The influence of prior knowledge and repeated questioning on children's long-term retention of the details of a pediatric examination

Children's recall of the details of pediatric examinations was examined over the course of a 6-month interval. Although the 83 4- to 7-year-old participants reported a substantial amount of information at each assessment, performance declined over time, dropping sharply over the course of 3 months but then remaining constant out to the final interview at 6 months. As expected, older children provided more total information than younger children did and reported a greater proportion of the event components in response to general rather than specific questions. However, comparable patterns of remembering and forgetting over time were observed at each age level. In addition, no effects of repeated questioning--in the form of an interview at 3 months for half of the children--were observed on performance at the 6-month assessment. Moreover, children's prior knowledge about routine doctor visits was assessed before the checkup for half of the participants at each age and was associated with initial but not delayed recall. Although knowledge increased with age as expected, it nonetheless affected recall over and above the influence of age.     

Commitment to organizational change: extension of a three-component model

Three studies were conducted to test the application of a three-component model of workplace commitment (J. P. Meyer & N. J. Allen, 1991: J. P. Meyer & L. Herscovitch, 2001) in the context of employee commitment to organizational change. Study 1, conducted with 224 university students, provided preliminary evidence for the validity of newly developed Affective, Continuance, and Normative Commitment to Change Scales. Studies 2 and 3, conducted with hospital nurses (N = 157 and 108, respectively), provided further support for the validity of the three Commitment to Change Scales, and demonstrated that (a) commitment to a change is a better predictor of behavioral support for a change than is organizational commitment, (b) affective and normative commitment to a change are associated with higher levels of support than is continuance commitment, and (c) the components of commitment combine to predict behavior.     

Through their own eyes: a media-based group approach to adolescent trauma

This paper describes the process of two groups of students from high schools located in the immediate vicinity of the World Trade Center grappling to make sense of the events of September 11 through the creation of a documentary chronicling their experiences. The process of creating these videos mirrored the process and curative factors of a psychotherapy group in a non-stigmatizing, innovative, and accessible format, one generated by the students themselves with the assistance of professionals in the visual and performing arts. After reviewing the literature on the potential impact of violence on adolescents and the use of group treatment, especially in school settings, as an optimal choice for this population, we describe the distinctive process of the two separate groups of students, each culminating in different expressions of their very personal experience of September 11. We understand and contextualize their process through the lens of the therapeutic dynamics and elements of group work.     

Endorsement of Group Change and Organization Change Affirmative Action Programs for Male and Female Beneficiaries

To test the position that some people’s willingness to endorse affirmative action is influenced by the match between beneficiary group and the attributional underpinnings of the programs, endorsement of four programs that could be used to benefit either women or men were assessed among 95 undergraduate students in Ontario, Canada. Students preferred the use of a remedial program that suggested that beneficiaries are under-qualified and need to develop job relevant skills for female versus male beneficiaries. This was driven by perceptions of the effectiveness of the program. For male beneficiaries, participants were more supportive of a mentorship development program that implied the necessity of structural change than they were of the remedial program. These effects were independent of participant gender.     

Perceptual match effects in direct tests of memory: the role of contextual fan

The aim of the present study was to determine whether physical attributes of a memory representation would affect explicit memory performance and, if so, what type of factors would affect the size of a perceptual match effect. Subjects studied words in different, uncommon fonts and were later asked whether the word had been studied earlier. Words could be re-presented in the original font, a font studied with another word, or a font not seen earlier. In two additional experiments, we varied the numbers of words studied in the same unusual font (1 vs. 12 words per font). Recognition memory for the words was better if the test and study fonts matched, and this effect was larger for fonts not shared with other words. Moreover, old judgments were most likely to be classified as remember responses when words were re-presented in the same font when it had not been studied with other words. Although we found a significant effect of levels of processing, this factor did not interact with whether the font matched between study and test. These results are consistent with the predictions of the source of activation confusion model of memory and suggest that perceptual information operates according to the same memory principles as conceptual information.     

Differential fan effect and attentional focus

As people study more facts about a concept, it takes longer to retrieve a particular fact about that concept. This fan effect (Anderson, 1974) has been attributed to competition among associations to a concept. Alternatively, the mental-model theory (Radvansky & Zacks, 1991) suggests that the fan effect disappears when the related concepts are organized into a single mental model. In the present study, attentional focus was manipulated to affect the mental model to be constructed. One group of participants focused on the person dimension of personlocation pairs, whereas the other group focused on the location dimension. The result showed that the fan effect with the focused dimension was greater than the fan effect with the nonfocused dimension, which is contrary to the mental-model theory. The number of associations with a concept is indeed crucial during retrieval, and the importance of the information seems to be accentuated with attentional focus.     

The formation of the therapeutic alliance in couple therapy

This study examines the predictive validity of several clinical variables--including marital distress, individual symptomatology, and family-of-origin experiences--on the formation of the alliance in couple therapy. Eighty people who were treated with a naturalistic course of integrative conjoint psychotherapy at a large midwestern outpatient clinic were assessed on the clinical variables before session 1. They also completed ratings of the therapeutic alliance after sessions 1 and 8. Individual symptomatology did not predict alliance formation at either treatment stage. Higher levels of marital distress predicted poorer alliances to treatment between partners at session 1. Marital distress also predicted therapeutic alliance quality for men and women at session 8. Family-of-origin distress predicted alliance quality for men at session 1, and for women at session 8. Family-of-origin distress for men and women predicted split alliances early in treatment, and marital distress predicted split alliances for women at session 8. Clinical implications for the assessment and treatment of couples are discussed.     

Borderline psychopathology in the first-degree relatives of borderline and axis II comparison probands

The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of each of the nine DSM criteria for borderline personality disorder and the prevalence of the disorder itself in the first-degree relatives of borderline probands and Axis II comparison subjects. Four hundred and forty-five inpatients were interviewed about familial borderline psychopathology using the Revised Family History Questionnaire--a semistructured interview of demonstrated reliability. Of these 445 subjects, 341 met both DIB-R and DSM-III-R criteria for BPD and 104 met DSM-III-R criteria for another type of personality disorder (and neither criteria set for BPD). The psychopathology of 1,580 first-degree relatives of borderline probands and 472 relatives of Axis II comparison subjects was assessed. Both DSM-III-R and DSM-IV BPD were found to be more common among the relatives of borderline than Axis II comparison probands. However, five of the criteria for BPD (inappropriate anger, affective instability, paranoia/dissociation, general impulsivity, and intense, unstable relationships) and all four sectors of borderline psychopathology (affect, cognition, impulsivity, and interpersonal relationships) were found to be both more common and discriminating than the BPD diagnosis itself. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that the subsyndromal phenomenology of BPD may be more common than the borderline diagnosis itself.