Does anhedonia in schizophrenia reflect faulty memory for subjectively experienced emotions?

The authors evaluated whether self-reported trait anhedonia in schizophrenia reflects faulty memory, such that patients are capable of experiencing pleasure while engaged in enjoyable activities but underestimate their pleasure in recalling these experiences. Thirty schizophrenia patients and 31 nonpatient control participants rated their emotional responses to pleasant and neutral foods and film clips and completed a surprise recall task for their emotions after a 4-hr delay. Despite reporting elevated trait anhedonia, patients did not significantly differ from control participants in immediate pleasant emotional responses to the stimuli or in delayed recall for these experiences. In-the-moment pleasure and short-term retention for emotional experiences thus appear to be relatively intact in schizophrenia. Alternative explanations for the hedonic deficit in this disorder are discussed.     

Examining the principles in principled conservatism: the role of responsibility stereotypes as cues for deservingness in racial policy decisions

Why do educated conservatives oppose affirmative action? Those in the "principled conservatism" camp say opposition is based on principled judgments of fairness about the policies. Others, however, argue that opposition is based on racism. The present article offers an alternative perspective that may reconcile these contradictory points of view. In 2 studies, the authors show 2 major findings: (a) that conservatives oppose affirmative action more for Blacks than for other groups, in this case women, and (b) that the relationship between conservatism and affirmative action attitudes is mediated best by group-based stereotypes that offer deservingness information and not by other potential mediators like old-fashioned racism or the perceived threat that affirmative action poses to oneself. The authors conclude that educated conservatives are indeed principled in their opposition to affirmative action, but those principles are group based not policy based.     

Native Americans and alcohol: past, present, and future

Native Americans have higher rates of alcohol use, frequency of use, and increased rates of fetal alcohol syndrome, compared with other ethnic groups (J. Hisnanick, 1992; P. A. May, 1996; J. M. Wallace et al., 2003). High prevalence rates of alcohol misuse among Native Americans must be understood in light of their unique history, which has resulted in trauma and exposure to many risk factors for problem alcohol use. Many risk factors have been identified in the general population; however, only some of these risk factors have been examined among Native American populations. The unique history and world view of Native Americans mean that, often, risk factors operate differently from the way they do in other populations. The authors discuss interventions and promising treatments.     

Surface features of utterances, credibility judgments, and memory

Information acquired in conversation is often not credible, which makes monitoring its credibility critical. Listeners of conversations often use surface features of utterances, such as pause and intonation, to guide their credibility judgments. In this research, we explore whether listeners' delayed credibility judgments about remembered information are affected by the surface features of the speakers' utterances. In addition, we examine some of the specific factors involved in this issue: (1) how listeners' listening strategies influence their subsequent credibility judgments and (2) how the type of surface features of the utterances influences listeners' ability to make delayed credibility judgments. The results indicate that intonation of the utterances continues to influence listeners' assessment of the credibility of remembered information, that the influences of intonation depend on listening strategies, and that people have difficulty using/remembering pause length when making a delayed credibility judgment. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Effects of instruction presentation mode in comparative judgments

In each of two experiments, the comparative instructions in a symbolic comparison task were either varied randomly from trial to trial (mixed blocks) or left constant (pure blocks) within blocks of trials. In the first experiment, every stimulus was compared with every other stimulus. The symbolic distance effect (DE) was enhanced, and the semantic congruity effect (SCE) was significantly larger, when the instructions were randomized than when they were blocked. In a second experiment, each stimulus was paired with only one other stimulus. The SCE was again larger when instructions were randomized than when they were blocked. The enhanced SCE and DE with randomized instructions follow naturally from evidence accrual views of comparative judgments.     

The associative-memory basis of cognitive skill learning: adult age differences

It has been established that memorizing common problems and their solutions underlies cognitive skill development, and that there are substantial age deficits in the rate of this learning. In a between-groups design, the authors compared learning rates for the same set of problems in skill (SK) training and paired-associate (PA) training. The authors found main effects due to condition (PA problems were acquired earlier) and to age (older adults' learning was delayed), but no condition-by-age interaction. The authors concluded that the age deficit in SK can be accounted for by the age deficit in associative memory; no further explanation is needed. The authors also analyzed fast and slow retrieves in SK and PA, and found that the frequency of fast retrieves did not differ in the two conditions. The overall advantage of PA was due to the occurrence of slow retrieves, which were absent in SK presumably because the skill algorithm displaces slow, explicit memory search in SK, but not fast, familiarity-based retrieval.     

“Counting” serially presented stimuli by human and nonhuman primates and pigeons

Much of Stewart Hulse's career was spent analyzing how animals can extract patterned information from sequences of stimuli. Yet an additional form of information contained in a sequence may be the number of times different elements occurred. Experiments that required numerical discrimination between different stimulus items presented in sequence are analyzed for primates and pigeons. It is shown that a model based on magnitude discrimination can account well for data from human and nonhuman primate experiments. Similar experiments carried out with pigeons showed a strong recency effect not found with primates. The pigeon data are modeled successfully, however, by assuming that representations of events decay as other events are presented.