Dividing attention lowers children's but increases adults' false memories

The present study examined the impact of divided attention on children's and adults' neutral and negative true and false memories in a standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Children (7- and 11-year-olds; n = 126) and adults (n = 52) received 5 neutral and 5 negative Deese/Roediger-McDermott word lists; half of each group also received a divided attention task. The results showed that divided attention affected children's and adults' false memory levels differently but did not alter true memory differently. Our results revealed a developmental shift in that divided attention lowered children's false memory rates but increased adults' false memory rates, regardless of the nature of the material (i.e., neutral or negative). Our study indicates that manipulations that target conscious processing (e.g., divided attention) result in marked qualitative and quantitative differences between children's and adults' false memories but not true memories.     

The development of norm-based coding and race-specific face prototypes: An examination of 5- and 8-year-olds’ face space

The current research investigated the organization of children’s face space by examining whether 5- and 8-year-olds show race-contingent aftereffects. Participants read a storybook in which Caucasian and Chinese children’s faces were distorted in opposite directions. Before and after adaptation, participants judged the normality/attractiveness of expanded, compressed, and undistorted Caucasian and Chinese faces. The method was validated with adults and then refined to test 8- and 5-year-olds. The 5-year-olds were also tested in a simple aftereffects paradigm. The current research provides the first evidence for simple attractiveness aftereffects in 5-year-olds and for race-contingent aftereffects in both 5- and 8-year-olds. Evidence that adults and 5-year-olds may possess only a weak prototype for Chinese children’s faces suggests that Caucasian adults’ prototype for Chinese adult faces does not generalize to child faces and that children’s face space undergoes a period of increasing differentiation between 5 and 8 years of age.     

Are we puppets on a string? Comparing the impact of contingency and validity on implicit and explicit evaluations

Research has demonstrated that implicit and explicit evaluations of the same object can diverge. Explanations of such dissociations frequently appeal to dual-process theories, such that implicit evaluations are assumed to reflect object-valence contingencies independent of their perceived validity, whereas explicit evaluations reflect the perceived validity of object-valence contingencies. Although there is evidence supporting these assumptions, it remains unclear if dissociations can arise in situations in which object-valence contingencies are judged to be true or false during the learning of these contingencies. Challenging dual-process accounts that propose a simultaneous operation of two parallel learning mechanisms, results from three experiments showed that the perceived validity of evaluative information about social targets qualified both explicit and implicit evaluations when validity information was available immediately after the encoding of the valence information; however, delaying the presentation of validity information reduced its qualifying impact for implicit, but not explicit, evaluations.     

Assessing Parenting Skills and Attitudes: A Review of the Psychometrics of Parenting Measures

There are many measures that assess parenting skills or practices, such as behavior, beliefs, coping mechanisms, reactions to stress, or discipline. However, little is known about the psychometric quality of these parenting measures. This information is essential for practitioners and researchers to aide in the selection of the most valid and reliable measures to assess parenting behavior or attitudes. This study examined the psychometric quality among parenting measures published from 1985 to 2009. After the initial search 164 measures were identified, but were reduced to 25 measures that supplied some degree of psychometric information, were published in the United States or Canada, and were in English. Measures were compared across numerous categories including respondent type, norming data, administration type, and ten psychometric variables such as internal consistency, content validity, and predictive validity. Out of the 25 measures, seven had no acceptable psychometric properties, seven had only 1–2 acceptable ratings on psychometric properties, six had between 3 and 4 acceptable psychometric ratings, none had between 5 and 6 acceptable ratings, and only five had strong psychometric properties in seven or more of the 10 categories. Likewise, only five measures provided and norming information and 14 measures provided scoring procedures. Implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Interference due to shared features between action plans is influenced by working memory span

In this study, we examined the interactions between the action plans that we hold in memory and the actions that we carry out, asking whether the interference due to shared features between action plans is due to selection demands imposed on working memory. Individuals with low and high working memory spans learned arbitrary motor actions in response to two different visual events (A and B), presented in a serial order. They planned a response to the first event (A) and while maintaining this action plan in memory they then executed a speeded response to the second event (B). Afterward, they executed the action plan for the first event (A) maintained in memory. Speeded responses to the second event (B) were delayed when it shared an action feature (feature overlap) with the first event (A), relative to when it did not (no feature overlap). The size of the feature-overlap delay was greater for low-span than for high-span participants. This indicates that interference due to overlapping action plans is greater when fewer working memory resources are available, suggesting that this interference is due to selection demands imposed on working memory. Thus, working memory plays an important role in managing current and upcoming action plans, at least for newly learned tasks. Also, managing multiple action plans is compromised in individuals who have low versus high working memory spans.     

Correction to: A psychophysiological investigation of mourning: There are two sides to the story

Motivation and Emotion - Mourning constitutes an important human emotion, which might cause—among other things—major depressive symptoms when lasting for too long. To date, no study...     

Emotion Dysregulation and Eating Disorder Symptoms: Examining Distinct Associations and Interactions in Adolescents

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Emotion dysregulation has been posited as a key transdiagnostic factor of mental health difficulties, including eating disorders. However, how...     

The sandwich model: The ‘music and dance’ of therapeutic action

My premise is that a ‘layered’ approach is necessary to understand the process of exchanges that result in therapeutic change. I imagine these processes occurring in three layers – although the number of domains in which change is taking place is actually infinite – such as in a sandwich. The top layer, or top slice of bread of the sandwich, represents a broad view of the change process; it is non‐linear and includes the feature of uncertainty, a general principle of dynamic systems theory. The middle layer, or the meat of the sandwich, is explained by theories that are immediately and clinically useful to a therapist, such as psychoanalytic theories. These are primarily linear theories and use language and symbols to ‘tell a story of what happened’. The bottom layer, or bottom slice of bread of the sandwich, is the micro‐process; this layer includes the moment‐to‐moment patterns of coordinated rhythms that both communicate meaning and provide the essential scaffold for all higher‐level change processes. The micro‐process also requires a non‐linear theory to make sense of its variability and emergent properties. Taking a bite out of the sandwich will include a ‘polysemic bundle of communicative behaviors’ (Harrison and Tronick, 2011). I will illustrate the ‘sandwich model’ with the clinical case of the analytic treatment of a 5 year‐old boy.     

Attention to Emotion and Non-Western Faces: Revisiting the Facial Feedback Hypothesis

In a modified replication of Strack, Martin, and Stepper's demonstration of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis (1988), we investigated the effect of attention to emotion on the facial feedback process in a non-western cultural setting. Participants, recruited from two universities in Ghana, West Africa, gave self-reports of their perceived levels of attention to emotion, and then completed cartoon-rating tasks while randomly assigned to smiling, frowning, or neutral conditions. While participants with low Attention to Emotion scores displayed the usual facial feedback effect (rating cartoons as funnier when in the smiling compared to the frowning condition), the effect was not present in individuals with high Attention to Emotion. The findings indicate that (1) the facial feedback process can occur in contexts beyond those in which the phenomenon has previously been studied, and (2) aspects of emotion regulation, such as Attention to Emotion can interfere with the facial feedback process.