Brendan Gail Rule

Adult age differences in working memory.

Active and passive measures of short-term memory over a large segment of the adult life span were compared. Two hundred twenty-eight volunteers, aged 30 to 99 years, performed the digit span forward and backward task, the Peterson-Peterson task, and a new working memory task in which active manipulation of information is emphasized. Age differences were slight for passive tasks. For the working memory task, significant declines were found between the ages of 60 to 69 and 70+ years. It is suggested that the age differences may be due to a decrease in the flexibility with which processing changes are made.

Laypersons' knowledge about the sequelae of minor head injury and whiplash.

Even minor head injuries can result in the post traumatic syndrome, a symptom complex that includes physical discomfort and sleep, sexual, affective, and memory disturbance. Little is known about the laypersons knowledge of the syndrome but this may influence judgements about malingering and attitudes towards victims of minor head injury. Descriptions of rear-end automobile accidents were presented to two groups. One group (n = 22) rated the likelihood of a variety of physical, affective, cognitive, and distractor (never or rarely reported by trauma victims) symptoms. A second group (n = 21) judged the speed necessary to cause each of the symptoms. The results indicated that highly exaggerated speeds were thought necessary to produce even the most common physical symptoms. Moreover, cognitive symptoms were thought to be no more likely than were distractor symptoms. In contrast, the knowledge about physical symptoms, the effects of loss of consciousness and whiplash versus direct head injuries was consistent with what is known from research literature.

Moral Evaluations and Judgments of Responsibility

There has been a failure to distinguish between moral evaluations and responsibility in the literature on moral judg- ment. Consequently, interpretive problems have occurred because the dependent measures of each have been discussed as if they were equivalent. An attempt was made in the present research to examine the comparability of moral evaluations and respon- sibility judgments. Factor analyses of the ratings of an ag- gression and an accident story by 94 women and 85 men revealed that moral evaluations (e.g. praise-blame) and responsibility judgments are distinct and cannot be interpreted interchangeably.

Effect on retaliation of causal attributions concerning attack.

In two studies, men were defeated on either 17%, 50%, or 83% of reaction time trials, received aversive noise, and could ostensibly retaliate by delivering shock to their partner. The noise level delivered was described in Experiment 1 as typical of most other people (high consensus) or atypical of most other people (low consensus) and in Experiment 2 as from a partner who knew (high foreseeability) or did not know (low foreseeability) the kind and level of stimulation controlled by the switches delivering reinforcement to the recipient. Hypotheses were based on the notion that retaliation increases as more personal causality is attributed to a provoker and that more personal causality is inferred in highly foreseeable--or low consensus--50% defeat conditions. As expected, greater differences in aggression between high and low consensus and between high and low foreseeability were displayed in the 50% defeat condition than in the other defeat conditions. Anticipated differences in inferences were obtained.

Mitigating circumstance information, censure, and aggression

One hundred men received one of two levels of mitigating circumstance information either before or after being insulted or not insulted by a co-worker. Participants were then provided with an opportunity ostensibly to deliver aversive noise to the co-worker under either high or low social censure conditions. Physiological data and self-report measures revealed that participants who learned of mitigating circumstance information before being provoked exhibited smaller increases in physiological arousal and reported less annoyance than did those who learned of mitigating circumstance information after insult. Aggression data showed that angered participants evaluated their provoker more favorably and retaliated less when they learned of mitigation before rather than after being insulted. These findings supported attribution theory assumptions that mitigating circumstance information known before the provoking incident influences the individuals interpretation of harm, thereby reducing anger and the instigation to aggression. The reduced impact of information on aggression that is acquired after provocation may reflect the provoked individuals shift of attention from cues surrounding harm to a consideration of inhibitory factors for aggression.

The Impact of Pacemaker Implantation on Cognitive Functioning in Elderly Patients

To describe and quantify the impact of pacemaker implantation on cognitive functioning in the elderly.

Design of Institutions: Cognitive Functioning and Social Interactions of the Aged Resident

Older people experience sensory, cognitive, and social deficits that adversely affect their interaction with the environment. Design of institutions for the elderly resident should be prosthetic to ensure that environments optimally accommodate the functioning of the residents. The sensory and cognitive state of the residents should be considered in everyfacility. This review discusses how sensory and cognitive changes in aging affect orientation and wayfinding as well as how the physical aspects of the environment can accommodate these changes to reduce confusion and disorientation. Environmental features that promote social interaction are reviewed Because the environmental needs and unique characteristics of the cognitively impaired resident differs from that of the nonimpaired resident, special issues in the design of facilities for demented residents are reviewed Conclusions are offered with regard to research needs and applied problems.

The effects of ambient temperature and insult on the motivation to retaliate or escape

In order to investigate the impact of high ambient temperature on the motivation of angered persons, 48 men were either insulted or not insulted under normal or excessively hot conditions. The men received ratings from a partner that conveyed a negative or neutral personality evaluation, ostensibly as part of an impression-formation task. During this time, the participants were exposed to normal or excessively hot temperatures in an experimental room while their partners were in a normal temperature room. The subjects were subsequently given the opportunity to choose between two tasks for the next part of the study. One task, described as tedious, permitted their leaving the situation earlier than did the other task, described as involving administration of white noise to their partner. The results revealed that the insulted relative to noninsulted men more often chose to participate in a potentially aggressive interaction in the normal conditions whereas insulted relative to noninsulted men chose more often to participate in a nonaggressive task in the hot conditions. The design of the study precluded a shared stress interpretation of the data. Supplementary data were interpreted as supporting a negative affect rather than an attributional interpretation of the results.

The Relations Among Attribution, Moral Evaluation, Anger, and Aggression in Children and Adults

Retaliation by a victim, or punishment by law for an act of harm, requires judgment about the motives underlying the act, its avoidability, and the amount of harm done within a normative context (Feshbach, 1971). However, despite the recognition by several authors (Feshbach, 1971; Pepitone, 1976, 1981; Tedeschi, Smith, & Brown, 1974) that such factors contribute to an understanding of reactions to harm, relatively few analyses of aggression have explicitly incorporated these cognitive and normative considerations.

Communicative function in patients with questionable Alzheimer's disease

The communicative skills of patients with questionable Alzheimers disease (AD) were examined by having patients describe events shown in a silent video cartoon. As anticipated, questionable AD patients provided fewer clauses in their descriptions than did education- and age-matched controls. This finding was independent of differences in word finding ability. More important, the patients failed to describe as many of the thematically important events as did the controls, a difference that affected the overall informativeness of the communication. Even though the patients were sensitive to event importance, there was no evidence of compensation in their descriptions (i.e., a greater concentration of important events). Several interpretations are presented that focus on possible deficits in the pragmatic or semantic systems of language or both as an early symptom of Alzheimers disease.