Anemia in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and the Potential Role of Iron Deficiency.

The purpose of this review is to evaluate the role of anemia on patient outcomes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the potential contribution that low iron stores may play in this process, and possible treatment considerations. A review of research studies found that anemia is associated with declining functional outcomes, increased health care utilization and costs, and increased mortality in COPD. Associations exist between reduced iron intake and progression of COPD and in reduction of iron status with declining lung function.

Emotional salience and the isolation effect.

When a homogeneous list contains a few items that are different from the rest of the items in the list, these isolated items show enhanced recall compared to the same items in a list where these items are not isolated. This phenomenon, known as the isolation effect, has been explained on the basis of isolated items eliciting salience. In this experiment, negative pictures and neutral pictures were isolated at the early and late part of the list.

Preattentive processing, poststimulus elaboration, and memory for emotionally arousing stimuli.

Christianson (1992) proposed two mechanisms to explain emotionally enhanced memory: preattentive processing and poststimulus elaboration. Experiment 1 examined these processes by instructing participants to perform (1) a concurrent distractor task, (2) a continuous distractor task, or (3) both while viewing the negatively arousing, positively arousing, and neutral pictures. Recall of negatively arousing pictures showed a small decline in one of the distractor conditions, indicating that elaboration plays a minor role in remembering these pictures.