As we go to press for the latest edition of African Literature Today, we hear of the passing of Marjorie Jones, wife of legendary scholar and critic of African literature, Professor Eldred Jones, on Sunday, 6 September in Freetown, Sierra Leone, at the age of 89. Marjorie was an active participant in the African literary field in her own right and not just the wife of a pioneer critic and scholar of African literature. Readers of African Literature Today will recall that when Eldred Jones was Editor and Eustace Palmer Associate Editor, Marjorie served as Editorial Assistant for the journal. This was in the pre-computer age, and it meant that she was responsible for re-typing all the articles and reviews accepted for publication in the journal and playing a very important role during the proofreading process. When Eustace Palmer left Sierra Leone for the United States in 1992, she and Eldred Jones virtually co-edited the journal until Ernest Emenyonu took over as Editor. What some may not know is that for the last thirty years or so Eldred has been completely blind and Marjorie has been literally his eyes. That meant that Marjorie read all the articles and reviews submitted to the journal to him, and therefore played a very important role in deciding what should be published. She helped to compose the editorials, and was instrumental in seeing each edition of the journal through the publication process. She thus played an unforgettable role in shaping the destiny of African Literature Today, and ensured its continuation even during the years of Sierra Leone's civil war.

As Eldred was blind, Marjorie had to read all new publications he was interested in to him. She thus became very well read and very highly informed herself. I remember a very notable incident when Syl Cheney-Coker published his massive novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar. At the launching ceremony in Freetown, Eldred Jones was asked to be the keynote speaker and to give his views of the book, which he did superbly. This meant that Marjorie must have read the whole of that extensive novel to Eldred, and read it so well that Eldred was able to give an informed opinion of it which he was able to share with his Sierra Leonean audience.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, exposed every person in the USA to an experience that, in recent decades, was unprecedented in its scope and traumatic impact. Perhaps over 100,000 individuals directly witnessed these events, and many others viewed the attacks and their aftermath via the media (Yehuda, 2002). It has been argued that this national trauma “influenced and will continue to influence the clinical presentation of patients seeking health care services” in the USA (Yehuda, 2002, p. 108).

A wide range of responses can be expected following traumatic life events. Research conducted after the Oklahoma City, OK, bombing indicates that responses to a terrorist attack are likely to be highly variable (North et al., 1999). Research in the broader field of stress and coping has also demonstrated considerable variability in emotional and cognitive responses to stressful experiences (Silver & Wortman, 1980;Wortman & Silver, 1989, 2001). Despite advances in understanding reactions to traumatic events, our understanding of responses to community-level events in general, and terror attacks in particular, is limited. Progress in understanding the social and psychological process following such occurrences requires examination of how responses to a variety of stressful events are similar and different at both the group and individual level. Research has matured to the point that large-scale, prospective, longitudinal studies with the scope to examine mediators and moderators of adjustment processes are not only possible, but also necessary (North & Pfefferbaum, 2002). Moreover, the threat of future terrorist attacks demands that a higher level of urgency and research sophistication be directed not only at understanding the effects of such attacks, but also at the individual and social variables that predict psychological outcomes to such events over time.

As technological advances lead to more understanding of the brain, or the “hardware” of human thought, the importance of understanding the “software” that is, cognitive functions, has become even more important. There has been progress in the cognitive sciences in understanding the basic processes of cognition and how these processes relate to the operations and behaviors of the organism in the environment. Among the most intensely studied processes are those relating to attention and working memory (e.g., inhibition, updating, and coordination) and higher level cognitive abilities such as planning, reasoning, comprehension, and problem solving, which are attributed to circuits associated with the brain's frontal lobe. One reason for this accelerating interest is the rapid progress in those areas of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience that focus on working memory and neuroimaging research (Andrade, 2001; Cabeza & Nyberg, 2000; Davidson, Pizzagalli, Nitschke, & Putnam, 2002; Gazzaniga, Ivry, & Mangum, 1998; Logie & Gilhooly, 1999; Miyake & Shah, 1999; Richardson et al., 1996). Another reason for this surge of interest is that many populations, such as older adults (Craik & Salthouse, 2000; Perfect & Maylor, 2000; Rabbitt, 1997), persons with emotional disorders (Hertel, 1997; von Hecker & Sedek, 1999; Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1997), and individuals with brain injuries (Waltz et al., 1999), have demonstrated cognitive limitations with respect to attention, working memory, and other so-called executive functions.

After a brief presentation of this book's structure and the questions that served to organize the material, we describe the basic research paradigms used in the research from the various chapters. The essence of the theoretical models and the value of empirical evidence is best articulated by the authors of thematic chapters, so we do not summarize them here. However, we do not want arcane terminology or a lack of knowledge of the specific methods on the reader's part to prevent researchers outside of the area from understanding the ideas presented here. Therefore, to make the material more accessible to students and to researchers outside mainstream cognitive psychology, we offer a brief tutorial on the various methods.

At the outset of this project, we tried to preserve an integrative approach by explicitly asking each author to address the same questions. The following set of issues and questions was proposed to be addressed by all authors:

Question 1: Which cognitive functions are the focus of your research? In response to this question, authors either provided a description of their own original models of working memory or executive functions, or they elaborated on more specialized executive functions or processes such as inhibition, attention control, or reasoning that they investigated. Authors were asked to review in the general introduction of their chapter the most important theoretical approaches related to their own field before presenting their approach in detail.

What is a helpless mind to do? Extending previous work noting parallels between cognitive impairments in depression and after preexposure to uncontrollability (Cox, Enns, Borger, & Parker, 1999; Flett, Vredenburg, & Krames, 1997; Hartlage, Alloy, Vazquez, & Dykman, 1993; Healy & Williams, 1988; Seligman, 1978), we present in this chapter new evidence that the mind switches to a simpler, less effortful “Plan B.” In examining the pattern of performance of complex cognitive tasks observed among helpless or depressed participants, we observe that this lowered level of performance is still clearly above the threshold of random or chaotic behavior. In our presentation of previous and new experimental evidence, we are guided by the view that the switch to the less efficient, but still not chaotic, performance (i.e., a switch to a cognitive exhaustion state, see Kofta & Sedek, 1998; von Hecker, Sedek, & McIntosh, 2000; von Hecker & Sedek, 1999) might represent an adaptive way of adjusting to prolonged uncontrollability and might also describe characteristic aspects of cognitive functioning in depression. In these states, there are not merely decrements across all measures, but instead there are impairments specifically in higher-order processes.

After we recall the origins of uncontrollability research, we unpack our perspective first by noting the similar pattern of cognitive deficits after exposure to uncontrollability among two very smart, although completely different, populations: laboratory rats and high school students. We then describe the cognitive exhaustion model of uncontrollability and depression and briefly summarize existing research evidence.