Applied Cognitive Psychology最新文献

We investigated the effects of positive/negative emotions towards autobiographical memories on impressions of the conversation and conversation partner during memory sharing in a reminiscence therapy setting. Fifty-six older (M_age = 69.3) and 60 younger (M_age = 20.7) participants' net emotional tendency (positive/negative) towards autobiographical memories and depressive symptoms were evaluated using validated rating scales. Positive/positive and positive/negative age-matched random pairs shared a nostalgic memory through free conversation. Participants with a negative emotional tendency towards autobiographical memories in positive/negative pairs tended to feel less “easy” about the conversation. Participants with a positive emotional tendency towards autobiographical memories in positive/negative pairs had a more negative impression of their partners. Our data provide insight into the relationship between net emotional tendency towards autobiographical memories and depression and suggest that an individual's net emotional tendency towards autobiographical memories potentially affects the outcome of group reminiscence therapy.

Accurately determining whether two images show the same person is a surprisingly difficult task, which becomes even harder if one or both faces are wearing medical face masks. Attempts to improve unfamiliar face matching accuracy have generally had limited success. Although one brief training program improved masked face matching accuracy by 4.9%, this increase would not overcome the entire performance deficit caused by masks. Here, we investigate whether combining independent identification decisions from different individuals can improve masked face matching performance through the wisdom of the crowd effect. Accuracy gains emerged reliably after combining the decisions of three individuals, culminating in significant improvements of 11%–26% among the largest crowds. Despite creating crowds of up to 80 people, half of the eventual improvement had generally already occurred in crowds of 6 individuals. The wisdom of the crowd effect is a highly effective approach to improving accuracy when identifying masked faces.

Children are well-documented to exhibit poor confidence–accuracy calibration on lineup identification tasks. Children tend to report overconfidence in their (often inaccurate) lineup identification decisions. This research explored the extent to which school-aged children's (N = 142; 6- to 8-year-old) confidence reports are implicitly driven by perceived social pressure to provide a specific confidence rating. Children were randomly assigned to two different confidence instruction conditions: the neutral (n = 69) or the reframed conditions (n = 73). The reframed instructions encouraged honesty and instructed children to ignore perceived pressure when reporting confidence. Results revealed that the reframed instructions resulted in more conservative confidence judgments; however, this shift did not translate into those confidence ratings better reflecting children's identification accuracy. Overall, these findings provide evidence that, while external or social factors play a contributing role, other aspects of development are likely contributing more to the poor confidence–accuracy calibration observed with child eyewitnesses.

Winning and losing voters tend to experience positive and negative emotions toward elections, respectively. The emotions of autobiographical event memories fade over time with unpleasant emotions fading faster than pleasant emotions; this phenomenon is referred to as the fading affect bias (FAB). Although the FAB differs across several event types (e.g., social media and nonsocial media), the FAB and its relations to political, healthy (e.g., grit), and unhealthy variables (e.g., depression) did not differ significantly across political and nonpolitical events in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. To further explore these relations across political and nonpolitical events, the current study used two online samples (college students and MTurk) in the 2020 US presidential election context. The FAB was expected and found to be robust, it was positively predicted by rehearsal ratings, and its relations to political variables were stronger for political events than nonpolitical events.

Age-related differences in identification performance between younger (18–35 years) and older adults (62–68 years), alongside the cross-age effect (CAE), where people recognise own-age faces better than other-age faces, were investigated. Self-reported levels of other-age contact and attitudes, participants' memory for the unbiased lineup instructions, and the confidence-accuracy (C-A) relationship were also examined. Participants (N = 154) viewed two filmed events: one with a young adult target and one with an older adult target. Older adults were less likely than younger adults to identify the perpetrator. Interestingly, the CAE, contact, attitudes, and choosing behaviours did not impact identification performance. Older adults experienced more difficulty remembering the pre-lineup instructions than younger adults, but only after the first lineup. Confidence was predictive of accuracy for both age groups, but this relationship was differently influenced by the CAE. The findings provide further insights into the factors that may impact younger and older adults' identification performance.

Most studies in the literature propose that new words should be presented in unrelated sets due to interfering effect of learning vocabulary in semantic sets. Semantically-related words are suggested to be taught in different sessions to avoid this negative effect. However, that is implausible for most second language (L2) teachers owing to the restrictions from curricula or coursebooks, most of which serve new words in semantic fields. The literature does not shed light on how to tackle that problem. Accordingly, this study involves three sets of classroom research conducted with 58 young EFL learners to investigate the effects of mnemonics on minimizing the interference of semantic clustering of new vocabulary. Within 15-week course, one intact class was taught target words through mnemonics while the control group received similar instruction with sentence-context method. The study results demonstrated that mnemonically-instructed L2 learners outperformed on both immediate and delayed recognition of target words.