Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica

In Houses in a Landscape, Julia A. Hendon examines the connections between social identity and social memory using archaeological research on indigenous societies that existed more than one thousand years ago in what is now Honduras. While these societies left behind monumental buildings, the remains of their dead, remnants of their daily life, intricate works of art, and fine examples of craftsmanship such as pottery and stone tools, they left only a small body of written records. Despite this paucity of written information, Hendon contends that an archaeological study of memory in such societies is possible and worthwhile. It is possible because memory is not just a faculty of the individual mind operating in isolation, but a social process embedded in the materiality of human existence. Intimately bound up in the relations people develop with one another and with the world around them through what they do, where and how they do it, and with whom or what, memory leaves material traces. Hendon conducted research on three contemporaneous Native American civilizations that flourished from the seventh century through the eleventh CE: the Maya kingdom of Copan, the hilltop center of Cerro Palenque, and the dispersed settlement of the Cuyumapa valley. She analyzes domestic life in these societies, from cooking to crafting, as well as public and private ritual events including the ballgame. Combining her findings with a rich body of theory from anthropology, history, and geography, she explores how objects—the things people build, make, use, exchange, and discard—help people remember. In so doing, she demonstrates how everyday life becomes part of the social processes of remembering and forgetting, and how “memory communities” assert connections between the past and the present.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1050/thumbnail.jp

The effect of hypertension on cognitive performance in older adults: Self-evaluation as a mediator.

The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of hypertension on both self-assessed and laboratory measures of memory and on non-cognitive factors such as anxiety, depression, self-efficacy, and locus of control. Eight male and twelve female normotensive adults aged 62 to 77 years (M = 71.8) and 8 male and 12 female hypertensive adults aged 62 to 78 years (M = 72.5) completed questionnaires measuring state and trait anxiety, depression, self-efficacy, locus of control, and health in addition to performing speed of processing, spatial and verbal working memory and short term memory tasks and measures of vocabulary and incidental memory. As expected, hypertensive subjects performed more poorly on rate of processing and 2 of 3 working memory tasks. No differences were found in short term memory, vocabulary, or incidental memory. In addition, hypertensives reported having more memory problems overall and rated their memory problems as being more serious than normotensives. Hypertensives also reported more psychological symptoms, having lower internal and higher chance locus of control, and being more depressed compared to normotensives. No differences in self-efficacy, state anxiety, trait anxiety or powerful others locus of control were found. Based on the results of hierarchial regression analyses, it was found that the effects of hypertension on cognitive performance could be attenuated and even eliminated by controlling for self-evaluations such as psychological symptoms, locus of control, and self-efficacy. Exploratory path analyses were employed to explore the relationships among anxiety, depression, efficacy, and cognitive performance. The primary finding of these analyses was that while anxiety and depression had significant direct effects on efficacy, these variables did not have significant direct effects on the effortful measures of memory. The strongest relationships between depression and performance were for incidental memory and vocabulary. Efficacy, on the other hand, had significant direct effects on working memory and short term memory and a large direct effect on self-assessed memory. These results support the model described by Berry (1989) and others which shows self-efficacy mediating the relationship between affect and cognitive performance

A forgiving workplace: An investigation of forgiveness climate, individual differences and workplace outcomes

Although forgiveness has been studied for centuries, it is a relatively new area of study in organizational behavior. Organizational climate has a history of influencing individual behaviors. This dissertation considers how a climate of forgiveness may foster a willingness to forgive in individuals. A measure of forgiveness climate is developed and empirically examined. The results of this study support the hypothesis that a cohesive/supportive climate and a trustworthy/integrity climate relate to a climate of forgiveness. Furthermore, this study examines the effects of climate on willingness to forgive. A scenario-based scale to measure willingness to forgive workplace offenses is developed. Willingness to forgive is found to be positively related to job satisfaction and OCB. On the other hand, willingness to forgive was found to be negatively related to job stress and performance. Two individual differences, psychological collectivism and narcissism, were examined as moderators. However, their moderating effect was not supported by the analyses

Acquiring & forgetting a second language : a study of three children aged 5-11 years

Bibliography: pages 333-356.This investigation is concerned with what three children remembered or had forgotten of a second language after an interval of two years. An in-depth study, consisting of recognition and recall tests, was made of 13-year-old identical twin girls and their 9-year-old brother, who previously had been English/French bilinguals. A phenomenological approach was taken, which included the children's reaction to the tests, and their description of the personal framework within which the learning and forgetting had taken place. The findings, which are suggestive due to limited data, are: first, cognitive and maturational differences between the children caused the twins to retain more recognition and active recall of French than their brother; second, the twins showed a surprising difference in their recognition of French, pos9ibly caused by affective factors; third, all three children showed strongest recognition in the area of semantics, while in recall they retained phonology best; fourth, in the tests, habit memory and episodic memory were more durable than semantic memory. The investigation is a first step towards understanding how children forget a language in which they have been submersed

Educational Learning Theories: 2nd Edition

This open textbook was the result of a remix of pre-existing open materials collected and reviewed by Molly Zhou and David Brown. Learning theories covered include the theories of Piaget, Bandura, Vygotsky, Kohlberg, Dewey, Bronfenbrenner, Eriksen, Gardner, Bloom, and Maslow. The textbook was revised in 2018 through a Round Ten Revisions and Ancillary Materials Mini-Grant. Topics covered include: Behaviorism Cognitive Development Social Cognitive Theory Experiential Learning Theory Human Motivation Theory Information Processing Theoryhttps://oer.galileo.usg.edu/education-textbooks/1000/thumbnail.jp

Development of the Inventory of Life Span Events

The possible relationship between stressful life events and subsequent illness has been studied in the past few decades, resulting in several widely-used questionnaires. However, these measures tend to focus on recent events and attempt to remove subjective rating of a stressful event by the respondent. These two factors may limit these scales clinical utility. An alternative measure, the Inventory of Life Span Events (ILSE) is proposed, to quantify the life-stress burden for childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and across the entire life span. ILSE was compared to other leading measures for life events, hassles and perceived stress, and was more closely related to life events than hassles or perceived stress measures. The comparative utility of these measures in explaining the variance for depressive, anxiety, neuroticism and dissociative symptoms was conducted. The ILSE childhood summary score (CHB) was specifically correlated with dissociation. ILSE displayed adequate validity through correlations with both life event and symptom measures and in predicting clinical vs. control group membership. ILSE also displayed adequate test-retest reliability on a six to eight week interval. It is anticipated ILSE will add a new dimension to life event assessment. Potential uses for the instrument concludes the write-up

Phonological Short-Term Memory and New Word Learning: Evidence from Paired-Associate and Hebb Repetition Paradigms

This thesis investigated the role of phonological short-term memory (PSTM) in the long-term learning of new phonological word-forms.. Previous studies using the paired-associate paradigm have suggested that the learning of unfamiliar material is mediated by PSTM (e.g. Papagno & Vallar, 1992). The first'aim was. to replicate a!1d extend this previous work. The second aim was to determine whether the Hebb repetition paradigm could provide an alternative method with which to investigate the role of PSTM in new word-form learning. Seven experiments w~re conducted to explore these aims. Experiment 1 obtained phonological similarity effects for words and nonwords in an immediate serial recall task, confirming that. the chosen manipulation of phonological similarity was adequate. Experiments 2 and' 3 . adopted the paired-associate task and replicated Papagno and Vallar' (1992), thus extending their results to English participants and materials. Phonological similarity was shown to selectively disrupt the learning of nonword pairs. In contrast, some evidence was found to suggest that phonological similarity fails to affect the learning' of word pairs. However, Experiment 3 showed that the detrimental effect of phonological similarity was restricted to an intermediate phase of learning. These findings suggest that PSTM mediates the learning of unfamiliar material, although the role of PSTM may change during the course of learning; Experiments 4 and 6 adopted the Hebb repetition task and generated patterns of results consistent with Papagno and Vallar (1992) and Experiments 2 and 3. Phonological similarity disrupted the learning of nonword s~quences, but not the learning of word sequences. These findings suggest that PSTM mediates sequence learning for unfamiliar material, thereby providing initia~ evidence that the Hebb repetition paradigm may be a possible analogue of new word-form learning. The role qf PSTM in nonword sequence learning could not be reliably assessed in Experiments 5 and 7 due to the absence of reliable Hebb Effects. Analyses of between-trial learning and forgetting rates using a Markov model revealed that phonological similarity had a negative impact on forgetting rates for nonwords in both paired-assoCiate and. Hebb repetItion paradigms, suggesting that phonological representations of nonwords are particularly fragile. Finally, it is proposed that the paired-associate paradigm represents a closer analogue of new word-form learning than the Hebb repetition paradigm as it makes use of existing lexical-semantic information