Developmental changes in application of the majority rule in group decisions

This study examined age-related changes in the child's application of the principle of majority rule in group decisions. Following a problem posed by Moessinger (1981), we enquired whether children routinely apply the majority rule when the majority consists of a shifting (variable) set of members across decisions, and alternate between majority and minority when the majority and minority is fixed, i.e. consists of the same individuals each time. In Geneva, Moessinger found that 8-year-olds failed to discriminate between fixed and shifting majorities, while most 13-year-olds (75 per cent) did so. An altered replication was conducted in Australia modifying Moessinger's procedure to control for extraneous variables such as ‘set’ and the need for variety in choice. It was found that on the task 7 per cent of 8-year-olds, 20 per cent of 10-year-olds, 32 per cent of 12-year-olds, and 39 per cent of 14-year-olds discriminated on a behavioural criterion between fixed and shifting majorities. Ten per cent of 8-year-olds, 40 per cent of 10-year-olds, 52 per cent of 12-year-olds, and 55 per cent of 14-year-olds made the discrimination on Moessinger's cognitive ‘reason’ criterion. The results show that development of the conceptual distinction between fixed and shifting majorities is gradual and continuous.     

Analysis of the learned irrelevance effect in appetitive Pavlovian conditioning

In Experiments 1 and 2 rats received uncorrelated presentations of a light conditioned stimulus (CS) and a food unconditioned stimulus (US) on each day of a preexposure phase. Control subjects received the same number of USs during the first half of preexposure and the same number of CSs during the second. Uncorrelated preexposure retarded inhibitory conditioning. Experiment 3 showed, however, that the different patterns of US preexposure experienced by the two groups could in itself influence the course of subsequent inhibitory conditioning. When this factor was equated by restricting the uncorrelated treatment to the first half of the pre-exposure phase (Experiment 2) or by extending the control treatment throughout the phase (Experiment 4) it was found that uncorrelated preexposure retarded excitatory conditioning, but facilitated inhibitory conditioning. This outcome challenges an interpretation in terms of the concept of learned irrelevance, which predicts that uncorrelated preexposure should retard both forms of conditioning.     

Mobilizing Schools for Suicide Prevention

ABSTRACT: Experience in providing consultation and survivor counseling to school personnel following student suicides led to the development of a program of prevention through training school personnel. The goal of the program was to increase the ability of resource persons available to adolescents—teachers, counselors and school nurses—to recognize signs of suicidal depression and to respond effectively to suicidal students. This report describes that program, the reaction of the participants and the observations of the project staff, and comments on the feasibility of this approach as a means of helping to prevent suicide among adolescents.     

Children's understanding of embarrassment: Integrating mental time travel and mental state information

The current study investigated 4‐ to 8‐year‐olds’ (N = 81) understanding of embarrassment and their ability to integrate temporal and mental state information to predict and explain emotions. Participants heard stories describing characters commit trivial social transgressions, and then the next day, characters found themselves in the same situation that led to the previous transgression. For some story endings, participants were asked to predict and explain how the character felt, and for others, participants were told the character started to feel embarrassed and they were asked to explain why. Participants’ responses were coded and analysed using nonparametric statistical tests. Kruskal–Wallis analyses revealed significant developments occur between 6 and 8 years in children's understanding of embarrassment and their ability to explain individual's emotion as caused by anticipating the reoccurrence of a previous embarrassing event. Younger children demonstrated a basic knowledge of embarrassment but failed to demonstrate more advanced understanding of the emotion. Findings from the current study indicate children reach a more mature understanding of embarrassment and the implications of committing social transgressions between 7 and 8 years. Finally, the current study contributes to the literature on children's ability to infer mental states and temporally connect experiences.     

Children's recognition of emotions from vocal cues

Emotional cues contain important information about the intentions and feelings of others. Despite a wealth of research into children's understanding of facial signals of emotions, little research has investigated the developmental trajectory of interpreting affective cues in the voice. In this study, 48 children ranging between 5 and 10 years were tested using forced‐choice tasks with non‐verbal vocalizations and emotionally inflected speech expressing different positive, neutral and negative states. Children as young as 5 years were proficient in interpreting a range of emotional cues from vocal signals. Consistent with previous work, performance was found to improve with age. Furthermore, the two tasks, examining recognition of non‐verbal vocalizations and emotionally inflected speech, respectively, were sensitive to individual differences, with high correspondence of performance across the tasks. From this demonstration of children's ability to recognize emotions from vocal stimuli, we also conclude that this auditory emotion recognition task is suitable for a wide age range of children, providing a novel, empirical way to investigate children's affect recognition skills.