Personal goals and psychological growth: testing an intervention to enhance goal attainment and personality integration

We hypothesized that semester goal attainment provides a route to short-term psychological growth. In an attempt to enhance this process, we randomly assigned participants to either a goal-training program or to a control condition. Although there were no main effects of program participation on later goal attainment, important interactions were found. Consistent with a "prepared to benefit" model, participants already high in goal-based measures of personality integration perceived the program as most useful and benefited the most from the program in terms of goal attainment. As a result, they became even more integrated and also increased in their levels of psychosocial well-being and vitality. Implications for theories of short-term growth and positive change are discussed, as is the unanswered question of how to help less-integrated persons grow.     

Smiling and relative status in news photographs

To test the hypothesis that lower social status is associated with more smiling, the authors used newspaper photographs and their associated news stories as the basis for scoring the smiling and relative social status of the 2 individuals in each photograph. Independent raters judged smiling and 5 dimensions of relative status for 496 individuals in 248 newspaper photographs. There was no relation between status and smiling, although status and smiling were both related to other variables such as gender, age, and story valence. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that there is no generalized relation between smiling and status.     

Differential age effects for case and hue mixing in visual word recognition

The authors compare older adults' lexical-decision data with younger adults' data reported in P. Allen, A. F. Smith, et al. (2002). On the basis of their work, it was proposed that consistent-case wordswould be processed by the faster holistic (magnodominated) stream, but that mixed-case words would be processed by the slower analytic (interblob-dominated or blob-dominated) steams. Hue mixing was predicted to have no effect on consistent-case performance, but mixed-hue/mixed-case words were predicted to be recognized faster than monochrome/mixed-case words. Younger adults showed the predicted results, but older adults did not. These results suggest that holistic central processes are maintained, but that older adults exhibited an analytic decrement     

On boredom and experimentation in humans

This article discusses the ethical and methodological issues associated with boredom experienced by human participants during psychological experiments. Ways are suggested in which informed consent, briefing, and debriefing can be used to prevent or remedy boredom induced during experiments. We address methodological and ethical concerns, and we discuss the advantages of the proposed approach for experimenters' practice and training of undergraduate students. Future directions for much needed research on these topics are also emphasized.     

The effects of adult aging and induced positive and negative mood on planning

Changes in executive functions have been found in older adults and also in young adults experiencing positive or negative mood states. The current study investigated the hypothesis that older adults would show greater executive function impairment following mood induction than young adults. Ninety-six participants (half aged 19-37, half aged 53-80) completed a neutral, positive, or negative mood induction procedure, followed by the Tower of London planning task. Significant interactions were found between age and mood such that older adults showed greater planning impairment than young adults in both the positive and negative mood conditions. Emotionally salient events occurring before testing may interfere with executive function in older adults.     

Intergroup emotions: explaining offensive action tendencies in an intergroup context

Three studies tested the idea that when social identity is salient, group-based appraisals elicit specific emotions and action tendencies toward out-groups. Participants' group memberships were made salient and the collective support apparently enjoyed by the in-group was measured or manipulated. The authors then measured anger and fear (Studies 1 and 2) and anger and contempt (Study 3), as well as the desire to move against or away from the out-group. Intergroup anger was distinct from intergroup fear, and the inclination to act against the out-group was distinct from the tendency to move away from it. Participants who perceived the in-group as strong were more likely to experience anger toward the out-group and to desire to take action against it. The effects of perceived in-group strength on offensive action tendencies were mediated by anger.     

Hypermnesia: Age-related differences between young and older adults

Hypermnesia is a net improvement in memory performance that occurs across tests in a multitest paradigm with only one study session. Our goal was to identify possible age-related differences in hypermnesic recall. We observed hypermnesia for young adults using verbal (Experiment 1) as well as pictorial (Experiment 2) material, but no hypermnesia for older adults in either experiment. We found no age-related difference in reminiscence (Experiments 1 and 2), though there was a substantial difference in intertest forgetting (Experiments 1 and 2). Older, relative to young, adults produced more forgetting, most of which occurred between Tests 1 and 2 (Experiments 1 and 2). Furthermore, older, relative to young, adults produced more intrusions. We failed to identify a relationship between intrusions and intertest forgetting. We suggest that the age-related difference in intertest forgetting may be due to less efficient reinstatement of cues at test by older adults. The present findings reveal that intertest forgetting plays a critical role in hypermnesic recall, particularly for older adults.     

The influence of distinctive processing on retrieval-induced forgetting

Recall of a portion of a previously experienced list benefits subsequent recall of that portion of the list but leads to poorer recall of nonpracticed items from the same set (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). One explanation for this retrieval-induced forgetting is that during practice of part of a set, the non-practiced items compete for recall and are suppressed; this suppression process inhibits later recall of the nonpracticed items. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between distinctive processing of the original set and retrieval-induced forgetting, on the assumption that distinctive processing reduces response competition. In the first experiment, distinctive processing induced by difference judgments among the studied items did reduce forgetting relative to a standard encoding task and a similarity judgment task. In fact, the difference judgment task completely eliminated retrieval-induced forgetting. In the second experiment, the similarity judgment task was analyzed in relation to a task assumed to foster associative integration (Anderson & McCulloch, 1999). Even though the similarity judgment met the requirements for associative integration, retrieval-induced forgetting persisted following similarity judgment. The results are consistent with the view that distinctive processing benefits memory within an organizational context (Hunt & McDaniel, 1993; Smith & Hunt, in press).