Nostalgia for Communist Times and Autobiographical Memory: Negative Present or Positive Past?

Twenty‐five years after the fall of communism in Poland, a considerable number of citizens manifest nostalgia for the communist times. In this article, we approach this phenomenon within the framework of autobiographical memory and decide between two sets of hypotheses, one predicting that postcommunist nostalgia is experienced mostly by people who are dissatisfied with the present time (transformation “losers”) and the other predicting that it is the memory of the happy and most recollected past, and memories of particular decades of communism, that mostly trigger nostalgia. The study, carried out on a representative sample of Poles who remembered communism, provided stronger confirmation of the “negative present” hypothesis, but the positive past is also shown to matter. The decade of communism whose memory turned out to predict nostalgia the best was the 1980s and not, as predicted, the 1970s.     

Color-Conscious Multicultural Mindfulness Training in the Counseling Field

The Color-Conscious Multicultural Mindfulness (CCMM) training focuses on addressing intercultural relationship ruptures, individual inequity, and systemic disparities. In this randomized control study, the authors examined the CCMM training effectiveness with 39 prelicensed counselors and counseling students using repeated measures analyses of covariance. Participants reported statistically significant changes in multicultural competence; mindfulness; and color-blind racial attitudes related to privilege, institutional discrimination, and blatant racism. Implications for counselor training practices and future research are provided.     

When does math anxiety in parents and teachers predict math anxiety and math achievement in elementary school children? The role of gender and grade year

Social Psychology of Education - The study investigated the relationship between math anxiety in parents and teachers and math anxiety and math achievement in first- to third-grade children. The...     

Letter-detection patterns in German: A window to the early extraction of sentential structure during reading

Letters are more difficult to detect in function words than in content words, presumably because function words serve to cue sentential structure but recede to the background as meaning unfolds. This function disadvantage was found for the definite article in German for all three genders and all four cases, but it was more pronounced when the article appeared in a nominative noun phrase than in an object noun phrase. It was also more pronounced for the typical subject-predicate-object sentential format than for the object-predicate-subject sentential format and also when the definite article unequivocally specified the case of a phrase than when it was ambiguous. The results suggest that the structural frames established on line in reading are finely tuned to both phrase-level and sentence-level organization.     

Fear of snakes and facial reactions: A case of rapid emotional responding

The aim of the present study was to explore how rapid emotional responses are manifested as facial electromyographic (EMG) reactions when people with explicit fear of snakes are exposed to their fear relevant stimuli. Fifty-six subjects, high or low in fear of snakes, were exposed to pictures of snakes and flowers while facial EMG activity from the corrugator supercilii and the zygomatic major muscle regions was recorded. Measures of autonomic activity and ratings of the stimuli were also collected. Pictures of snakes evoked a rapid corrugator supercilii muscle reaction which was larger in the High fear group as early as 500ms after stimulus onset. The High fear group also rated snakes as more unpleasant and displayed larger skin conductance responses (SCRs) and increased heart rate (HR) when exposed to snakes. Pictures of flowers tended to evoke increased zygomatic major muscle activity which did not differ among the groups. The present results demonstrate that the facial EMG technique is sensitive enough to detect rapidly evoked negative emotional reactions. The results support the hypothesis that people high in fear of snakes are disposed to react very rapidly with a negative emotional response to their fear relevant stimuli.     

Benefits of Blocked Over Serial Feedback on Complex Motor Skill Learning

The effects of blocked versus serial feedback (FB) on the learning of a complex motor skill-the production of slalom-type movements on a ski-simulator-were examined. FB was given about force onset, which is considered to be a measure of movement efficiency; relatively late force onsets characterize expert performance. One group of participants (blocked FB; n = 10) received FB about 1 foot per day; for example, for the right foot on Days 1 and 3 and for the left foot on Days 2 and 4. For another group (serial FB; n = 10), the foot about which FB was received was switched on consecutive trials on each of 4 days of practice. Learning was assessed on no-FB trials at the beginning of Days 2, 3, and 4, and on Day 5. Even though there were no differences between groups in force onset, the blocked FB group produced significantly larger movement amplitudes and higher movement frequencies than the serial FB group on the retention test on Day 5. Thus, contrary to the learning of more simple skills (e.g., T. D. Lee & H. Carnahan, 1990), constantly changing the movement component that FB is provided about did not seem to be beneficial for the learning of more complex skills. The findings add to the increasing evidence showing that practice variables that have been shown to enhance the learning of simple skills can actually be detrimental to the learning of complex skills.     

Having shaved a kiwi fruit: Memory of unfamiliar subject-performed actions

Summary In an experiment with young and elderly adults, memory of unfamiliar actions performed by the subjects was compared with memory of actions low and high in familiarity, in order further to assess the role of a knowledge base as regards memory material encoded by enacting. Memory of similar actions encoded verbally was also assessed. The findings showed that the type of encoding, as well as familiarity, determined free-recall memory performance. The highest free-recall scores were found for familiar actions encoded by performance, in both an immediate and a delayed free-recall test. Recognition memory was also enhanced by enacting, whereas the influence of familiarity with an item upon recognition performance was limited to actions encoded verbally. The role of familiarity in recognition performance of actions encoded verbally was reversed compared with that in free recall, in that recognition of unfamiliar actions was most effective. Moreover, age-related memory deficits were found in this study. Elderly adults showed a consistently lower level of performance than younger subjects in both types of free-recall test and in the recognition test. This effect of age was found regardless of the type of encoding, demonstrating that age-related memory differences are not compensated by motor encoding. The age effect was also found regardless of familiarity with the items, and was most significant for unfamiliar actions. This demonstrates that elderly adults have particular difficulty in processing unfamiliar memory material.The experiment was conducted as part of the fulfillment of the requirements for obtaining the diploma degree of Maria Schumacher. Portions of this paper were presented at the 32nd Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen, Regensburg, April 1990.     

German capitalization of nouns and the detection of letters in continuous text.

The missing-letter effect refers to the phenomenon that letters are more difficult to detect in common function words (such as the) than in content words. Assuming that the missing-letter effect is diagnostic of the extraction of text structure, we exploited a special feature of German--the convention to capitalize the initial letter of nouns. Given the great flexibility of word order in German, it was proposed that this convention might help readers specify the structure of the sentence. Therefore orthographic variations that violate the capitalization rules should disrupt structure extraction and should result in a reduced missing-letter effect. The results indicated that: 1) capitalization of function words eliminated the missing-letter effect, but not at the beginning of a sentence; 2) A missing-letter effect occurred when the capitalization of the first letter was correct, but was followed by typecase alternation, and also when the size of the initial letters was relatively large for function words, but relatively small for content words. The results were discussed with respect to the possible contributions of visual familiarity, structural role, and processing time to the missing-letter effect, taking into account that a capitalized initial letter conveys significant information about the word class for German readers. Thus, the present results indicate that readers take advantage not only of function words but of any other information (here the capitalization of nouns) that helps to extract the structure of a sentence.     

Set-Congruent Priming Stimuli Normalize the Information Processing of Psychopathic Offenders

Psychopathic individuals display characteristic deficits in processing emotion cues, the abstract meaning of words, and peripheral inhibitory cues, that have been linked to deficits in self-regulation and antisocial behavior. One view, supported by recent research, is that psychopathic individuals have difficulty processing set-incongruent information and that their difficulty may be ameliorated using task manipulations that establish a set-relevant focus of attention. We evaluated this characterization of the psychopathic deficit using a lexical decision (i.e., word recognition) task and priming manipulation that caused target stimuli to be set-congruent or set-incongruent. As predicted, low-anxious (i.e., primary) psychopathic participants displayed a significantly greater priming effect than low anxious non-psychopathic participants. The results highlight the potential value of priming relevant cognitive sets to overcome the costly information processing deficits associated with psychopathy. Treatment efforts emphasizing a balance of attention between primary and peripheral information may prove especially effective for reducing maladaptive behavior in psychopathic individuals.