► Examined whether social connectedness could be derived from Facebook. ► Facebook social connectedness emerged as a distinct construct. ► Facebook social connectedness was associated with positive ...psychological outcomes.
Previous research has identified the importance of social connectedness in facilitating a number of positive outcomes, however, investigation of connectedness in online contexts is relatively novel. This research aimed to investigate for the first time social connectedness derived from the use of Facebook. Study 1 investigated whether offline social connectedness and Facebook connectedness were separate constructs. Participants were Facebook users (N=344) who completed measures of offline social connectedness and Facebook social connectedness. Factor analysis (Maximum Likelihood analysis with Oblimin rotation) revealed Facebook connectedness to be distinct from offline social connectedness. Study 2 examined the relationship between Facebook social connectedness and anxiety, depression, and subjective well-being in a second sample of Facebook users (N=274) in a cross-sectional design. Results suggest that Facebook use may provide the opportunity to develop and maintain social connectedness in the online environment, and that Facebook connectedness is associated with lower depression and anxiety and greater satisfaction with life. Limitations and future directions are considered. It is concluded that Facebook may act as a separate social medium in which to develop and maintain relationships, providing an alternative social outlet associated with a range of positive psychological outcomes.
Objective: To test the effectiveness of using a non-targeted, dual-task methodology to promote positive cognitive behavior change in acute stroke.
Method: Three stroke survivors, selected because ...they exhibited different recovery profiles, different lesion sites, and time since suffering a stroke, were administered an anagram task five or six times across a two-week period in the days following a stroke. Task difficulty increased across sessions by means of adding a category instance detection task, where participants had to identify instances from either one or two different semantic categories. The same regime was administered to a control group over a two-week period.
Results: All three participants were in the clinical range on early tests but were in non-clinical range on their last test session. Dual-task effects on completion time were also similar across participants as were anagram length effects. The three participants exhibited enhanced cognitive performance.
Conclusions: The results suggest the possibility that cognitive interventions aimed at restoring lost function can be administered in the early days post-stroke and can produce beneficial outcomes, in much the same way that early motor or speech intervention programs have been shown to produce long-term benefits.
In the weeks immediately following a stroke, impairments across multiple cognitive domains are pervasive yet there is little literature that explores cognitive recovery during this period. This paper ...evaluates the use of Mahalanobis distance as a means of statistically evaluating cognitive change at the individual level.
A small battery of standardized neuropsychological tests was administered on five or six occasions across a 2-week period to the participants recovering from a stroke and a non-stroke control group. Mahalanobis distance was used to evaluate the change profile of those who were recovering from a stroke relative to the non-stroke control.
The outcomes of three patients show that Mahalanobis distance could statistically differentiate recovery, no change, and deterioration from normal repetition effects.
In the acute phase of stroke using Mahalanobis distance it is possible to distinguish between recovery, normal learning, and gerneralized learning deficits thereby identifying likely candidates for further cognitive assessment and rehabilitation.
Given the changing online environment (from anonymity to social connection) and the importance of establishing equivalence in psychological measures used in online environments, the aim of this ...research was to examine the equivalence of socially value-laden measures with data sourced from web-based social media and traditional pen-and-paper methods. Data on a suite of socially value-laden measures comparing the equivalence of scores obtained via social media (Facebook) versus offline environments were considered. Participants (
N
= 193) completed measures of primary and secondary psychopathy, emotional manipulation, emotional intelligence, interpersonal cognition, social desirability, and ethical position either online or using pen-and-paper in a between groups design. Results suggested that both social media and offline data were equivalent in terms of internal reliability and patterns of relationships among constructs. However, participants were more likely to report higher levels of ethical relativism when completing the measure via social media. These findings highlight the importance of establishing equivalence for specific measures when engaging in online data collection, as well as providing insight into the nature of self-disclosure in the social media environment. Future research should assess the equivalence of other socially value-laden measures in online and pen-and-paper environments.
The following experiments explore word length and concreteness effects in short-term memory within an item-order processing framework. This framework asserts order memory is better for those items ...that are relatively easy to process at the item level. However, words that are difficult to process benefit at the item level for increased attention/resources being applied. The prediction of the model is that differential item and order processing can be detected in episodic tasks that differ in the degree to which item or order memory are required by the task. The item-order account has been applied to the word length effect such that there is a short word advantage in serial recall but a long word advantage in item recognition. The current experiment considered the possibility that concreteness effects might be explained within the same framework. In two experiments, word length (Experiment 1) and concreteness (Experiment 2) are examined using forward serial recall, backward serial recall, and item recognition. These results for word length replicate previous studies showing the dissociation in item and order tasks. The same was not true for the concreteness effect. In all three tasks concrete words were better remembered than abstract words. The concreteness effect cannot be explained in terms of an item-order trade off.
Les expériences suivantes visent à explorer les effets de longueur du mot et de concrétude en mémoire à court terme dans un cadre de traitement item-ordre. Ce cadre suggère que la mémoire de l'ordre est meilleure pour les items étant relativement faciles à traiter au niveau de l'item. Cependant, les mots qui sont difficiles à traiter bénéficient d'une augmentation d'attention/ressources au niveau de l'item. La prédiction du modèle est qu'un traitement différentiel de l'ordre et de l'item peut être détecté dans les tâches épisodiques qui diffèrent quant au degré auquel la mémoire de l'ordre ou de l'item est sollicitée par la tâche. L'explication item-ordre a été appliquée à l'effet de longueur du mot faisant en sorte qu'il y a un avantage pour les mots courts dans le rappel sériel mais un avantage pour les longs mots dans la reconnaissance d'items. Dans la présente expérience, la possibilité que les effets de concrétude puissent être expliqués dans ce même cadre a été considérée. Dans deux expériences, la longueur du mot (Expérience 1) et la concrétude (Expérience 2) ont été examinés en utilisant le rappel sériel antérograde, le rappel sériel rétrograde et la reconnaissance d'items. Les résultats pour la longueur du mot reproduisent ceux des études antérieures démontrant une dissociation entre les tâches d'item et d'ordre. Cela ne fut pas le cas pour l'effet de concrétude. Dans les trois tâches, les mots concrets ont été mieux rappelés que les mots abstraits. L'effet de concrétude ne peut être expliqué en termes d'un compromis item-ordre.
•Development and preliminary evaluation of a measure was undertaken.•Cognitive social self-efficacy was assessed for the first time.•Factor analyses revealed cognitive and behavioural domains of ...social self-efficacy.•Sound psychometric properties were evident.
Although social self-efficacy appears influential across a broad spectrum of human behaviour, existing adult measures of social self-efficacy have conceptual and psychometric limitations. The current research brought together the realms of trait social intelligence and self-efficacy to develop and evaluate a measure of social self-efficacy which for the first time included assessment of cognitive domains of social self-efficacy. Items were administered to 301 participants, along with measures of general self-efficacy, subjective wellbeing, social anxiety, depression, general anxiety, and stress. An exploratory factor analysis (Maximum Likelihood with Direct Oblimin extraction) revealed two interpretable factors that were labeled “Social Understanding Self-efficacy” (cognitive) and “Social Skill Self-efficacy” (behavioural). Construct and criterion validity were evident and internal consistency and test–retest reliability were good. It was concluded that the new 18-item measure has sound psychometric properties. As such, this measure may serve as a meaningful tool for researchers and clinicians. While theoretical and empirical frameworks informed the current research, given the exploratory nature of this study, future research should further investigate the psychometric properties of this measure using confirmatory factor analysis and by examining the predictive validity of this measure in a clinical context.
Working memory was designed to explain four benchmark memory effects: the
word length effect
, the
irrelevant speech effect
, the
acoustic confusion effect
, and the
concurrent articulation effect
. ...However, almost all research thus far has used tests that emphasize forward recall. In four experiments, we examine whether each effect is observable when the items are recalled in reverse order. Subjects did not know which recall direction would be required until the time of test, ensuring that encoding processes would be identical for both recall directions. Contrary to predictions of both the primacy model and the feature model, the benchmark memory effect was either absent or greatly attenuated with backward recall, despite being present with forward recall. Direction of recall had no effect on the more difficult conditions (e.g., long words, similar-sounding items, items presented with irrelevant speech, and items studied with concurrent articulation). Several factors not considered by the primacy and feature models are noted, and a possible explanation within the framework of the SIMPLE model is briefly presented.
In two experiments short‐term forgetting was investigated in a short‐term cued recall task designed to examine proactive interference effects. Mixed modality study lists were tested at varying ...retention intervals using verbal and nonverbal distractor activities. When an interfering foil was read aloud and a target item read silently, strong PI effects were observed for both types of distractor activity. When the target was read aloud and followed by a verbal distractor activity, weak PI effects emerged. However, when a target item was read aloud and nonverbal distractor activity filled the retention interval, performance was immune to the effects of PI for at least 8 seconds. The results indicate that phonological representations of items read aloud still influence performance after 15 seconds of distractor activity.
Dans deux expériences, l'oubli à court terme est examiné dans une tâche de rappel avec indice développée afin d'examiner les effets d'interférence proactive. Des listes de modalité mixtes ont été utilisées à différents intervalles de rétention en utilisant des activités distractives verbales et non verbales. Lorsqu'un distracteur était lu à voix haute et qu'un item cible était lu silencieusement, un effet d'interférence proactive important était observé pour les deux types d'activités de distraction. Lorsque la cible était lue à voie haute et que des activités distrayantes verbales étaient ensuite exécutées, un effet d'interférence proactive plus faible était observé. Néanmoins, lorsqu'un item cible était lu à voix haute et qu'une activité distrayante non verbale était réalisée au cours de l'intervalle de rétention, la performance n'était pas affectée par l'interférence proactive pendant au moins huit secondes. Les résultats indiquent que les représentations phonologiques d'items lus à voix haute influencent encore la performance après quinze secondes de distraction.
The word length effect is one of the cornerstones of trace decay plus rehearsal models (TDR) of memory. Words of long spoken duration take longer to rehearse than words of short spoken duration and ...as such suffer more decay and are thus less well recalled. The current experiment manipulates both syllable length and spoken duration within words of fixed syllable length in an aim to test the assumptions of the TDR model. Our procedures produced robust effects of both syllable length and spoken duration in four measures of the time it takes to pronounce the different types of words. Serial recall for the same materials produced robust syllable effects, but no duration effects.
Immediate serial recall of visually presented lists is disrupted by irrelevant background speech. One explanation for the irrelevant speech effect assumes that features of the auditory material ...become incorporated into the memory trace of the to-be-remembered item thereby reducing the fidelity of the short-term trace. From this perspective the resultant short-term memory trace is a composite of features of the list item and features of an item in the irrelevant stream. While there is evidence that item interactions in short-term memory are observable, there is currently no direct empirical evidence for such interactions involving irrelevant speech. We report six experiments using a short-term cued recall task that manipulates proactive interference in which item interactions have been observed. In these experiments we consistently show that with irrelevant speech specific items in the auditory stream influence target recall and the presence or absence of proactive interference. These results provide relatively direct evidence for feature interaction involving irrelevant speech. The results are evaluated against the three current models of irrelevant speech effects.
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