COVID-19, Sex,Addictions, Women's Health,Care of the Elderly,and Medical Education

Journal of Religion and Health -     

The effects of mood and retrieval cues on semantic memory and metacognition

We investigated whether the previously established effect of mood on episodic memory generalizes to semantic memory and whether mood affects metacognitive judgments associated with the retrieval of semantic information. Sixty-eight participants were induced into a happy or sad mood by viewing and describing IAPS images. Following mood induction, participants saw a total of 200 general knowledge trivia items (50 open-ended and 50 multiple-choice after each of two mood inductions) and were asked to provide a metacognitive judgment about their knowledge for each item before providing a response. A sample trivia item is: Author – – To kill a mockingbird. Results indicate that mood affects the retrieval of semantic information, but only when the participant believes they possess the requested semantic information; furthermore, this effect depends upon the presence of retrieval cues. In addition, we found that mood does not affect the likelihood of different metacognitive judgments associated with the retrieval of semantic information, but that, in some cases, having retrieval cues increases accuracy of these metacognitive judgments. Our results suggest that semantic retrieval processes are minimally susceptible to the influence of affective state but does not preclude the possibility that affective state may influence encoding of semantic information.     

The Analysis of Verbal Explanations for Marital Separation: Implications for Attribution Theory1

The main purpose of this study was to analyze the structure and content of real-life attributions, using these data to examine some important theoretical and empirical issues in attribution theory. The causal attributions examined came from free-response verbal protocols of explanations for marital separation of 29 males and 33 females living in New Zealand. Respondents gave causal importance weghts to the attributions from their verbal protocols, utilizing the technique of subjective magnitude estimation. Ipsative data, representing perceived causal responsibility for different attribution targets (self, ex-spouse, external factors, etc.), were derived from these weights, and the impact a range of independent variables exerted on these derived free-response attribution percentages was examined. Evidence is presented which supports the validity and reliability of this technique. The normative data gathered was found to be both consistent and inconsistent with different aspects of attribution theory. The implications for attribution theory are discussed.     

Remembering changes: repetition effects in face recollection.

Two experiments examined effects of repetition and change on states of awareness in face recognition. Participants studied repeatedly presented photographs of faces, with the second presentation following either immediately after the first presentation (massed repetition) or following six intervening items (spaced repetition). To manipulate perceptual change, each repeated face was either identical or a mirror image of the first presentation. Subsequently, when recognising a face, participants indicated whether they consciously recollected its prior occurrence ("remembering") or recognised it on the basis of familiarity ("knowing"). Changes in appearance between repeated faces enhanced remember, but not know, responses, and these effects were accentuated for spaced, rather than massed, repetition. These findings suggest that distinctiveness of encoding supports the phenomenological experience of conscious remembering.