ABSTRACTThis study examined duration judgments for taboo and neutral words in prospective and retrospective timing tasks. In the prospective task, participants attended to time from the beginning and generated shorter duration estimates for taboo than neutral words and for words that they subsequently recalled in a surprise free recall task. These findings suggested that memory encoding took priority over estimating durations, directing attention away from time and causing better recall but shorter perceived durations for taboo than neutral words. However, in (...) the retrospective task, participants only judged durations in a surprise test at the end, and their duration estimates were longer for taboo than neutral words. Present findings therefore suggest that the same emotion-linked memory encoding processes can cause underestimation of durations in prospective tasks but overestimation in retrospective tasks, as if emotion enhances recall of ongoing events but causes overestimation of the durations of those... (shrink)

This paper examines how inner theories influence lexical choice. Subjects in one study completed auditorily presented sentence fragments, some of which contained nonhuman antecedents such as dog and cat. Subjects were more likely to use human pronouns rather than it for referring to pets rather than nonpets , and antecedents that were liked rather than disliked , familiar rather than unfamiliar , named rather than unnamed , rational rather than nonrational , and engaging in typically human rather than nonhuman activities (...) . The beliefs and attitudes underlying these pronoun choices intruded not just hypoconsciously , but contraconsciously . A second study examined rapidly generated inferences that influenced what pronoun subjects chose to complete visually presented sentences, such as "When a student practices basketball instead of studying" and "When a student practices ballet instead of studying." The results indicated that inferences from beliefs altered the choice of pronoun from predominately he to predominantly she. Other results indicated that pronouns have semi-autonomous functions of their own, and reflect beliefs and attitudes that vary with subject sex, and are context dependent, pragmatic in nature, and dynamic over time. (shrink)

This chapter examines the stages of processing meta‐theory (SPM) that has guided construction of theories in psychology during the past 350 years, from philosopher René Descartes in seventeenth‐century France to neuropsychologists Carl Wernicke and Paul Broca in nineteenth‐century Europe to psychologists Dominic Massaro and Alan Baddeley in late twentieth‐century America and Britain. The most basic SPM assumptions are that processing and storage of information take place within a finite number of autonomous modules or stages, and that some stages are sequentially (...) ordered with respect to others. Flowcharts typically summarize these assumptions. The traditional stages of processing for verbal information are comprehension, storage, retrieval, and production. SPM flowcharts can add new stages and can alter old labels to represent new types of information processing, but whatever the labels, the stages must be finite in number, distinct, independent, and sequentially ordered between input and output. (shrink)

Claims that representatives of both sides of the psi debate (e.g., J. E. Alcock; K. R. Rao and J. Palmer [see PA, Vol 76:10501 and 10507]) have implicitly adopted the empirical epistemology without spelling out or systematically applying the rational epistemology, an essential step for both psychology and parapsychology. ((c) 1997 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved).

Despite several positive features, such as extensive theoretical and empirical scope, aspects of Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer 's theory can be challenged on theoretical grounds and empirical grounds.