Our autobiographical self depends on the differential recollection of our personal past, notably including memories of morally laden events. Whereas both emotion and temporal recency are well known to influence memory, very little is known about how we remember moral events, and in particular about the distribution in time of memories for events that were blameworthy or praiseworthy. To investi...

Traumatic stress associated with childhood sexual abuse (CSA) may result in chronic alterations of stress-sensitive neurochemical systems (e.g., the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and sympathetic-adrenal medullary activity). Some authors have suggested that these alterations might help explain why some individuals, after a period of inability to remember, demonstrate delayed recall of CSA ...

Subjects hearing a list of associates to a nonpresented lure word later often claim to have heard the lure (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). To examine the characteristics of such false memories, subjects completed a memory characteristics questionnaire (MCQ; Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) or made remember/know (RK; Gardiner & Java, 1993) judgments for previously heard theme as...

In contrast to neutral events, emotionally arousing events often are remembered vividly and with great detail. Although generally adaptive to survival, this emotional memory enhancement may contribute to psychopathology. Blocking the arousal-related noradrenergic activity with a β blocker shortly after learning prevents the emotional enhancement of memory. In the present experiment, we tested i...

The investigation of medieval slavery is still rooted in an approach first laid down by the likes of Adam Smith and John Millar over two hundred years ago. They conceptualised history as a series of stages through which societies moved, driven by the motor of increasing economic sophistication. In this conceptualisation, slavery was an economic institution and its decline in Britain during the ...

“Slavery existed before money or law” (Hochschild 2005). Indeed the “peculiar institution” is one of humanity’s oldest. It has, however, evolved and manifested itself quite distinctly in different periods of history. In contrast to historical views of slavery that are associated with Chattel Slavery, numerous forms fall under the umbrella term of contemporary slavery. The United Nations (U.N.) ...