Application of a Temporal Persistence Model to Community Residents' L]ong-Term Beliefs about the Three Mile island Nuclear Accident1

Little is known about the conditions under which beliefs and attitudes about an issue or event will persist over time. The present research took advantage of a “natural experiment”, namely, the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear accident, in order (a) better to understand the nature of individuals' b]eliefs about a major event to which they were exposed and (b) to evaluate a conceptual formulation developed from laboratory-based experimental literature concerning when beliefs and attitudes are likely to be temporally persistent. Data were collected over a 3-year period following the accident from two samples of community residents: mothers of young children who lived within a 10-mile radius of TMI and TMI nuclear power plant employees. Samples of mothers and workers from a western Pennsylvania comparison site were also included in the study design. Results supported the persistence model in several respects. First, TMI subjects' b]eliefs, although more extreme than comparison subjects' v]iews, showed virtually no change during the study period. Second, the factors that the model suggests should account for the observed persistence were indeed consistently important predictors of TMI subjects' b]eliefs over time. Implications of the results for future applied work on long-term reactions to major events are discussed.     

Remembering words and how often they occurred in memory-impaired patients

Memory &; Cognition - The recent memory impairments in Korsakoff’s (KD), Huntington’s (HD), and Alzheimer’s (SDAT) diseases are qualitatively different from one another. All...     

STM capacity for Chinese and English language materials

This paper delineates the theoretical implications of a program of research on short-term memory using Chinese characters as stimuli, and compares the findings with studies of short-term memory that use English language materials. The 14 experiments on which it is principally based, carried out in the People’s Republic of China and in the U.S.A., are reported in detail in Yu et al. (1984), W. Zhanget al. (1984), and G. Zhang and Simon (this issue). One major theoretical product of this research is an experimentally tested model that reconciles the chunking theory of STM capacity with the articulatory loop theory of Baddeley, making good quantitative predictions of capacity compatible with both. Another result, obtained by using homophones as stimuli, is a demonstration that STM is mainly acoustically encoded, but that there are an additional two or three chunks of visually or semantically encoded short-term memory available. Chunks are shown to play the same role in immediate recall and rote learning in both the Chinese language and English language stimuli; and STM capacity, measured in chunks, is essentially the same for materials in both languages.     

Suicide: The Psychosocial Dimension

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the relationships among culture, character, and suicide. It draws on the author's research in Scandinavia and his studies of suicide among United States urban blacks and college students. The differences in motivation and significance of suicide in Sweden and Denmark are illustrated. The United States is an amalgam of subcultures which must be studied separately to identify the psychosocial determinants of behavior. The varying rates and motivations for suicide in different cultures and subcultures, the differences between men and women, between young and old, differences in ways of coping with love and loss, life and death make clear that suicide is part of a culture's possibilities. The varying psychodynamic ways in which the suicidal individual in differing cultures and subcultures conceives of, uses, and absorbs death also has much to tell us about how we live.