Remembering the past and imagining the future: Examining the consequences of mental time travel on memory

Cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that remembering the past and imagining the future rely on overlapping processes in episodic memory. The three experiments reported here examine the consequences of remembering the past and imagining the future on the accessibility of other information in memory. Participants first studied events associated with a specific context and then either (a) retrieved past autobiographical events associated with that same context or (b) imagined future autobiographical events associated with that same context. Replicating and extending evidence of retrieval-induced forgetting, remembering autobiographical events from the past caused participants to forget the related studied events. However, imagining future autobiographical events failed to cause participants to forget the related studied events. These results suggest an important difference in the memorial consequences of remembering and imagining.     

Thought Suppression in Spider-Fearful and Nonfearful Individuals

The authors examined the suppression of spider-related thoughts in spiderfearful (n = 23) and nonfearful (n = 22) individuals. Participants were primed with vivid pictures of spiders and a story about spiders. Next, they were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions: (a) suppression of thoughts associated with the previously presented spiderrelated stimuli or (b) free expression of any thoughts, including those related to the spider-related stimuli. All participants completed a subsequent free-expression exercise. Results indicated that spider-fearful individuals expressed thoughts about the spider-related stimuli for a longer length of time than did nonfearful individuals, particularly in the suppression condition. Participants in both groups demonstrated a rebound of thoughts associated with the spider-related stimuli following suppression. The authors propose that the priming of feared stimuli makes suppression of fear-related thoughts particularly difficult for fearful individuals, perhaps by activating a state of heightened arousal.     

Trait Self‐Esteem Moderates the Effect of Initiator Status on Emotional and Cognitive Responses to Romantic Relationship Dissolution

ABSTRACT We hypothesized that the effect of initiator status on post breakup distress would vary as a function of trait self‐esteem, such that individuals with low self‐esteem would experience more distress after being rejected by their partners, whereas, among individuals with high self‐esteem, initiator status would not predict distress. We used a prospective design in which university students (N=66) were assessed for emotional responses following the dissolution of their real‐life romantic relationships, as well as a laboratory design in which students (N=190) imagined breaking up with their partners. As predicted, participants with lower trait self‐esteem exhibited greater distress after experiencing or imagining a romantic rejection than after ending or imagining themselves ending their relationships. Conversely, distress experienced by those with high trait self‐esteem did not differ as a function of who ended the relationship. Implications for understanding self‐esteem processes and the effects of romantic rejection are discussed.     

Confirming,Validating, and Norming the Factor Structure of Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change Initial and Intersession

Progress or feedback research tracks and feeds back client progress data throughout the course of psychotherapy. In the effort to empirically ground psychotherapeutic practice, feedback research is both a complement and alternative to empirically supported manualized treatments. Evidence suggests that tracking and feeding back progress data with individual or nonsystemic feedback systems improves outcomes in individual and couple therapy. The research reported in this article pertains to the STIC^® (Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change)—the first client‐report feedback system designed to empirically assess and track change within client systems from multisystemic and multidimensional perspectives in individual, couple, and family therapy. Clients complete the STIC Initial before the first session and the shorter STIC Intersession before every subsequent session. This study tested and its results supported the hypothesized factor structure of the six scales that comprise both STIC forms in a clinical outpatient sample and in a normal, random representative sample of the U.S. population. This study also tested the STIC's concurrent validity and found that its 6 scales and 40 of its 41 subscales differentiated the clinical and normal samples. Lastly, the study derived clinical cut‐offs for each scale and subscale to determine whether and how much a client's score falls in the normal or clinical range. Beyond supporting the factorial and concurrent validity of both STIC forms, this research supported the reliabilities of the six scales (Omega_hierarchical) as well as the reliabilities of most subscales (alpha and rate–rerate). This article delineates clinical implications and directions for future research.     

Magnitude effects for experienced rewards at short delays in the escalating interest task

A first-person shooter video game was adapted for the study of choice between smaller sooner and larger later rewards. Participants chose when to fire a weapon that increased in damage potential over a short interval. When the delay to maximum damage was shorter (5–8 s), people showed greater sensitivity to the consequences of their choices than when the delay was longer (17–20 s). Participants also evidenced a magnitude effect by waiting proportionally longer when the damage magnitudes were doubled for all rewards. The experiment replicated the standard magnitude effect with this new video game preparation over time scales similar to those typically used in nonhuman animal studies and without complications due to satiation or cost.     

Camouflage-Collar Crime: An Examination of Wildlife Crime and Characteristics of Offenders in Florida

Fish and wildlife crime is an understudied area of criminology and criminal justice and when it is the focus of research, studies tend to be characterized by small samples and a lack of multivariate analyses. This study examines the nature and extent of cited fish and wildlife offenses and characteristics of offenders through quantitative analysis of 15,657 incidents of cited fish and wildlife offenses in Florida. The results indicate that a viable typology of wildlife crime is emergent and that there are important racial and ethnic differences across types of wildlife offenses.