False memories in music listening: exploring the misinformation effect and individual difference factors in auditory memory

ABSTRACT

The study of false memory has had a profound impact on our understanding of how and what we remember, as shown by the misinformation paradigm [Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361–366. doi:10.1101/lm.94705]. Though misinformation effects have been demonstrated extensively within visual tasks, they have not yet been explored in the realm of non-visual auditory stimuli. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate whether post-event information can create false memories of music listening episodes. In addition, we explored individual difference factors potentially associated with false memory susceptibility in music, including age, suggestibility, personality, and musical training. In two music recognition tasks, participants (N?=?151) listened to an initial music track, which unbeknownst to them was missing an instrument. They were then presented with post-event information which either suggested the presence of the missing instrument or did not. The presence of misinformation resulted in significantly poorer performance on the music recognition tasks (d?=?.43), suggesting the existence of false musical memories. A random forest analysis indicated that none of the individual difference factors assessed were significantly associated with misinformation susceptibility. These findings support previous research on the fallibility of human memory and demonstrate, to some extent, the generality of the misinformation effect to a non-visual auditory domain.     

《管子》公平观对员工激励的启示

《管子》从执政的角度定义了如何建设正确的公平观,本文从《管子》关于“公平是什么”这一核心问题的回答出发,以现代组织管理者的角度去探讨如何实现对员工恰当的激励。这就是要从组织整体的角度去营造恰当的公平观,并且围绕社会公平、个人公平、经济公平等几个方面在组织内部建立公平合理的组织气氛,并最终有效的激励员工。     

Gender and Compensation: Understanding the Impact of Gender and Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Rewards

Children’s understanding of rewards for task completion was examined in the context of gender, and gender-based stereotypes. Eighty-eight children (43 girls, M_overall?=?58.39 months) completed a measure assessing gender-based occupational stereotypes. This measure, along with gender, was used to predict children’s self-reward for undergoing the testing, as well as their reward for a fictional other child having undergone the same procedure. The methodology provided a novel approach for studying reward allocation in children, as it did not require children to divide resources between themselves and another child for completing the same task. An occupation-based stereotype measure was found to predict the self-reward, as well as the reward allocated to the other child. In addition, the participant’s gender predicted self-reward, and an interaction between participant gender and gender of the experimenter contributed to predicting the other child reward. Overall, these findings suggest that gender and gender-based stereotyping have an impact on reward allocation of young children. Implications of these results in the context of reward allocation research among children and adult populations are discussed.     

The Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Positive and Negative Priming in Identity and Spatial Priming Tasks

The authors examined whether stimulus activation and inhibition in the identity priming task are related to the temporal lobe, and whether these processes in the spatial priming task are related to the parietal lobe. Forty participants performed spatial and identity positive and negative priming tasks, the Vandenberg Mental Rotation task, and the Digit Span task. Both men and women showed significant positive and negative priming in the identity and spatial tasks with no gender difference. The magnitude of identity positive priming was predicted by the Digit Span task, and the magnitude of spatial positive priming was predicted by the mental rotation task. Only women showed a correlation between spatial ability and spatial negative priming. The results are partially consistent with the dorsal-ventral model of cognitive inhibition.     

A Swedish validation of the Berlin Numeracy Test

Recent research has highlighted the importance of considering an individual's level of numeracy, that is their numerical abilities, in a vast variety of judgment and decision making tasks. To accurately evaluate the influence of numeracy requires good and valid measures of the construct. In the present study we validate a Swedish version of the Berlin Numeracy Test (Cokely, Galesic, Schulz, Ghazal & Garcia‐Retamero, 2012). The validation was carried out on both a student sample and a sample representative of the Swedish population. The Swedish BNT showed sound psychometrical properties in both samples. Further, in both samples the BNT had satisfactory convergent and discriminant validity when correlating with other measures of numeracy, while not being significantly related to measures of personality. With respect to predictive validity the results indicated divergent patterns in the two samples. In the student sample, participants scoring highest on the BNT outperformed those in the other three levels, which did not differ in performance. In contrast, in the population sample participants scoring lowest on the BNT performed worse than those in the other three levels, which did not differ in performance. Taken together, however, the results suggest that the Swedish version of the BNT should be considered a valid measure of numeracy in both Swedish student and population representative samples.     

Religious pluralism and processes of individualisation in Hinduism

The paper explores the interconnection between religious pluralisation and processes of individualisation in India by focusing on the emergence of religious alternatives to Vedic ritualism in the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era. Criticism of established religious goals and practices voiced by individuals was accompanied by an increasing interest in the structures of individual existence. The conceptualisation of the individual in the philosophical and religious literature of the period is an important aspect of establishing new religious pathways with ideas of self, agency and personal relatedness being of central concern. On the basis of different doctrines religious options gained acceptance which allow individuals to pursue their religious aspirations either apart from or parallel to the ritual-social obligations in the context of caste-hierarchy. The new religious options gravitate towards institutionalisation in the form of religious communities (sampradāya). These are not only important elements in organising Hindu religious pluralism, but also allow for recurrent processes of religious individualisation.     

Helpful processes in psychological therapy for patients with primary cancers: A qualitative interview study

Aims: The purpose of this study was to identify what patients with primary cancers found helpful in therapy. Method: In‐depth qualitative interviews were conducted with eight patients who had completed a course of psychological therapy within an NHS psychology service for cancer patients. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: The participants identified a range of helpful processes in therapy: talking and expressing their feelings to someone outside of the family; forming a relationship with their therapist; normalisation through the therapists' expert knowledge; problem‐solving and CBT. Limitations: As with all qualitative studies, the small sample and size and dependence on participant recall limits generalisability of the findings. Implications: The findings of this study are consistent with a pluralistic perspective: that multiple therapeutic processes ‐ aligned to a range of different orientations ‐ can be of value to patients with primary cancers. This supports the provision of a range of therapeutic interventions and strategies for this patient group.     

Exploring Individual and Contextual Antecedents of Attitudes Toward the Acceptability of Cheating and Plagiarism

The purpose of this study was to identify the relative contribution of individual and contextual predictors to students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism. A group of 324 students from a tertiary institution in New Zealand completed an online survey. The findings indicate that gender, justice sensitivity, and understanding of university policies regarding academic dishonesty were the key predictors of the students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism, both as agents of dishonest conduct and as witnesses of misconduct among their peers. The implications of these findings for the development of policies and initiatives in tertiary institutions are discussed.     

Causality as individual essence: its bearing on synchronicity

Causality, time, and number are subjectively lived realities and need to be noticed as such. Fundamental to the wide range of living experience, they are also basic to scientific knowing. In this article I examine causality in relation to an article on synchronicity by Harald Atmanspacher and Wolfgang Fach. My examination is neither scientific nor metaphysical, but rather phenomenological, as it is a clarification of form as individual essence of a thing. This non‐material form of an individual thing in the widest sense of the word ‘thing’ was rejected and so lost during modern seventeenth‐century science but, renewed now, can help describe synchronicity. A commentary by William Willeford follows.     

An Examination of the “Greening of Christianity” Thesis Among Americans, 1993–2010

Some environmental and religious scholars, religious leaders, and media figures have claimed there has been a “greening of Christianity” in the United States since the mid‐1990s. Such a trend would be socially significant, as the integration of Christian values and environmental values may invigorate both domains. Using nationally representative data from the 1993 and 2010 General Social Surveys, we analyze how green self‐identified Christians in the U.S. general public are in their pro‐environmental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Using structural equation modeling, we find no clear evidence of a greening of Christianity among rank‐and‐file Christians in the general public between 1993 and 2010. Indeed, the patterns of our results are quite similar to those from earlier decades, which documented that self‐identified Christians reported lower levels of environmental concern than did non‐Christians and nonreligious individuals. We did find evidence of some greening among evangelical Protestants, especially relative to mainline Protestants, between 1993 and 2010. We close by suggesting a few fruitful avenues for further research in this area via variable‐oriented, case‐oriented, and experimental studies and discussing some theoretical implications of our findings.