An Associative Interpretation of the Indirect McCollough Effect

Following an induction procedure in which a coloured grid is alternated with a square of a complementary colour, subjects report colour after-effects on both the grid orientation present during induction and the orthogonal non-induced grid orientation. The after-effect reported on the induced grid orientation is called the McCollough effect (ME). The aftereffect reported on the non-induced grid orientation is called the indirect ME. There is evidence that the ME represents an instance of Pavlovian conditioning. The present results support a conditioning interpretation of the indirect ME and are inconsistent with interpretations of the indirect ME that attribute the phenomenon to special orthogonal coding mechanisms within the visual system.     

The impact of stress on mothers' memory of a natural disaster

The effects of stress on mothers' recall for a major hurricane were studied. Stress was objectively defined as low, moderate, or high according to the severity of home damage. This study of 96 mothers was conducted concurrently with L. E. Bahrick, J. F. Parker, R. Fivush, and M. Levitt (1998), allowing the authors to compare child and adult recall as a function of the same stressor. There was a quadratic relationship between storm severity and total recall for adults, similar to their children. Mothers' recall increased from low to moderate severity, but recall at moderate severity did not differ from high severity. These findings help clarify the effects of stress on the amount and type of information adults recall in retrospective accounts of naturalistic, temporally extended events.     

Validity of the Personality Assessment Screener in Veterans Referred for Psychological Testing

Screening for psychopathology is desirable in many settings where routine administration of full assessment batteries is not practical or cost efficient. The Personality Assessment Screener (PAS) is a 22-item self-report subset of Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) items that was designed to screen for respondents who would be likely to achieve a clinically significant PAI profile. In this study, the PAS demonstrated classification rates in a sample of veterans referred for psychological evaluations that were similar to those described in initial validation studies. In addition, the three-item Negative Affect element of the PAS demonstrated impressive reliability and sensitivity given its brevity. These results support the use of the PAS as a screening tool to indicate clinically significant PAI profiles among veterans.     

Attributional Style,Self-Esteem,and Celebrity Worship

Two studies were carried out to investigate the relationship between attributional style (Study 1), self-esteem (Study 2), and different forms of celebrity worship. Entertainment social celebrity worship (the most normal form considered) was unrelated to attributional style or self-esteem; intense personal celebrity worship was related positively to self-esteem but also to a propensity toward stable and global attributions; and borderline pathological celebrity worship (the most negative form considered) was related to external, stable, and global attributions. These results were independent of whether participants were located in Europe or North America, and are discussed in terms of whether celebrity worship should be regarded as positive or negative and as a unitary concept.     

Who? What? When? Using a timeline technique to facilitate recall of a complex event

Accurately recalling a complex multi-actor incident presents witnesses with a cognitively demanding retrieval task. Given the important role played by temporal context in the retrieval process, the current research tests an innovative timeline technique to elicit information about multiple perpetrators and their actions. Adopting a standard mock witness paradigm, participants were required to provide an account of a witnessed event. In Experiment 1, the timeline technique facilitated the reporting of more correct details than a free recall, immediately and at a two-week retention interval, at no cost to accuracy. Accounts provided using the timeline technique included more correct information about perpetrator specific actions and fewer sequencing errors. Experiment 2 examined which mnemonic components of the timeline technique might account for these effects. The benefits of exploiting memory organization and reducing cognitive constraints on information flow are likely to underpin the apparent timeline advantage.     

Abandoned babies -- abandoned issue

Abandoned babies generate enormous interest but very little academic or systematic study. The psychological state of their mothers and consideration of their fathers is not studied and access to these groups are restricted or unavailable. This pilot study grapples with the concepts of abandonment, looks at patterns over time via notifiable criminal record data and explores systematic factors by way of newspaper report analysis. The discourse around abandonment is emotive. More boys are abandoned than girls. Newborn abandonments differ from older babies in that parents are rarely identified and society judges them with sympathy. Finders are emotionally moved, but rarely included in ongoing policy. Some pointers for future policy are drawn.     

Temporal Contiguity and Contingency Judgments: A Pavlovian Analogue

The two experiments reported examine the role of temporal contiguity on judgments of contingency in a human analogue of the Pavlovian task. The data show that the effect of the actual delay on contingency judgment depends on the observer's expectation regarding the delay. For a fixed contingency between the cue and the outcome, ratings of the contingency are higher when the actual delay is congruent with the observer's expectation than when it is incongruent. We argue that our data can be understood within the context of the temporal coding hypothesis.