Truly incidental encoding of frequency information.

Four experiments demonstrated that adults can reliably remember frequency of occurrence information about items they have been exposed to under truly incidental memory conditions. Subjects neither knew that the ultimate test task would concern item frequency nor that they had any reason to remember the items. This was accomplished by presenting items under the guise of one of three cover tasks: anagram solving, sentence completion, and picture naming in a Stroop-like task. In addition, one experiment found that subjects who were prewarned for either a nonspecific memory test or a frequency test were no better able to judge frequency than were subjects operating under truly incidental conditions.

Mood, recall, and selectivity effects in normal college students.

In three experiments we explored the relation between normal variation in depressed mood and memory in college students. Subjects read and subsequently recalled stories whose protagonists experienced good, bad, and neutral events. Contrary to predictions arising independently from capacity theory and from schema theory, the recall of depressed and nondepressed subjects did not differ in either overall level or in affective content. The results are not easily handled by a conceptualization of depression, tied to schema theory, which proposes that negative cognitions are important for the initiation and maintenance of depression. The general usefulness of induction procedures in research on the depressive syndrome is discussed.

[Iron metabolism in chronic alcohol abuse]. / Eisenstoffwechsel bei chronischen Alkoholabusus.

Disturbances of the iron metabolism in patients with chronic alcohol abuse are of very complex genesis. The frequently probable hypersideraemia is caused by an increased intake of iron, by release of depot iron, when an alcohol-conditioned liver damage is present, and by an increased iron balance with disturbed iron use of the bone marrow. Thus the in alcoholics often provable combined megaloblastic-sideroblastic anaemia is in close connection with this.

[Hematologic changes following chronic alcoholism]. / Hämatologische Veränderungen nach chronischem Alkoholabusus.

Changes in all three blood cell systems could be covered in 50 patients treated in hospital for a high consumption of alcohol for years and even decades. There is no symptom which would be pathognomonic for alcoholism in itself. Macrocytosis and macrovoluminity of erythrocytes, hyper-sideraemia and thrombocytopenia were findings frequently encountered and easily to be identified. Megaloblasts, vacuolization, and an increase of sideroblasts could be observed in the bone-marrow. The prompt reversibility of these changes mentioned by simply abstaining from alcohol has a considerable diagnostic utility. The impact of liver damage partly produced by an accompanying spleen enlargement could only be ensured for thrombocyte depression. The increase of methaemoglobin which is unequivocal but without any clinical importance can also be reversed by alcohol deprivation. From a haematological point of view an alcoholic is endangered by a deficient immunological system. Haemorrhagic diatheses due to thrombocytopenia, thromboembolic complications during rebound-thrombocytosis and severe haemolyses can rarely be found.