“Aha” effects in the generation of pictures

An "aha" effect in memory was first reported by Auble, Franks, and Soraci (1979). They demonstrated that recall was greater for sentences that were initially incomprehensible but which were eventually comprehended, as compared with sentences that were understood from the outset. The present studies extend this "aha" effect to memory for pictorial stimuli. In Experiment 1, a recall advantage for pictures encoded by connecting the dots as compared with those encoded by tracing or visual scanning occurred only in the absence of foreknowledge of the picture (i.e., an "aha" effect). In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding and obtained evidence that conceptually based, verbal foreknowledge does not function in a similar manner as does pictorial foreknowledge in suppressing the "aha" recall advantage. These results place important constraints on previous research on generation effects for visual stimuli and attest to the cross-modal generalizability of the "aha" effect.     

Immediate serial recall of words and nonwords: Tests of the retrieval-based hypothesis

In two experiments, the immediate serial recall of lists of words or nonwords was investigated under quiet and articulatory suppression conditions. The results showed better item recall for words but better order recall for nonwords, as measured with proportion of order errors per item recalled. Articulatory suppression hindered the recall of item information for both types of lists and of order information for words. These results are interpreted in light of a retrieval account in which degraded phonological traces must undergo a reconstruction process calling on long-term knowledge of the tobe-remembered items. The minimal long-term representations for nonwords are thought to be responsible for their lower item recall and their better order recall. Under suppression, phonological representations are thought to be minimal, producing trace interpretation problems responsible for the greater number of item and order errors, relative to quiet conditions. The very low performance for nonwords under suppression is attributed to the combination of degraded phonological information and minimal long-term knowledge.     

Age changes in the missing-letter effect revisited

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. Reflecting developmental changes in component language and literacy skills, the size of this effect increases with age. With adults, the missing-letter effect is due to both word function and word frequency. With children, it is unclear whether the growing size of the missing-letter effect across development is due to a larger effect of word function, word frequency, or both because previous studies with children seeking to isolate the influence of word frequency and word function suffer from important methodological limitations. With these methodological limitations eliminated (Experiments 1 and 2), performance in a letter detection task was assessed for children in Grades 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 as well as for undergraduate students. The results revealed that the influence of word function increases with age, whereas the effect of frequency is fairly stable across ages. Furthermore, normative predictability data collected in Experiment 3 revealed that third graders and undergraduate students were equally good at predicting function slots in a sentence.     

Social exclusion impairs self-regulation

Six experiments showed that being excluded or rejected caused decrements in self-regulation. In Experiment 1, participants who were led to anticipate a lonely future life were less able to make themselves consume a healthy but bad-tasting beverage. In Experiment 2, some participants were told that no one else in their group wanted to work with them, and these participants later ate more cookies than other participants. In Experiment 3, excluded participants quit sooner on a frustrating task. In Experiments 4-6, exclusion led to impairment of attention regulation as measured with a dichotic listening task. Experiments 5 and 6 further showed that decrements in self-regulation can be eliminated by offering a cash incentive or increasing self-awareness. Thus, rejected people are capable of self-regulation but are normally disinclined to make the effort.     

Priming prepositional-phrase attachment during comprehension

Strong evidence suggests that prior syntactic context affects language production (e.g., J. K. Bock, 1986). The authors report 4 experiments that used an expression-picture matching task to investigate whether it also affects ambiguity resolution in comprehension. All experiments examined the interpretation of prepositional phrases that were ambiguous between high and low attachment. After reading a prime expression with a high-attached interpretation, participants tended to interpret an ambiguous prepositional phrase in a target expression as highly attached if it contained the same verb as the prime (Experiment 1), but not if it contained a different verb (Experiment 2). They also tended to adopt the high-attached interpretation after producing a prime with the high-attached interpretation that included the same verb (Experiment 3). Finally, they were faster to adopt a high-attached interpretation after reading an expression containing the same verb that was disambiguated to the high-attached versus the low-attached interpretation (Experiment 4).     

Pediatric do-not-attempt-resuscitation orders and public schools: a national assessment of policies and laws

Some children living with life-shortening medical conditions may wish to attend school without the threat of having resuscitation attempted in the event of cardiopulmonary arrest on the school premises. Despite recent attention to in-school do-not-attempt-resuscitation (DNAR) orders, no assessment of state laws or school policies has yet been made. We therefore sought to survey a national sample of prominent school districts and situate their policies in the context of relevant state laws. Most (80%) school districts sampled did not have policies, regulations, or protocols for dealing with student DNARs. A similar majority (76%) either would not honor student DNARs or were uncertain about whether they could. Frequent contradictions between school policies and state laws also exist. Consequently, children living with life-shortening conditions who have DNARs may not have these orders honored if cardiopulmonary arrest were to occur on school premises. Coordinated efforts are needed to harmonize school district, state, and federal approaches in order to support children and families' right to have important medical decisions honored.     

Competitive martial arts and aggressiveness: a 2-yr. longitudinal study among young boys

This study is a follow-up study of Reynes and Lorant's studies assessing the effect of one year of judo and karate training on aggressiveness scores among young boys. The data reported here were obtained after a second year of practice, 14 judoka, 9 karateka, and 20 control participants who filled out the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire three times, 1 year apart. At the first assessment, all participants, born the same year, were 8 yr. old and at the third they were 10 yr. old. Analysis indicated that after two years of practice, karate training seemed to have neither positive nor negative effects on aggressiveness scores, while judo training seemed to have a negative effect on anger scores. However, the results suggested the importance of kata or meditation in training sessions on self-control acquisition for such young boys.     

Suicidality and bereavement: complicated grief as psychiatric disorder presenting greatest risk for suicidality

The influence of complicated grief (CG) on suicidality among bereaved adults was examined. The Yale Evaluation of Suicidality scale and the Inventory of Complicated Grief-Revised were administered to 309 bereaved adults in face-to-face interviews conducted at baseline (6.2 months post-loss) and at follow-up (10.8 months post-loss). Cross-sectionally, CG was associated with a 6.58 (95% CI: 1.74-18.0) times greater likelihood of "high suicidality" at baseline, and an 11.30 (95% CI: 3.33-38.10) times greater risk of high suicidality at follow-up, after controlling for gender, race, major depressive disorder (MDD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and social support. Longitudinally, CG at baseline was associated with an 8.21 (95% CI: 2.49-27.0) times greater likelihood of high suicidality at follow-up, controlling for the above confounders. The study results indicate that CG substantially heightened the risk of suicidality after controlling for important confounders such as MDD and PTSD, suggesting that CG poses an independent psychiatric risk for suicidal thoughts and actions.     

MMPI-2 profile code types and measurement error

We studied simulated MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) code type stability and change expected with measurement error for 12 MMPI-2 well-defined mean code type profiles. Profile scores for the 2 scales defining the code type were systematically varied to represent target code type profiles at 9 different levels of T-score profile definition. We randomly generated samples of 50 simulated, estimated true score profiles at each level of profile definition for each code type around the estimated true scores for each scale at each level of profile definition. Two sets of simulated profiles were developed. The first simulation was based on the reported means, test-retest reliabilities, and the standard errors of measurement for the MMPI-2 normative group. The second simulation was based on the means, standard deviations, and estimated retest stability for a clinical group of psychiatric patients. We calculated frequencies and percentages of simulated profiles with the highest estimated true scores on the same 2 scales as the original code type profile. Percentages of simulated profiles with the same 2 highest scales as the original code type profiles increased from 27% to 37% for the 3-point level of definition, 37% to 49% for the 5-point definition, 46% to 61% for 7-point definition, 63% to 78% for 10-point definition, 78% to 89% for 13-point definition, 83% to 93% for 15-point definition, and greater than 90% for profile definition greater than 15 points.