Age, gender, and individual differences in memory failure appraisal

Young adults (22 men and 24 women) and older adults (24 men and 24 women) rated 12 gender-neutral vignettes describing short-term, long-term, and very-long-term memory failures. Vignette target persons were young (21-32) or older (65-75) men or women. Subjects of both age and gender groups used a double standard: Failures of older targets of both genders were rated as signifying greater mental difficulty than failures of young targets; failures of young targets were attributed to lack of effort and attention. Young subjects judged very-long-term failures more harshly than did older subjects. Subjects' objective memory performance, self-rated memory failure frequency, memory failure discomfort, and depression made little difference in their target person ratings.     

The contribution of postural bias to lateral preferences for holding human infants

When asked to hold an infant, 60-85% of adults hold on their left, so that the infant's head is to the left of their midline (Brüser, 1981; de Chateau, 1983; Saling & Tyson, 1981). The same group bias has been found even when persons are merely asked to imagine holding an infant (Nakamichi & Takeda, 1995; Harris, Almerigi, & Kirsch, 2000). A number of variables have been found to contribute modestly to the bias, including the sex and handedness of the holder. In the current study, the role of a new variable is investigated, namely, the feeling of comfort for holding an infant on a particular side as indexed by one's foot preference for acts of stabilizing or postural support. To test this hypothesis, 282 right-handed college students (218 women, 64 men) were given the imagine-hold task along with 4 questions about their foot preference for posture and balance. The results showed that, at least for women, the two measures were modestly but significantly related.     

Behavioral and physiological responses of young horses to different weaning protocols: a pilot study

In this study, effects of weaning on behavioral and physiological stress parameters in young horses (foals) were determined. Foals were weaned either simultaneously without the presence of adult horses (group A, n?=?6), or in the presence of two adult females familiar but unrelated to the foals (group B, n?=?5), or weaned consecutively by removing two mother horses per day (group C, n?=?6). Behavior, locomotion, salivary cortisol concentration, beat-to-beat (RR) interval, heart rate variability (HRV) and weight were determined. Group A foals lost weight for 2 days (mean?±?SEM) -?8.3?±?1.6?kg, p?相似文献   

Age differences in self-reported anxiety and psychomotor performance

10 young and 10 older adults completed a self-report questionnaire on Debilitative and Facilitative Anxiety both prior to and following 10 psychomotor coding trials. Older adults were higher on Facilitative Anxiety at both times. These scores were negatively correlated with coding task performance for the total group but not for the individual age groups. There was no age effect for Debilitative Anxiety, although it was lower at Time 2, particularly for older adults. Debilitative Anxiety was not correlated with psychomotor performance. These results do not support the hypothesis that the psychomotor performance of older adults is differentially negatively affected by anxiety.     

Age and forgetfulness: perceivers' impressions of targets' capability.

In a person perception paradigm, 72 young and 72 old adult Ss listened to tape recordings of a nonforgetful, moderately forgetful, or highly forgetful female target person being interviewed for a volunteer job. Ss then rated their opinion of the target's memory and how likely they would be to assign the target to easy and difficult tasks. Overall, Ss gave higher memory opinion ratings to old than to young targets. As expected, they were more likely to assign tasks to nonforgetful than to forgetful targets. However, they were more egalitarian than was hypothesized in their task assignment ratings for forgetful young versus forgetful old targets.     

Effects of salience and time pressure on ratings of social causality

A model is proposed to account for the effects of a target person's salience on judgments of that target. It is argued that salience leads to more extreme inferences in the direction implied by prior knowledge that is relevant to the judgment. This knowledge may include both specific information about the target being rated and general information about the class of stimuli to which the target belongs. Two experiments supported these hypotheses. When subjects were under time pressure to make judgments of a target person's influence in a social situation, their judgments increased with the salience of the target when they had prior knowledge that the target was generally high in social influence. However, their judgments decreased with the target's salience when subjects had prior knowledge that the target was generally low in social influence. When subjects were given ample time to make their judgments, however, the effects of target salience were attenuated. Possible implications of these findings for prior research on salience effects are discussed.     

Transactive memory in close relationships.

Memory performance of 118 individuals who had been in close dating relationships for at least 3 months was studied. For a memory task ostensibly to be performed by pairs, some Ss were paired with their partners and some were paired with an opposite-sex partner from another couple. For some pairs a memory structure was assigned (e.g., 1 partner should remember food items, another should remember history items, etc.), whereas for others no structure was mentioned. Pairs studied together without communication, and recall was tested in individuals. Memory performance of the natural pairs was better than that of impromptu pairs without assigned structure, whereas the performance of natural pairs was inferior to that of impromptu pairs when structure was assigned.     

Everyday memory failure: age differences in appraisal and attribution

A person perception paradigm was used to test 86 young and 84 older Ss for evidence of a double standard in appraising everyday memory failures of young and older targets. Vignettes were judged on separate Likert scales for possible attributions for the failure (ability, effort, task difficulty, chance, and 2 measures of attention), signs of mental difficulty, need for memory training, and indications of need for professional evaluation. Results confirmed a double standard used by young and old: The failures of older targets were judged as signifying greater mental difficulty and greater need for memory training than were the identical failures of young targets. Older Ss were more lenient overall than young Ss in their appraisals. Young Ss judged target persons' memory failures as signifying more mental difficulty, and they more readily recommend professional evaluation.