The Impact of Anxiety on Memory for Details in Spider Phobics

According to the attentional narrowing account of emotional memory, physiological arousal results in attention being directed towards central rather than peripheral characteristics of the situation. Consequently, memory for central details would be relatively good, whereas memory for peripheral information would be impaired. The present experiment sought to test this attentional narrowing hypothesis under highly stressful conditions. Spider phobics and low-fear controls were confronted with a large live spider, eliciting high levels of emotion in the phobic group. Afterwards, subjects' memory for the experimental situation was tested. On a cued recall test, phobics displayed a poor memory for peripheral detail information relative to control subjects. There were no differences between phobics and controls with respect to central detail information. Thus, the present data provide partial support for the attentional narrowing account of emotional memory. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

I haven't thought about this for years! Dating recent recalls of vivid memories

In three studies, we examined memories for previous recall. In Studies 1 and 2, undergraduates were asked whether they had vivid memories about various childhood events. After a one‐hour (Study 1) or 2‐week (Study 2) interval, they completed a second questionnaire containing new, but also previously presented childhood items. Participants estimated how recently they had thought about old and new items. A non‐trivial proportion of recent recalls of vivid childhood memories was dated incorrectly. In Study 3, women with recovered and continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) completed the childhood events questionnaires used in studies 1 and 2. After a one‐hour interval, they indicated how recently they had thought about new, but also previously presented childhood items. Compared to women with continuous CSA memories, women with recovered memories underestimated their prior remembering. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fantasy proneness as a confounder of verbal lie detection tools

This study investigated whether high fantasy‐prone individuals have superior storytelling abilities. It also explored whether this trait is related to specific linguistic features (i.e. self‐references, cognitive complexity, and emotional words). Participants high (n = 30) and low (n = 30) on a fantasy proneness scale were instructed to write down a true and a fabricated story about an aversive situation in which they had been the victim. Stories were then examined using two verbal lie detection approaches: criteria‐based content analysis (CBCA) and linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC). Irrespective of the truth status of the stories, independent observers rated stories of high fantasy‐prone individuals as being richer in all nine CBCA elements than those of low fantasy‐prone individuals. Furthermore, overall, high fantasy‐prone people used more self‐references in their stories compared with low fantasy‐prone individuals. High fantasy prones' fabricated stories scored higher on various truth indices than authentic stories of low fantasy prones. Thus, high fantasy‐prone people are good in creating a sense of authenticity, even when they fabricate stories. Forensic experts should bear this in mind when they employ verbal lie detection tools. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Expression intensity, gender and facial emotion recognition: Women recognize only subtle facial emotions better than men

Two experiments were conducted in order to investigate the effect of expression intensity on gender differences in the recognition of facial emotions. The first experiment compared recognition accuracy between female and male participants when emotional faces were shown with full-blown (100% emotional content) or subtle expressiveness (50%). In a second experiment more finely grained analyses were applied in order to measure recognition accuracy as a function of expression intensity (40%-100%). The results show that although women were more accurate than men in recognizing subtle facial displays of emotion, there was no difference between male and female participants when recognizing highly expressive stimuli.     

Professional Discretion and Accountability in the Welfare State

The discretionary powers of welfare state professionals are in tension with the requirements of the democratic Rechtsstaat. Extensive use of discretion can threaten the principles of the rule of law and relinquish democratic control over the implementation of laws and policies. These two tensions are in principle ineradicable. But does this also mean that they are impossible to come to grips with? Are there measures that may ease these tensions? We introduce an understanding of discretion that adds an epistemic dimension (discretion as a mode of reasoning) to the common structural understanding of discretion (an area of judgment and decision). Accordingly we distinguish between structural and epistemic measures of accountability. The aim of the former is to constrain discretionary spaces or the behaviour within them while the aim of the latter is to improve the quality of discretionary reasoning. The focus in this article is on epistemic measures that are internally related to the main characteristic of accountability, namely justified use of discretionary power.     

The effects of co-witness discussion on confidence and precision in eyewitness memory reports

We examined the influence of co-witness discussion on the metacognitive regulation of memory reports. Participants (N?=?92) watched a crime video. Later, a confederate confidently agreed with (gave confirming feedback), disagreed with (gave disconfirming feedback), or gave no feedback (control) regarding participants’ answers to questions about the video. Participants who received disconfirming feedback reported fewer fine-grain details than participants in the confirming and control conditions on a subsequent, individual recall test for a different question set. Unexpectedly, this decrease in fine-grain reporting was not accompanied by a decrease in participants’ confidence in the accuracy of their fine-grain responses. These results indicate that receiving social comparative feedback about one’s memory performance can affect rememberers’ metamemorial control decisions, and potentially decrease the level of detail they volunteer in later memory reports. Further research is needed to assess whether these results replicate under different experimental conditions, and to explore the effects of social influences on metamemory.     

Konzept der komplexen posttraumatischen Belastungsstörung

The long-term effects of complex and sequential traumatization and the related diverse symptomatology have resulted in the development of the concept of complex posttraumatic stress disorder. The disorder is characterized by enduring disturbances of the affective system, self-perception and interpersonal as well as social relationships. The number of randomized controlled trials on complex posttraumatic stress disorder is relatively limited. The results of these studies show that cognitive-behavioral trauma-focused interventions are efficacious with good effect strengths.