Kitty Klein

North Carolina State University | NCSU · Department of Psychology

Narrative coherence is an important concept in studies of how people come to understand and cope with negative or stressful events in their lives. In three studies we compare two approaches to the measurement of narrative coherence: the percentage of cognitive words and a holistic definition based on criteria indexing the degree to which a story pr...

In three related experiments, 250 participants rated properties of their autobiographical memory of a very negative event before and after writing about either their deepest thoughts and emotions of the event or a control topic. Levels of emotional intensity of the event, distress associated with the event, intrusive symptoms, and other phenomenolo...

Cognitive-emotional distinctiveness (CED), the extent to which an individual separates emotions from an event in the cognitive representation of the event, was explored in four studies. CED was measured using a modified multidimensional scaling procedure. The first study found that lower levels of CED in memories of the September 11 terrorist attac...

We investigated the costs of suppressing emotional and nonemotional memories, as evidenced in response times on a concurrent sentence verification task with three levels of syntactic complexity. Participants suppressing memories of personal negative experiences (n=26) had slower response times compared to the control group (n=23) and to participant...

The authors investigated how word use in a stressful narrative is related to levels of grief and intrusive and avoidant thinking associated with the stressful event. A total of 218 college students who had experienced the breakup of a romantic relationship during the preceding 12 months produced a written narrative of the relationship and subsequen...

Current theories on autobiographical memory and recent neurological evidence suggest that emotional and non-emotional features of a memory may be retrieved by separate systems. To test this notion, 207 participants who had experienced the break-up of a significant romantic relationship in the last 12 months completed a Multidimensional Scaling (MDS...

The effect of emotional disclosure through expressive writing on available working memory (WM) capacity was examined in 2 semester-long experiments. In the first study, 35 freshmen assigned to write about their thoughts and feelings about coming to college demonstrated larger working memory gains 7 weeks later compared with 36 writers assigned to a...

The relationship between life stress and working memory capacity (WM) was examined in three studies. Participants with more life event stress performed more poorly on Turner and Engle's (1989) operation-word span WM task, and this impairment was more pronounced on longer operations. Life event stress also predicted intrusion errors. Finally, self-r...

The present study explored the psychometric properties of Turner and Engle's (1989) operation span task, a widely used measure of working memory capacity. We administered the task three times to 33 college students, using equivalent test materials. The interval between the first and second administrations was 3 weeks, with 6-7 weeks between the sec...

To examine the hypothesis that a fixed-capacity information-processing model (Kahneman, 1973) can be used to explain the relationship between problem-solving errors and life stress as moderated by state anxiety and private body consciousness (PBC; Miller, Murphy & Buss, 1981), we administered a series of simple (two-term) and more complex (three-te...

I. L. Janis and L. Mann's (1977) model was used to study the relationship of naturally occurring life stress and private body consciousness (PBC; L. Miller et al, 1981) to decision making. Students ( N = 61) performed an analogies task developed by G. Keinan (1987). Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that performance quality could be explai...

We conducted three experiments to investigate: (a) the extent to which student research participants believe they will disclose details of their experiences, (b) how much subjects actually will disclose immediately following a request not to reveal information, and (c) how much they will disclose after a 2-week interval. Disclosure rates increased...

Three experiments, with 98 undergraduates, investigated the effects of increasing task difficulty and noise intensity on postnoise persistence on the Feather tolerance for frustration puzzles. In Exp I, greater persistence occurred both after exposure to moderate noise levels (55 db [A]) and an easy perceptual-motor task and after high noise levels...

Two experiments were conducted to investigate how racial bias affects juror decision making. Three sources of bias were studied: (1) prior probabilities of guilt, (2) distortion of the meaning of evidence, and (3) differential weighting of information. A paired comparison technique employed in the first study revealed that pretrial probabilities of...

A modified role-playing technique was employed to examine the effects of no information, misinformation, and correct information on discomfort during imagined dental treatment. After listening to relaxation instructions, subjects read a scenario in which they were given no expectancy, led to expect a filling replacement (mild threat), or led to exp...

In recent years the college dormitory has become a popular setting for examining chronic effects of crowding and high density in humans. Possible differences between corridor- and suite-type residents were investigated to examine the degree to which corridor- and suite-design dormitories influence assertive behavior of the residents. It was hypothe...

The experiment utilized a 2 (high vs. low room density) X 2 (forewarning of a crowded room vs. no forewarning) X 2 (simple vs. complex task) design to examine the effects of anticipation of crowding on task performance. More tasks were attempted and efficiency was higher when expectancies about the crowd were confirmed. Subjects not told to anticip...

Tested predictions from the 2nd author's cognitive space model of memory which differentiates levels of semantic processing and posits (a) that word meaning is specified in the cognitive space by the intersection of a set of relevant attribute dimensions and (b) that word recall will be facilitated to the extent that the relevant attribute dimensio...

Integrates theory and data from social, cognitive, and clinical psychological perspectives to propose that writing has sizable effects on fundamental cognitive processes, in addition to its effects on health outcomes. The author further discusses the importance of such processes for behavior and speculates on how these cognitive changes may ultimat...