Cognitive factors have been identified as critical variables in the origin and maintenance of interpersonal dysfunction associated with high social anxiety. Although evidence of a memory deficit accompanying general anxiety states is abundant, studies of memory accompanying social anxiety have failed to demonstrate a deficit. Previous studies of memory deficit in social anxiety have measured only retention of evaluative feedback, the present study investigated memory more typical of interpersonal encounters, the recall of information about others. Forty-eight high socially anxious males and forty-eight low anxious males were asked to listen to a tape recording of self-disclosures either during an interaction with the self-discloser or in private. Following an interim task, each subject was then asked to recall the information from the tape either in the presence of the female self-discloser or in private. This design allowed for social anxiety provoking manipulation at encoding to be completely crossed with social anxiety manipulation at retrieval. Multiple measures of memory were taken and analyzed with a multivariate procedure. It was hypothesized that a situational deficit would occur for the high socially anxious subjects when they were encoding the other-referent information in a social context. Additionally, it was hypothesized that high socially anxious subjects would recall more affective as opposed to neutral information, and more negative items than positive or neutral. The results confirmed that memory is disturbed for high socially anxious subjects when in a social context, and specifically the disturbance occurs at the encoding phase. Results regarding the recall of affective material were contrary to prediction and suggest that high socially anxious subjects selectively process less affective material than do low socially anxious subjects. The results are supportive of a cognitive perspective arguing that dysfunctional interpersonal experiences may stem from impoverished, incomplete, and barren schema that guide the social behavior. The presence of a recall deficit along with intact recognition memory suggests that information about others is attended to but not processed 'deeply' or elaborately enough to be available on a free recall basis. The identification of memory deficit as a component of social anxiety provides a variety of new intervention possibilities including social memory enhancement programs, interventions aimed at unearthing poorly encoded memories, and strategies focused on attention to affective messages. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Degree: MA in Psychology by Coursework and Research Report, 2016 / A comprehensive study has demonstrated that language experience provides cognitive benefits above the attainment of a second language (Bialystok, Craik, Green & Gollan, 2009) and thus it is purported that being a bi/multilingual stimulates memory and other executive functions (Jessner, 1999).The relation between language experience and verbal working memory and visual and verbal long-term memory was explored by assessing 30 healthy, young multilingual adults. The instruments that were used for this study are as follows: The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q) which rated self-reported language experience/s, the Letter-Number Sequencing subtest from the WAIS-IV which assessed verbal working memory, the Visual Reproduction (VR) subtest from the WMS-IV which evaluated visual long-term memory and the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) which measured verbal memory and learning. The results of the ANOVA statistics found that there was a correlation between language experience and verbal long-term memory (which was measured by utilising the RAVLT), but no links between language experience and verbal working memory and visual long-term memory were found. The results suggest that the language experience of young, multilingual adult South Africans is not related with verbal working memory and visual long-term memory. / MT2017

A research project submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social and Psychological Research by Coursework and Research Report in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, March 2017 / Working memory (WM) is an executive function that may promote resilience by enabling individuals to generate novel solutions in adverse situations. Research regarding the relationship between these constructs is limited. It is particularly unclear whether, and how, WM may promote resilience in the South African context. This study thus used a mixed method concurrent triangulation design to quantitatively investigate whether WM is related to resilience; and to qualitatively investigate how WM processes feature in participants’ experiences of resilience, and how this is influenced by socio-cultural factors. Thirty-eight young Black South African adults from disadvantaged backgrounds (whose WM had been assessed in a pre-existing study) completed a demographic questionnaire and the Resilience Research Centre-Adult Resilience Measure in person or online. For the qualitative phase, 14 of these participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. Quantitative findings were equivocal, but primarily non-significant. Qualitative findings indicated that WM processes featured in participants’ accounts of resilience-promoting resources, but that this was shaped by socio-cultural resources accessible to participants. Working memory also featured as one amongst many of the resilience-promoting resources accessible to participants. The disparity between the quantitative and qualitative findings may be due to the individualistic nature of the quantitative WM measure used. Findings are interpreted in relation to existing literature regarding cognitive functioning and resilience. Implications for understanding and promoting the resilience of Black South African young adults are discussed. / XL2018

published_or_final_version / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Recent research has shown heightened interest in the potential role of inhibitory mechanisms in solving the multiple category problem associated with processing person-specific information. Inhibition has been proposed to control the activation saliency of one category of person-specific information over other activated categories to guide the processing, interpretation and behavioural responses to socially-relevant stimuli. The current research considers a) whether inhibition operates in a similar manner for both self- and other-referent information, and b) whether the inhibitory mechanism associated with laboratory-observed retrieval-induced forgetting is also involved in categorically thinking about the self and others. Participants studied and carried out guided retrieval practice on positive and negative self- and other-referent traits in seven studies that used variants of the retrieval practice paradigm. The observed patterns of forgetting were found to be consistent with the notion that retrieval inhibition operates in a flexible goal-directed manner to reduce the activation of person-specific information that carries little or no meaning for the social perceiver, regardless of whether that information relates to the self or to a target other. Consideration of the significance subjectively attributed to person information showed that both personally significant self information (Studies 4a,b, 5b) and highly informative other-referent material (Studies 2, 5b) are protected against active forgetting, whilst information of low diagnostic value succumbs to inhibitory processing. The goal-directed nature of active forgetting was also shown to operate in an implicit manner (Study 4a) which remained unaffected by attentional focus being brought to bear on target or non-target items (Study 4b). Two main conclusions are discussed, a) that both self- and other-referent information are protected against active forgetting where that information carries meaning for the social perceiver and becomes integrated into existing person-specific knowledge, and b) that both the retrieval practice procedure and the processes involved in categorical person perception may be subject to the same inhibitory mechanism.

The research reported here examines how a person's knowledge of the world is used in language recognition and production. Essentially it is concerned with the importance of a word's meaning as a factor in its recognition by a listener or reader and is its production by a speaker or writer. This area of research overlays with a great many areas in psychology, drawing upon research in attention, pattern recognition, memory, psycholinguistics and thought . It is necessary to give some working definitions of the terms used. The definition of semantic memory used here is that supplied by Tulving (1972, p 386): "Semantic memory is the memory necessary for the use of a language. It is a mental thesaurus, the organized knowledge a person possesses about words and other verbal symbols, their meanings and referents, about relations among them and about rules, formulas and algorithms for the manipulation of these symbols, concepts and relations." The contents of semantic memory are typically what a person would say that he "knows" rather than what he "remembers". e . g. a person might say "I know canaries are yellow" whereas "I remember canaries are yellow" would not "sound right" to most native English speakers. This also illustrates an important property of semantic memory. The knowledge it contains is to a large extent common to members of a given culture. There will of course be individual differences but a sufficient body of knowledge will be shared in order to allow communication between persons. Retrieval from semantic memory is used here to refer to any process that involves making use of such stored knowledge. This may range from simply deciding that a particular sound pattern has occurred in speech before to verifying complex propositions. Context is restricted here to linguistic context. The question asked is how information provided by previous linguistic input affects processing of later input or output of language. The view of language comprehension taken here is similar to Goodman's (1967) approach to reading. This approach is described as follows: " ... Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perceptions and identification of all elements but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right first time. The ability to anticipate that which has not been seen, of course, is vital in reading, just as the ability to anticipate what has not yet been heard is vital in listening." (p 260) It is assumed here that a person's ability to anticipate is dependent upon the knowledge stored in semantic memory. The way this knowledge is used will in turn depend upon how it is organized. Since the Ancient Greeks the importance of organization in memory has been recognized but it is only relatively recently that psychologists have attempted to determine the principles underlying this organization. Since Quillian (1966) a number of models of how semantic memory is organized have been proposed. These will be discussed in the following sections. Many of the experiments reported here are concerned with what might be called "micro-context", that is how individual words, phrases and sentences affect recognition of incoming stimuli. Of course, the use of context goes far beyond the immediately preceding input but as yet there are no satisfactory theories, linguistic or psychological, that can deal with these wider aspects of language use. In fact there is still considerable disagreement over the processes involved in the recognition of single words, (see, for example, Rubenstein, Lewis and Rubenstein, 1971; Baron, 1973) . The approach taken to word recognition here is similar to Norman (1968) and Morton (1969). The notion which is central to both these authors and Goodman (see above) is the realization that no process can be analysed in isolation. The language system cannot decode the incoming sensory information without reference to stored knowledge. As Norman (1969, p 3) describes the role of memory, "it provides the information about the past necessary for proper understanding of the present". Thus context indicates to the memory system what knowledge is relevant to the analysis of the current input. To summarize this approach the information provided by context (immediate past) is referred to semantic memory (past) which in turn helps to produce the best guess as to the nature of the current sensory input (present) or even the nature of input which has not yet arrived (future) . The problem examined in this research is how the organizational structure of knowledge in semantic memory influences this guessing process . Whether such guessing is an active process as suggested by some investigators (e . g. Liberman, Stevens and Halle) or a passive process suggested by others (e . g. Morton, Treisman) will be discussed in a later section.

The memory system is adaptive in so far as it is able to provide the most robust predictions of what will happen next in our environment. Three means through which it can do this are: arbitrating between temporally embedded recollections and generalized knowledge; rescuing remote memories that are learned to be behaviorally relevant; and updating existing memories if they provide invalid predictions of the outside world. Here, I cover three studies that probe these functions in behavior and in the brain. In Chapter 1, I show how a data-driven parcellation reveals non-linear gradients in measures of signal heterogeneity across the body of the hippocampus, suggesting novel areas of investigation into how the memory system flexibly constructs fine- and coarse-grained memories. In Chapter 2, I then explore how memories might be rescued by later aversive experiences, finding novel evidence that the online inferences participants make as to what current stimuli are relevant to their arousal subtly shapes what previous stimuli they retroactively maintain in memory. Finally, in Chapter 3, I show that signals from the ventral tegmental area modulate the effect of replaying memories on the eventual updating of those memories. Each of these provides novel pieces of evidence into the neural and behavioral markers of how memories are constructed, strengthened, or updated in the brain.

The ability to find positive meaning and in turn generate positive emotions in the face of negative life circumstances is a protective factor against the harmful effects of stress, and a critical pathway to resilience and growth. Despite its clear importance, little is known about the brain mechanisms that support this ability, the processes that underlie decisions to implement it, or the long-term effects it has on memories of negative life experiences. Study 1 shows that finding positive meaning in negative experiences engages the brain’s system for reward valuation, whereas minimizing negative emotions dampens activity in a region involved in generating emotional arousal. Study 2 shows that spontaneous brain responses to aversive stimuli can be used to prospectively predict decisions to regulate emotion, and the predictive value of these responses is comparable across finding positive meaning and minimizing negative emotions. Study 3 shows that finding positive meaning and minimizing negative feelings can bring about distinct lasting effects on the content and affective impact of memories of negative experiences.

Research supports the notion that weapons impair eyewitnesses' memory for visual information (weapon focus effect). Pickel and Betts (1999) found that the presence of a weapon can also interfere with witnesses' memory for auditory information. The primary objective of the current study was to replicate Pickel and Betts's (1999) findings, to extend their findings by implementing different methodological procedures, and to control for a confound associated with their study. A secondary goal was to further investigate the impact that arousal and novelty have on the weapon focus effect. Participants watched a videotape depicting a story about a man stalking a woman. The man approached the woman holding either a switchblade knife or a black ballpoint pen. The man's conversation varied so that it was either easy or difficult to comprehend. Participants then completed questionnaires assessing their arousal level, memory for visual and auditory information, and perceived unusualness of the object carried by the target. [n addition, they attempted to identify the target in a photo and audio lineup. Results indicate that the presence of a weapon does not affect memory for vocal characteristics or for semantic content of speech when the content of the message is rather simple. As the complexity of the message increases, however, a weapon will interfere with witnesses' memory for the content. Also, results support the hypothesis that the weapon focus effect occurs because the weapon is perceived to be unusual and that increased levels of arousal are not necessary to obtain the effect. Analyses revealed no significant effects or interactions related to witnesses' ability to identify the man in the photo or audio lineup. The results supported Pickel and Betts's (1999) conclusions, thus increasing our knowledge concerning the reliability of eyewitness testimony. / Department of Psychological Science

Aging has long been associated with a (i) systematic bias in both attention and in memory towards positive stimuli compared with negative, and (ii) a gradual increase in self-reported positive affect and decrease in negative affect in daily life. The findings are considered to be paradoxical, because as people get older, the neural mechanisms responsible for cognitive functioning undergo gradual decline in structure and function. This dissertation aims to break down the mechanisms of aging that allow for the age-related changes in emotion to prevail in the midst of other ongoing aging processes. Here, I present three papers that address age-related changes in emotional experience. Study 1 showed that age predicted feeling more positive and less negative when faced with a pandemic that disproportionality impacted older adults. Study 2 showed that while younger adults are better than older adults at regulating negative images, all participants rely on similar brain regions for accomplishing the same regulatory goals. Study 3 showed that when given the explicit goal to up or down-regulate positivity, older adults do not have an advantage over younger adults. One way to explain these results is that there are age-related distinctions between the way participants behave in lab-based studies and when they are observed in daily life, which account for inconsistencies between my three studies.