Personal and collective mental time travel across the adult lifespan during COVID-19.

Older adults exhibit an age-related positivity effect, with more positivity for memories than young adults. Theoretical explanations attribute this phenomenon to greater emphasis on emotion regulation and well-being due to shortened time horizons. Adults, across the lifespan, also exhibit a collective negativity bias (more negativity about their country than their personal past and future) and a future-oriented positivity bias (more positivity for future projections than for memories). Threats to global health (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) may shorten future time horizons which may serve to impact emotional valence for memories and future projections. We investigated this possibility in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in young, middle-aged, and older adults (N = 434; age: 18-81 years), for positive and negative events in the past (2019) and future (2021) in the personal and collective domains, as well as for future excitement and worry in these same domains in 1 week, 1 year, and 5-10 years' time. We replicated the collective negativity bias and future-oriented positivity bias, indicating the robustness of these phenomena. However, the pattern of age-related positivity diverged for personal events such that young adults exhibited similar positivity to older adults and more positivity than middle-aged adults. Finally, consistent with theoretical proposals of better emotion regulation with age, older adults reported more muted excitement and worry for the long-term future compared to young adults. We discuss the implications of this work for understanding valence-based biases in memory and future projections across the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Deceitful Hints: a Meta-Analytic Review of the Part-List Cuing Impairment in Recall.

A large body of research in the study of memory has accumulated to date on the part-list cuing impairment in recall. This phenomenon refers to the lower recall of studied information in the presence of some studied words provided as retrieval cues compared to when no cues are provided. We review the current literature on the part-list cuing impairment in recall and report a meta-analysis utilizing the procedural and statistical information obtained from 109 samples (N = 5,605). In each experiment, participants studied a list of words and subsequently performed a recall task either in the presence or absence of part-list cues. The meta-analysis shows that the part-list cuing impairment is a robust, medium-sized impairment (Cohen, 1988). This recall impairment was not significantly sensitive to the number of study items provided, the relationship among study items, the number of part-list cues provided, the amount of time provided for recall, or certain other factors of interest. Our analyses also demonstrate that longer retention periods between study and retrieval mitigate the part-list cuing impairment in recall. We discuss the implications of meta-analysis results for elements of experimental design, the findings of past literature, as well as the underlying theoretical mechanisms proposed to account for this impairment in recall and the applied consequences of this recall impairment.

Retroactive interference: Counterconditioning and extinction with and without biologically significant outcomes.

Following cue-outcome (X-O) pairings, 2 procedures that reduce conditioned responses to X are extinction, in which X is presented by itself, and counterconditioning, in which X is paired with a different outcome typically of valence opposite that of training. Although studies with animals have generally found counterconditioning more efficient than extinction in reducing responding, data from humans are less clear. They suggest counterconditioning is more efficient than extinction at interfering with emotional processing, but there is little difference between the two procedures regarding their impact on the verbal assessment of the probability of the outcome given the cue. However, issues of statistical power leave conclusions ambiguous. We compared counterconditioning and extinction in highly powered experiments that exploited a novel procedure. A rapid streamed-trial procedure was used in which participants were asked to rate how likely a target outcome was to accompany a target cue after being exposed to acquisition trials followed by extinction, counterconditioning, or neither. In Experiments 1 and 2, evaluative conditioning was assessed by asking participants to rate the pleasantness of the cues after treatment. These studies found counterconditioning more efficient than extinction at reducing evaluative conditioning but less efficient at decreasing the assessment of the conditional probability of the outcome given the cue. The latter effect was replicated with neutral outcomes in Experiments 3 and 4, but the effect was inverted in Experiment 4 in conditions designed to preclude reinstatement of initial training by the question probing the conditional probability of the outcome given the cue. Effect sizes were small (Cohen's d of 0.2 for effect on evaluative conditioning, Cohen's d of 0.3 for effect on the outcome expectancy). If representative, this poses a serious constraint in terms of statistical power for further investigations of differential efficiency of extinction and counterconditioning in humans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).