Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task and E. Tulving's (1985) remember-know judgments for recognition memory, the authors explored whether emotional words can show the false memory effect. Participants studied lists containing nonemotional, orthographic associates (e.g., cape, tape, ripe; part, perk, dark) of either emotional (e.g., rape) or nonemotional (e.g., park) critical lures. This setup produced significant false "remembering" of emotional lures, even though initially no emotional words appeared at study. When 3 emotional nonlure words appeared at study, emotional-lure false recognition more than doubled. However, when these 3 study words also appeared on the recognition test, false memory for the emotional lures was reduced. Across experiments, participants misremembered nonemotional lures more often than they did emotional lures, but they were more likely to rate emotional lures as "remembered," once they had been recognized as "old." The authors discuss findings in light of J. J. Freyd and D. H. Gleave's (1996) criticisms of this task.

College age (mean age 20 years) and older adults (mean age 69 years) were asked to predict their memory spans and to indicate readiness to recall sets of line drawings in Experiment 1. Although no age differences were found in span prediction accuracy, clear differences were obtained in recall readiness. When given unlimited study time with sets of items matched in difficulty, young adults chose to study longer and then recalled more accurately than did older adults. In Experiment 2 the recall of a chunking and rehearsal trained group of older adults was better than that of a control group given standard instructions. However, the best recall was obtained in a group required to take extra study time but given no strategy training. The older adult recall readiness deficit may thus not have been due to lack of available memory strategies. Instead, we hypothesize that older adults may have failed to monitor their readiness to recall so that they did not know how long to study.

Two psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted to examine overlapping processing in younger and older adults. A shape discrimination task (triangle or rectangle) for Task 1 (T 1) and a lexical-decision task (word or nonword) for Task 2 (T 2) were used. PRP effects, response time for T 2 increasing as stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) decreased, were obtained for both age groups. The effect of word frequency on T 2 was smaller at the short SOA than at the long SOA, reflecting slack effects, which were larger for older than younger adults in both experiments. These results suggest that older adults can perform lexical access of T 2 in parallel with the processing of T 1 at least as efficiently as younger adults.

Contrast effects have been found to be a potentially serious source of error in interviewers' ratings of job applicants. A series of experiments was conducted in an attempt to eliminate these errors. Use of a warning in the first experiment was not successful. Use of an anchoring treatment in the second experiment was equally unsuccessful. Combining and strengthening the warning and anchor treatments in the. third experiment also failed, revealing that contrast effects are a surprisingly tenacious source of rating error. Finally, in the fourth experiment, an intensive workshop incorporating basic learning principles was successful in eliminating contrast effects as well as some other sources of interviewer error.

Older and younger adults were asked to think aloud while studying sets of pictures matched in difficulty for immediate serial recall. When instructed only to remember, young adults tended to study longer, rehearse more, and recall better than did older adults on the most difficult lists. Young adults were also much more likely to spontaneously test themselves during study in the most difficult condition. Older adult groups instructed either to study longer or to self-test, both showed improved recall. Only the older adults who had been instructed to self-monitor, however, recalled better on tests of short-term maintenance and generalization; overt rehearsal data showed that these older adults continued to test themselves. Metamemory deficits may be present with older adults when a strategy, like self-testing, is needed to generate metamemorial knowledge. Strategies such as self-testing can be easily taught, however, and they hold promise of being useful across situations.