Mental shock can produce retrograde amnesia

Subjects in three experiments saw a short film of a mentally shocking event in which a young boy is violently shot in the face. Compared to other subjects who saw a nonviolent version of the same film, those who saw the mentally shocking version showed poorer retention of the details of the film. Retention was poorer whether measured by recognition or recall. Furthermore, impaired memory occurred only when the event was mentally upsetting, and not when it was merely unexpected but not upsetting. These results suggest that mentally shocking episodes may disrupt the lingering processing necessary for full storage of information in memory.     

A comparison of mothers' and fathers' speech to their 3-year-old sons

The language patterns of 10 mothers and 10 fathers with their firstborn 3-year-old sons were compared. Ten-minute mother-son and father-son conversations were recorded independently in the home during a free-play session with standard play mterials. The findings of this study indicate that although mothers and fathers used a similar number of utterances in conversing with their sons over a 10-minute period, their patterns of speech were different on a number of quantitative measures including MLU, MLU of five longest utterances, percent of imperatives, and percent of questions. In general, fathers' communication was viewed as more controlling and involving the child less, while mothers' communication was viewed as more child-centered and involving the child more.     

Self-reflection,mood, and helpful behavior

Two pilot studies and two experiments were conducted to test for relationships between mood states, self-reflection, and helpfulness. It was hypothesized that both negative and positive feelings would increase helpful reactions. In the case of negative moods, however, helpfulness would be inhibited if the induced affect engenders self-reflection by associating the bad mood with the person's self-image in a self-referencing process. To test these predictions, female undergraduates read mood-inducing statements that were either (a) negative in content and containing the personal pronoun “I”, (b) negative but not self-referencing, (c) emotionally positive in content, (d) emotionally neutral, or (e) no statements. Afterward, they were asked to complete a questionnaire and to volunteer to participate in a future study. Findings in the first experiment confirmed the hypothesis. Women who had read negative, self-referencing statements were the least likely to comply with a helpful request. The most helpful participants were those who had previously recited the negative, but not self-referencing, and the positive statements. Neutral and control subjects displayed intermediate amounts of compliance with the helping request. Questionnaire results showed that self-reflection was responsible for decreasing the helpfulness of women when negative mood was associated with some aspect of the self. A second experiment successfully replicated the major findings of the pilot studies and the first experiment.     

Reading with and without eye movements: reply to Just, Carpenter, and Woolley

Just, Carpenter, and Woolley propose that measures of single-word processing times, such as gaze durations during normal reading or durations of reader-controlled exposures, can be used both for developing theories of comprehension and for determining the course of new reading technologies. We argue that better understanding of comprehension processes does not necessarily follow from observed correlations between text variables and eye-fixation parameters. Further, recent rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) research suggests that eye fixation data obtained from studies of normal reading might have little practical value in optimizing the readability of RSVP displays and other means of text presentation.     

Irrational beliefs as predictors of negative affective states

One effort to specify cognitive mediators related to dysfunctional emotional responses has been made by Ellis, who proposed that certain irrational beliefs elicit maladaptive emotional reactions. In order to test Ellis's hypotheses in a nonclinical sample, the Irrational Beliefs Test, two anxiety inventories, the MMPI-168, and a locus of control scale were completed by 32 male heavy social drinker undergraduates, who then kept daily records of their anxiety, anger, unhappiness, and drinking behaviors for 7 months. Four factors underlay the 10 beliefs but did not necessarily correlate with dysphoric affect. Certain irrational beliefs predicted daily unhappiness ratings over the 7-month period and daily anger ratings over 3 months, but the beliefs exhibited only a weak relationship with daily general anxiety ratings. Irrational beliefs, especially worrying about approval and competence, were strongly related to test anxiety and Spielberger's trait anxiety measure, were somewhat related to social anxiety and general anxiety, were minimally related to locus of control and social desirability, and were essentially unrelated to the MMPI-168's measures of depression and anxiety and to drinking behaviors. Although 2 of the irrational beliefs failed to exhibit relationships with negative affect, the other 8 show the predicted relationships to moods, providing support for a cognitive mediational model of maladaptive emotions in a nonpathological population.This research was partially supported by grants from the Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, from a National Institute of Mental Health small grant AA03947-01, and from a National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism postdoctoral training fellowship No. 1T32AA07171-01. We would like to thank Jean Chapman, Ph.D., for her advice on the statistics and Dorothy Knapp, Ph.D., for her painstaking scoring and coding of all the data records.     

Parental defense style and child competence: A match-mismatch hypothesis

This study sought to explore the possible relationship between parental style of psychological defense and children's social competence in 50 families in which one parent had been hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder. Based upon a formal analysis of the logical transformations inherent in various defense mechanisms, three levels of complexity of defenses were identified, along with a counterpart set of cognitive operations necessary for decoding these defense levels. It was hypothesized that children lacking the requisite cognitive skills to grasp the logical complexities of their disturbed parent's primary mode of psychological defense would be less socially adjusted and judged less competent than children who could understand the defensive transformations of their parent. The results suggested that children who, due to their cognitive immaturity, are potentially     

The personality of women who wish to adopt alternative delivery positions

The personalities of 51 women who wished to avoid obstetric intervention and to adopt alternative delivery positions were assessed. The EPQ was completed by the women and their consorts. The women were slightly higher on tough-mindedness (Psychoticism), more extra-verted and had lower dissimulation (Lie scores), than the average woman. Their Neuroticism scores were within the normal range for their age group. The personality scores for their consorts did not differ from the normal population.