The basis of the 3/4 view advantage in face recognition

Three-quarter views of faces promote better recognition memory for previously unfamiliar faces than do full-face views. This paper reports experiments which examine the possible basis of the effect, and, in particular, examine whether the effect reflects some ‘canonical’ role for the 3/4 view of a face. Experiment 1 showed no advantage of 3/4 views over full-face views when the task was to decide whether or not each of a series of faces was that of a highly familiar colleague. In Experiment 2 a sequential matching task was used, where subjects had to respond positively if both members of a pair of faces were of the same person. When the faces used were highly familiar to the subjects, there was no evidence of an advantage for a 3/4 view in the matching task. Three-quarter views and full-face views led to equivalent performance, though profiles produced decrements in performance. When the same faces were shown to subjects who were unfamiliar with the faces, 3/4 views did lead to increased speeds in same trials, compared with full-face, though profiles again proved difficult. Thus a 3/4 view advantage appeared only where the faces were unfamiliar, and the task had to be performed at the level of visual matching. It appears that the 3/4 view advantage may be obtained only when the task involves explicit matching between test views and remembered target photographs, rather than reflecting any more fundamental properties of the representations used to recognize highly familiar faces.     

Affirmation and Care: A Feminist Account of Bullying and Bullying Prevention

Despite the amount of attention that activists, educators, psychologists, and the media place on bullying and bullying prevention, there has been no sustained philosophical reflection on bullying, nor has there been a feminist analysis of the growing literature on bullying. This essay seeks to satisfy those two needs. The first section is a broad introduction to the literature on bullying. I define bullying and distinguish it from teasing, sassing, roughhousing, and other more benign interactions. I also outline two common solutions to bullying: zero‐tolerance policies and “ecological” interventions. The second section uses feminist ethics of care to analyze the effectiveness of each approach. I argue that ecological approaches to bullying are preferable to zero‐tolerance policies because they operate on a relational model of the self and identity‐formation. I elaborate a notion of affirmation as the mechanism that stabilizes and solidifies our sense of self across time. I then use affirmation to analyze three things: why people bully one another, the specific harm inflicted by bullying, and why ecological approaches are more effective in reducing bullying. The third section uses my account of affirmation to critique the scientism and troublingly gendered assumptions that underlie much of the work on bullying.     

Reduced specificity of autobiographical memories following a negative mood induction

Reduced autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) to emotional and neutral cue words appears to be a stable cognitive marker of clinical depression. For example, reduced AMS is present in remitted/recovered depressed patients and shows no reliable relationship with current levels of depressed mood in correlational studies. The present study examined whether reduced AMS could be induced in healthy volunteers with no history of depression, using a negative mood manipulation and whether levels of AMS and induced mood were positively correlated. Results showed a reduction in AMS following negative mood induction, compared to a neutral induction, whereas positive mood induction had no effects on AMS. Furthermore, lower happiness following the induction phase correlated positively with reduced AMS, and the extent of happiness reduction from pre- to post-induction correlated positively with reduction in AMS. These results suggest that AMS is, at least in part, a function of current emotion state. The implications for the literature on AMS as a stable marker of clinical depression are discussed.     

Conditions under which function information attenuates name extension via shape

Children often extend names to novel artifacts on the basis of overall shape rather than core properties (e.g., function). This bias is claimed to reflect the fact that nonrandom structure is a reliable cue to an object having a specific designed function. In this article, we show that information about an object's design (i.e., about its creator's intentions) is neither necessary nor sufficient for children to override the shape bias. Children extend names on the basis of any information specifying the artifact's function (e.g., information about design, current use, or possible use), especially when this information is made salient when candidate objects for extension are introduced. Possible mechanisms via which children come to rely less on easily observable cues (e.g., shape) and more on core properties (e.g., function) are discussed.     

Overgeneral autobiographical memory in depressed adolescents with, versus without, a reported history of trauma

Autobiographical memory retrieval is fundamental to the developing self-concept in adolescence, to emotion regulation, and to social problem solving and has been shown to be compromised in adolescents diagnosed with depression (R. J. Park, I. M. Goodyer, & J. D. Teasdale, 2002). The authors of the present study assessed autobiographical memory overgenerality in a sample of depressed adolescent participants with, versus without, a reported history of trauma and never-depressed control participants by using an emotion word-cueing paradigm. The authors' analyses showed for the first time that adolescents with major depression and with no reported history of trauma exhibited an overgeneral memory bias. They also revealed that depressed adolescents who reported a history of trauma retrieved fewer overgeneral memories than did depressed adolescents who reported no history of trauma. Among depressed adolescents who reported a history of trauma, more severe posttraumatic stress symptoms were associated with less overgenerality. Possible accounts of these findings are suggested.     

The effects of suppressing a negative autobiographical memory on concurrent intrusions and subsequent autobiographical recall in dysphoria

Depressed individuals endeavor to suppress intrusive thoughts and memories as a form of mood control. Two predictions from this literature were examined. The 1st was that attempts to suppress a preselected negative memory during a stream-of-consciousness (SOC) task in dysphoric individuals, relative to a no-suppress condition, would lead to relatively speeded access to other negative but not positive memories on a subsequent cue-word recall task. No such effects were predicted for nondysphoric controls. The 2nd prediction was that, across all participants who were asked to suppress memories, higher levels of depressed mood would be associated with more intrusions of the to-be-suppressed memory during the SOC and that this association would be stronger than the comparable relation in participants who were not asked to suppress memories. Results support both predictions.     

Automatic and effortful processing of self-statements in depression

Clark and Beck (1999) and Williams et al. (1997) have come up with quite different conclusions regarding which cognitive processes are most affected by negative self-schemata and negative knowledge structures. In order to increase the understanding of differences in effortful and automatic processing in depression, we compared never depressed (ND), previously depressed (PD) and clinically depressed (CD) individuals on free recall, recognition and fabrication of positive and negative self-statements. The results showed that: (i) overall NDs and PDs recalled more positive self-statements than CDs, whereas CDs correctly recognized more negative self-statements than NDs and PDs; and (ii) CDs and PDs fabricated more negative than positive self-statements, whereas no difference was obtained for NDs. The results seem to be in line with Clark and Beck's suggestions. However, there are several aspects of the present findings that make the picture more complicated.     

Nostalgia and Satisfaction with Life: A Behavioral Genetic Analysis

Journal of Happiness Studies - Nostalgia, a bittersweet but predominantly positive emotion, arises from self-relevant and social memories. Evidence suggests that nostalgia is a potential source of...     

Conflict and criterion setting in recognition memory

Recognition memory requires both retrieval processes and control processes such as criterion setting. Decision criteria were manipulated by offering different payoffs for correct "old" versus "new" responses. Criterion setting influenced the following late-occurring (1,000+ ms), conflict-sensitive event-related brain potential (ERP) components: the stimulus-locked late posterior negativity (LPN) and the response-locked error-related negativity (ERN). The LPN-ERN were most negative to hits under conservative payoff conditions involving conflict between the correct old response and the payoff for new responses. This same conservative-hit condition was most frequently associated with response reversals when fast initial judgments were followed by slower judgments. Postresponse ERP activity may index conflict-sensitive processes underlying postretrieval cognitive control mechanisms involved with assessing responses to current items and updating response criteria on later trials.