Reactivation, interference, and reconsolidation: Are recent and remote memories likewise susceptible?

The retrieval of a consolidated, apparently stable memory can return it to a labile state, necessitating another period of stabilization, termed reconsolidation. During reconsolidation, memories are susceptible to modifications, thus providing the opportunity to change unwanted memories. In a test of whether the possibility to alter retrieved memories depends on the age of the memories, participants learned a set of emotional and neutral pictures and recalled it 1, 7, or 28 days later. Immediately after retrieval, participants learned a second set of pictures. Memory retrieval per se enhanced 28-day-old memories but had no effect on 1-day- or 7-day-old memories. Learning new pictures interfered with 1-day-old and 28-day-old memories but not with 7-day-old memories. Evidence for reconsolidation effects was generally rather weak and at most present for 7-day-old memories. These findings show that retrieval and interference have opposite effects on memory that depend on the remoteness of the memories and raise the question under which conditions reconsolidation effects occur in human memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Are individuals’ reputations related to their history of behavior?": Correction to Anderson and Shirako (2008).

Reports an error in "Are individuals' reputations related to their history of behavior" by Cameron Anderson and Aiwa Shirako (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008[Feb], Vol 94[2], 320-333). Coefficient alpha reliabilities for the social connectedness variable were reported as .97 and .78 in Studies 2 and 3, respectively. Instead, they should have been reported as intraclass correlations (ICC) of .87 and .74, respectively. In the original reliability analyses, the authors included self-ratings of social connectedness and thus omitted participants from the analysis who did not provide a self-rating. Similarly, the authors included self-ratings when assessing the reliability of social connectedness in an unreported classroom sample (n=36) that was collected at the same time as the data reported in Study 2. In that unreported sample, they originally obtained a coefficient that was far below satisfactory levels, leading them to exclude that data set. However, after taking out the self-ratings in that unreported sample, the ICC was .82. The erratum summarizes the correlations reported in Study 2 for the unreported and included data sets combined. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2008-00466-010.) Functional theories of reputation imply that individuals' reputations are tied to their history of behavior. However, indirect evidence suggests that the relation between reputation and behavior might be tenuous at best. In 3 studies, the authors tracked the development of reputations among individuals who engaged in multiple negotiation tasks across several weeks. The authors found that on average, individuals' reputations were only mildly related to their history of behavior. However, the link between reputation and behavior was stronger for some individuals than others--specifically, for individuals who were more well-known and received more social attention in the community. In contrast, for less well-known individuals, their behavior had little impact on their reputation. The findings have implications for psychologists' understanding of reputations, person perceptions in larger groups, and the costs and benefits of social visibility. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are the memories of older adults positively biased?

There is disagreement in the literature about whether a "positivity effect" in memory performance exists in older adults. To assess the generalizability of the effect, the authors examined memory for autobiographical, picture, and word information in a group of younger (17-29 years old) and older (60-84 years old) adults. For the autobiographical memory task, the authors asked participants to produce 4 positive, 4 negative, and 4 neutral recent autobiographical memories and to recall these a week later. For the picture and word tasks, participants studied photos or words of different valences (positive, negative, neutral) and later remembered them on a free-recall test. The authors found significant correlations in memory performance, across task material, for recall of both positive and neutral valence autobiographical events, pictures, and words. When the authors examined accurate memories, they failed to find consistent evidence, across the different types of material, of a positivity effect in either age group. However, the false memory findings offer more consistent support for a positivity effect in older adults. During recall of all 3 types of material, older participants recalled more false positive than false negative memories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How "rigid" is the "authoritarian?"

Ss were given the California F-scale, a reversed F-scale and a series of Einstellung water-jar problems. Ss who used the "rigid" solution to the water-jar problems also tended to agree with both F-scale and reversed F-scale items. This would suggest that both the Einstellung test and F-scale may be reflecting acquiescence. 20 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Again, "What Price Intelligence?"

This article comments on a recent reply by Dr. Yacorzynski (American Psychologist, 1961, 16, 711-712) to an original comment on Yacorzynski and Tucker's article "What Price Intelligence?" (see record 1961-02545-001.) The author of this comment feels that the reply given to the original comment was confusing because it used only partial quotations. He gives several examples and clarifies the original comment. Dr. Yacorzynski's reference to a study of the author's is also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A national answer to the question, "Do sons follow their fathers' occupations?"

For a sample representative of urban males over the age of 25 in six major American cities, data collected as a part of a major analysis of labor mobility in the United States revealed that "sons do tend to follow their fathers' general type of occupation. When sons do not, they generally tend to make a jump up the occupational ladder… ." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do the Kallikaks look "menacing" or "retarded?"

To extend R. E. Fancher's (see record 1987-31600-001) review of claims that photographs of the Kallikak family in H. H. Goddard's (1912) study had been retouched to make them look more menacing and retarded, 29 Ss (aged 18–69 yrs) were surveyed for their impressions of the photographs. Overall, Ss were strongly inclined to view the photographed individuals as "kind" and "very bright." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comment on "Psychology--A Profession or What?"

I read Leah Fein's letter in the February American Psychologist with deep interest because it represents a view I feel is becoming more and more prevalent, as the years go by, among the PhD members of the APA. Rather than on insisting on the prestige value of the PhD and attempting to build it into an equivalent of an MD, let us devote our energies to finding valid and meaningful standards of job performance for the various fields of psychology, specifically the field of clinical, since this appears to be the field giving members the most concern today. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The "Who's Teaching Whom?" Machine.

Discusses an exhibit at an APA convention involving a live chicken. The author explains how the chicken in the exhibit was cued to push a lever, and why the exhibit could be referred to as the "Who's Teaching Whom?" machine. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What is the connection between true and false memories? The differential roles of interitem associations in recall and recognition.

Veridical memory for presented list words and false memory for nonpresented but related items were tested using the Deese/Roediger and McDermott paradigm. The strength and density of preexisting connections among the list words, and from the list words to the critical items, were manipulated. The likelihood of producing false memories in free recall varied with the strength of connections from the list words to the critical items but was inversely related to the density of the interconnections among the list words. In contrast, veridical recall of list words was positively related to the density of the interconnections. A final recognition test showed that both false and veridical memories were more likely when the list words were more densely interconnected. The results are discussed in terms of an associative model of memory, Processing Implicit and Explicit Representations (PIER 2) that describes the influence of implicitly activated preexisting information on memory performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the Issue "What Is a Science?"

Item expresses the author's very strong feeling that the entire argument of whether or not any particular profession or occupational area is or is not a science is invalid and needless. He submits that there is no such thing as a science; only Science, with a capital "S." Science is a method and a philosophy and is not related to whichever area it is applied. And that a true Scientist may apply himself to any problem whatsoever without lessening his position as a Scientist. There are no such things as sciences; there is only Science and there are only Scientists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are there social correlates to suicide?

A structural-sociological approach to suicide research holds that an aggregate-level cause of suicide should correlate with the suicide rates in a population. In 1980, Sainsbury, Jenkins, and Levey published the article "The Social Correlates of Suicide in Europe" which related the suicide rates in 1961-63 and the changes in them in the following 11 years to 15 social variables in 18 European countries. Its main findings were that the changes in suicide rates could be attributed to specific changes in the social environment. Complementary discriminant analyses showed that it was possible accurately to divide the countries into low- and high-change suicide rate groups on the basis of a combination of the social variables. Although criticized for its method, the study has been widely quoted and sometimes presented as the most definitive current study on the subject. In order to see whether its results held for similar data 16 years later it was replicated for 1977-79 and the ensuing 11 years, with data and method as similar as possible to the original. The results agreed with those of the original study on only one point: the correlations between the levels of the social variables and those of the suicide rates were similar in both periods. However, changes in the suicide rates were unrelated to either the levels of the social variables or the changes in them: correlations found in the original study tended to change profoundly or disappear. Moreover, the results of the original discriminant analyses were a property of the method employed and thus independent of the data. Statistical artefacts or social processes such as changing expectations are unlikely to explain the suddenly changing or vanishing correlations. The original correlations seem to have been largely spurious and dependent on the fact that the more modern countries in Europe experienced a "suicide boom" in the 1960s. As the boom waned in these, it was beginning in the less modern countries: the correlations between the processes indicated by the social variables and the suicide rates were reversed or disappeared. The results call the existence of clear relations between these "suicidogenic" social circumstances and the suicide rates into question. Since many of the variables used are traditional "Durkheimian" indicators of the integration of society, a critique of this still-dominant view of the relationship between society and suicide mortality, or its common operationalization, is implied.     

"Is clinical psychology a science?": Comment.

Comments on an article by Carlton Berenda titled Is clinical psychology a science? (see record 1959-03759-001). As one who aligns himself firmly with those who hold the view that much of clinical psychology and most of psychoanalysis is "obscure and poetic" fabrication, I should like to suggest that in his discussion Berenda apparently has overlooked and failed to take into account perhaps the most crucial issue upon which is based this negative evaluation: that of empirical verification of predicted consequences. Apart from any other errors and misconceptions that may stem from such an omission, this unfortunate oversight leads Berenda with relentless logic to the inescapable assumption of a rather weird and obviously untenable position of subjective relativism as well as to the promulgation of a strangely naive and equally indefensible rationalism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"How interchangeable are different estimators of effect size?": Correction to Ray and Shadish (1996).

Reports an error in the original article by J. W. Ray and W. R. Shadish (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1996[Dec], Vol 64(6), 1316–1325). On page 1325, a correction is made to column 1, lines 25–26. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1996-07086-021). The computation of effect sizes is a key feature of meta-analysis. In treatment outcome meta-analyses, the standardized mean difference statistic on posttest scores (d) is usually the effect size statistic used. However, when primary studies do not report the statistics needed to compute d, many methods for estimating d from other data have been developed. Little is known about the accuracy of these estimates, yet meta-analysts frequently use them on the assumption that they are estimating the same population parameter as d. This study investigates that assumption empirically. On a sample of 140 psychosocial treatment or prevention studies from a variety of areas, the present study shows that these estimates yield results that are often not equivalent to d in either mean or variance. The frequent mixing of d and other estimates of d in past meta-analyses, therefore, may have led to biased effect size estimates and inaccurate significance tests. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unraveling social categorization in the "who said what?" paradigm

A multinomial model of the "Who said what?" paradigm (S. E. Taylor, S. T. Fiske, N. J. Etcoff, & A. J. Ruderman, 1978) explains the pattern of participants' assignment errors by means of the joint operation of several processes. Specifically, memory for discussion statements, person memory, category memory, and 3 different guessing processes can be accommodated by the model. The model's ability to disentangle these processes is validated in a series of 5 experiments. The model thereby enables a more refined use of the "Who said what?" paradigm in testing theories of social categorization. This is demonstrated in a 6th experiment in which the validated model is applied to the study of the effects of cognitive load on categorization.     

Does the experimental scientist have a "theory of mind?"

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 12(4) of Review of General Psychology (see record 2008-17010-002). In the article, "Does the Experimental Scientist Have a 'Theory of Mind'?" by Matthew K. Belmonte (Review of General Psychology, 2008, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 192-204), a reference was listed in incorrect order. The reference, "Lévi-Straus, C. (1926). La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind]. Paris: Plon." should have followed, "Lesslie, A. M., & Thaiss, L. (1992). Domain Specificity in conceptual development: Neuropsychological evidence from autism. Cognition, 43, 225-251."] The concept of a "theory of mind" was widely used in developmental and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience in the wake of Premack and Woodruff's 1978 article "Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?" and Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith's 1985 follow-up "Does the Autistic Child Have a 'Theory of Mind?'" The subsequent confluence of cognitive science and narrative theory brought "theory of mind" to literary critics. Only a very small set of people, however, have read both the neuropsychological and the literary texts on "theory of mind"; as a result of this lack of interdisciplinary expertise, the term has acquired subtly differing senses in the literary and neuroscientific communities. Because of this terminological slippage, neuroscientists and literary critics who argue in terms of "theory of mind" may believe that they are speaking with each other when they actually are speaking past each other. If proponents of cognitive literary theory are to realize the interdisciplinary fusion to which we aspire, then we must ensure that we speak in the same idiom. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Why Teacher Certification for School Psychologists?": Comment.

Comments on Piers' article (American Psychologist, 1959, 14, 656-657). Powell agrees with Piers' comments but notes that Piers did not mention another area of confusion: the college training programs for school psychologists. Powell asserts that there is often conflict between education and psychology departments concerning whose function it should be to train the school psychologist. It is suggested that there is a need for both departments to upgrade the courses required for school psychologists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are medical specialist interest scales applicable to Negroes?

"Interest scores of 60 Negro seniors from Harvard University Medical College are contrasted with the scores of [a sample of] 150 white seniors… the differences between the two racial groups are small, taking everything into account… .There is no warrant for assuming that the medical specialist interest scales are not applicable to Negroes." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The "where is it?" reflex: autoshaping the orienting response

The goal of this review is to compare two divergent lines of research on signal-centered behavior: the orienting reflex (OR) and autoshaping. A review of conditioning experiments in animals and humans suggests that the novelty hypothesis of the OR is no longer tenable. Only stimuli that represent biological "relevance" elicit ORs. A stimulus may be relevant a priori (i.e., unconditioned) or as a result of conditioning. Exposure to a conditioned stimulus (CS) that predicts a positive reinforcer causes the animal to orient to it throughout conditioning. Within the CS-US interval, the initial CS-directed orienting response is followed by US-directed tendencies. Experimental evidence is shown that the development and maintenance of the conditioned OR occur in a similar fashion both in response-independent (classical) and response-dependent (instrumental) paradigms. It is proposed that the conditioned OR and the signal-directed autoshaped response are identical. Signals predicting aversive events repel the subject from the source of the CS. It is suggested that the function of the CS is not only to signal the probability of US occurrence, but also to serve as a spatial cue to guide the animal in the environment.     

"Now tell me, what is your orientation to religion?"--Therapeutic attitude and management as an expression of religious faith

The essence of the therapeutic process is the relationship: the client experiences that the therapist is prepared "to be there" and to remain with him/her on the journey unconditionally. A possible goal of personal life, as well as of a therapeutic process, is to become oneself. This is described in the biblical symbol of Exodus: the motivation of the way and all existential experience of being on the way are a possibility to interpret my human existence and to fit it into the wider horizon of religious understanding; to know and experience a liberator-God (a God who sets me free) as the very basis of my development. To what extent therapy--as part of the way the therapist and the client go together--always also touches a religious dimension is shown by giving examples of some attitudes and consequent actions.