Personal memories at different ages

Men and women aged between 25 and 75 were asked to associate personal experiences to a set of 50 randomly chosen common words. The dates of these experiences were reconstructed and plotted as frequency distributions. Neither sex differences nor introversion--extraversion had reliable effects, and response latencies did not differ between conditions, but age differences significantly affected the memory distributions. Contrary to the hypothesis that ageing produces a selective deficit for recency, it appears that the average date of remembered events tends to increase with age.     

Effects of signals preceding and following shock on baseline responding during a conditioned-suppression procedure

Long-Evans rats were exposed to a succession of conditioned-suppression procedures involving pairings of (1) signal-shock, (2) shock-signal, and (3) a signal-shock-signal sequence in which first and second signals were at first physically identical. Traditional suppression of food-reinforced responding was obtained under the signal-shock arrangement, and exposure to the shock-signal sequence resulted in conditioned enhancement of responding during the signal. The signal-shock-signal condition reliably suppressed responding during the first signal, but produced no differential effect on response rate during the second signal. Baseline responding was least changed from preshock rates under the signal-shock-signal procedure, but baseline rate was considerably reduced under the signal-shock and shock-signal arrangements, the latter yielding most substantial reductions. A second experiment indicated that the magnitude and direction of changes in baseline responding reported in Experiment I were not confined to cases in which the first and second signals in the signal-shock-signal arrangement were physically identical. It is suggested that the major effects of the conditioned-suppression procedure on response rate might not be confined to presentations of the signal.     

Patterns of self-disclosure in homosexual and heterosexual college students

Two hypotheses concerning self-disclosure were investigated and confirmed in the present study, comparing homosexual and heterosexual college students. The first hypothesis was that self-disclosure, as measured by the Jourard Self-Disclosure Questionnaire, would be positively correlated with psychological femininity. The second hypothesis was that homosexual males and heterosexual females would exhibit similar patterns of high disclosure and femininity. No significant differences were found in total disclosure between homosexuals and heterosexuals, although homosexuals disclosed less to father, and more to friends than to parents. The conclusion was that psychological femininity and masculinity are more important than biological sex in determining self-disclosure.     

Performance of typical and superior face recognizers on a novel interactive face matching procedure

Unfamiliar simultaneous face matching is error prone. Reducing incorrect identification decisions will positively benefit forensic and security contexts. The absence of view-independent information in static images likely contributes to the difficulty of unfamiliar face matching. We tested whether a novel interactive viewing procedure that provides the user with 3D structural information as they rotate a facial image to different orientations would improve face matching accuracy. We tested the performance of ‘typical’ (Experiment 1) and ‘superior’ (Experiment 2) face recognizers, comparing their performance using high-quality (Experiment 3) and pixelated (Experiment 4) Facebook profile images. In each trial, participants responded whether two images featured the same person with one of these images being either a static face, a video providing orientation information, or an interactive image. Taken together, the results show that fluid orientation information and interactivity prompt shifts in criterion and support matching performance. Because typical and superior face recognizers both benefited from the structural information provided by the novel viewing procedures, our results point to qualitatively similar reliance on pictorial encoding in these groups. This also suggests that interactive viewing tools can be valuable in assisting face matching in high-performing practitioner groups.     

Ensemble coding of facial identity is not refined by experience: Evidence from other-race and inverted faces

The ability to recognize identity despite within-person variability in appearance is likely a face-specific skill and shaped by experience. Ensemble coding – the automatic extraction of the average of a stimulus array – has been proposed as a mechanism underlying face learning (allowing one to recognize novel instances of a newly learned face). We investigated whether ensemble encoding, like face learning and recognition, is refined by experience by testing participants with upright own-race faces and two categories of faces with which they lacked experience: other-race faces (Experiment 1) and inverted faces (Experiment 2). Participants viewed four images of an unfamiliar identity and then were asked whether a test image of that same identity had been in the study array. Each test image was a matching exemplar (from the array), matching average (the average of the images in the array), non-matching exemplar (a novel image of the same identity), or non-matching average (an average of four different images of the same identity). Adults showed comparable ensemble coding for all three categories (i.e., reported that matching averages had been present more than non-matching averages), providing evidence that this early stage of face learning is not shaped by face-specific experience.     

Things fall apart. The cultural complex in contemporary times1

These extraordinary months due to COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, set as they are against a backdrop of the increasingly worrying climate emergency, have brought fear, anxiety and discord across the globe. But we have also experienced a deepening of our understanding of our connectedness, protests against injustice, expressions of social concern and a demand for change. The concept of the cultural complex as developed by Singer & Kimbles (2004) offers a helpful means of connecting the psychology of the individual psyche and the political phenomena of power relations. Using a small example to illustrate how it might operate at a local level, I suggest that a fundamental shift is taking place raising profound levels of anxiety as we move from the known to the unknown. The bipolar nature of these complexes means the extremes are surfacing bringing fears of the very real possibility of more entrenched attacks on democracy from the far right and the hunkering down behind armed borders. But there is also hope that different ways of living together may be developing from the ground up, ways that are rooted in our sense of interdependence – with each other and our planetary home.