The effects of existential threat on reading comprehension of worldview affirming and disconfirming information

Terror management theory posits that cultural worldviews buffer people from thoughts and concerns about death. In support of this claim, numerous studies have shown that mortality salience (MS) increases an individual's motivation to uphold and defend important cultural worldviews. We hypothesized that the motivation to defend cultural worldviews following MS would also enhance people's ability to comprehend worldview affirming (vs. disconfirming) information. Three studies investigated this possibility. Study 1 showed that MS (vs. control) increased reading comprehension of a pro‐evolution essay among participants with a strongly evolutionist worldview, but decreased reading comprehension among participants with a strongly creationist worldview. With the use of a pro‐creation essay, Study 2 conceptually replicated these effects and demonstrated that the interactive effect of worldview and death anxiety on reading comprehension was mediated by defensive motivation. Study 3 replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2 among participants with a strongly evolutionist worldview, but only when the information in the essay was perceived as veridical. Discussion focused on the specific process through which MS affects reading comprehension of worldview relevant ideas. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improving Working Memory in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: The Separate and Combined Effects of Incentives and Stimulant Medication

Working memory (WM) is considered a core deficit in Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), with numerous studies demonstrating impaired WM among children with ADHD. We tested the degree to which WM in children with ADHD was improved by performance-based incentives, an analog of behavioral intervention. In two studies, WM performance was assessed using a visuo-spatial n-back task. Study 1 compared children (ages 9-12?years) with ADHD-Combined type (n?=?24) to a group of typically developing (TD) children (n?=?32). Study 1 replicated WM deficits among children with ADHD. Incentives improved WM, particularly among children with ADHD. The provision of incentives reduced the ADHD-control group difference by approximately half but did not normalize WM. Study 2 examined the separate and combined effects of incentives and stimulant medication among 17 children with ADHD-Combined type. Both incentives and a moderate dose of long-acting methylphenidate (MPH; ~0.3?mg/kg t.i.d. equivalent) robustly improved WM relative to the no-incentive, placebo condition. The combination of incentives and medication improved WM significantly more than either incentives or MPH alone. These studies indicate that contingencies markedly improve WM among children with ADHD-Combined type, with effect sizes comparable to a moderate dose of stimulant medication. More broadly, this work calls attention to the role of motivation in studying cognitive deficits in ADHD and in testing multifactorial models of ADHD.     

Political Humiliation and Conversion

In this article, I explore political humiliation and its relation to conversion, as seen in the autobiographies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In brief, I argue that before and during the time that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X lived, political structures, laws, policies, and programs gave rise to and supported social behaviors and communications of the dominant group that were aimed at humiliating a subjugated, marginalized group—African-Americans. These experiences of political humiliation served to motivate Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to make changes in their religious commitments and attitudes. I argue further that their conversions, while different in a number of ways, cannot simply be understood as religious acts. Rather, their conversions represent political-religious acts that involved a turning away from the individual and social political subjugation to acts of political resistance against the pervasive barrage of humiliations at the hands of whites. Their political-religious acts of resistance also included a redemptive telos, which was a quest for a present and future political, social, and religious realization of human dignity and freedom.     

Malcolm X’s Conversions: The Interplay of Political and Religious Subjectivities

In this article, I offer a way of thinking about the interplay of political and religious subjectivities in persons’ conversion experiences or faith journeys. More particularly, I contend that a person’s political and religious experiences interact such that political experiences and ideas shape the person’s religious values and beliefs, and vice versa. Malcolm X’s story is used to illustrate this interplay of subjectivities vis-à-vis the varied changes or conversions in his life. The major point here is that the richness and depth of change in Malcolm X’s life (and other figures) are better grasped when we take into account the dynamic intersection of the political and religious.     

The effects of age and divided attention on spontaneous recognition

Studies of recognition typically involve tests in which the participant’s memory for a stimulus is directly questioned. There are occasions however, in which memory occurs more spontaneously (e.g., an acquaintance seeming familiar out of context). Spontaneous recognition was investigated in a novel paradigm involving study of pictures and words followed by recognition judgments on stimuli with an old or new word superimposed over an old or new picture. Participants were instructed to make their recognition decision on either the picture or word and to ignore the distracting stimulus. Spontaneous recognition was measured as the influence of old vs. new distracters on target recognition. Across two experiments, older adults and younger adults placed under divided-attention showed a greater tendency to spontaneously recognize old distracters as compared to full-attention younger adults. The occurrence of spontaneous recognition is discussed in relation to ability to constrain retrieval to goal-relevant information.     

Experience with proactive interference diminishes its effects: mechanisms of change

In three experiments, we examined the mechanisms by which prior experience with proactive interference (PI) diminished its effects. Cued recall tasks conforming to an A–B, A–D paradigm were used to induce PI effects. Experiment 1 showed that reduced PI was not due to a reduction in attention to the source of PI. Experiment 2 revealed that participants’ awareness of PI effects on memory performance increased with experience, resulting in a shift in encoding processes. Experiment 3 demonstrated that changes in encoding provided additional support for recollection that further enhanced participants’ ability to constrain their retrieval processing to the appropriate source of information at the time of test. These results can be interpreted as showing that experience with PI enhances awareness of its effects and allows individuals to adjust their learning and retrieval strategies to compensate for such effects.