Sources of Bias in Memory for Emotions

How accurately can people remember how they felt in the past? Although some investigators hold that emotional memories are resistant to change, we review evidence that current emotions, appraisals, and coping efforts, as well as personality traits, are all associated with bias in recalling past emotions. Bias occurs as memories of emotional states are updated in light of subsequent experience and goals. Biased memories in turn influence future plans and emotions, and may contribute to the formation of enduring personality traits. People's memories for emotions provide highly condensed and accessible summaries of the relevance of past experiences to current goals.     

Age as a Variable in the Connotative Perceptions of Some Animal Symbols

Using the Rorschach as one instrument in the selection of industrial- and business-personnel, the author become aware that in the testing-the-limits (tt1) phase individuals showed a strong tendency (and consistency) in either accepting or rejecting all suggested concepts. The popularity-level of the suggested concept appeared to operate at the best on a secondary level in influencing acceptance or rejection of the concepts.

Three studies described in the present paper conclusively support the existence of such a consistent tendency, at least among normal Ss of average or above-average intelligence.

This finding is interpreted as proof that the ttl measures a different dimension than the Rorschach-test proper.

The nature of the dimension is still questionable but indications are that it is a measure of a person's willingness (and ability) to look at problems, or situations, in a genuinely flexible manner upon demand from persons in authority.     

Interpreter Bias on the Rorschach Test as a Function of Patients' Socioeconomic Status

Hypotheses investigated were: Rorschach interpretation would indicate more negative and pathological factors for patients with lower-class, than for patients with middle-class social histories; and experienced interpreters would be less biased than inexperienced ones. Groups of experts (Fellows of the Society for Projective Techniques) and novices (graduate students) rated the same protocols; a) blind, b) accompanied by a lower-class history, c) accompanied by a middle-class history, on 21 objective scales. Addition of social-class information significantly influences judgments in the predicted directions. Much of the effect was attributable to the novice Rorschachers but the experts were not entirely free of the biasing effect.     

The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire: Scale Development and Initial Validation of a Factor-Analytic Solution to Multiple Empathy Measures

To formulate a parsimonious tool to assess empathy, we used factor analysis on a combination of self-report measures to examine consensus and developed a brief self-report measure of this common factor. The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) represents empathy as a primarily emotional process. In 3 studies, the TEQ demonstrated strong convergent validity, correlating positively with behavioral measures of social decoding, self-report measures of empathy, and negatively with a measure of Autism symptomatology. Moreover, it exhibited good internal consistency and high test–retest reliability. The TEQ is a brief, reliable, and valid instrument for the assessment of empathy.     

Application of Projective Tests to Psychotherapy: A Case Study

Case study of a severely disturbed patient seen in psychotherapy in a university counseling center and tested at the beginning and after the termination of therapy. It is concluded that the projective tests proved useful in estimating the extent of pathology prior to therapy and in assessing the degree and direction of change following therapy. Discussion of this patient's projective responses with him during therapy was found to be beneficial, in accord with Richman's views on the reporting of test results to patients. It is suggested that clinical psychologists doing psychotherapy may similarly find projective tests of use to them.     

Implicit scene learning is viewpoint dependent

When novel scenes are encoded, the representations of scene layout are generally viewpoint specific. Past studies of scene recognition have typically required subjects to explicitly study and encode novel scenes, but in everyday visual experience, it is possible that much scene learning occurs incidentally. Here, we examine whether implicitly encoded scene layouts are also viewpoint dependent. We used the contextual cuing paradigm, in which search for a target is facilitated by implicitly learned associations between target locations and novel spatial contexts (Chun & Jiang, 1998). This task was extended to naturalistic search arrays with apparent depth. To test viewpoint dependence, the viewpoint of the scenes was varied from training to testing. Contextual cuing and, hence, scene context learning decreased as the angular rotation from training viewpoint increased. This finding suggests that implicitly acquired representations of scene layout are viewpoint dependent.     

Reliability and validity of the Women's Health Initiative Insomnia Rating Scale

The reliability and construct validity of the 5-item Women's Health Initiative Insomnia Rating Scale (WHIIRS) were evaluated in 2 studies. In Study 1, using a sample of 66,269 postmenopausal women, validity of the WHIIRS was assessed by examining its relationship to other measures known to be related to sleep quality. Reliability of the WHIIRS was estimated using a resampling approach; the mean alpha coefficient was .78. Test-retest reliability coefficients were .96 for same-day administration and .66 after a year or more. Correlations of the WHIIRS with the other measures were in the predicted directions. Study 2 used a sample of 459 women and compared the WHIIRS with objective indicators of sleep quality. Results showed that differences in the objective indicators could be detected by the WHIIRS. Findings suggest that a between-group mean difference of approximately 0.50 of a standard deviation on the WHIIRS may be clinically meaningful.