The effect of cognitive reappraisal on long‐term emotional experience and emotional memory

One's ability to properly regulate emotion is critical to psychological and physical well‐being. Among various strategies to regulate emotion, cognitive reappraisal has been shown to modulate both emotional experience and emotional memory. However, most studies of reappraisal have focused on reappraisal of negative situations, with reappraisal of positive emotion receiving considerably less attention. In addition, the effects of reappraisal on emotional reactions to stimuli are typically only assessed either immediately or after a short delay, and it remains unclear whether reappraisal effects persist over longer time periods. We investigated the effect of cognitive reappraisal on emotional reactions and long‐term episodic memory for positive and negative stimuli. Men and women viewed emotionally negative, positive, and neutral pictures while they were instructed to either increase, decrease, or maintain the initial emotional reactions elicited by the pictures. Subjective ratings of emotional valence and arousal were assessed during the regulation task and again after 1 week. Memory for the pictures was assessed with free recall. Results indicated that pictures accompanied by instructions to increase emotion were better recalled than pictures reappraised to decrease emotion. Modulation of emotional arousal elicited by stimuli persisted over a week, but this effect was observed only for men. These findings suggest that cognitive reappraisal can have long‐lasting effects on emotional reactions to stimuli. However, the sex differences observed for the effects of reappraisal on emotional reactions highlight the importance of considering individual differences in the effects of regulation.     

Causal Networks or Causal Islands? The Representation of Mechanisms and the Transitivity of Causal Judgment

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge—an interconnected causal network, where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms—causal islands—such that events in different mechanisms are not thought to be related even when they belong to the same causal chain. To distinguish these possibilities, we tested whether people make transitive judgments about causal chains by inferring, given A causes B and B causes C, that A causes C. Specifically, causal chains schematized as one chunk or mechanism in semantic memory (e.g., exercising, becoming thirsty, drinking water) led to transitive causal judgments. On the other hand, chains schematized as multiple chunks (e.g., having sex, becoming pregnant, becoming nauseous) led to intransitive judgments despite strong intermediate links ((Experiments 1–3). Normative accounts of causal intransitivity could not explain these intransitive judgments (Experiments 4 and 5).     

Beliefs about essences and the reality of mental disorders

Do people believe mental disorders are real and possess underlying essences? The current study found that both novices and practicing clinicians held weaker essentialist beliefs about mental disorders than about medical disorders. They were also unwilling to endorse the idea that mental disorders are real and natural. Furthermore, compared with novices, mental health clinicians were less likely to endorse the view that there is a shared cause underlying a mental disorder and that one needs to remove the cause to get rid of the mental disorder. Clinicians were polarized on their views about whether mental disorders are categorical or dimensional. These findings reflect current controversies about mental disorders in the field at large.     

Feature Centrality and Conceptual Coherence

Conceptual features differ in how mentally tranformable they are. A robin that does not eat is harder to imagine than a robin that does not chirp. We argue that features are immutable to the extent that they are central in a network of dependency relations. The immutability of a feature reflects how much the internal structure of a concept depends on that feature; i.e., how much the feature contributes to the concept's coherence. Complementarily, mutability reflects the aspects in which a concept is flexible. We show that features can be reliably ordered according to their mutability using tasks that require people to conceive of objects missing a feature, and that mutability (conceptual centrality) can be distinguished from category centrality and from diagnosticity and salience. We test a model of mutability based on asymmetric, unlabeled, pairwise dependency relations. With no free parameters, the model provides reasonable fits to data. Qualitative tests of the model show that mutability judgments are unaffected by the type of dependency relation and that dependency structure influences judgments of variability.     

The Effect of Physical Activity on Children With ADHD: A Quantitative Review of the Literature

Research on the effects of physical activity on children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is promising, yet no attempt has been made to integrate current findings using meta-analytic techniques. Using a meta-regression, the present study examined the effectives of physical activity for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder on a number of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional outcomes. From 20 empirical studies, 164 effect sizes quantifying the effectiveness of physical activity for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder were extracted from 22 independent samples. Results indicated an overall moderate-to-large effect for physical activity on children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, with a significant effect for emotion/mood. Limitations of the study, future directions, and implications for school professionals are discussed.     

Exploring the contributions of spatial and non-spatial working memory to priming of pop-out

Priming of pop-out (PoP) refers to the facilitation of performance that occurs when a target-defining feature is repeated across consecutive trials in a pop-out oddball search task. The underlying mechanism of PoP has been poorly understood and raises important questions about how our visual system is guided by past experiences, even during bottom-up processing. Lee, Mozer, and Vecera (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 71, 1059–1071, 2009) demonstrated that PoP remained unaffected by a concurrent non-spatial visual working memory (VWM) load, and they concluded that PoP occurs through feature gain modulation, essentially eliminating the contribution of memory representations in VWM to PoP. In the present study, we followed up on those results by (a) replicating the null effect of non-spatial VWM load on PoP and (b) examining the effect of spatial VWM load on PoP. The results showed that spatial VWM load does interfere with PoP, supporting the notion that spatial VWM is involved in PoP. In Experiment 2, we extended this finding by manipulating VWM load and observing its consequence on the magnitude of PoP. Increasing spatial VWM load decreased the amount of PoP observed, in a dose-dependent manner, whereas changes in non-spatial VWM load did not. Contrary to Lee et al.’s conclusions, these results suggest that VWM resources appear to contribute to the occurrence of PoP, supporting the theory that PoP is, in fact, a multilevel process in which the deployment of spatial attention, relying on VWM representations, plays an important role.     

To what degree do situational influences explain spontaneous helping behaviour? A meta-analysis

Prosocial behaviour is an interdisciplinary topic, involving psychologists, philosophers, and educators. Based on experimental helping research, some moral philosophers have claimed that helping behaviour is entirely situationally determined. The dominance of situational factor experimentation gives the appearance that situational factors alone can explain helping behaviour. This meta-analysis investigated situational explanations of helping behaviour with 286 effects and 46,705 participants from experimental studies with non-manipulation control groups, and observed unilateral adult behavioural helping. Results indicated expected group differences in helping behaviour frequency among help encouraging or help discouraging experimental conditions and no-manipulation control conditions. Helping behaviour was also frequent in help discouraging and control conditions and far from universal in help encouraging conditions. Because helping occurred in control groups, situational factors cannot explain all observed helping. Because helping was not universal in help encouraging conditions, it raises the question of individual differences in responsiveness to helping cues.     

Reactivity to sensations in borderline personality disorder: a preliminary study

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are widely considered to have problems with emotional reactivity. However, the specific kinds of stimuli that are associated with heightened emotional reactivity in BPD have not been well characterized. Thus, it is unclear whether the emotional dysfunction in BPD occurs in response to any emotionally evocative stimuli, or to specific classes of stimuli. In this study, we used subjective measures (self-report and interview-based) to compare reactivity to sensations (auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, visual) between participants with BPD (n = 30) and healthy controls (n = 50). Controlling for trait negative emotional reactivity, individuals with BPD reported being significantly more reactive across sensory stimuli. However, the difference between controls and BPD was significantly greater for reactivity to auditory stimuli compared to other sensory stimuli. Findings from this study provide preliminary data suggesting individuals with BPD may be characterized by heightened self-reported reactivity to aversive sounds.     

The social status of aggressive students across contexts: the role of classroom status hierarchy, academic achievement, and grade

This study tested the effects of 5 classroom contextual features on the social status (perceived popularity and social preference) that peers accord to aggressive students in late elementary school, including classroom peer status hierarchy (whether within-classroom differences in popularity are large or small), classroom academic level, and grade level as the main predictors of interest as well as classroom aggression and ethnic composition as controls. Multilevel analyses were conducted on an ethnically diverse sample of 968 fourth- and fifth-graders from 46 classrooms in 9 schools. Associations between aggression and status varied greatly from one classroom to another. Aggressive students were more popular and better liked in classrooms with higher levels of peer status hierarchy. Aggressive students had higher social status in Grade 5 than in Grade 4 and lower social preference in classrooms of higher academic level. Classroom aggression and ethnic composition did not moderate aggression-status associations. Limitations and practical implications of these findings are discussed.