A self-and other-diary method was used to investigate the factors affecting memory for different aspects of real-world events. Ss kept a diary of unique events that happened to them during the course of an academic quarter and kept a 2nd diary of unique events that had happened to a close relative or acquaintance. At the end of the quarter, Ss provided both memory and date estimates for all events. When each diary entry was made, Ss provided ratings of the event's memorability, pleasantness, and person typicality. The impact of (a) these prerating factors, (b) the type of diary (self or other), and (c) the gender of the diary keeper on both memory for event content and memory for temporal aspects of the event was assessed. Implications for real-world memory and dating judgments and implications for the principles of social memory that have emerged from laboratory research in social cognition are discussed.
Most of the literature on attitude formation assumes that attitudes are the products of deductive integration of an individual's beliefs about an object's attributes. Two studies demonstrate that attitudes can develop without deduction from such beliefs and, indeed, without individuals' being aware of the antecedents of those attitudes. Subjects viewed nine slides of a target person going about normal daily activities; immediately preceding the presentation of each photograph was a subliminal exposure of an affect-arousing photograph. Half the subjects in each study were subliminally exposed to positive-affect-arousing photos and half to negative-affect-arousing photos. The subliminal photographs affected attitudes toward the target person and shaped beliefs about the target person's personality traits. Presumably because relevant objective data were available, the subliminal photographs apparently had less impact on judgments of the target person's physical attractiveness. These findings demonstrate conditioning of attitudes without awareness of their antecedents.
The use of different types of partial temporal information is shown to affect dating accuracy and the distribution of errors in event dating. Several different types of partial temporal information are discussed, but three are highlighted by the data. Specifically, subjects' dating error patterns suggest that they (1) use different types of within-week information, (2) use recalled event sequences, and (3) use boundary landmarks to report the dates of events. In general, these data suggest that although precise temporal information is sometimes represented in the memory trace for an event, more often the date-related information is inferred from other aspects of memory.
A diary methodology was used to assess factors related to temporal dating and cued recall of realworld events. In one diary, participants kept a record of unique personal autobiographical events. In a second diary, participants recorded unique events from the life of a friend or relation. At the time each event was recorded, participants rated the event's pleasantness, person typicality, and degree of initial mental involvement in the event. At the end of the academic quarter, participants provided a recall rating, a rehearsal rating, a date estimate, and a report of the strategy used to estimate the date for each event. Results of regression analyses indicated that both self-events and other-events were characterized by superior memory for person-atypical events. Furthermore, there was a positivity bias in recall for self-events, but there was a negativity bias in recall for other-events. Mediational analyses indicated that the self-event positivity bias was due to enhanced mental involvement when the events occurred, whereas the other-event negativity bias was due to subsequent event rehearsal. The date estimation results indicated that self-event dating was more accurate and evinced less telescoping than other-event dating. Furthermore, the accuracy of date estimates was substantially mediated by event memory. However, mediational differences between self-events and other-events did not emerge. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.Various aspects of memory for real-world events have recently received substantial empirical attention (see, e.g., G. Cohen, 1989;Conway, 1990). Two of the more active areas include memory for the content of real-world events (see, e.g., Robinson, 1992;Rubin, 1982 Rubin, , 1996 and memory for the dates on which events occurred (Friedman, 1993;Thompson, Skowronski, Larsen, & Betz, 1996). Because event dates are often reconstructed rather than recalled, and because the content of event memory is one of the prime sources of material for this reconstruction, our own research often has simultaneously collected information on both event memory and event dating (Skowronski, Betz, Thompson, & Larsen, 1995;Skowronski, Betz, Thompson, & Shannon, 1991;Thompson, Skowronski, & Betz, 1993).In one of our prior studies, we compared event memory and event dating for two types of autobiographical events: self-events and non-self events (Skowronski et al., 1991). The non-selfevents were the events ofclose friends or relatives of the study participants. Although previous We thank the students from The Ohio State University at Newark who helped to conduct the diary test sessions and to content-code the diary entries: Laura Shannon, Jeannie Rausch, Michelle Monroe, Mary McGovern, Robin Butler, and Julie Hott. We also thank Purdue University for facilities provided to the second author during the revision of this manuscript. Correspondence should be addressed to A. L. Betz, GTE Laboratories, Inc., 40 Sylvan Road, Waltham, MA 02254 (e-mail: abetz@gte.com). studies have investigated ...
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