Political Identity Over Personal Impact: Early U.S. Reactions to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Research suggests political identity has strong influence over individuals' attitudes and beliefs, which in turn can affect their behavior. Likewise, firsthand experience with an issue can also affect attitudes and beliefs. A large (N = 6,383) survey (Pew Research and Ipsos W64) of Americans was analyzed to investigate the effects of both political identity (i.e., Democrat or Republican) and personal impact (i.e., whether they suffered job or income loss) on individuals' reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that political identity and personal impact influenced the American public's attitudes about and response to COVID-19. Consistent with prior research, political identity exerted a strong influence on self-reports of emotional distress, threat perception, discomfort with exposure, support for restrictions, and perception of under/overreaction by individuals and institutions. The difference between Democrats and Republican responses were consistent with their normative value differences and with the contemporary partisan messaging. Personal impact exerted a comparatively weaker influence on reported emotional distress and threat perception. Both factors had a weak influence on appraisal of individual and government responses. The dominating influence of political identity carried over into the bivariate relations among these self-reported attitudes and responses. In particular, the appraisal of government response divided along party lines, tied to opposing views of whether there has been over- or under-reaction to the pandemic. The dominance of political identity has important implications for crisis management and reflects the influence of normative value differences between the parties, partisan messaging on the pandemic, and polarization in American politics.

The repetition decrement effect in recognition memory: The influence of prime-target spacing.

Rosner, Lopez-Benitez, D'Angelo, Thomson, and Milliken (2018, see also Collins, Rosner & Milliken, 2018) reported a novel recognition memory effect. In an incidental study phase, participants saw prime-target word pairs and were asked to name aloud just the target. Primes were unmasked, but participants were not required to attend to them. On repeated trials the prime and target were the same word, whereas on not-repeated trials the prime and target were different words. In the following test phase, recognition memory was better for not-repeated targets than for repeated targets. The present study explores whether this effect is influenced by the spacing between primes and targets. The results replicated prior studies in that immediate repetition resulted in a repetition decrement effect, but spaced repetition (by about 10 min) resulted in the opposite effect - better recognition for repeated than not-repeated targets. The results are discussed in relation to deficient processing theories of the spacing effect.

Remembering 'primed' words: The effect of prime encoding demands.

Rosner, Lopez-Benitez, D'Angelo, Thomson, and Milliken (2017) reported a novel recognition memory effect using an immediate repetition method during the study phase. During each trial of an incidental study phase, participants named a target word that followed a prime word that had the same identity (repeated trials) or a different identity (not-repeated trials). Recognition in the following test phase was better for the not-repeated trials. In the present study, we examined the influence of prime encoding demands on this counterintuitive effect. In Experiment 1, we instructed 1 group to simply ignore the prime, as in the original study. A second group completed a divided attention task on prime presentation. Recognition memory was better for not-repeated than repeated words in both groups. In Experiment 2, encoding of the prime varied across 3 groups: 1 group named each prime, a second group counted the vowels in each prime, and a third group made a semantic discrimination for each prime. Recognition was better for repeated than for not-repeated words in the semantic group and did not differ across conditions for the other 2 groups. Finally, in Experiment 3, we assessed memory for not-repeated primes in addition to memory for targets (as in Experiments 1 and 2). The results confirmed that poor memory for the primes plays a significant role in producing the previously described effects. The results are discussed in relation to transient processing adaptations that affect memory encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record