Exceptional achievement and early parental loss: the phaeton effect in American writers, presidents, and eminent individuals.

This study explored predictions made from Lucille Iremonger's Phaeton theory (1970), which argues that individuals who show exceptional personal achievement in certain fields frequently have experienced childhoods that were marked by parental loss through death and desertion. Three groups were examined: eminent American writers, presidents of the USA, and the 100 Americans who were judged by Life magazine to have been the most influential in 20th century society. Bereavement was common in the childhoods of these outstanding individuals, but was also high, or even higher, for those individuals who achieved somewhat less eminence (less successful writers, and presidential also-rans).

Is intelligence enhanced by letter priming? A failure to replicate the results of Ciani and Sheldon (2010).

Previous research has suggested that motivational processes outside an individual's conscious awareness may be primed so as to enhance or impair cognitive performance. The present study involved a conceptual replication of the 2010 study of Ciani and Sheldon (Experiments 1 and 2), employing the same materials and task, to test whether exposure to the letter A before an analogies test improved performance and the letter F impaired it, relative to the neutral letter J. It also examined the effect of pre-exposing participants before testing to a positive or negative verbal passage concerning letter grades.

People, clothing, music, and arousal as contextual retrieval cues in verbal memory.

Four experiments (N = 164) on context-dependent memory were performed to explore the effects on verbal memory of incidental cues during the test session which replicated specific features of the learning session. These features involved (1) bystanders, (2) the clothing of the experimenter, (3) background music, and (4) the arousal level of the subject. Social contextual cues (bystanders or experimenter clothing) improved verbal recall or recognition.

Effects of size congruency on item and size recognition with words or pictures.

The effect of size changes (8:1 or 1:8) between learning and recognition sessions upon item and size recognition was tested, using either pictures or words as stimuli. Participants (N = 34) viewed color photographs of everyday objects or the corresponding printed words and then performed 160 trials of a recognition task, including 50% new stimuli, for which they had to indicate whether each item had been seen before and whether its size had changed. Item recognition, for pictures only, was improved by size congruency between the learning and test sessions.

Recognition memory for concrete, regular abstract, and diverse abstract pictures.

Based on previous research by Goldstein and Chance in which poor recognition memory for abstract visual patterns was reported, this study compared recognition memory for pictures of everyday concrete objects, regular abstract stimuli as employed by Goldstein and Chance, and diverse abstract stimuli. A (3) x 2 design (stimulus type x test order) analysis of variance design was used. The subjects (N = 31) first viewed 30 target stimuli, followed by an immediate recognition test in which for 30 paired target and distractor stimuli shown they indicated which one they had seen previously.

Demand characteristics of music affect performance on the Wonderlic Personnel Test Of Intelligence.

This study examined whether demand characteristics concerning music can change subjects' performance on the Wonderlic Personnel Test of intelligence. Participants (N= 60) were randomly assigned and informed either that Mozart's music typically enhances cognitive performance or diminishes it. They then completed the Wonderlic Personnel Test while listening to a Mozart piano sonata.

Can business and economics students perform elementary arithmetic?

Business and economics majors (N=146) were tested on the D'Amore Test of Elementary Arithmetic, which employs third-grade test items from 1932. Only 40% of the subjects passed the test by answering 10 out of 10 items correctly. Self-predicted scores were a good predictor of actual scores, but performance was not associated with demographic variables, grades in calculus courses, liking for science or computers, or mathematics anxiety.