Can Everyday Brands Be Threatening? Responses to Brand Primes Depend on Childhood Socioeconomic Status

The current work investigates whether childhood socioeconomic status influences how people respond to brands. Results from two experiments show that, perhaps counterintuitively, everyday brands—and not luxury brands—can threaten the self‐esteem of people who had poor childhoods. Supported by the results of our pilot study, we argue this is because everyday brands represent a material norm that can be difficult for low‐income consumers to achieve. Furthermore, our findings suggest that consumers from poor backgrounds may cope with this threat by becoming morse self‐interested, as indicated by decreased volunteer intentions.     

Leaving to Love: Filipina Caregivers and The Queer Kinship of Transnational Childcare

This article considers the affective and psychosocial dimensions of transnational childcare. It offers a transdisciplinary engagement with the subjectivity of Filipina caregivers, suggesting that the ways in which their love and care are split across borders and nations “queers” conceptions of family, childhood, and maternal obligation. Specifically, queer theories of kinship and diaspora are employed to offer an affective reading of Canada’s Caregiver Program. D. W. Winnicott’s theory of the “good enough” mother is also engaged in an effort to complicate narratives of maternal obligation, neglect, and love.     

Central Asia as the economic and geopolitical tension nexus: Some implications for the world futures

During the last millennium the world economic and geopolitical conflicts were to a great extent connected: different crises in the World System's evolution stimulated geopolitical shifts and vice versa. This article argues that in the 15th century different geopolitical events and conflicts in Central Asia initiated the fall of the previous World System and the rise of the new one. This transformation resulted in the fall of overland and river trade routes, including the Great Silk Route, which passed through Central Asia. World trade shifted to sea and ocean routes, and European countries became the center of the new World System. Now, in the beginning of the 21st century a new transformation of the World System is underway. The center of economic and political development is migrating gradually to the East: this is why the geopolitical role of the Central Asian states is increasing. Central Asian states are a very important part of the New Silk Route; this route is to connect Eastern Asia with Europe and the Middle East. The United States, China, Russia, and other states are ardently competing to control the New Silk Route. Hence, different geopolitical, social, and military conflicts are probable in Central Asia. So economic and political integration in Eurasia between Russia, China, the United States and Central Asian states is very important for the geopolitical stabilization of the region. The article evaluates the main scenarios of geopolitical changes in Central Asia.     

Links between family gender socialization experiences in childhood and gendered occupational attainment in young adulthood

Gendered occupational segregation remains prevalent across the world. Although research has examined factors contributing to the low number of women in male-typed occupations – namely science, technology, engineering, and math – little longitudinal research has examined the role of childhood experiences in both young women's and men's later gendered occupational attainment. This study addressed this gap in the literature by examining family gender socialization experiences in middle childhood – namely parents' attitudes and work and family life – as contributors to the gender typicality of occupational attainment in young adulthood. Using data collected from mothers, fathers, and children over approximately 15 years, the results revealed that the associations between childhood socialization experiences (~ 10 years old) and occupational attainment (~ 26 years old) depended on the sex of the child. For sons but not daughters, mothers' more traditional attitudes toward women's roles predicted attaining more gender-typed occupations. In addition, spending more time with fathers in childhood predicted daughters attaining less and sons acquiring more gender-typed occupations in young adulthood. Overall, evidence supports the idea that childhood socialization experiences help to shape individuals' career attainment and thus contribute to gender segregation in the labor market.     

Using cumulative-recall curves to assess the extent of relational and item-specific processing

Although distinguishing between item-specific and relational information has proved to be a useful approach for understanding a variety of important memory phenomena, finding measurement tools for assessing the amount and type of information processed has proven difficult. Using the repeated-testing procedure, Burns (1993) demonstrated that item gains (the recall of items on a later test that were not recalled on earlier tests) and item losses (the forgetting of items on a later test that were recalled on earlier tests) reflected differences in amount of item-specific and relational information processed, respectively. Although several researchers have begun to use the measures with apparent success, the present research demonstrates that the accuracy of the item-gain measure is largely dependent on the rather arbitrary choice of recall-test length. We also show that a related but alternative measure, analysis of cumulative-recall curves, avoids some of the shortcomings of the item gain and loss measures. Moreover, we provide evidence for the generality of the cumulative-recall approach by demonstrating its effectiveness in mixed-list designs.     

The fallibility of memory in judicial processes: Lessons from the past and their modern consequences

The capability of adult and child witnesses to accurately recollect events from the past and provide reliable testimony has been hotly debated for more than 100 years. Prominent legal cases of the 1980s and 1990s sparked lengthy debates and important research questions surrounding the fallibility and general reliability of memory. But what lessons have we learned, some 35 years later, about the role of memory in the judicial system? In this review, we focus on what we now know about the consequences of the fallibility of memory for legal proceedings. We present a brief historical overview of false memories that focuses on three critical forensic areas that changed memory research: children as eyewitnesses, historic sexual abuse and eyewitness (mis)identification. We revisit some of the prominent trials of the 1980s and 1990s to not only consider the role false memories have played in judicial decisions, but also to see how this has helped us understand memory today. Finally, we consider the way in which the research on memory (true and false) has been successfully integrated into some courtroom procedures.     

Childhood amnesia: Empirical evidence for a two-stage phenomenon

The term childhood amnesia refers to the inability of adults to remember events from their infancy and early childhood. If we plot the number of memories that adults can recall as a function of age during childhood, the number of memories reported increases gradually as a function of age. Typically, this finding has been used to argue that gradual changes in memory development contribute to a gradual decline in childhood amnesia during the preschool period. Alternatively, it is possible that pooling data across participants has obscured more abrupt, stage-like changes in the remission of childhood amnesia. In the present study we examined the number and distribution of childhood memories for individual participants. Six adults were repeatedly interviewed about their childhood memories. We found that the distribution of adults' early childhood memories may be less continuous than pooled data suggest. This finding has important implications for current explanations of childhood amnesia.     

Children dating childhood memories

How accurate are children when dating very long-term memories? Chinese and European Canadian 8-, 11-, and 14-year-olds (N=344) recalled and dated memories from before they went to school in a memory fluency task. Parents provided verification of children's memories and age estimates. Across all age and culture groups, a telescoping effect (i.e., events were dated as taking place more recently than they actually did) was found for earlier memories (before 48 months) and a reverse telescoping effect for later memories (after 48 months). Older children showed a greater tendency to telescope earlier memories and a weaker tendency to reverse telescope later memories than did younger children. Euro-Canadian children showed larger reverse telescoping than Chinese children. These are the first systematic findings concerning the accuracy of children's dating of very long-term memories. They shed new light on the phenomenon of telescoping and have implications for research on childhood amnesia.     

Phenomenology of autobiographical memories: The Memory Experiences Questionnaire

The phenomenology of autobiographical memories varies on a number of dimensions: some memories are vivid and others dim; some are emotionally intense and others lack emotional content. The present research sought to develop a psychometrically-sound scale to assess the entire range of dimensions on which autobiographical memories differ. We reviewed the literature on memory experiences and identified 10 relevant dimensions: Vividness, Coherence, Accessibility, Time Perspective, Sensory Details, Visual Perspective, Emotional Intensity, Sharing, Distancing, and Valence. We constructed a comprehensive item pool to assess these dimensions and, using data from several large samples (Ns=941; 510; 212), we showed that: (a) all 10 scales had adequate reliability (median alpha=.87; range=.72 to .97), (b) the 10-factor structure provided a good fit to the data, and (c) gender, personality, and memory recency had theoretically meaningful relations with the 10 scales. For example, gender and ethnicity differences in phenomenology were mediated by memory content, and early and recent memories had distinct phenomenologies. The discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical utility of the 10 scales.     

The onset of childhood amnesia in childhood: A prospective investigation of the course and determinants of forgetting of early-life events

The present research was an examination of the onset of childhood amnesia and how it relates to maternal narrative style, an important determinant of autobiographical memory development. Children and their mothers discussed unique events when the children were 3 years of age. Different subgroups of children were tested for recall of the events at ages 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 years. At the later session they were interviewed by an experimenter about the events discussed 2 to 6 years previously with their mothers (early-life events). Children aged 5, 6, and 7 remembered 60% or more of the early-life events. In contrast, children aged 8 and 9 years remembered fewer than 40% of the early-life events. Overall maternal narrative style predicted children's contributions to mother–child conversations at age 3 years; it did not have cross-lagged relations to memory for early-life events at ages 5 to 9 years. Maternal deflections of the conversational turn to the child predicted the amount of information children later reported about the early-life events. The findings have implications for our understanding of the onset of childhood amnesia and the achievement of an adult-like distribution of memories in the school years. They highlight the importance of forgetting processes in explanations of the amnesia.