Sharon Bertsch

• University of Pittsburgh

The influence of listening to music on subsequent spatial rotation scores has a controversial history. The effect is unreliable, seeming to depend on several as yet unexplored factors. Using a large sample (167 women, 160 men; M age = 18.9 yr.), two related variables were investigated: participants' sex and the emotion conveyed by the music. Partic...

Oswald and Wu (2010; Science) recently reported life satisfaction ranks for residents of the 50 U.S. states. Their rankings were framed as measures of “well-being,” but were derived from responses to only a single survey item (“In general, how satisfied are you with your life?”). Here we contrast Oswald and Wu's subjective rankings with our (Pesta,...

Well-being is a construct spanning multiple disciplines including psychology, economics, health, and public policy. In many ways, well-being is a nexus of inter-correlated variables, much like the g nexus. Here, we created an index of well-being for the geographical and political subdivisions of the United States (i.e., states). The measure resulte...

Lynn, Harvey and Nyborg [Lynn, R., Harvey, J., & Nyborg, H. (in press). Average intelligence predicts atheism rates across 137 nations. Doi:10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.004.] discovered that average intelligence (IQ) co-varies with national atheism rates. Extending this work, we investigated relationships among individual IQ scores, elementary cognitiv...

It has been established in the animal literature that context generalization gradients flatten over time-performance of a learned behavior is more likely to be expressed in novel situations after longer retention intervals. We attempted to extend this finding to stimulus generalization among human participants. One hundred twenty participants were...

Whether males and females differ in general mental ability (GMA) remains an open question. Complicating the issue is that standardized IQ tests are constructed to minimize sex differences. We propose a potential solution whereby GMA is measured via performance on elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs). ECTs assess basic information-processing ability, y...

The generation effect refers to the finding that subjects who generate information (e.g., produce synonyms) remember the information better than they do material that they simply read. Meta-analytic techniques were used to summarize 445 effect sizes over 86 studies, thereby assessing the magnitude and 11 potential moderators of the generation effec...

Episodic or context dependent memory is often studied as a function of the context cues in immediate retrieval of target information. Little research has been done on how the relationship of context cues to target retrieval changes over time, and none with older adult subjects. The current research investigated how the influence of context on accur...

This experiment had two purposes: investigation of the effect of variability in the content used during training on concept learning, retention, and transfer and the extent to which this training manipulation interacts with age. Participants were 27 older adults (M = 68.2 yr., SD = 7.4) and 54 younger adults (M = 20.6 yr., SD = 4.0) who were asked...

"August, 2000." Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Akron, Dept. of Psychology, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-64).