American-Japanese cultural differences in judgements of emotional expressions of different intensities

Although research has generated a wealth of information on cultural influences on emotion judgements, the information we have to date is limited in several ways. This study extends this literature in two ways, first by obtaining judgements from people in two cultures of expressions portrayed at different intensity levels, and second by incorporating individual level measures of culture to examine their contribution to observed differences. When judging emotion categories in low intensity expressions, American and Japanese judges see the emotion intended at above-chance rates, albeit lower than when judging high intensity faces. Also, American and Japanese intensity ratings of external displays and internal experiences differ dramatically for low intensity expressions compared to high intensity faces. Finally, the two cultural dimensions measured in this study—individualism versus collectivism (IC) and status differentiation (SD)—accounted for almost all of the variance in the observed differences. These findings are discussed in terms of their underlying possible mechanisms, and future research possibilities.     

Expository Text Comprehension: Helping Primary-Grade Teachers Use Expository Texts to Full Advantage

This study investigated the effectiveness of an instructional program designed to teach expository text comprehension during guided reading. Participants included 72 second graders in six classrooms, organized into four guided reading groups in each class (n = 24). The six classes were randomly assigned to one of three groups: Text Structure, Content, and No Instruction. The Text Structure group focused on text structure awareness. The Content group focused on background knowledge and vocabulary. The No Instruction group carried out their regular instruction. Findings suggest that text structure is an effective strategy for promoting expository text comprehension and that young children benefit from well-structured texts.     

The Absence of Practice Effects on a Forced-Choice Temporal Order Judgment Task

The encoding of temporal order information improves with practice (Zacks, Hasher, Alba, Sanft, & Rose, 1984), but this improvement may be a result of task performance factors and may have little or nothing to do with encoding phenomena. In the present study, a forced-choice recency discrimination procedure was used to obviate the use of retrieval/performance strategies on the temporal order test. No improvement in temporal order judgments was observed.     

Representation of letter position in spelling: Evidence from acquired dysgraphia

The graphemic representations that underlie spelling performance must encode not only the identities of the letters in a word, but also the positions of the letters. This study investigates how letter position information is represented. We present evidence from two dysgraphic individuals, CM and LSS, who perseverate letters when spelling: that is, letters from previous spelling responses intrude into subsequent responses. The perseverated letters appear more often than expected by chance in the same position in the previous and subsequent responses. We used these errors to address the question of how letter position is represented in spelling. In a series of analyses we determined how often the perseveration errors produced maintain position as defined by a number of alternative theories of letter position encoding proposed in the literature. The analyses provide strong evidence that the grapheme representations used in spelling encode letter position such that position is represented in a graded manner based on distance from both-edges of the word.     

Knowledge of counting principles: How relevant is order irrelevance?

Most children who are older than 6 years of age apply essential counting principles when they enumerate a set of objects. Essential principles include (a) one-to-one correspondence between items and count words, (b) stable order of the count words, and (c) cardinality—that the last number refers to numerosity. We found that the acquisition of a fourth principle, that the order in which items are counted is irrelevant, follows a different trajectory. The majority of 5- to 11-year-olds indicated that the order in which objects were counted was relevant, favoring a left-to-right, top-to-bottom order of counting. Only some 10- and 11-year-olds applied the principle of order irrelevance, and this knowledge was unrelated to their numeration skill. We conclude that the order irrelevance principle might not play an important role in the development of children’s conceptual knowledge of counting.     

Intergroup Contact Facilitates Physiological Recovery following Stressful Intergroup Interactions

A growing body of research has demonstrated the importance of intergroup contact in reducing fear, threat and anxiety in intergroup domains. Here we focus on the regulatory benefits of intergroup contact. We hypothesized that past intergroup contact would facilitate recovery from a stressful intergroup evaluation. White and Black participants completed a stressful evaluative task in the presence of two White or two Black interviewers while autonomic nervous system and hormonal responses were assessed. When examining how participants recovered after the stressful task, intergroup contact predicted faster physiological recovery for both autonomic and neuroendocrine reactivity. The importance of recovery from stress for physiological resilience in diverse contexts is discussed.     

Differential‐associative processing: A new strategy for learning highly‐similar concepts

For many students concepts like fluid and crystallized intelligence are difficult to learn because they have highly‐similar definitions that are easy to confuse. The challenge of learning these highly‐similar, yet often confused concepts is further complicated by the fact that students are tested on exams about differences between the concepts. In this theoretically‐motivated research we test a new strategy for learning highly‐similar pairs of concepts, called differential‐associative processing. The results revealed that performance on multiple‐choice questions was higher when students learned highly‐similar concepts using differential‐associative processing rather than a strategy of their own choice, text‐based elaboration, or identifying similarities and differences. The results also revealed that students spontaneously transferred differential‐associative processing to a neutral control condition. Taken as a whole, the present study supports differential‐associative processing as a useful strategy for learning similar concepts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.