The effect of burn injury on adolescents autobiographical memory.

Autobiographical memory recall was investigated in two female adolescent groups; one group who had experienced a burn injury and a matched control group. The Burn group was not currently depressed or anxious, but scored significantly higher on the intrusion subscale of the impact of event scale compared to controls. Two autobiographical memory tasks, the autobiographical memory cueing task and the Children's Autobiographical Memory Inventory (CAMI), were used. For the cueing task, the Burn group was significantly slower to recall specific memories. This group also recalled significantly fewer specific memories and significantly more extended overgeneral memories. For the CAMI, the burns group produced significantly lower semantic and episodic recall. The Burn group also produced significant correlations between sub-scales of the impact of event scale and selected measures on the autobiographical memory tasks. Higher intrusion scores were associated with less detailed episodic recall. Higher avoidance scores were associated with longer latencies to recall memories to negative cue words and fewer specific memories to all cue words. These results are discussed from the perspective that the Burn group experienced intrusive thoughts which interfered with normal autobiographical functioning.

Everyday planning difficulties following traumatic brain injury: a role for autobiographical memory.

The present study examines the role of autobiographical memory in describing how to perform both open-ended and closed everyday activities in 12 patients suffering traumatic brain injury and 12 aged-matched controls. The frequency (high versus low) of performing the activities was also manipulated. Patients seemed less well able to benefit from using specific autobiographical memories; they reported using significantly fewer specific autobiographical memories for describing how to perform low-frequency activities and significantly more such memories for high-frequency activities compared with controls. The quality of their descriptions was also significantly poorer for the open-ended activities. Finally, significant correlations were found between the quality of the descriptions and the retrieval of specific autobiographical memories for the controls only. The importance of the retrieval of specific autobiographical memories for everyday problem-solving is discussed.

Stimulus-independent thought depends on central executive resources.

Stimulus-independent thoughts (SITs) are streams of thoughts and images unrelated to immediate sensory input. Four experiments examined the contribution of aspects of working memory to production of SITs. In Experiments 1 and 2, interventions that were targeted on, respectively, phonological and visuospatial components of working memory both interfered with production of SITs, but there was evidence that these tasks also made demands on central executive resources. Experiments 3 and 4 specifically examined the hypothesis that production of SITs and control of nonproceduralized tasks both depend on central executive resources, and so should show mutual interference. In Experiment 3, prior practice on pursuit rotor and memory tasks reduced the interference with SITs from concurrent task performance. In Experiment 4, randomness within a task involving random-number generation was less when SITs were being produced concurrently than it was when they were not. The results suggest that production of SITs depends on central executive resources.

Autobiographical fluency: a method for the study of personal memory.

Fifty-five subjects recalled autobiographical episodes or personal facts such as names of friends and teachers, from different lifetime periods. In each case, subjects were given 90 sec in which to retrieve as many items as possible. Also tested was subjects' fluency in generating items from semantic categories (animals, vegetables, British prime ministers, and U.S. presidents). Results of cluster analysis on the fluency tasks showed a dissociation between subjects' ability to retrieve personal episodes, personal semantic information, and nonpersonal semantic information. The dissociations observed in the fluency tasks are interpreted in terms of the different retrieval strategies required for the different types of information sought.

Individual differences in affect-related cognitive operations elicited by experimental stimuli.

Beck's cognitive model of depression suggests the importance of cognitive distortions, such as overgeneralization and personalization, in the aetiology of depression. Larsen, Diener & Cropanzano (1987) developed a method for directly measuring the cognitive operations of overgeneralization and personalization in the reactions of normal subjects to experimentally presented visual stimuli. The present study employed this method to examine the relationship between use of these cognitive operations and the personality dimensions of affect intensity, neuroticism and extraversion. Results showed that high scorers on affect intensity exhibited more evidence of overgeneralization and personalization, replicating Larsen et al.'s (1987) findings, with a similar effect for neuroticism. The results suggest that the persistent differences in response to emotional events measured by the traits of affect intensity and neuroticism may be mediated by particular styles of cognitive processing.

The role of female occupation in severity of alcohol-related problems.

This study investigated whether occupational class is related to the severity of problems associated with alcohol abuse in females. Sixty-six female alcoholic inpatients at a private psychiatric hospital were studied. Of these women, 31 were workers (working at the time of admission), 18 were unemployed workers (unemployed at admission but had worked most of their adult lives), and the remaining 17 were homemakers. Problem severity was assessed for 66 alcoholic women using the Addiction Severity Index (ASI), a standardized clinical interview. A questionnaire assessing the degree of occupational stress experienced was also administered. Employment problem severity ratings from the ASI differed significantly across the three occupation subgroups [F(2,63) = 10.99, p less than .05]; the unemployed workers reported more severe employment problems than did either the workers [t(63) = 3.07, p less than .05] or homemakers [t(63) = 4.77, p less than .05]. There were no significant differences between the three groups on the other five ASI dimensions. A cluster analysis on ASI severity ratings revealed a trend for workers to have family and psychological problems in addition to alcoholism. This seems not to have had an impact on wanting a job change; significantly more homemakers (z = 4.77, p less than .05) and unemployed workers (z = 4.56, p less than .05) than workers wanted a job change.