There's something social happening at the mall

Part of the success of the retail mall was hypothesized to be the result of the socially stimulating environment that the indoor mall provides. To test this idea, three studies were completed. In the first, the composition of shoppers attracted to a downtown shopping area and a regional mall were compared. Results showed shopping at the mall was most likely to be either as singles or in larger groups suggesting that people go to the mall because the mall supports social interaction. In the second study, social behavior in a regional mall was observed. The pattern of social interaction observed in the mall setting was compared to a farmers market and a supermarket. Social behavior in the mall was found to be more similar to that of the social farmers market than the impersonal supermarket. In the third study, the image of the mall was found to be more social than a comparable downtown area and the image of a mall store was more social than the image of the same store located in a downtown business district. The overall findings suggest that the mall attracts consumers because it may be a magnet for social behavior and may reinforce consumer behavior by its sociability.     

Adverse childhood experiences and coping strategies: identifying pathways to resiliency in adulthood

ABSTRACT

Objective

The current study examined whether coping strategies mediate the link between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and adult psychiatric and physical health outcomes.     

Memory in sub-clinical obsessive-compulsive checkers

In a series of experiments we extended the research on possible memory deficits in subclinical obsessive-compulsive Ss who reported excessive checking. Using a variety of memory tests we compared 20 subclinical checkers to 20 Ss without obsessive-compulsive symptomatology. Contrary to hypothesis, checkers remembered self-generated words better than read words just as much as did normals, but they were more likely than normals to report thinking they had studied words that, in fact, had not been on the study list. Further, they more often confused whether they read or generated the words at study. Checkers did not appear to perseverate on already-recalled words on repeated free recall tests any more than did normals. However, checkers remembered fewer actions overall and more often misremembered whether they had performed, observed, or written these actions. Such memory deficits may contribute to the development of excessive checking.