Creating nonbelieved memories for bizarre actions using an imagination inflation procedure

The current experiments examined the creation of nonbelieved true and false memories after imagining bizarre and familiar actions using the imagination inflation procedure (Goff & Roediger, 1998). In both experiments, participants took part in three sessions. In Session 1, participants had to perform or imagine simple familiar actions (e.g., “stir the water with the spoon”) and bizarre actions (e.g., “balance the spoon on your nose”). A day later, participants needed to imagine simple actions of which some were new actions, and some were old actions that appeared in the first session. After a week, the participants completed a recognition task. For those actions that were correctly or incorrectly remembered as having been performed, the participant was challenged that the action was not performed in order to evoke nonbelieved true and false memories. In general, we found that the imagination inflation procedure can successfully induce participants to produce nonbelieved memories. In Study 1, we successfully induced nonbelieved memories for bizarre actions, although in general nonbelieved memory rates were low. In Study 2, more participants formed nonbelieved memories for bizarre actions than for familiar actions. Also, we found that especially belief was more susceptible to revision when memories were challenged than recollection. In two experiments, we showed that nonbelieved memories can successfully be induced for both familiar and bizarre actions.     

Putting the cart before the horse: the benefits of arbitrating before mediating

The authors examined the impact of 2 hybrid dispute resolution procedures (mediation-arbitration [med-arb] and arbitration-mediation [arb-med]) and 3 disputant dyadic structures (individual vs. individual, individual vs. team, and team vs. team) on various dispute outcomes. Consistent with W. H. Ross and D. E. Conlon (2000), the authors found that disputants in the arb-med procedure (a) settled in the mediation phase of their procedure more frequently and (b) achieved settlements of higher joint benefit than did disputants in the med-arb procedure. These results suggest that arb-med may be a dispute resolution procedure with broader applicability than originally imagined.     

Developmental and content effects in reasoning with causal conditionals

Two predictions derived from Markovits and Barrouillet's (2001) developmental model of conditional reasoning were tested in a study in which 72 twelve-year-olds, 80 fifteen-year-olds, and 104 adults received a paper-and-pencil test of conditional reasoning with causal premises ("if cause P then effect Q"). First, we predicted that conditional premises would induce more correct uncertainty responses to the Affirmation of the consequent and Denial of the antecedent forms when the antecedent term is weakly associated to the consequent than when the two are strongly associated and that this effect would decrease with age. Second, uncertainty responding to the Denial of the antecedent form ("P is not true") should be easier when the formulation of the minor premise invites retrieval of alternate antecedents ("if something other than P is true"). The results were consistent with the hypotheses and indicate the importance of retrieval processes in understanding developmental patterns in conditional reasoning with familiar premises.     

Ethics issues in security hospitals

The term 'security hospital' is used for a variety of facilities including forensic hospitals and prison hospitals, which, because of their mission, the nature of their work, and the populations they serve-or because of the authority under which they operate-place the staff at considerable risk of ethical violations related to either clinical care or to forensic activities. The problem of divided loyalties is of special concern in security hospitals. Ethics principles particularly at risk are confidentiality and informed consent. Where there are cultural disparities between the staff and the patients, differences in background, socioeconomic class, education, and other types of diversity, cultural awareness is required and must be reflected in appropriate treatment and evaluation. To counteract the risks of ethical violations, a security hospital should create an ethical climate and develop means to anticipate, prevent, and deal with ethical violations. These might include detailed and specific policies and procedures, programs of orientation, education, consultation, and liaison as well as its own ethics committee.     

The Social Costs of Treatment Programs

The medicalization of deviance refers to the identification as diseases or illnesses of patterns of behavior that were previously considered in moral terms. Herbert Spencer viewed society as analogous to a living organism. A problem or disease in one part of the organism affects the entire organism. Early sociologists built on this idea and arrived at the conclusion that deviant behavior could be thought of as social disease and social pathology. The early social pathologists were concerned with crime, mental illness, drug abuse, and suicide. There is a tendency to treat such ailments in a hospital or clinical setting. The medicalization of deviance removes responsibility from the individual as well as from the society which continues to produce the problem. Treatment programs give the false impression that something worthwhile is being done about society's behavioral problems and turn the individuals treated back into the same social milieu in which the problem was incubated in the first place. The medicalization of deviance creates a vested-interest industry dependent upon the treatment of individuals. It has constructed a system of individualized microlevel treatment programs that can be beneficial on a limited basis for a few individuals and their families, but it tends to treat only the symptoms but not change the society of which they are but emanations.     

Low-frequency acoustic modulations generated by the high-frequency portion of the cochlea, noninvasively recorded from the scalp of mice (Mus musculus)

Vocalizations often contain low-frequency modulations of the envelope of a high-frequency sound. The high-frequency portion of the cochlear nerve of mice (Mus musculus) generates a robust phase-locked response to these low-frequency modulations, and it can be easily recorded from the surface of the scalp. The cochlea is most sensitive to envelope modulation frequencies of approximately 500 to 2000 Hz. These responses have detection thresholds that are approximately 10 dB more sensitive than auditory brainstem responses, and they are very sharply tuned. These measurements may provide a nontraumatic means of repeatedly assessing cochlear functions involved in sound localization and perception of vocalizations.