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Tracy P. Alloway is a Professor of Psychology at the University of North Florida. Formerly she was the Director of the Center for Memory and Learning in the Lifespan at an institution in the United Kingdom. She has spent almost 15 years being part of cutting-edge research on the importance of working memory in education. In addition to publishing scientific articles, she has also written numerous books for academics, educators and the general public on the importance of working memory. She developed the internationally recognized Alloway Working Memory Assessment. Working memory has become a key construct in the psychological and intellectual literature over the past few decades. In this interview, Dr. Alloway discusses some key issues and reviews some of her research in this realm.
NAJP: What research are you currently working on?
TA: I'm working on a number of different projects. My main research interest is in working memory, which is our ability to work with information. I recently just submitted a paper looking at working memory and mental health, so we had a large scale study. We had a little over three-thousand adults across a life-span of eighteen to seventy-nine. We wanted to find out how our sense of optimism or our feelings of depression are all related to working memory. For example, we found that working memory mediates the optimism and depression, which simply means that how optimistic we are, is determined by our working memory, which in turn can impact our feelings of depression. In other words, working memory helps us focus on more positive outcomes in our lives, and this, in turn, can minimize feelings of depression. That's one of the projects that I'm currently working on.
There are a number of other projects related to working memory that I've been looking at, one of which is the role of working memory when it comes to moral decisions. This is a project that I'm working on with my husband, Ross Alloway. We've published a couple of pieces of research together already (Alloway & Alloway, 2010; 2012; 2013a), and there's been one or two pieces of research that looked at when people are making moral decisions, you know these kinds of apocalyptic scenarios, would you sacrifice one person for the...