Personality characteristics associated with susceptibility to false memories

This study examined whether certain personality characteristics are associated with susceptibility to false memories. Participants first answered questions from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in order to measure various personality characteristics. They then watched a video excerpt, the simulated eyewitness event. They were next encouraged to lie about the videotaped event during an interview. A week later, some participants recognized confabulated events as being from the video. Two personality characteristics in particular--the introversion-extroversion and thinking-feeling dimensions--were associated with susceptibility to false memories.     

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Words Relate to Adult Physiology? Child Abuse Experience and Women's Sympathetic Nervous System Response while Self-Reporting Trauma

Child abuse predicts a wide range of long-lasting deleterious outcomes, including disruptions in the biological systems central to emotion arousal and regulation. However, little is known about the specific ways in which child abuse affects adulthood sympathetic reactivity and recovery. This study investigated the association between child abuse experience and adult skin conductance level and habituation in 85 at-risk women as they completed a self-report trauma questionnaire. Childhood emotional abuse was independently associated with blunted skin conductance habituation over the course of survey completion after controlling for other abuse subtypes and current trauma symptoms. These results suggest that women emotionally abused as children experience prolonged emotional arousal and poor physiological regulation of emotion in response to reminders of traumatic experiences.     

Mnemonic differences and similarities across opposing social groups: The linguistic conflict at the University of Leuven as a case study

In the 1960s, a historical event occurred at one of Europe's most prestigious universities: The Dutch-speaking students forced the French-speaking students to relocate and establish their own university. We compared the extent to which members of each social group developed elaborate memories of the events surrounding the conflict and whether they were associated with differences in rehearsal type (media, conversational, rumination) and initiating conditions (importance, political engagement, and negative/positive emotions). All participants were university students at the time of the conflict. We found that Dutch-speakers exhibited more elaborate memories compared to French-speakers and that importance was associated with elaborate memories only for the Dutch-speakers. However, positive emotions appear to be critical in the formation of elaborate memories across the social groups. We found no such associations for negative emotions. We discuss these results in terms of the social/cognitive processes transcending social group membership in understanding how individuals remember past conflicts.     

Does European citizenship breed xenophobia? European identification as a predictor of intolerance towards immigrants

The European Union is generally perceived as endorsing universalistic and multi‐cultural values. However, social identity and self‐categorization theories predict that, when certain conditions are met, a negative relation between ingroup identification and tolerance towards outgroup members should be observed. We argue that the creation of the status of ‘Citizen of the Union’ in Maastricht may contribute to meeting those conditions and therefore to increase intolerance towards resident foreigners. If that is the case, a paradoxical situation could emerge, in which people's levels of tolerance towards foreigners would contradict group values. We examined the relations between values associated with Europe, European and national identification, and tolerance towards foreigners through a survey study with a—non‐representative—sample of undergraduate French‐speaking Belgian students. Results show that Europe was generally associated with humanistic values. But they also reveal that strong European identifiers tended to express more xenophobic attitudes than weak European identifiers, whilst national identification was not related with such attitudes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Limits of rhythm perception

To what extent are listeners sensitive to the time intervals separating non-consecutive events in sound sequences? The subjects of Experiment 1 were presented with sequences of 20 identical tones in which the 10 odd-numbered tones or the 10 even-numbered tones made up an isochronous sub-sequence (with a periodicity of 0.5-1 s) whereas the other tones, acting as distractors, occurred at random moments. Such sequences appeared to be very difficult to discriminate from sequences without any timing regularity, which revealed a lack of perceptual sensitivity to their "second-order" intervals. Experiment 2 employed repetitive sequences in which the first-order intervals (separating consecutive tones) took two possible values, forming a ratio that subjects had to classify as larger or smaller than 2. The results of this experiment suggest that subjects were able to make use of second-order intervals in their task, but mainly due to the predictable nature of the sequences; the relative positions of subjective accents (Povel & Essens, 1985) had no significant effect on performance. It is concluded that the perception of subtle timing details in "ordinary" music may rest on nothing more than a sensitivity to the relations between first-order intervals (within a given auditory stream).