Prevalence of auditory verbal hallucinations in a general population: A group comparison study

The present study was specifically designed to investigate the prevalence of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in the general population, and sought to compare similarities and differences regarding socio‐demographics, mental health and severe life events between individuals who have never experienced AVH with those who had. The study also aimed to compare those who sought professional help for their experience of AVH with those who had not sought help. Through a postal questionnaire, 2,533 participants ages 18 and over from a national survey completed the Launay‐Slade Hallucinations Scale and other measures examining AVH characteristics and other areas related to AVH. In total, 7.3% of the sample reported a life‐time prevalence of AVH. Those with AVH were more likely to be single and unemployed, reported higher levels of depression and anxiety, and experienced a higher number of severe life events compared with those without AVH. Only 16% of those who experienced AVH in the general population sought professional help for these experiences. Compared to those who did not seek professional help, participants that had were more likely to experience AVH with a negative content, experience them on a daily basis, undergo negative reactions when experiencing AVH, and resist AVH. In conclusion, the prevalence of AVH was found to be relatively high. The results also revealed higher levels of reduced mental health for individuals who sought professional help, followed by those who did not, compared with those who had never experienced AVH.     

Empirical and theoretical limits on lag recency in free recall

One widely accepted empirical regularity in free recall holds that when people successively transition from report of one list item to another, they prefer transitions across short lags (e.g., by reporting items from adjacent serial positions) to transitions involving large lags. This regularity has provided crucial support for the temporal context model (TCM), a model of the evolution of temporal context in episodic memory (Howard & Kahana, 2002a). We report a reanalysis of 14 data sets that shows that, contrary to the presumed preference for short lags, people often produce transitions with larger lags during recall. We show that these data cannot be accommodated by the TCM. We furthermore show that existing applications of the model have, for mathematical convenience, introduced assumptions that have circumvented its core principle of context evolution. When we instantiated the TCM as it was actually described, with a gradually evolving context, we found that its behavior qualitatively departed from that of the version currently implemented, but that the model was still unable to capture the nature of transitions in free recall. We conclude that the TCM requires further modification and development before it can explain the data that constitute its main source of support. Supplementary materials relevant to this article can be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Norms, Stimuli, and Data Archive, www.psychonomic .org/archive.     

Editing the Reactive Genome: Towards a Postgenomic Ethics of Germline Editing

The reported birth of genetically modified twins in late 2018 has given new fuel to debates about the ethics of germline genome editing (GGE). There is a broad consensus among stakeholders that clinical uses of GGE should be temporarily banned as the technology is not yet deemed safe for use in humans. However, the idea of a complete ban is dismissed by many based on the expectation that more research will eventually allow scientists to make the technology safe without having to put humans at risk first. In this article, I will analyse this assumption and argue that it is undermined by recent developments in the postgenomic life sciences. In particular, I will argue that in a postgenomic view of germline editing a complete ban on specific uses of the technology is warranted, because the research needed to assess the safety of these interventions would not be morally defensible.     

Advancing the Applied Psychology of Inclusion and Diversity: A Special Issue by Fons van de Vijver

This introduction to the special issue outlines key issues in research on inclusion—as the process of recognizing an individual’s needs for both belonging and distinctiveness. Whereas past research often focuses on diversity in relation to discrimination, this special issue attempts to offer a positive lens and asks how we can build inclusive societies. The answers range from emphasizing similarities based on multiple group memberships (intersectionality); creating inclusive workplaces by nurturing leadership that is authentic, respectful, creating belonging and valuing individuals’ unique contributions (ideas, skills, etc.); to developing bridging social capital as a means of cultural integration (vs. separation). The methodological approaches employed by the contributions in this special issue include an experimental vignette study, comparative studies of different ethnicities within a country and cross-culturally comparative work spanning multiple countries. The special issue is dedicated to the memory of Fons van de Vijver, who had initiated the special issue and sadly died last year.     

Representational momentum in spatial hearing

The final position of a moving visual object usually appears to be displaced in the direction of motion. We investigated this phenomenon, termed representational momentum, in the auditory modality. In a dark anechoic environment, an acoustic target (continuous noise or noise pulses) moved from left to right or from right to left along the frontal horizontal plane. Listeners judged the final position of the target using a hand pointer. Target velocity was 8 degrees s(-1) or 16 degrees s(-1). Generally, the final target positions were localised as displaced in the direction of motion. With presentation of continuous noise, target velocity had a strong influence on mean displacement: displacements were stronger with lower velocity. No influence of sound velocity on displacement was found with motion of pulsed noise. Although these findings suggest that the underlying mechanisms may be different in the auditory and visual modality, the occurrence of displacements indicates that representational-momentum-like effects are not restricted to the visual modality, but may reflect a general phenomenon with judgments of dynamic events.     

Time does not cause forgetting in short-term serial recall

Time-based theories expect memory performance to decline as the delay between study and recall of an item increases. The assumption of time-based forgetting, central to many models of serial recall, underpins their key behaviors. Here we compare the predictions of time-based and event-based models by simulation and test them in two experiments using a novel manipulation of the delay between study and retrieval. Participants were trained, via corrective feedback, to recall at different speeds, thus varying total recall time from 6 to 10 sec. In the first experiment, participants used the keyboard to enter their responses but had to repeat a word (called the suppressor) aloud during recall to prevent rehearsal. In the second experiment, articulation was again required, but recall was verbal and was paced by the number of repetitions of the suppressor in between retrieval of items. In both experiments, serial position curves for all retrieval speeds overlapped, and output time had little or no effect. Comparative evaluation of a time-based and an event-based model confirmed that these results present a particular challenge to time-based approaches. We conclude that output interference, rather than output time, is critical in serial recall.     

Distinctiveness revisited: Unpredictable temporal isolation does not benefit short-term serial recall of heard or seen events

The notion of a link between time and memory is intuitively appealing and forms the core assumption of temporal distinctiveness models. Distinctiveness models predict that items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors at presentation should be recalled better than items that are temporally crowded. By contrast, event-based theories consider time to be incidental to the processes that govern memory, and such theories would not imply a temporal isolation advantage unless participants engaged in a consolidation process (e.g., rehearsal or selective encoding) that exploited the temporal structure of the list. In this report, we examine two studies that assessed the effect of temporal distinctiveness on memory, using auditory (Experiment 1) and auditory and visual (Experiment 2) presentation with unpredictably varying interitem intervals. The results show that with unpredictable intervals temporal isolation does not benefit memory, regardless of presentation modality.     

Memory for fact, fiction, and misinformation: the Iraq War 2003

Media coverage of the 2003 Iraq War frequently contained corrections and retractions of earlier information. For example, claims that Iraqi forces executed coalition prisoners of war after they surrendered were retracted the day after the claims were made. Similarly, tentative initial reports about the discovery of weapons of mass destruction were all later disconfirmed. We investigated the effects of these retractions and disconfirmations on people's memory for and beliefs about war-related events in two coalition countries (Australia and the United States) and one country that opposed the war (Germany). Participants were queried about (a) true events, (b) events initially presented as fact but subsequently retracted, and (c) fictional events. Participants in the United States did not show sensitivity to the correction of misinformation, whereas participants in Australia and Germany discounted corrected misinformation. Our results are consistent with previous findings in that the differences between samples reflect greater suspicion about the motives underlying the war among people in Australia and Germany than among people in the United States.