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474This study demonstrates six interrelated effects of emotion on attention and memory. The main one is the taboo Stroop effect: When people name the color of randomly intermixed taboo and neutral words, color-naming times are longer for taboo than for neutral words (Siegrist, 1995). The taboo Stroop effect shares characteristics with two other effects, known as the clinical and the emotional Stroop effects. The clinical Stroop effect occurs when patients with a particular affective disorder (e.g., spiderphobia) name the colors of words that are either phobia related (e.g., web) or phobia unrelated (e.g., wet): Colornaming times are longer for the patients than for the normal controls, but only for the phobia-related words (e.g., Dalgleish & Watts, 1990;Mathews & MacLeod, 1985;Richards & Millwood, 1989;Watts, McKenna, Sharrock, & Tresize, 1986). However, unlike taboo Stroop effects, which are robust across experimental contexts and are not confined to individuals suffering from clinical disorders, clinical Stroop effects (for a review, see Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996) are often small, difficult to replicate (see MacLeod & Hodder, 1998), context specific (e.g., readily observable with blocked, but not with randomly intermixed, emotional and unemotional words; see Richards, French, Johnson, Naparstek, & Williams, 1992), and variable (e.g., holding for some types of clinical traits and emotional disorders, but not for others; see Matthews & Harley, 1996).A closer relative of the taboo Stroop effect is the emotional Stroop effect, the fact that people take longer to name the color of unpleasant words (e.g., grief, fail, fear, and death) than that of neutral words (see, e.g., Sharma & McKenna, 2001;Whalen et al., 1998). Unlike taboo Stroop effects, time pressure (240 msec or less between prior response and subsequent color word) may be essential for observing emotional Stroop effects (see Sharma & McKenna, 2001). Moreover, the label emotional Stroop effect may be inappropriate: Repeated failures to demonstrate emotional Stroop effects for pleasant words suggest that negative affect, rather than emotionality per se, may underlie emotional Stroop effects (see McKenna & Sharma, 1995;Richards & Millwood, 1989). Despite these complications, clinical and emotional Stroop effects have stimulated development of a global resource theory of emotion and attention, which we will outline next in order to frame the general issues that motivated the present experiments.Under the theory, emotional reactions "soak up processing resources" (Bower, 1992, p. 17), and clinical and emotional Stroop effects occur when limited-capacity attentional resources are allocated to threatening stimuli, thereby reducing resources available for processing and responding to other stimuli (e.g., font color). If one applies this basic logic to taboo words, by attracting attentional resources, taboo words will slow down color naming, rela- This article reports five experiments demonstrating theoretically coherent effects of emotion on memory and a...

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Abstract-Spoonerisms are defined as involuntary rearrangements of elements in the serial order of speech, as when waste the term is produced as taste the werm. An analysis of 124 Spoonerisms in the natural speech of Germans showed that:1. Identical phonemes usually preceded (or followed) the reversed phonemes. 2. Reversals preceding identical phonemes were as common as reversals following identical phonemes. / 3. Reversed phonemes usually had similar articulatory form, i.e. voicing, nasality, open ness, and syllabic position were usually similar. But the place of articulation of reversed phonemes differed more frequently than would be expected by chance.Without serious revision chain-association theories appeared incapable of explaining these and other aspects of Spoonerisms. An alternative theory of serial order was proposed which had potential application not only to the pronunciation of words, but to the syntax of other forms of behavior and perception as well.

, 1987, 233 pages Donald G. MacKay's monograph --in line with the current Zeitgeist--is a theoretical contribution to the effort to overcome the increasing difficulty of explaining behavior in terms of"boxological" models. Box-models, in fact, fall to accommodate flexible changes and adaptations of every kind of processing device. It is this variability that produces answer-inconsistency and post-lesional features of neuropsychological performance. The hundred-year-old use of "boxes" (ie rigid segmentations of essentially sequential processings similar to biochemical steps in a metabolic pathway) harks back to the first steps of Neuropsychology, that is to those of cognitive positivism that inspired the Wemicke (1874) --Lichrheim (1885) anatomo-psychological aphasia model and the more complex psychoanalytical theorizations. Modern cognitive psychology resumed this approach with the aim of fiUing out the black box of behaviorism with sequences of processing steps that act as inter-related working hypotheses for subsequent goal-directed experiments. Popular instances are the psychological box models for memory developed by Waugh and Norman (1965), Atkinson and Shiffrin (1972) and many others, particularly in the linguistic domain. MacKay models psychological processing in connectionistic terms, with perception as input and action/language as output taking a probabilistic path through interconnected "nodes". In MacKay's and in other models of this kind nodes and connections are loaded by "weights", whose variability controls and directs the quality of processing from input to output. The weights change autonomously according --inter alia --to quantitative features of the incoming information over long periods of time. Again the metaphor with the inihibitory/excitatory features of synapses should be avoided. Nodes and connections gradually master more and more complex cognitive performances, the network learning to produce highly sophisticated and flexible answers. This is nowadays much more than armchair speculation. Actually, artificial devices with the above properties are already in operation, providing an opportunity for routh simulation of the degraded performances of a brain-damage patient. Such simulations are studied on ad hoc"damaged" artificial devices (see Karalyn Patterns, Cambridge, research on the Seidenberg-McClelland, Montreal, model of spelling-to-sound transformation in reading). They are even capable of producing the phenomen response-inconsistency of current neuropsychological evidence. All this and much more belongs to every kind of connectionistic modelling of processing, not only to MacKay's (see "Connectionistic models and neuropsychological phenomena", chaired by Tun Shallice, Cambridge, 6th European Workshop on Cognitive Neuropsychology, Brixen, Italy, 24-29 January 1988). Unfortunately, many of these experimental aspects are not considered in MacKay's book.MacKay's "Node Structure Theroy" (NST) is a general theory of skilled behavior in speech, perception and action that, like many other ...

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