The patterns of mood-congruent encoding effect (MCE) in self- and other-referent judgments were investigated. Subjects were sequentially presented single words from a list of pleasant or unpleasant trait adjective words after inducing a positive, negative or neutral mood by music. In Experiment 1, they were then required to decide whether each word described themselves (in self-referent judgment) or their mother (in other-referent judgment). In Experiment 2, subjects were required to decide whether each word described a liked, disliked, or neutral friend (in other-referent judgment). An incidental free recall test followed the task. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that MCE in a positive mood was observed in self- and other-referent judgments, however, MCE in a negative mood was observed only in self-referent judgment. It is suggested that the self-reference might strengthen MCE in a negative mood and positive and negative moods have different influences on memory of affective information.

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As reported in Yip (2004), the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC), a mechanism proposed by Norris, McQueen, Cutler, and Butterfield (1997), could effectively operate in Cantonese speech segmentation. In this study, a word-spotting experiment was conducted to further examine how the mechanism works in segmenting Cantonese speech. In the word-spotting experiment, listeners were asked to spot out the target Cantonese word from a series of nonsense sound strings. In general, results suggested that listeners found it more difficult to spot out the target Cantonese word [po:k³si:⁶] from the nonsense sound strings, which attached or embedded with a single consonant context [npo:k³si:⁶], than from the nonsense sound strings, which attached or embedded with either a vowel context [a:¹po:k³si:⁶] or a pseudo-syllable context [khi:m¹po:k³si:⁶]. Different locations of the context (initial; intermediate; final) produced different degrees of interference effects. Together with my previous findings, the present results further supported that the PWC appears to be a useful mechanism in segmenting Cantonese speech.

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This study examines the effect of irrelevant speech effect on a serial recall task, focusing on individual difference indexes, such as introversion/extraversion, field dependence/independence, and reading span. A foreign language (Spanish) and pink noise were used as auditory distractor stimuli. The results demonstrate that the irrelevant speech effect is robust and causes a fixed increase in the number of serial recall errors, irrespective of the individual difference indexes, such as introversion/extraversion, field dependence/independence. On the other hand, the serial recall performance itself was related to both introversion/extraversion and field dependence/independence. The results are interpreted as suggesting that while the irrelevant speech effect mainly reflects the functioning of phonological loop, the performance of serial recall may depend more on the functioning of the central executive, which may differ between introverts and extraverts and between field dependents and field independents. Further examination from this perspective may serve to clarify the mechanism by which the irrelevant speech effect occurs and its relation to the individual differences of performance in various cognitive tasks.

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This study examined the effects of criterion shift on false memory by manipulating payoff types and participants’ expectations about the probability of target words occurring in the recognition test. Participants in Experiment 1 received different sets of instructions that emphasized the negative consequence of either misses or false alarms. Results showed no changes in false recognition when the focus was on false alarm avoidance. In Experiment 2, the experimental groups studied the target words, whereas the control groups did not see any of the target words during the study phase. Both groups were also told that the probability of target words appearing in the recognition test was either one third or two thirds. Changes in the instructions did not affect performance of the experimental group, but had a large effect on performance of the control groups. Overall results of this study support the memory sensitivity view of false memory.

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