts were paired with the same feature as that at study, or a different feature from either the same modality (within-modality priming) or another modality (cross-modality priming). In both experiments functional decisions were faster than sensory decisions for living and nonliving concepts. Whilst no semantic priming occurred between study and test in Experiment 1, the shorter study-test interval of Experiment 2 did lead to test phase semantic priming. Here there was greater within- than cross-modality priming for sensory decisions, but equivalent within- and cross-modality priming for functional decisions owing to significantly greater facilitation of functional decisions from prior sensory decisions than vice versa. Experiment 3 involved a single verification phase: For half the participants the feature name preceded the concept name, and for half the concept name preceded the feature name. The functional processing advantage persisted irrespective of presentation order. Results suggest that functional information is central to the representation of all concepts: Function is processed faster than sensory information and is activated obligatorily.     

The Great Mandate,Sages and Sufism: Expounding Ma Dexin and his Sino-Muslim predecessors

Abstract: Ma Dexin (1794–1874), the prestigious Sino-Muslim philosopher, bridged Sufi ideas and Neo-Confucian philosophy by his handling of the concept of the Great Mandate. For Ma, the Sufi idea of ‘the Muhammadan Reality’, namely the reality of the perfect human, could be understood through an adoption and exploration of an ontological and cosmological interpretation of the Confucian concepts ‘sage’ and ‘ming’. The paper explains how Ma departed from the Neo-Confucian conceptual framework by holding that the Non-Ultimate had more ontological significance than the Supreme Ultimate. It is proposed that Ma's difference from the Neo-Confucians on that point explains his identification of the Great Mandate with the Non-Ultimate.     

The role of dynamic information in the recognition of unfamiliar faces

The effects of movement on unfamiliar face recognition were investigated. In an incidental learning task, faces were studied either as computer-animated (moving) displays or as a series of static images, with identical numbers of frames shown for each. The movements were either nonrigid transformations (changes in expression) or rigid rotations in depth (nodding or shaking). At test, participants saw either single, static images or moving sequences. Only one experiment showed a significant effect of study type, in favor of static instances. There was no additional advantage from studying faces in motion in these experiments, in which both study types showed the same amounts of information. Recognition memory was relatively unaffected by changes in expression between study and test. Effects of viewpoint change were large when expressive transformations had been studied but much smaller when rigid rotations in depth had been studied. The series of experiments did reveal a slight advantage for testing memory with moving compared with static faces, consistent with recent findings using familiar faces. Future work will need to examine whether such effects may also be due to the additional information provided by an animated sequence.     

Review Article

The Pope's Armada Gordon Urquhart, 1995 London: Bantam 441 pp., £16.99 hb ISBN 0–593–033884     

Access to Categories of Experience and Mental Health in a Sample of Managers

This study of 28 managers investigated the importance for mental health of Jahoda's (1982) five categories of experience, measured for both work and leisure. Each of the categories of experience of time structure, social contact, collective purpose, status, and activity correlated with at least one measure of mental health. Multiple regression analysis showed that collective purpose and status, in both work and leisure, had moderate to large β coefficients, indicative of their potential influence, for a range of measures of mental health, covering positive mental health and freedom from negative mental health. Analyses of Warr's (1987) nine "principal environmental influences" (PEI) also supported the importance of collective purpose and status. This showed that the PEI "valued social position," which includes these two categories of experience, remained significantly associated with several measures of mental health. Analysis of the PEIs also showed that opportunity for use of existing skills in leisure, and variety in leisure, were significantly associated with several measures of mental health. The importance of valued social position and active leisure for the well-being of managers is discussed.