Are emotionally charged lures immune to false memory?

Using the Deese–Roediger–McDennott task and E. Tulving's (1985) remember–know judgments for recognition memory, the authors explored whether emotional words can show the false memory effect. Participants studied lists containing nonemotional, orthographic associates (e.g., cape, tape, ripe; part, perk, dark) of either emotional (e.g., rape) or nonemotional (e.g., park) critical lures. This setup produced significant false "remembering" of emotional lures, even though initially no emotional words appeared at study. When 3 emotional nonlure words appeared at study, emotional-lure false recognition more than doubled. However, when these 3 study words also appeared on the recognition test, false memory for the emotional lures was reduced. Across experiments, participants misremembered nonemotional lures more often than they did emotional lures, but they were more likely to rate emotional lures as "remembered," once they had been recognized as "old." The authors discuss findings in light of J. J. Freyd and D. H. Gleaves, (1996) criticisms of this task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Choice processing in emotionally difficult decisions": Correction.

Reports an error in the article "Choice Processing in Emotionally Difficult Decisions' by Mary Frances Luce, James R. Bettman, and John W. Payne (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1997, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 384–405; see record 1997-03378-007). In Table 7 on page 396, the high conflict/low trade-off difficulty mean for the PATTERN variable was printed as -0.13, but the actual mean is 0.13. A portion of the original abstract follows: Extends the standard effort-accuracy approach to explaining task influences on decision processing by arguing that coping goals will interact with effort-minimization goals for negatively emotion-laden decision tasks. These coping goals may involve both a desire to process in a thorough, accurate manner and a desire to avoid particularly distressing aspects of processing. The authors hypothesized and found in 3 experiments that decision processing under increasing negative emotion both becomes more extensive and proceeds more by focusing on one attribute at a time. In particular, increased negative emotion leads to more attribute-based processing at the beginning of the decision process. The results are inconsistent with views that negative emotion acts only as an incentive or only as a source of decision complexity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ecological memory reconsidered: A comment on Bruce's "The how and why of ecological memory."

The present authors explore the exact role of the ecology of the acts of memorizing and remembering in D. Bruce's (see record 1986-03043-001) program of research. It is argued that although there is much to praise in Bruce, his program does not tackle the difficult problem of guiding the research in assessing and identifying ecologically valid problems of memory. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit priming of alcohol expectancy memory processes and subsequent drinking behavior.

Expectations about the effects of alcohol have been modeled as stored memories. This study tested the memory view for investigating the processes that influence drinking. Strategies taken from recent memory research were used to implicitly prime drinking. Consequent effects on consumption of a commercial nonalcoholic beer were measured. Participants were led to believe this beer contained alcohol. Eighty undergraduate women (n?=?20 per cell) participated in 2, apparently unrelated, studies. A 2?×?2 factorial design simultaneously varied videotaped primes (bar setting or neutral video) with semantic primes (expectancy or neutral words). Women exposed to unobtrusive alcohol primes of either type drank significantly greater amounts (p?     

An alternative conceptualization to memory "strength" in reality monitoring.

Recently, H. G. Hoffman (1997) has proposed that reality-monitoring judgments can be made using average differences in the strength of 2 classes of studied items. The support for this claim was that the inferred recognition hit rate differed for the 2 classes of items. Hoffman argued that misattributions of new items to an old source were more frequent to the source that was weaker in memory strength. The authors of the present study have demonstrated that source misattribution biases of this sort can arise when the inferred recognition hit rate does not differ between classes of items. Their argument is that different source-monitoring situations may require different weightings of source-monitoring decision criteria and that these can provide a valid account of both their own and Hoffman's data. Arguments concerning when strength might and might not be used in tasks involving source monitoring versus unconscious plagiarism are clarified. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Neuropsychological assessment of memory in the elderly": Erratum.

Reports an error in "Neuropsychological assessment of memory in the elderly" by Donald E. Read (Canadian Journal of Psychology Revue Canadienne de Psychologie, 1987[Jun], Vol 41[2], 158-174). On p. 171: The last sentence of the first paragraph should read "This finding has now been replicated in a follow-up study with the same subjects (Read, 1986)." (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1988-30166-001.) Administered 3 tests designed for the neuropsychological assessment of older people. The tests focus on evaluating the storage abilities of the brain for both explicit and implicit aspects of memory. Ss were volunteers in 3 age groups: 89 males and 153 females (aged 50–59 yrs); 122 males and 181 females (aged 60–69 yrs); and 77 males and 112 females (aged 70–79 yrs). The tests were (1) the Supermarket Test, designed to measure both immediate and delayed episodic memory for test items, plus episodic recall of the spatial location of the same items; (2) the Visual Closure Test, designed to measure implicit and explicit memory; and (3) the Sequential Geometric Design Test, designed to measure visuoperceptual ability and nonverbal memory. Findings show the tests to work well with patients suffering from mild to severe memory loss and with those in the early stages of dementia. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive alcohol expectancies and drinking behavior: The influence of expectancy strength and memory accessibility.

College student drinkers (N ?=?314) participated in a health survey in which they (a) completed an alcohol-related memory association task (expectancy accessibility measure), (b) rated their positive expectancies about alcohol use (expectancy strength measure), and (c) reported their level of alcohol involvement. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that both expectancy accessibility and expectancy strength predicted frequency of alcohol use and alcohol-related problems. Moreover, moderational analyses showed that the association between expectancy strength and frequency of alcohol use was greater for those who generated more alcohol responses on the expectancy association task. These findings, suggest that the outcome association measure and Likert scale ratings of expectancies may assess distinct properties of expectancy representations, which may have independent and interactive effects on different aspects of drinking behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Addendum to "Consciousness."

The author extends his previous discussion (see record 1979-22877-001) to encompass the role of a concept of awareness in each of 7 ordinary concepts of consciousness: joint or mutual knowledge, internal knowledge or conviction, awareness, direct awareness, personal unity, normal waking state, and double consciousness. In each case, the crucial involvement of a certain concept of awareness is brought out and references are included of authors who have used similar scientific concepts that implicate the same concept of awareness. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Collaboration in associative recognition memory: Using recalled information to defend "new" judgments.

S. E. Clark, A. Hori, A. Putnam, and T. J. Martin (2000) showed that collaboration on a recognition memory task produced facilitation in recognition of targets but had inconsistent and sometimes negative effects regarding distractors. They accounted for these results within the framework of a dual-process, recall-plus-familiarity model but showed only weak evidence to support it. The present results of 3 experiments present stronger evidence for Clark et al.'s dual-process view and also show why such evidence is difficult to obtain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Schema abstraction" in a multiple-trace memory model.

Applies a simulation model of episodic memory, MINERVA 2, to the learning of concepts, as represented by the schema-abstraction task. The model assumes that each experience produces a separate memory trace and that knowledge of abstract concepts is derived from the pool of episodic traces at the time of retrieval. A retrieval cue contacts all traces simultaneously, activating each according to its similarity to the cue, and the information retrieved from memory reflects the summed content of all activated traces responding in parallel. It is suggested that the MINERVA 2 model is able to retrieve an abstracted prototype of the category when cued with the category name and to retrieve and disambiguate a category name when cued with a category exemplar. The model successfully predicts basic findings from the schema-abstraction literature (e.g., differential forgetting of prototypes and old instances, typicality, and category size effects), including some that have been cited as evidence against exemplar theories of concepts. The model is compared with other classification models, and its implications regarding the abstraction problem are discussed. (63 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Memory independence and memory interference in cognitive development": Correction.

Reports an error in the original article by C. J. Brainerd and V. F. Reyna (Psychological Review, 1993[Jan], Vol 100[1], 42–67). On page 56, there were some incorrect data values in the 3rd and 4th columns of Table 4. The amended table is presented. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1993-17013-001.) Recent experiments have established the surprising fact that age improvements in reasoning are often dissociated from improvements in memory for determinative informational inputs. Fuzzy-trace theory explains this memory-independence effect on the grounds that reasoning operations do not directly access verbatim traces of critical background information but, rather, process gist that was retrieved and edited in parallel with the encoding of such information. This explanation also envisions 2 ways in which children's memory and reasoning might be mutually interfering: (1) memory-to-reasoning interference, a tendency to process verbatim traces of background inputs on both memory probes and reasoning problems that simultaneously improves memory performance and impairs reasoning and (2) reasoning-to-memory interference… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A "humanistic alternative" to "Political ethics."

Challenges E. Gologor's (1978) contention that research concerning positive characteristics of people might be disruptive, as it could be discovered that people possess considerable potential for evil. A paradigm is presented that allows an objective evaluation of the effects of deception-disclosure on a given psychological phenomenon or procedure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonnormality and divergence in posttreatment alcohol use: Reexamining the Project MATCH data "another way."

Alcohol lapses are the modal outcome following treatment for alcohol use disorders, yet many alcohol researchers have encountered limited success in the prediction and prevention of relapse. One hypothesis is that lapses are unpredictable, but another possibility is the complexity of the relapse process is not captured by traditional statistical methods. Data from Project Matching Alcohol Treatments to Client Heterogeneity (Project MATCH), a multisite alcohol treatment study, were reanalyzed with 2 statistical methodologies: catastrophe and 2-part growth mixture modeling. Drawing on previous investigations of self-efficacy as a dynamic predictor of relapse, the current study revisits the self-efficacy matching hypothesis, which was not statistically supported in Project MATCH. Results from both the catastrophe and growth mixture analyses demonstrated a dynamic relationship between self-efficacy and drinking outcomes. The growth mixture analyses provided evidence in support of the original matching hypothesis: Individuals with lower self-efficacy who received cognitive behavior therapy drank far less frequently than did those with low self-efficacy who received motivational therapy. These results highlight the dynamical nature of the relapse process and the importance of the use of methodologies that accommodate this complexity when evaluating treatment outcomes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Another response to "Homosexuality: The ethical challenge."

Discusses the ethical integrity of accepting a voluntary patient's wish to change his sexual orientation, emphasizing G. D. Davison's article (see PA, Vol: 56:Issue 6) which argues that homosexuality is not pathological state. The problem of how a therapist can discriminate between his/her own values and what is a set of symptoms elicited by environment (e.g., social pressures) is examined. Four tasks must be accomplished before a therapist can attempt a sexual orientation change in a homosexual--deciding how the patient's biological state, past learning, access to information, and the impact of the current environment affect him or her. A therapist, behavioral or otherwise, is obligated to engage in a dialogue involving a scrupulous, nonmystical, time-consuming information exchange with the patient, such interchange being directed toward the clarification in the patient's mind of whether in fact he or she really wants to change. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

From chair to "chair": A representational shift account of object labeling effects on memory.

What are the consequences of calling things by their names? Six experiments investigated how classifying familiar objects with basic-level names (chairs, tables, and lamps) affected recognition memory. Memory was found to be worse for items that were overtly classified with the category name--as reflected by lower hit rates--compared with items that were not overtly classified. This effect of labeling on subsequent recall is explained in terms of a representational shift account, with labeling causing a distortion in dimensions most reliably associated with the category label. Consistent with this account, effects of labeling were strongly mediated by typicality and ambiguity of the labeled items, with typical and unambiguous items most affected by labeling. Follow-up experiments showed that this effect cannot be explained solely by differences in initial encoding, further suggesting that labeling a familiar image distorts its encoded representation. This account suggests a possible mechanism for the verbal overshadowing effect (J. W. Schooler & T. Y. Engstler-Schooler, 1990). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Aging and forgetting in prospective and retrospective memory tasks": Correction.

Reports an error in the original article by E. A. Maylor (Psychology and Aging, 1993[Sep], Vol 8[3], 420–428). There is an error in the picture recognition data. This was one of the tasks administered in an earlier group testing session (see page 421). The number of false positives for an older S was incorrectly entered onto the data sheet as 31 instead of only 13. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1994-01191-001.) Ss (aged 52–83 yrs) named 30 famous people 4 times over the course of an hour and responded to 2 targets (a beard and a pipe) by marking the trial number on the response sheet. Initial performance in the prospective memory task was related only to a measure of incidental learning. Subsequent forgetting (i.e., success followed by failure) occurred more often for older Ss than for younger Ss, but there was no difference between the age groups in recovery (i.e., failure followed by success). Forgetting was predicted by age, even after a composite measure of general ability was included in the regression. Recovery was related to general ability alone. Results both replicate and extend those from a reanalysis of a previous study (E. A. Maylor, 1990). They provide a striking contrast with the effect of age on retrospective memory.… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Olfaction and the "data" memory system in rats.

Conducted studies to characterize the memory system involved in successive olfactory discrimination learning in rats. Two odors emanated from different arms of a radical maze; 1 of the arms contained a water reward. After training on 4 to 5 pairs of odors Ss learned to discriminate the members of a new pair in 5–20 trials. Experiments in which either member of the pair was compared with a novel cue indicated that the Ss learn both positive and negative odors, rather than ignoring the negative cue. The memories for the odors were apparently persistent, and no evidence for retroactive interference from subsequent training was obtained. Animals trained on 3 component odors with 2 in common did not recognize the elements that were unshared when these were presented by themselves. Even when 1 of the 2 shared components was combined with the differentiating component into a cue the new cue was treated as a novel odor. Inclusion of a previously learned simple odor in a complex odor did affect the learning of that odor. Findings, combined with those of previous studies in which lesions were used, suggest that learning that a series of odor discriminations involves a version of the "data" memory system described by cognitive psychologists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Parsimonious prediction of Wechsler Memory Scale—Revised memory indices": Correction.

Reports an error in the original article by J. L. Woodard and B. N. Axelrod ( Psychological Assessment, 1995, Vol 7[4], 445–449). On page 448, lines 16–28, there is an error in the computational example demonstrating the calculation of the weighted sum of raw scores for General Memory. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1996-10112-001.) The Wechsler Memory Scale—Revised (WMS—R; D. Wechsler, 1987) represents a significant improvement over the original WMS (D. Wechsler, 1945). However, its usefulness is diminished by the increased administration time, and the incremental validity of the new subtests is questionable. Using a sample of 308 patients referred for neuropsychological evaluation, two regression equations were developed to predict weighted raw score sums for General Memory (GM) and Delayed Recall (DR), using the WMS—R analogs of 5 subtests from the original WMS. Predicted scores were within +6 points of actual performance for 92% of the sample for GM and for 96% of the sample for DR. Application of these equations to the WMS—R standardization sample subtests means produced estimated GM indices ranging from 96 to 103 and estimated DR indices ranging from 98 to 101 across age groups.… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)