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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Cognition In Emotional Disorders: An Abundance Of Habit And A Dearth Of Control, Paula T. Hertel
Cognition In Emotional Disorders: An Abundance Of Habit And A Dearth Of Control, Paula T. Hertel
Psychology Faculty Research
Emotional and other psychological disorders are categories of experience identified at least in part by the goal of having treatment plans for people in distress. Because the categories exist for such purposes, research efforts are organized to discover distinctions among the categories and between disordered and nondisordered individuals. Many of these distinctions are cognitive. When clinical scientists began experimental studies, the term “cognitive” had been used to refer primarily to conscious thoughts that characterize disorders (see Beck, 1976), but in more recent decades the term signifies an experimental approach framed according to the theories and paradigms of cognitive psychology. In …
Suppression-Induced Reduction In The Specificity Of Autobiographical Memories, Elizabeth Stephens, Amy Braid, Paula T. Hertel
Suppression-Induced Reduction In The Specificity Of Autobiographical Memories, Elizabeth Stephens, Amy Braid, Paula T. Hertel
Psychology Faculty Research
To extend its relevance to everyday forgetting, we applied the think/no-think (TNT) suppression method devised by Anderson and Green (2001) to autobiographical memories. Dysphoric and nondysphoric participants first generated autobiographical memories and corresponding titles to neutral and emotionally positive or negative cues. During the TNT phase, participants repeatedly practiced responding to some cues with their associated titles and avoiding thoughts about titles and memories associated with other cues. Later, they were asked to report memories associated with all cues, including baseline cues not presented during the TNT phase. Results revealed impaired recall, as measured by reductions in specificity, for suppressed …
Depression-Related Differences In Learning And Forgetting Responses To Unrelated Cues, Paula T. Hertel, A. Mahan
Depression-Related Differences In Learning And Forgetting Responses To Unrelated Cues, Paula T. Hertel, A. Mahan
Psychology Faculty Research
Using the think/no-think paradigm, we examined the effect of a meaningful connection between emotionally neutral cues and targets on initial learning and later recall by students in dysphoric or nondysphoric mood states. Compared to meaningfully connected cue-target pairs, unrelated pairs were less easily learned and more easily forgotten, even when initial learning was controlled. Depressive deficits were obtained in initial learning (only marginally) and final recall. When examined separately within each cuing condition, the recall deficit associated with depressed mood was restricted to the unrelated condition, but when initial learning differences were controlled this deficit was only marginally significant. Results …
Am I Blue? Depressed Mood And The Consequences Of Self Focus For The Interpretation And Recall Of Ambiguous Words, Paula T. Hertel, L. El-Messidi
Am I Blue? Depressed Mood And The Consequences Of Self Focus For The Interpretation And Recall Of Ambiguous Words, Paula T. Hertel, L. El-Messidi
Psychology Faculty Research
In two experiments, dysphoric and nondysphoric students first concentrated on either self-focused or other-focused phrases and then performed an ostensibly unrelated task involving the interpretation of homographs with both personal and impersonal meanings. In Experiment 1, they constructed sentences for the homographs; dysphoric students' sentences were more emotionally negative (although not more personal) in the self-focused condition than in the other-focused condition. In Experiment 2, they freely associated to the homographs, and the percentage of personal meanings reflected by the associations revealed an effect of self versus other focus that depended on mood group. Following free associations, they attempted to …
Memory For Emotional And Nonemotional Events In Depression: A Question Of Habit?, Paula T. Hertel
Memory For Emotional And Nonemotional Events In Depression: A Question Of Habit?, Paula T. Hertel
Psychology Faculty Research
The truest claim that cognitive science can make might also be the least sophisticated: the mind tends to do what it has done before. In previous centuries philosophers and psychologists invented constructs such as associations, habit strength, and connectivity to formalize the truism, but others have known about it, too. In small towns in the Ozarks, for example, grandmothers have been overheard doling out warnings such as, "Don't think those ugly thoughts; your mind will freeze that way." Depressed persons, like most of us, usually don't heed this advice. The thoughts frozen in their minds might not be "ugly," but …
Emotional Episodes Facilitate Word Recall, Paula T. Hertel, C. Parks
Emotional Episodes Facilitate Word Recall, Paula T. Hertel, C. Parks
Psychology Faculty Research
Dysphoric and nondysphoric college students described self-generated images of themselves interacting with the referents of neutral nouns; the nouns were paired with adjectives that changed their emotional meaning (e.g., cruise ship, cargo ship, sinking ship). On the subsequent unexpected test, the nouns from emotional pairings were more frequently recalled than were those from neutral pairings, regardless of their valence or congruence with the students' mood. An examination of the initial descriptions revealed that emotional images were more distinctive, but not in a pattern correlated with recall of the corresponding nouns.
Capacity And Procedural Accounts Of Impaired Memory In Depression, Paula T. Hertel, T. Meiser
Capacity And Procedural Accounts Of Impaired Memory In Depression, Paula T. Hertel, T. Meiser
Psychology Faculty Research
Findings of impaired memory in states of dysphoria or depression are summarized and subsumed under different accounts of mood-related memory deficits. Theoretical accounts based on the assumption of a storage system of limited capacity are compared to accounts which emphasize the role of procedures and strategies in attending and remembering. Two reanalyses of a recent experiment in the process-dissociation paradigm are reported. They address issues of dysphoria-related differences in automatic versus controlled uses of memory in a task of word-stem completion. The two reanalyses rest on different assumptions about the relation between automatic and controlled components, but they converge in …
Relation Between Rumination And Impaired Memory In Dysphoric Moods, Paula T. Hertel
Relation Between Rumination And Impaired Memory In Dysphoric Moods, Paula T. Hertel
Psychology Faculty Research
College students in dysphoric or nondysphoric moods studied pairs of words and later took a fragment-completion test of memory for targets from the pairs (under process-dissociation procedures for obtaining estimates of controlled and automatic retrieval; L. L. Jacoby, 1996). Between the study and test phases, some participants waited quietly for 7 min; others rated self-focused materials designed to invoke ruminations in the dysphoric group; and still others rated self-irrelevant and task-irrelevant materials. A dysphoria-related impairment in controlled retrieval occurred in the first 2 conditions but not in the 3rd condition. These results show that the nature of task-irrelevant thoughts contributes …
Solving Problems By Analogy: The Benefits And Detriments Of Hints And Depressed Moods, Paula T. Hertel, Alicia J. Knoedler
Solving Problems By Analogy: The Benefits And Detriments Of Hints And Depressed Moods, Paula T. Hertel, Alicia J. Knoedler
Psychology Faculty Research
In Experiment 1, mildly depressed (dysphoric) and nondysphoric subjects tried to solve logic, problems that were analogous to subsequent target problems; then they attempted target solutions with or wit hour hints in the form of the analogues' themes. Target solutions were impaired by the hints in the nondysphoric group alone. Experiment 2A was a no-training control to verify that transfer did indeed occur. In Experiment 2B, all subjects received hints in the transfer phase; the training phase was either problem oriented (as in Experiment 1) or memory oriented. Again, nondysphoric subjects solved fewerproblems following problem-oriented training than did both dysphoric …
Practical Aspects Of Emotion And Memory, Paula T. Hertel
Practical Aspects Of Emotion And Memory, Paula T. Hertel
Psychology Faculty Research
Can anyone doubt that the study of emotion and memory should have practical implications? Surely not those among us who have had emotional experiences and sometimes try to forget them, to remember them, or to remember other things while having them. Extreme examples include the witness to a robbery and the victim of abuse. Less dramatically but far more commonly, anxious or depressed people perform everyday acts that are memory dependent. Indeed, a practical or useful science of memory should have a great deal to say about how memory works under such emotional conditions.
Depressive Deficits In Recognition: Dissociation Of Recollection And Familiarity, Paula T. Hertel, S. Milan
Depressive Deficits In Recognition: Dissociation Of Recollection And Familiarity, Paula T. Hertel, S. Milan
Psychology Faculty Research
Dysphoric and nondysphoric students (48 women and 24 men) participated in an experiment that was designed to separate automatic and controlled uses of memory in a modified recognition paradigm. First, they judged the relation of target words to paired words. Later they made recognition decisions on target items alone or in the context of the original paired item. The use of L.L. Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure revealed depressive deficits in estimates of recollection but not in estimates of familiarity. The paired test improved recollection for all subjects and showed a trend in the direction of increased familiarity. These outcomes …