Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals-this has been termed the "verbal overshadowing" effect (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). More recent studies suggested that this effect might be substantially smaller than first reported. Given uncertainty about the effect size, the influence of this finding in the memory literature, and its practical importance for police procedures, we conducted two collections of preregistered direct replications (RRR1 and RRR2) that differed only in the order of the description task and a filler task. In RRR1, when the description task immediately followed the robbery, participants who provided a description were 4% less likely to select the robber than were those in the control condition. In RRR2, when the description was delayed by 20 min, they were 16% less likely to select the robber. These findings reveal a robust verbal overshadowing effect that is strongly influenced by the relative timing of the tasks. The discussion considers further implications of these replications for our understanding of verbal overshadowing.

No abstract

No abstract

Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the “puzzle of belief”: how people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with innate cognitive biases engendering, for example, the misattribution of intentional agency. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that nonbelievers often act “as if” they believe. For example, atheists are reluctant to sell the very souls they deny having, or to angrily provoke the God they explicitly state does not exist. In our own recent work, participants who claimed not to believe in the afterlife nevertheless demonstrated a physiological fear response when informed that there was a ghost in the room. Such findings are often interpreted as evidence for an “implicit” belief in the supernatural that operates alongside (and even in contradiction to) an individual’s conscious (“explicit”) religious belief. In this article, we investigate these arguably tenuous constructs more deeply and suggest some possible empirical directions for further disentangling implicit and explicit reasoning.

Objective: Depression has unfavourable effects on emotion perception, and potential downstream consequences on social functioning. However, it is not clear if depressed individuals themselves are aware of these effects. We explored the relation between the independent and interactive contributions of depressive symptoms and rumination on self-perceived emotion recognition ability. Method: Depressive symptoms and ruminative tendencies of 108 university students (54 females) were measured, and participants rated both their self-perceived ability to perceive emotion, and to recognize the change from one emotion to another, in other people. Results: Multiple regressions showed rumination and depressive symptoms both independently and interactively explain participants' beliefs about their emotion recognition skills but only among females. Female ruminators thought they were more accurate, whereas those with more severe depressive symptoms believed they were less accurate. Interestingly, the relation between rumination and accuracy depended on depressed mood, such that rumination predicted self-perceived emotion recognition to a greater extent as depression increased. The pattern of findings were weaker and non-significant for males. Conclusions: At least in women, both depression and rumination are, independently and interactively, correlated with self-perceived ability to recognize emotion. These findings have implications for both research and clinical practice. KEY POINTS What is already known about this topic:(1) Depression has detrimental effects on emotion recognition, and possible downstream effects on social functioning. (2) It is not known whether depressed individuals themselves are aware of the effects of depressive symptoms on their social interactions.(3) The tendency towards prolonged, repetitive thinking about one's own thoughts, feelings, and problems -termed rumination -might explain depression-related emotion recognition deficiencies. What this topic adds:(1) The current study examined the independent and interactive effects of depressive symptoms and rumination on self-perceived emotion recognition. Overall, results revealed main and interaction effects of rumination and depressive symptoms on self-perceived emotion recognition but only among females.(2) Inspection of interaction effects revealed that somewhat counterintuitively, females with higher levels of rumination reported greater self-perceived emotion recognition, controlling for depression. (3) Among females, more depressed individuals who tended not to ruminate reported the least competency in detecting the emotions of others. Put another way, the negative relation between depression and self-perceived emotion recognition is stronger when people do not ruminate.