Reviews

Dnevniki ("Diaries") by Eduard Kuznetsov. Les Editeurs Réunis, Paris, 1973. 374 pp.

Sergei by Sergei Kourdakov. Oliphants, London, 1973. 205 pp. £2.50.

Zakonodatelstvo o religii v SSSR. Doklad Komitetu prav cheloveka ("Legislation on Religion in the USSR. Report submitted to the Human Rights Committee") by I. R. Shafarevich, Paris, 1973. 81 pp.     

Alcohol intoxication and memory for events: A snapshot of alcohol myopia in a real-world drinking scenario

Alcohol typically has a detrimental impact on memory across a variety of encoding and retrieval conditions (e.g., Mintzer, 2007; Ray & Bates, 2006). No research has addressed alcohol's effect on memory for lengthy and interactive events and little has tested alcohol's effect on free recall. In this study 94 participants were randomly assigned to alcohol, placebo, or control groups and consumed drinks in a bar-lab setting while interacting with a “bartender”. Immediately afterwards all participants freely recalled the bar interaction. Consistent with alcohol myopia theory, intoxicated participants only differed from placebo and control groups when recalling peripheral information. Expanding on the original hypervigilance hypothesis, placebo participants showed more conservative reporting behaviour than the alcohol or control groups by providing more uncertain and “don't know” responses. Thus, alcohol intoxication had confined effects on memory for events, supporting and extending current theories.     

Role of Researchers in the Ethical Conduct of Research: A Discourse Analysis From Different Stakeholder Perspectives

The ethical conduct of research rests largely on researchers, and as such, an understanding of how they perceive and enact their role in research is paramount. However, the literature around ethics and research mostly focuses on researchers’ perception of Research Ethics Boards (REB; also known as Institutional Review Boards) roles and functions. To fill that gap, we analyzed the perceptions of researchers, REB members, and influential parties (n = 40) about researchers’ role in the ethical conduct of research through discourse analysis. Three discourses emerged: researchers as reflective practitioners, protectors of participants, and technicians. Understanding the commonalities and differences among the discourses may foster a shared and compelling institutional research culture.     

A probabilistic account of exemplar and category generation

People are capable of imagining and generating new category exemplars and categories. This ability has not been addressed by previous models of categorization, most of which focus on classifying category exemplars rather than generating them. We develop a formal account of exemplar and category generation which proposes that category knowledge is represented by probability distributions over exemplars and categories, and that new exemplars and categories are generated by sampling from these distributions. This sampling account of generation is evaluated in two pairs of behavioral experiments. In the first pair of experiments, participants were asked to generate novel exemplars of a category. In the second pair of experiments, participants were asked to generate a novel category after observing exemplars from several related categories. The results suggest that generation is influenced by both structural and distributional properties of the observed categories, and we argue that our data are better explained by the sampling account than by several alternative approaches.     

Test-Retest Reliability of the Emotional Stroop Task: Examining the Paradox of Measurement Change

The Emotional Stroop (ES) task (I. H. Gotlib & C. D. McCann, 1984) has been proposed as an experimental measure to assess the processing of emotion or the bias in attention of emotion-laden information. However, study results have not been consistent. To further examine its reliability for empirical research, the authors of this study administered the ES task to 33 participants on 2 separate occasions separated by 1 week. Results indicated that retest reliabilities for reaction times (RTs) derived from the 3 separate emotion conditions (manic, neutral, and depressive) across the 1 week interval were very high. However, consistent with previous research, the reliabilities were very low for the interference indices (manic and depressive). These low reliabilities reflect the very high intercorrelation between the RTs derived from the 3 conditions. The authors concluded that a better indicator of the reliability for this task is the individual RTs from each emotion condition.     

Triggering Conservation of the Self's Regulatory Resources

Three experiments investigated people's motivation to conserve the self's limited regulatory resource after it is depleted by initial self-control exertion. Across the experiments, the results supported the idea of a conservation process. In Experiment 1, depleted participants' subsequent performance decreased when expecting to engage in a future self-regulation task compared to engaging in no task at all. In Experiments 2 and 3 we employed the “end-effect” pattern found in past vigilance research to further examine conservation. In Experiment 2, depleted and nondepleted participants who knew the study ran for 30 min performed similarly following 20 min of self-regulation, whereas 3 min or 10 min of self-regulation produced typical depletion effects. Likewise, the findings from Experiment 3 revealed this same conservation pattern using a shortened 6-min initial task. Specifically, when depleted participants believed the study was finished their task performance was better compared to those who believed the study would run for another 20 min. In short, the current findings support the idea of conservation—decrements in self-regulatory performance may represent an adaptive inclination to conserve the self's diminished resources rather than an inability to wield further self-control.     

Overgeneral autobiographical memory and chronic interpersonal stress as predictors of the course of depression in adolescents

This study investigated whether overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM) predicts the course of depression in adolescents. As part of a larger longitudinal study of risk for emotional disorders, 55 adolescents with a past history of major depressive disorder or minor depressive disorder completed the Autobiographical Memory Test. Fewer specific memories predicted the subsequent onset of a major depressive episode (MDE) over a 16-month follow-up period, even when covarying baseline depressive symptoms. This main effect was qualified by an interaction between specific memories and chronic interpersonal stress: Fewer specific memories predicted greater risk of MDE onset over follow-up at high (but not low) levels of chronic interpersonal stress. Thus, our findings suggest that OGM, in interaction with chronic interpersonal stress, predicts the course of depression among adolescents, and highlight the importance of measuring interpersonal stress in OGM research.