Rewriting the past: some factors affecting the variability of personal memories

Three experiments assessed the variability of autobiographic memories and investigated the effects of age of the person, the age of the memory and memory characteristics. Using different paradigms to examine repeated recall of the same memories all three experiments showed that the memories of the older adults were more stable in terms of the content. The memories of the younger group showed greater variability across successive recalls. Experiment 3 also showed that the order in which older people recalled memory details was relatively consistent: younger adults showed greater variability in output order. Variability was also significantly affected by the age of the memory with older memories being less variable. No significant effects of memory characteristics (importance, emotion and frequency of rehearsal) were detected. Several explanations for these findings were considered. It was concluded that the personal memories of older people tend to be reproduced from a fixed precompiled representation whereas young people's memories are dynamically reconstructed on each occasion of recall. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exposure as a treatment for social phobia: Some instructive difficulties

The main rules guiding the application of exposure to the treatment of simple phobias and agoraphobia are described, together with the four principal difficulties that came to attention when these rules were applied to the treatment of social phobia. These difficulties were: (i) specifying graduated and repeatable tasks; (ii) prolonging exposure; (iii) securing adequate engagement during exposure; and (iv) dealing with the cognitive aspects of social phobia. Solutions to these difficulties are described and illustrated from case material collected during the treatment of 45 socially-phobic out-patients. The discussion considers the implications of these solutions both for the treatment of other conditions and for understanding the processes involved in exposure.     

Superordinate goals and intergroup behaviour: The effect of role ambiguity and status on intergroup attitudes and task performance

An experiment examined the effects of role ambiguity and relative group status in an intergroup situation where a superordinate goal was salient. One-hundred-and-fifty-six subjects in groups of three undertook a cooperative task under conditions where the groups' roles were clearly Different, Similar, or not allocated (Control). In addition, the groups' perceived competence at the task was either equally High, equally Low, or unequal. Financial rewards were contingent on successful completion of the joint task. Two contrasting hypotheses were derived from Social Identity Theory: one (H1) predicted most favourable intergroup attitudes in the Control condition where lack of any clear differentiation in group roles might facilitate a superordinate identifcation. In contrast, (H2) predicted least favourable attitudes in this condition on the grounds that groups lacked a distinctive identity. Support for the second hypothesis was found since friendliness towards the outgroup decreased with increasing role ambiguity. The status variable also had consistent effects. As predicted, mutual evaluations tended to reflect the consensually agreed status differences: least bias being shown towards high status outgroups, most by high status ingroups. Task performance was also affected by role ambiguity. Judges' ratings of the group products were found to be more favourable as role ambiguity increased, in contrast to the friendliness data. The implications of these findings for Social Identity Theory, the Contact Hypothesis, and theories of group performance are discussed.     

A comparison of semantic. acoustic and visual criteria for matching of word pairs

Ss judged the some pairs of words “same” or “different” under semantic, acoustic and visualcriteria. RTs were compared for each criterion, and the effects of different kinds of confusabittty, such as acoustic similarity in the semantic matching task, or semantic similarity in the acoustic matching task, were also studied.     

Inferential reasoning in old age

Two experiments examined the effects of aging on the kind of inferential reasoning required in comprehending discourse. In Experiment 1 old subjects made more errors than young subjects in solving logical problems framed in everyday language. Unlike the young subjects they had more difficulty when the problems were spoken than when they were written. Experiment 2 revealed that old subjects are inefficient at extracting implicit information during reading; they fail to generate bridging inferences to supply missing information, so that comprehension is restricted to explicitly stated information. The results show that verbal reasoning ability is impaired in old age and that this affects language comprehension in both listening and reading although the deficit is more marked in listening.