Living in History: How War, Terrorism, and Natural Disaster Affect the Organization of Autobiographical Memory

ABSTRACT— Memories of war, terrorism, and natural disaster play a critical role in the construction of group identity and the persistence of group conflict. Here, we argue that personal memory and knowledge of the collective past become entwined only when public events have a direct, forceful, and prolonged impact on a population. Support for this position comes from a cross-national study in which participants thought aloud as they dated mundane autobiographical events. We found that Bosnians often mentioned their civil war and that Izmit Turks made frequent reference to the 1999 earthquake in their country. In contrast, public events were rarely mentioned by Serbs, Montenegrins, Ankara Turks, Canadians, Danes, or Israelis. Surprisingly, historical references were absent from (post–September 11) protocols collected in New York City and elsewhere in the United States. Taken together, these findings indicate that it is personal significance, not historical importance, that determines whether public events play a role in organizing autobiographical memory.     

Pedagogy for diversity: mediating between tradition and equality in schools

The aim of this paper is to provide evidence‐based guidance for educational practitioners and, in particular, for those in leadership positions in schools, on good practice in developing and implementing school level strategies and actions to promote an appreciation of diversity in schools and society.     

未来配偶偏爱的特征——选择长期配偶与短期配偶的条件

该研究中被试分配有限“配偶币”来抉择与理想配偶标准相符合的性交往对象。首先,该研究重复验证了Li 等人 (2002) 和Kenrick (2006)的发现,男性理想的长期配偶需要外表出众,而女性理想的长期配偶需要社会地位较高;两性理想的短期配偶都必须外表出众。其次,两性所投射出的理想自我与潜在配偶偏好的特征一致,研究发现,长期性交往条件下,男性需要具有较高社会地位,女性需要外表出众;短期性交往条件下,男性和女性都需要外表出众。评价潜在配偶的机制与评价现有配偶的机制可能是两种受到选择的不同的心理机制。     

Do traumatic events influence the clinical expression of compulsive hoarding?

Traumatic experiences have been posited as one potential catalyst for the abrupt onset of obsessive-compulsive symptoms including compulsive hoarding. To determine whether traumatic life events (TLEs) might influence the expression of compulsive hoarding in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), interview responses to the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder module of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID) were examined in 180 individuals with OCD. Compared to individuals with OCD who did not meet criteria for hoarding, participants classified as hoarders (24% of the sample) were significantly more likely to have reported at least one TLE in their lifetime. Patients who met criteria for hoarding and who had also experienced TLEs had significantly greater hoarding symptom severity than those hoarders not exposed to trauma. This association was found to be robust. That is, the relationship between TLEs and hoarding symptom severity was not better accounted for by age, age of OCD onset, depressive symptoms, general OCD symptomatology, or mood and anxiety comorbidity. Closer examination revealed that the clutter factor of compulsive hoarding (and not difficulty discarding or acquisitioning) was most strongly associated with having experienced a traumatic event.     

An investigation of traumatic life events and obsessive-compulsive disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), like most other psychiatric disorders, is suspected of being influenced by an interaction between life events and genes, both with regard to onset and course of illness. To date, no specific genes have been identified as playing a frequent role, and only a relatively few empirical studies have assessed the association between stressful life events (SLEs) and OCD. The present study builds on past research by examining the potential contributions from traumatic life events (TLEs) on the severity and symptom features in 265 individuals with Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID)-diagnosed OCD. Of these participants 54% endorsed having experienced at least one TLE in their life time. The presence of one or more TLEs was associated with increased OCD symptom severity. This relationship remained significant despite controlling for key variables including age, OCD age-of-onset, comorbidity, and depressive symptoms. In addition, obsessions/checking and symmetry/ordering were two of four symptom factors that were specifically associated with the occurrence of TLEs. These results are generally supportive of a pathoplastic relationship between TLEs and OCD symptomatology and thus suggest the need for greater systematic consideration of life stresses in research focused on the nature and treatment of OCD.     

Memory for general and specific value information in younger and older adults: Measuring the limits of strategic control

The ability to selectively remember important information is a critical function of memory. Although previous research has suggested that older adults are impaired in a variety of episodic memory tasks, recent work has demonstrated that older adults can selectively remember high-value information. In the present research, we examined how younger and older adults selectively remembered words with various assigned numeric point values, to see whether younger adults could remember more specific value information than could older adults. Both groups were equally good at recalling point values when recalling the range of high-value words, but younger adults outperformed older adults when recalling specific values. Although older adults were more likely to recognize negative value words, both groups exhibited control by not recalling negative value information. The findings suggest that although both groups retain high-value information, older adults rely more on gist-based encoding and retrieval operations, whereas younger adults are able to remember specific numeric value information.     

Associative representational plasticity in the auditory cortex: a synthesis of two disciplines

Historically, sensory systems have been largely ignored as potential loci of information storage in the neurobiology of learning and memory. They continued to be relegated to the role of "sensory analyzers" despite consistent findings of associatively induced enhancement of responses in primary sensory cortices to behaviorally important signal stimuli, such as conditioned stimuli (CS), during classical conditioning. This disregard may have been promoted by the fact that the brain was interrogated using only one or two stimuli, e.g., a CS(+) sometimes with a CS(-), providing little insight into the specificity of neural plasticity. This review describes a novel approach that synthesizes the basic experimental designs of the experimental psychology of learning with that of sensory neurophysiology. By probing the brain with a large stimulus set before and after learning, this unified method has revealed that associative processes produce highly specific changes in the receptive fields of cells in the primary auditory cortex (A1). This associative representational plasticity (ARP) selectively facilitates responses to tonal CSs at the expense of other frequencies, producing tuning shifts toward and to the CS and expanded representation of CS frequencies in the tonotopic map of A1. ARPs have the major characteristics of associative memory: They are highly specific, discriminative, rapidly acquired, exhibit consolidation over hours and days, and can be retained indefinitely. Evidence to date suggests that ARPs encode the level of acquired behavioral importance of stimuli. The nucleus basalis cholinergic system is sufficient both for the induction of ARPs and the induction of specific auditory memory. Investigation of ARPs has attracted workers with diverse backgrounds, often resulting in behavioral approaches that yield data that are difficult to interpret. The advantages of studying associative representational plasticity are emphasized, as is the need for greater behavioral sophistication.     

Can the theory of planned behavior explain patterns of health behavior change?

This article tested the ability of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to predict patterns of behavior change associated with health screening. Attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and intentions were used to predict objective measures of attendance 1 month and 13 months later among participants who had never previously been screened (N = 389). Findings showed that the TPB predicted attendance on each occasion and also predicted frequency of attendance. However, the model was unable to reliably distinguish among consistent attendees, participants who delayed attending, and participants who initially attended but relapsed. Thus, the TPB needs to be extended to understand behaviors that must be performed promptly and repeatedly for health benefits to accrue.     

State and trait anxiety: A cross-cultural comparison of Chinese and Caucasian students in Canada

Chinese people immigrating to North America are subject to specific Stressors in moving to a new country, and, furthermore, these factors interact with their cultural background to produce higher levels of anxiety than are commonly believed to exist. The present study compared the responses of 60 Chinese and 60 Caucasian Canadian students to questionnaires measuring multidimensional trait and state anxiety. As predicted, the Chinese students endorsed significantly higher levels of trait anxiety for ambiguous situations and daily routines than did the Caucasians. Moreover, they were also significantly more likely than the Caucasians to rate the research situation as being ambiguous and threatening. Of all the possible background variables tested, English fluency was the single most powerful covariate that was predictive of the results, with those students who indicated a lowered English proficiency tending to score higher across all four facets of trait anxiety. As the Chinese students were also significantly more likely than the Caucasians to indicate a lower level of English fluency, the present results are supportive of the likelihood that lack of familiarity with the adopted culture and language may contribute to adjustment difficulties in Chinese immigrants. This paper is based in part on an M.A. thesis in psychology at York University by the first author under the supervision of the second author. This research was supported in part by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to the second author (Grant No. 410-94-1473).     

General self-efficacy and control in relation to anxiety and cognitive performance

The present investigation employed a general measure of self-efficacy, a measure of perceived control, and items relating to expectation and evaluation (pre and post). The purpose was to determine whether general self-efficacy or perceived control best predicted the criterion variables of state anxiety and performance on a stressful cognitive task (solving anagrams) under conditions of high versus low control. These relationships were tested under the experimental conditions of high and low objective control (i.e., the actual control afforded by the situation). Results showed that general self-efficacy, relative to perceived control was a better predictor of state anxiety in the high and low control conditions but neither predicted actual performance. Participants’ expectations of task difficulty, their own performance, and their performance relative to the performance of others taken before the task were compared with their evaluations of difficulty and performance after completing the task. Participants indicated that the task was easier than anticipated, but rated their own performance more poorly after completion of the task. The study reported in this article was supported, in part, by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant No. 410-94-1473 to Norman S. Endler.