Twenty-four college and 37 elderly women kept diaries for six weeks, at the end of which they voluntarily submitted them for analysis. The college women selected significantly more emotions for their dreams than did the elderly women. Enjoyment-joy accounted for a significantly higher proportion of emotions in dreams of elderly than in those of college women; but anger-rage and fear-terror occurred significantly less often in dreams of the elderly. The results were interpreted as providing support for the continuity hypothesis which states that dream content is a reflection of one's daily life.

At the end of 6 wk., 37 elderly women turned in 145 dream narratives and accompanying emotions. Approximately two emotions were used to describe each dream; enjoyment, surprise, distress, confusion, interest, and fear accounted for 86% of all dream emotions. The emotions of disgust, anger, shame, and contempt were infrequently reported by these elderly persons. The dreams associated with the retirement life style of the elderly exhibited pleasant as well as unpleasant emotions.

The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of depth of processing as it applies to the retention of meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary words. College students viewed 20 target words with definitions for 60 sec. each. 14 subjects in the rote group wrote the word and its definition; the semantic group of 34 wrote sentences using the target word and the pronouns he, she, it, or they; and the 30 self-referencing subjects wrote sentences using the target word and the pronouns I or me. All groups were tested for recall of the word meanings at 5 min. and 3 wk. At 5 min., self-referencing produced significantly higher retention than semantic and semantic was higher than rote. At 3 wk., there was no difference in retention between the processing groups. Reasons for the lack of a long-term effect were discussed.