Emotion regulation and memory: the cognitive costs of keeping one's cool

An emerging literature has begun to document the affective consequences of emotion regulation. Little is known, however, about whether emotion regulation also has cognitive consequences. A process model of emotion suggests that expressive suppression should reduce memory for emotional events but that reappraisal should not. Three studies tested this hypothesis. Study 1 experimentally manipulated expressive suppression during film viewing, showing that suppression led to poorer memory for the details of the film. Study 2 manipulated expressive suppression and reappraisal during slide viewing. Only suppression led to poorer slide memory. Study 3 examined individual differences in typical expressive suppression and reappraisal and found that suppression was associated with poorer self-reported and objective memory but that reappraisal was not. Together, these studies suggest that the cognitive costs of keeping one's cool may vary according to how this is done.     

Brain Potentials in the Processing of Complex Sentences: An ERP Study of Control and Raising Constructions

In the present study we made use of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to examine raising and subject control constructions in German. Our most salient result is that the ERPs elicited at the empty subject position of a raising construction are clearly different from those elicited at the corresponding position of an otherwise identical subject control construction, the former producing a stronger P600. We argue that this result provides an electrophysiological correlate of the theoretical distinction between NP trace and PRO.     

Infants' formation and use of categories to segregate objects

Four- and-a-half-month-old infants' (N = 100) category formation and use was studied in a series of five experiments. For each experiment, the test events featured a display composed of a cylinder and a box. Previous research showed that this display is not clearly parsed as a single unit or as two separate units by infants of this age. Immediately prior to testing, infants were shown a set of category exemplars. Knowledge about this category could help infants disambiguate the test display, which contained a novel exemplar of this category. Clear interpretation of the test display as composed of two separate units (as indicated by infants' longer looking at the move-together than at the move-apart test event) was taken as evidence of category formation and use. In Experiments 1 and 5, infants' prior experience with a set of three different boxes that were similar to the test box facilitated their segregation of the test display. Experiment 2 showed that three different exemplars are necessary: prior experience with any two of the three boxes used in Experiment 1 did not facilitate infants' segregation of the test display. Experiment 3 showed that variability in the exemplar set is necessary: prior experience with three identical boxes did not facilitate infants' segregation of the test display. Experiment 4 showed that under these conditions of very brief prior exposure, similarity between the exemplar set and test box is necessary: prior experience with three different boxes that were not very similar to the test box did not facilitate infants' segregation of the test display. Together, these findings suggest that: (a) number of exemplars, variability, and similarity in the exemplar set are important for infants' category formation, and (b) infants use their category knowledge to determine the boundaries of the objects in a display.     

The effect of school-based kindergarten transition policies and practices on child academic outcomes

This study examined the effect of school-based kindergarten transition policies and practices on child outcomes. The authors followed 17,212 children from 992 schools in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten sample (ECLS-K) across the kindergarten school year. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that the number of school-based transition practices in the fall of kindergarten was associated with more positive academic achievement scores at the end of kindergarten, even controlling for family socioeconomic status (SES) and other demographic factors. This effect was stronger for low- and middle-SES children than high-SES children. For low-SES children, 7 transition practices were associated with a .21 standard deviation increase in predicted achievement scores beyond 0 practices. The effect of transition practices was partially mediated by an intervening effect on parent-initiated involvement in school during the kindergarten year. The findings support education policies to target kindergarten transition efforts to increase parent involvement in low-SES families.     

The social context of imitation in infancy

Infants increasingly generalize deferred imitation across environmental contexts between 6 and 18 months of age. In three experiments with 126 6-, 9-, 12-, 15-, and 18-month-olds, we examined the role of the social context in deferred imitation. One experimenter demonstrated target actions on a hand puppet, and a second experimenter tested imitation 24h later. When the second experimenter was novel, infants did not exhibit deferred imitation at any age; when infants were preexposed to the second experimenter, all of them did. Imitating immediately after the demonstration also facilitated deferred imitation in a novel social context at all ages but 6 months. Infants' pervasive failure to exhibit deferred imitation in a novel social context may reflect evolutionary selection pressures that favored conservative behavior in social animals.     

The construct of work commitment: testing an integrative framework

This study meta-analytically examined extensive literature associated with work commitment. The primary purposes were to (a) cumulate correlations among dimensions of work commitment to see which were intercorrelated and (b) determine impact of work commitment dimensions and subdimensions on specific outcome variables (job satisfaction, job performance, turnover intentions, and turnover). Results were cumulated across 997 articles. The positive manifold of correlations suggests the presence of a common psychological construct underlying different commitment forms, with the exception of calculative, continuance, and union commitment. Most of the 94 meta-analyzed correlations were small, suggesting that concept redundancy is not a major concern. Meta-analyses of the correlations of 24 commitment constructs with 4 outcome variables suggest that different commitment forms have similar patterns of correlations with outcome variables.     

The influence of restricted viewing conditions on egocentric distance perception: implications for real and virtual indoor environments

We carried out three experiments to examine the influence of field of view and binocular viewing restrictions on absolute distance perception in real-world indoor environments. Few of the classical visual cues provide direct information for accurate absolute distance judgments to points in the environment beyond about 2 m from the viewer. Nevertheless, in previous work it has been found that visually directed walking tasks reveal accurate distance estimations in full-cue real-world environments to distances up to 20 m. In contrast, the same tasks in virtual environments produced with head-mounted displays (HMDs) show large compression of distance. Field of view and binocular viewing are common limitations in research with HMDs, and have been rarely studied under full pictorial-cue conditions in the context of distance perception in the real-world. Experiment 1 showed that the view of one's body and feet on the floor was not necessary for accurate distance perception. In experiment 2 we manipulated the horizontal and the vertical field of view along with head rotation and found that a restricted field of view did not affect the accuracy of distance estimations when head movement was allowed. Experiment 3 showed that performance with monocular viewing was equal to that with binocular viewing. These results have implications for the information needed to scale egocentric distance in the real-world and reduce the support for the hypothesis that a limited field of view or imperfections in binocular image presentation are the cause of the underestimation seen with HMDs.