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We examined face memory deficits in patients with Idiopathic Parkinson's disease (IPD) with specific regard to the moderating role of sex and the different memory processes involved. We tested short- and long-term face recognition memory in 18 nonclinical participants and 18 IPD-patients matched for sex, education and age. We varied the duration of item presentation (1, 5, 10s), the time of testing (immediately, 1hr, 24hrs) and the possibility to re-encode items. In accordance with earlier studies, we report face memory deficits in IPD. Moreover, our findings indicate that sex and encoding conditions may be important moderator variables. In contrast to healthy individuals, IPD-patients cannot gain from increasing duration of presentation. Furthermore, our results suggest that I PD leads to face memory deficits in women, only.
Two experiments examined the effects of dispositional optimism and attributions on feelings of success in a performance setting. In Experiment 1, participants successfully solved three cognitive tasks and attributed the success either internally (i.e., to themselves) or externally (i.e., to a teammate). We found no effect of optimism, but a significant effect of the attribution: Internal attribution predicted an increase in feelings of success. In Experiment 2, we replicated the design and adopted an extreme groups approach in order to include the extremes of the optimism dimension. Only optimism affected feelings of success in this sample: Pessimistic participants showed higher increases in feelings of success than optimistic participants. We conclude that optimism, if disentangled from attribution, may have an effect on affect, with pessimism showing potential affective benefits. However, this association may be concealed if samples with a restricted range of the optimism dimension are studied.