Little previous research has examined the link between popular music and autobiographical memory. College-age participants recalled a memory associated with a song from each of five lifetime eras and then described and rated the memories. Participants heard part of the song, read the lyrics, saw a picture of the artist or began describing their memory immediately. Ratings for vividness, specificity, feeling brought back and feeling emotional in connection with the memory were all significantly different across lifetime eras. Differences also existed between sensory conditions in memory description length, feeling brought back and feeling emotional. However, hearing the song did not produce higher ratings than all the other sensory conditions. These findings show that music is a valuable cue to evoke autobiographical memory.

This paper addresses the current and potential impact of the outreach activities that engineering professional societies (and others) offer to children and young adults and describes how to advance the outreach state of the art by using methods and tools that most engineers routinely use in their technical projects but do not typically transfer to an outreach project: research, training, adoption of best practices, and awareness of user needs and culture. Also critical, assessment (establishing goals, identifying outcomes metrics, and evaluating success) is discussed in the companion paper "Outcomes-Based Assessment: Driving Outreach Program Effectiveness" published in this special issue. Specifically, the paper discusses challenges facing professional society outreach efforts; key and proven practices for outreach success, including assessment; and the use of social science research in designing outreach programs.

Engineering professional societies are leading and prominent providers of engineering outreach activities in the United States. Many outreach efforts are innovative and impressive, but their ability to raise awareness about engineering and recruit more people to study engineering remains largely unknown. Comprehensive assessment and evaluation results that measure how effective these program activities are in meeting their goals and objectives simply are not available. Using the example of an engineering outreach program for high school girls, this paper describes good outreach practices, including use of proven practices and relevant research, effective assessment, and reports of outcomes; provides resources for tools that outreach professionals and practitioners can use to measure and continuously improve outreach impact; and makes the case that application of good engineering practice to outreach delivery is essential to reach engineering professional society outreach goals.L e a d e r s h i p a n d M a n a g e m e n t

The purpose of the current research was twofold. First, a pilot study was conducted in which participants were asked to recall any memorable gay or lesbian television or film character and complete a survey about their perceptions of the character. Results indicated that over two-thirds of heterosexual participants recalled either Ellen or Will, and evaluative ratings for these characters were generally positive. The second purpose of this research was to examine the priming effects of remembering portrayals of homosexual characters in the media. Therefore, an experiment was conducted to directly assess the effects of thinking about either a positive or negative homosexual character on general heterosexuals' attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. Results indicated that those recalling a positive portrayal later showed a more positive attitude toward gay men than those recalling a negative portrayal, and women had a more positive attitude overall than men toward gay men and lesbians. Such findings illustrate the importance of positive role models in entertainment media as potential primes of social attitudes.

Summary: Workload refers to the amount of cognitive resources necessary to perform a task, and it can be manipulated by incorporating secondary tasks into a primary task such as driving. The present study incorporated answering a phone and removing a plastic bottle top into a driving task for teen drivers. Results showed few performance differences between driving with and without distractions, although subjective workload did increase for the drive that included distractions compared to the non-distraction drive. This indicates that teens may be able to maintain driving performance while performing secondary tasks, although their workload appears to increase.