John F. Kihlstrom

Mental Representations of the Self

Publisher Summary The study of the self is now of concern to almost every part of social psychology. This chapter attempts to adopt two complementary theoretical perspectives in cognitive psychology and pursue their implications for research and for theory on the structure and function of the self-concept. These implications should be construed as hypotheses rather than conclusions. It concerns with the cognitive aspects of the self, however, there are problems that must be confronted. Self-assessment is represented by a process involving the direct look up of features associated with the self concept. Because of the widespread implications and the great interest in the self throughout the behavioral sciences, research and theorizing in this field have inevitably followed different approaches. In the chapter, the relatively new information-processing perspective and the way the concepts and methods employed in the study of memory and information processing generally contribute in important ways to understand the self-concept is reviewed. The self-concept may be construed as a set of features that are characteristic of the person and also distinguish him or herself from other individuals.

Dissociative tendencies and dissociative disorders.

Although dissociative disorders are relatively rare, dissociative experiences are rather common in everyday life. Dissociative tendencies appear to be modestly related to other dimensions of personality, such as hypnotizability, absorption, fantasy proneness, and some facets of openness to experience. These dispositional variables may constitute diathesis, or risk factors, for dissociative psychopathology, but more complex models relating personality to psychopathology may be more appropriate. The dissociative disorders raise fundamental questions about the nature of self and identity and the role of consciousness and autobiographical memory in the continuity of personality.

Self-knowledge of an amnesic patient: toward a neuropsychology of personality and social psychology

The authors present the case of W.J., who, as a result of a head injury, temporarily lost access to her episodic memory. W.J. was asked both during her amnesia and following its resolution to make trait judgments about herself. Because her responses when she could access episodic memories were consistent with her responses when she could not, the authors conclude that the loss of episodic memory did not greatly affect the availability of her trait self-knowledge. The authors discuss how neuropsychological evidence can contribute to theorizing about personality and social processes.

Posthypnotic amnesia for recently learned material: Interactions with “episodic” and “semantic” memory

Abstract In two experiments, posthypnotic amnesia was suggested for a word list memorized during hypnosis. After an initial test of amnesia the subjects gave word associations (Experiment 1) or category instances (Experiment 2) to stimuli intended to elicit the critical (word list) items covered by the amnesia. The extent of initial amnesia observed was strongly associated with measured hypnotic susceptibility. Even among the most hypnotizable subjects, however, the dense amnesia did not prevent the critical items from being elicited by the semantic memory tasks, nor did it modulate the priming which these associations received by virtue of the prior learning experience. Moreover, production of the critical items did not, in general, remind the amnesic subjects of those items which they had previously learned, but could not now remember. Full memory was restored after the amnesia suggestion was canceled by a prearranged cue. Posthypnotic amnesia appears to represent a temporary dissociation of episodic features from memory traces, so that the subject has difficulty in reconstructing the context in which the target events occurred.

Information Processing and the Study of the Self

Publisher Summary The self is an important concept in personality and social psychology. The mental representation of the self includes both abstract information about the persons attributes (semantic knowledge) and concrete information about the persons experiences, thoughts, and actions (episodic knowledge). Mental representations fall into two broad classes. Those representations that are perception based contain details extracted from stimulus information processed by the sensory-perceptual system. Representations that are meaning based contain the gist of an object or event, which has been abstracted from stimulus information by higher mental processes. The basic architecture of the cognitive system is briefly described in the chapter. Autobiographical memory is interesting in and of itself, but it also may be able to shed important light on various other aspects of information processing about the self. In addition to analyzing the structure of mental representations of the self, information-processing concepts may be useful in the study of the involvement of the self in social judgment and behavior.

False Memories in Women with Self-Reported Childhood Sexual Abuse: An Empirical Study:

Although controversy exists about the validity of memories of childhood abuse, little is known about memory function in individuals reporting childhood abuse. This study assessed memories for previously presented words, including the capacity for false memory of critical lures not actually present in the word list, in 63 subjects, including abused women with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), abused women without PTSD, and men and women without abuse or PTSD. Abused women with PTSD had a higher frequency of false recognition memory of critical lures (95%) than abused women without PTSD (78%), nonabused women without PTSD (79%), or nonabused men without PTSD (86%). PTSD women also showed poorer memory for studied words and increased insertions of non-studied words other than critical lures. These findings are consistent with a broad range of memory alterations in abused women with PTSD.

Implicit and Explicit Memory Following Surgical Anesthesia

Paired associates were presented to 25 surgical patients following the induction of anesthesia by thiopental, vecuronium, and isoflurane. Postoperative testing (immediately or after two weeks) showed no free recall for the list; nor was there significant cued recall or recognition, compared to a matched control list. However, a free-association task showed a significant priming effect on both immediate and delayed trials. At least under some conditions, adequate surgical anesthesia appears to abolish explicit, but not implicit, memory for intraoperative events.

Source memory : extending the boundaries of age-related deficits

Previous research has established that elderly adults can exhibit impaired memory for the source of newly acquired facts even when levels of fact recall in old and young do not differ. However, source memory impairments have been observed only under conditions of many-to-1 mapping: A large number of facts are related to either of 2 sources. It is thus possible that apparent source memory impairments reflect a more general age-related problem in handling many-to-1 mappings. Two experiments provide evidence against this possibility by demonstrating age-related source memory deficits with 1-to-1 mapping between facts and sources. The data also indicate that source memory deficits are observed across encoding tasks that manipulate the allocation of attention to the source or to the fact.

Absorption and hypnotizability: context effects reexamined

Two independent studies failed to find evidence consistent with Council, Kirsch, and Hafner (1986), who argued that the repeatedly observed correlations between Tellegens (1981) Absorption Scale (TAS) and hypnosis measures were artifacts of testing context, and de Groot, Gwynn, and Spanos (1988), who claimed evidence for a Gender x Context moderator effect. In the present studies, Ss completed the TAS and other personality questionnaires on 2 occasions: during an independent survey and later immediately prior to an assessment of hypnotizability. In Experiment 1 (N = 475), the effect of context on the relation between questionnaire scores and hypnotizability was weak and variable; in Experiment 2 (N = 434), these weak effects were reversed. The results reaffirm the construct validity of absorption as both a major dimension of personality and as a predictor of hypnotic responsiveness.

Effects of item-specific and relational information on hypermnesic recall.

The role of encoding conditions in producing hypermnesia (increased recall over successive trials) was examined by manipulating the availability of item-specific and relational information at encoding. Our findings demonstrate that encodings providing item-specific information (e.g., elaborative encodings) produce hypermnesia by facilitating the recovery of new items over trials, whereas encodings providing relational information (e.g., organizational encodings) produce hypermnesia by protecting against the loss of previously recalled items. Thus, the effects of encodings on hypermnesia may be understood by considering the type of trace information they make available.