Anticipating academic performance and feedback: unrealistically optimistic temporal shifts in performance estimates and primary and secondary control strategies

Social Psychology of Education - Students typically overestimate how well they will perform on future academic events, then lower those expectations as the event and performance feedback approach....     

Homophily in stable and unstable adolescent friendships: Similarity breeds constancy

This study examines homophily among adolescent friends. Participants were drawn from a community-based sample of Swedish youth who ranged from 11 to 18 years old. A total of 436 girls and 338 boys identified their closest friends and described their own delinquent activities, intoxication frequency, achievement motivation, and self-worth. Correlations and difference scores describe similarity between reciprocally nominated friends on each dimension. Adolescents who remained friends from one year to the next tended to be more similar than those who did not, during the friendship and, to a lesser extent, before the friendship. Comparisons with random pairs of same-age peers revealed that age-group homophily accounts for most of the similarity between unstable friends but only a fraction of the similarity between stable friends.     

Failure to replicate the deleterious effects of safety behaviors in exposure therapy

The current study attempted to replicate the finding obtained by Powers, Smits, and Telch (2004; Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 72, 448–545) that both the availability and utilization of safety behaviors interfere with the efficacy of exposure therapy. An additional goal of the study was to evaluate which explanatory theories about the detrimental effects of safety behaviors best account for this phenomenon. Undergraduate students (N = 58) with high claustrophobic fear were assigned to one of three treatment conditions: (a) exposure only, (b) exposure with safety behavior availability, and (c) exposure with safety behavior utilization. Participants in each condition improved substantially, and there were no significant between-group differences in fear reduction. Unexpectedly, exposure with safety behavior utilization led to significantly greater improvement in self-efficacy and claustrophobic cognitions than exposure only. The extent to which participants inferred danger from the presence of safety aids during treatment was associated with significantly less improvement on all outcome measures. The findings call into question the hypothesized deleterious effects of safety behaviors on the outcome of exposure therapy and highlight a possible mechanism through which the mere presence of safety cues during exposure trials might affect treatment outcomes depending on participants’ perceptions of the dangerousness of exposure stimuli.     

Predicting reasoning from memory

In an effort to assess the relations between reasoning and memory, in 8 experiments, the authors examined how well responses on an inductive reasoning task are predicted from responses on a recognition memory task for the same picture stimuli. Across several experimental manipulations, such as varying study time, presentation frequency, and the presence of stimuli from other categories, there was a high correlation between reasoning and memory responses (average r = .87), and these manipulations showed similar effects on the 2 tasks. The results point to common mechanisms underlying inductive reasoning and recognition memory abilities. A mathematical model, GEN-EX (generalization from examples), derived from exemplar models of categorization, is presented, which predicts both reasoning and memory responses from pairwise similarities among the stimuli, allowing for additional influences of subtyping and deterministic responding.     

Australian Norms and Retest Data for the Rey Auditory and Verbal Learning Test

This article presents normative data for the Rey Auditory and Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT). A representative sample of 390 healthy young adults aged between 18 and 34 living within the Sydney metropolitan area, Australia, completed Form AB of the RAVLT as part of the Macquarie University Neurological Normative Study. Retest data were collected from a subsample of 98 participants after an interval of 1 year. Norms were derived for commonly used measures of the RAVLT and are presented for the whole sample as well as separately for males and females with different levels of education. Age was not found to impact significantly on test performance for this group of young adults, and therefore age‐adjusted norms are not provided. An excel program to calculate RAVLT standard scores (mean of 10 and standard deviation of 3) can be downloaded from http://www.psy.mq.edu.au/RAVLT . Poor test–retest reliability raises concerns about the use of the RAVLT in clinical diagnosis.     

Do girls and boys perceive themselves as equally engaged in school? The results of an international study from 12 countries

This study examined gender differences in student engagement and academic performance in school. Participants included 3420 students (7th, 8th, and 9th graders) from Austria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Malta, Portugal, Romania, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The results indicated that, compared to boys, girls reported higher levels of engagement in school and were rated higher by their teachers in academic performance. Student engagement accounted for gender differences in academic performance, but gender did not moderate the associations among student engagement, academic performance, or contextual supports. Analysis of multiple-group structural equation modeling revealed that perceptions of teacher support and parent support, but not peer support, were related indirectly to academic performance through student engagement. This partial mediation model was invariant across gender. The findings from this study enhance the understanding about the contextual and personal factors associated with girls' and boys' academic performance around the world.     

Anticipation from biological motion: the goalkeeper problem

People can often anticipate the outcome of another person's actions based on visual information available in the movements of the other person's body. We investigated this problem by studying how goalkeepers anticipate the direction of a penalty kick in soccer. The specific aim was to determine whether the information used to anticipate kick direction is best characterized as local to a particular body segment or distributed across multiple segments. In Experiment 1, we recorded the movements of soccer players as they kicked balls into a net. Using a novel method for analyzing motion capture data, we identified sources of local and distributed information that were reliable indicators of kick direction. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects were presented with animations of kickers' movements prior to foot-to-ball contact and instructed to judge kick direction. Judgments were consistent with the use of distributed information, with a possible small contribution of local information.     

Trait Self-esteem Moderates Decreases in Self-control Following Rejection: An Information-processing Account

In the current paper, the authors posit that trait self-esteem moderates the relationship between social rejection and decrements in self-control, propose an information-processing account of trait self-esteem's moderating influence and discuss three tests of this theory. The authors measured trait self-esteem, experimentally manipulated social rejection and assessed subsequent self-control in Studies 1 and 2. Additionally, Study 3 framed a self-control task as diagnostic of social skills to examine motivational influences. Together, the results reveal that rejection impairs self-control, but only among low self-esteem individuals. Moreover, this decrement in self-control only emerged when the task had no social implications-suggesting that low self-esteem individuals exert effort on tasks of social value and are otherwise preoccupied with belonging needs when completing nonsocial tasks.     

Delineating potential mechanisms of implicit alcohol cognitions: drinking restraint, negative affect, and their relationship with approach alcohol associations

Problem drinkers may use alcohol to avoid negative mood states and may develop implicit cognitive associations between negative emotional states and reinforcing properties of drinking. It is paradoxical that attempts to control drinking, such as among those high in drinking restraint, may inadvertently increase desire to drink and subsequent alcohol consumption, and this may be exaggerated under times of emotional distress when urges to drink are high. We examined whether individuals who are high on drinking restraint would demonstrate stronger alcohol-related thoughts elicited by stimuli that represent the desire to use alcohol, in response to stronger versus weaker negative mood arousal. Seventy hazardous drinkers completed measurements of drinking restraint, alcohol consumption, and consequences of use. After being randomized to view negative or positive pictures sets, participants completed an Implicit Association Task (IAT) to test differences in the strength of the association between desire to approach or avoid alcohol or water cues, and then a measurement of subjective craving following the IAT. Regression analyses showed that trait restriction not temptation was positively related to IAT scores, after controlling for relevant covariates and explained 7% of the total variance. Trait temptation not IAT predicted subjective craving. Negative affect was unrelated to IAT scores, singly or in conjunction with measures of drinking restraint, contrary to predictions. In sum, implicit alcohol cognitions are related to attempts to restrict drinking not temptation to drink and are less strongly influenced by mood state.     

Let the pigeon drive the bus: pigeons can plan future routes in a room

The task of determining an optimal route to several locations is called the traveling salesperson problem (TSP). The TSP has been used recently to examine spatial cognition in humans and non-human animals. It remains unclear whether or not the decision process of animals other than non-human primates utilizes rigid rule-based heuristics, or whether non-human animals are able to flexibly ‘plan’ future routes/behavior based on their knowledge of multiple locations. We presented pigeons in a One-way and Round-Trip group with TSPs that included two or three destinations (feeders) in a laboratory environment. The pigeons departed a start location, traveled to each feeder once before returning to a final destination. Pigeons weighed the proximity of the next location heavily, but appeared to plan ahead multiple steps when the travel costs for inefficient behavior appeared to increase. The results provide clear and strong evidence that animals other than primates are capable of planning sophisticated travel routes.