Ordinary physical punishment: is it harmful? Comment on Gershoff (2002)

E. T. Gershoff (2002) reviewed processes that might mediate and contexts that might moderate the associations between corporal punishment (CP) and child behaviors and provided an account of the methodological weaknesses of the research reviewed in her meta-analyses. In this examination of Gershoff, the authors argue that the biases and confounds in the meta-analyses further limit any causal inferences that can be drawn concerning the detrimental "effects" of CP on associated child behaviors. The authors suggest that undesirable child outcomes are associated with CP because the construct marks inept harsh parenting and conclude that although the harmful effects of physical abuse and other extreme punishments are clear, a blanket injunction against spanking is not justified by the evidence presented by Gershoff.     

Strong cues are not necessarily weak: Thomson and Tulving (1970) and the encoding specificity principle revisited

Performance on tests in which there is control over reporting (e.g., cued recall with the option to withhold responses) can be characterized by four parameters: free- and forced-report retrieval (correct responses retrieved from memory when the option to withhold responses is exercised and when it is not, respectively), monitoring (discrimination between correct and incorrect potential responses), and report bias (willingness to report responses). Typically, researchers do not examine all these components in cued-test performance; blanks are sometimes counted the same as errors, meaning that the (free-report) performance index is contaminated with report bias and monitoring ability. In this research, a two-stage testing procedure is described that allows measures of free- and forced-report retrieval, monitoring, and bias to be derived from the original encoding specificity experiments (Thomson & Tulving, 1970). The results show that their cue-reinstatement manipulation affected free-report retrieval, but once report bias and monitoring effects were removed by forcing output, retrieval was unaffected.     

Age differences in overlapping-task performance: evidence for efficient parallel processing in older adults

Two psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted to examine overlapping processing in younger and older adults. A shape discrimination task (triangle or rectangle) for Task 1 (T1) and a lexical-decision task (word or nonword) for Task 2 (T2) were used. PRP effects, response time for T2 increasing as stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) decreased, were obtained for both age groups. The effect of word frequency on T2 was smaller at the short SOA than at the long SOA, reflecting slack effects, which were larger for older than younger adults in both experiments. These results suggest that older adults can perform lexical access of T2 in parallel with the processing of T1 at least as efficiently as younger adults.     

Differential age effects for case and hue mixing in visual word recognition

The authors compare older adults' lexical-decision data with younger adults' data reported in P. Allen, A. F. Smith, et al. (2002). On the basis of their work, it was proposed that consistent-case wordswould be processed by the faster holistic (magnodominated) stream, but that mixed-case words would be processed by the slower analytic (interblob-dominated or blob-dominated) steams. Hue mixing was predicted to have no effect on consistent-case performance, but mixed-hue/mixed-case words were predicted to be recognized faster than monochrome/mixed-case words. Younger adults showed the predicted results, but older adults did not. These results suggest that holistic central processes are maintained, but that older adults exhibited an analytic decrement     

Synesthetic color experiences influence memory

We describe the extraordinary memory of C, a 21–year–old student who experiences synesthetic colors (i.e., photisms) when she sees, hears, or thinks of digits. Using three matrices of 50 digits, we tested C and 7 nonsynesthetes to evaluate whether C's synesthetic photisms influence her memory for digits. One matrix consisted of black digits, whereas the other two matrices consisted of digits that were either incongruent or congruent with the colors of C's photisms. C's recall of the incongruently colored digits was considerably poorer than her recall of either the black or the congruently colored digits. The 7 nonsynesthetes did not show such differences in their recall of the matrices. In addition, when immediate recall of the black digits was compared with delayed recall of those digits (48 hr), C showed no decrease in performance, whereas each of the nonsynesthetes showed a significant decrease. These findings both demonstrate C's extraordinary memory and show that her synesthetic photisms can influence her memory for digits.     

Judgment heuristics and recognition memory: Prime identification and target-processing fluency

In three experiments, the effect of identification of a briefly presented word (prime) on a subsequent recognition response to that word (target) was investigated. Theories of current processing fluency (e.g., Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989) suggest that prime identification should reduce P(old) relative to prime misidentification because awareness of the prime provides a source to which to attribute target fluency, rendering attributions to prior presentation less likely. However, counter to these predictions, Experiment 1 demonstrated that prime identification increased P(old) relative to misidentified primes. It is hypothesized that this reversed effect was due to participants' using a heuristic that related prime identification success to prior presentation but was not based on current processing fluency. In Experiment 2, participants were induced to avoid using this heuristic by making an alternate source for prime identification success (display duration) highly available. Under these circumstances, prime identification reduced P(old) relative to prime misidentification, suggesting that participants now relied on current processing fluency rather than on prime identification success. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2, but with fixed rather than variable prime displays.     

A short duration group treatment of smoking behavior by stimulus saturation

Two saturation procedures of different lengths were administered to Ss who desired to quit smoking. Ss chain-smoked for either 20 hr (group E₁) or 10 hr (E₂). Total abstinence was the main dependent measure. Both groups experienced relatively equal success on a short-term basis. Long-term abstinence was noted for group E₁ only. Sixty per cent of the E₁ Ss were not smoking 4 months after treatment.