Loneliness and peer relations in childhood

Although loneliness is a normative experience, there is reason to be concerned about children who are chronically lonely in school. Research indicates that children have a fundamental understanding of what it means to be lonely, and that loneliness can be reliably measured in children. Most of the research on loneliness in children has focused on the contributions of children's peer relations to their feelings of well-being at school. Loneliness in children is influenced by how well accepted they are by peers, whether they are overtly victimized, whether they have friends, and the durability and quality of their best friendships. Findings from this emerging area of research provide a differentiated picture of how children's peer experiences come to influence their emotional well-being.     

Review of the book: Psychosocial Well-being of Children and Adolescents in Latin America: Evidence-based Interventions. Jorge Castellá Sarriera & Lívia Maria Bedin (Eds.) (2017) Children´s Well-Being: Indicators and Research

Applied Research in Quality of Life -     

Delay of gratification as a function of exchange values and appetitive values of the rewards

This study examined the manner in which the probability of delaying gratification is affected by the exchange values and the appetitive values of the rewards offered. Several delay-of-gratification questions were used, requiring a choice between an early small reward and a reward twice as great due at a later time. A total of 6,799 fourth- and sixth-grade Israeli public school pupils participated in the study. Results consistent across sexes, grades, and two delay conditions (now versus in a week from now and in a week versus in a month) indicated that the tendency to delay gratification is directly related to the exchange values of the rewards offered but inversely related to their appetitive values. Several implications of these results for the Value X Expectancy model of delay behavior were discussed.The present report is based on data collected as part of a nationwide study on educational achievement in public schools in Israel supported by the Van Leer Foundation (Holland) and the Ministry of Education of Israel.     

Confidence in Personal Preferences

The first aim of this study was to test the self‐consistency model (SCM) of subjective confidence as it applies to personal preferences. According to SCM, participants presented with a two‐alternative forced‐choice (2AFC) item draw a small sample of representations of the item. Their confidence reflects the extent to which the choice is representative of the population of representations associated with the item, and the likelihood of making that choice on subsequent occasions. The second aim was to use confidence judgment as a clue to the dynamics of online preference construction. Participants were presented with 2AFC items measuring everyday personal preferences. The task was presented five times. In line with SCM, (i) when participants changed their preferences across presentations, they were systematically more confident when they made their more frequent choice; (ii) confidence in a choice in the item's first presentation predicted the likelihood of repeating that choice in subsequent presentations; (iii) despite the idiosyncratic nature of personal preferences, confidence was higher for consensual than for nonconsensual preferences; (iv) when participants predicted the preferences of others, they were also more confident when their predictions agreed with those of others; and (v) the confidence/accuracy correlation for predictions was positive for consensually correct but negative for consensually wrong predictions. These results suggest that confidence in preferences can help separate between the stable and variable contributions to preference construction in terms of the population of representations available in memory and the representations that are accessible at the time of preference solicitation, respectively. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events

Four studies examined the intrapersonal and interpersonal consequences of seeking out others when good things happen (i.e., capitalization). Two studies showed that communicating personal positive events with others was associated with increased daily positive affect and well-being, above and beyond the impact of the positive event itself and other daily events. Moreover, when others were perceived to respond actively and constructively (and not passively or destructively) to capitalization attempts, the benefits were further enhanced. Two studies found that close relationships in which one's partner typically responds to capitalization attempts enthusiastically were associated with higher relationship well-being (e.g., intimacy, daily marital satisfaction). The results are discussed in terms of the theoretical and empirical importance of understanding how people "cope" with positive events, cultivate positive emotions, and enhance social bonds.     

Illusions of competence during study can be remedied by manipulations that enhance learners’ sensitivity to retrieval conditions at test

Monitoring one's knowledge during study is susceptible to a foresight bias (Koriat and Bjork, 2005). Judgments of learning (JOLs) are inflated whenever information that is present at study and absent, but solicited, at test, such as the targets in cue-target paired associates, highlights aspects of cues that are less apparent when those cues are presented alone. The present findings demonstrate that foresight bias can be alleviated by study-test experience (Experiment 1), particularly test experience (Experiments 2 and 3), and by delaying JOLs after study (Experiment 4) and that both foresight bias and its alleviation have behavioral consequences, as measured by study time allocation (Experiment 5). Collectively, the findings suggest that overconfidence and misallocation of study time arise from a mismatch that is inherent to education--that the answer is present at study and absent at test--and that alleviating the problem requires creating conditions at study that sensitize learners to retrieval conditions at test.     

The intricate relationships between monitoring and control in metacognition: lessons for the cause-and-effect relation between subjective experience and behavior

Do we run away because we are frightened, or are we frightened because we run away? The authors address this issue with respect to the relation between metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control. When self-regulation is goal driven, monitoring effects control processes so that increased processing effort should enhance feelings of competence and feelings of knowing. In contrast, when self-regulation is data driven, such feelings may be based themselves on the feedback from control processes, in which case they should decrease with increasing effort. Evidence for both monitoring-based control and control-based monitoring occurring even in the same situation is presented. The results are discussed with regard to the issue of the cause-and-effect relation between subjective experience and behavior.     

The extraction of structure during reading: Evidence from reading prosody

According to the structural approach to reading, the extraction of structure precedes the analysis of meaning and paves the way for it. In this study, reading prosody was used to examine this proposition. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that reading prosody produced on line reflects the early extraction of structure. In Experiment 1, readers were successful in assigning natural prosody to unfamiliar text immediately upon its reading. Experiment 2 showed that the prosodic patterns applied are tuned to the structure of the sentence and are largely indifferent to the content of the sentence or to its semantic coherence. The results join with other findings in speech production and comprehension in supporting the precedence of structure to meaning in reading.     

Response Channel Activation and the Temporoparietal Junction

When we learn to make one motor response to one visual stimulus and a different motor response to another, representations of these stimulus–response associations must be maintained to efficiently transduce perception into action. When an irrelevant distractor is presented adjacent to a target stimulus, interference is observed when the two stimuli are associated with conflicting responses, presumably due to response channel activation by the incompatible information. We have explored the neural bases of these interference effects. In a previous study, patients with hemispatial neglect showed normal interference from contralesional flankers. In another study, patients with lesions of the lateral prefrontal cortex were found not to show interference from distractors presented in the contralesional hemifield. The current study provided a more anatomically detailed investigation of the effects of posterior association cortex lesions on flanker interference. Patients with chronic, unilateral lesions involving the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), two of whom had hemispatial neglect, were compared with patients with lesions of the posterior association cortex not involving the TPJ. All patients performed a color discrimination task at fixation while a congruent or incongruent colored flanker was briefly presented (16.7 ms) in the adjacent contralesional or ipsilesional hemifield. Patients with TPJ lesions showed no interference effects from the contralesional flankers. These results suggest that the TPJ, in combination with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is involved in transducing perception into action.     

Depth of processing and memory organization

Summary The study examined the idea that the organization of information in memory varies depending on the depth of processing during input, as well as on the conditions for retrieval. Two types of memory organization are distinguished: Conceptual organization implies a hierarchical structure in which items are grouped according to a principled taxonomic system (e.g., cow — horse). Associative organization, in contrast, is based on direct links among the members of a group (e.g., cow — milk). Two experiments examined the propositions that conceptual relations require more effort to be encoded during learning and more effort to be utilized during remenbering than associative relations. In Experiment 1 a list of 28 words was used, which could be grouped into 14 conceptual categories or, alternatively, into 14 associative categories of two words each. The words were presented under either shallow or deep encoding conditions. Increased depth of encoding resulted in increased conceptual clustering but had little effect on amount of associative clustering. Similar amounts of associative and conceptual clustering were observed during early output positions, but conceptual clustering tended to increase with recall trials, suggesting that it might depend on the establishment of a retrieval schema. In Experiment 2, after memorizing a list of words, subjects recalled the words either with or without the requirement to perform a secondary task while recalling. Relative to the undisturbed recall condition, the secondary task condition indicated stronger associative than conceptual clustering. The results were seen to support the idea that different types of memory organization may become salient under different attentional conditions.