Development and validation of the situational self-awareness scale.

This article discusses the manipulation and measurement of levels of situational self-focus, which is generally labeled "self-awareness." A new scale was developed to quantify levels of public and private self-awareness. Five studies were conducted to assess the psychometric properties, reliability, and validity of the Situational Self-Awareness Scale (SSAS). The SSAS was found to have a reliable factor structure, to detect differences in public and private self-awareness produced by laboratory manipulations, and to be sensitive to changes in self-awareness within individuals over time and across situations. The SSAS can be used as a manipulation check of laboratory self-awareness manipulations and as a means of assessing naturally occurring fluctuations in public and private self-awareness in order to clarify the relation between self-awareness and other variables (e.g., mood and memory).

Inducing positive mood without demand characteristics.

The possibility that a state of private self-awareness induced by a small mirror can facilitate the effect of procedures which induce a positive mood was investigated. Participants were 171 female and 60 male undergraduates who were randomly assigned to one of six conditions in a 2 (Mirror vs No-mirror) x 3 (Control vs Velten manipulation vs Music manipulation) design. As predicted, participants who experienced the Velten and Music manipulations in the presence of the mirror reported elevated mood relative to control participants. The mood of participants who experienced the Velten and Music manipulations without the mirror did not differ from the mood of control participants. The potential benefits of using a small mirror as a substitute for explicit instructions about the expected effect of mood-induction procedures are discussed.

Recognition memory test: validity in diffuse traumatic brain injury.

This study evaluated the validity and clinical utility of the Recognition Memory Test (RMT) as a measure of memory in severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). RMT scores for 86 TBI inpatients were related to injury severity, lesion location, and other memory indices. Only recognition memory for words (RMW) was significantly (p<0 01) related to duration of posttraumatic amnesia and a measure of "day to day" memory. Both RMT subtests showed expected modality-specific relationships with other clinical memory tasks. Patients with normal CT and right sided CT lesions tended to be more frequently impaired on recognition memory for faces (RMF) than RMW.