PROGRAMMING GENERALIZATION OF IN-CLASS TRANSITION SKILLS: TEACHING PRESCHOOLERS WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS TO SELF-ASSESS AND RECRUIT CONTINGENT TEACHER PRAISE

We investigated a self-management intervention package that taught preschoolers with developmental delays to self-assess performance of targeted skills and to recruit teacher praise. Self-assessment alone resulted in increases in active engagement across all participants during the training sessions, but generalization to classrooms was sporadic and short-lived. When recruitment of contingent praise was added to the training package, treatment effects generalized to the participants' classrooms and teachers' rates of contingent praise increased. The implications of combining self-assessment and recruitment of contingent teacher praise are discussed.     

Converting interns into regular employees: The role of intern–supervisor exchange

Internship participation has undergone rapid expansion over the past three decades, to a point where today, many graduates and internship host-organisations regard internships as the preferred career entry point into a range of professional vocations. To date, however, there has been a dearth of studies examining factors that can influence the conversion of interns into regular employees with their host-organisations. This study bridges that gap as it involved the collection of data at three time intervals from 303 intern–supervisor dyads (n = 606), in order to determine the key predictors of intern conversion. Findings indicated that although intern–supervisor exchange played a strong role in influencing intern's performance, learning opportunities and satisfaction it did not play a significant role in predicting both the intern's and the supervisor's conversion intentions. Nonetheless, both intern's and supervisor's conversion intentions measured during the internship period did play a strong role in predicting actual conversion to employment at the host-organisation subsequent to the intern's graduation. Thus, this study begins to shed light on the dynamics on intern conversion, as a pivotal early juncture in an employee's career lifespan.     

Changes in Roman Catholic Beliefs and Practices in Ireland between 1981 and 2008 and the Emergence of the Liberal Catholic

This study aimed to investigate the changes that have occurred in the religious beliefs and practices of Roman Catholics in Ireland between 1981 and 2008 and to examine the extent to which Catholics have become liberal in their attitudes towards social issues over this period. Data were derived from 23 religious indicators and six social items sourced from the European Values Study (EVS). Only Roman Catholic respondents (n=3810) were included in the analysis. Data were analysed using ANOVA, t-tests, and chi-square tests. The majority of religious indicators were found to be in significant decline between 1981 and 2008. Also, Catholic attitudes towards homosexuality, euthanasia, abortion, prostitution, divorce, and the use of ‘soft drugs’ were found to have become significantly more liberal over this period. These findings support not only the notions of privatisation of religion and morality but also the emergence of a liberal ethos among a considerable proportion of Catholics in Ireland. Results are discussed in relation to theories of secularisation, believing without belonging, and the emergence of Liberal Catholics. Suggestions for future research, such as investigating the effect of conflict between one’s Catholic identity and liberal views, are made.     

Attention bias in youth: Associations with youth and mother's depressive symptoms moderated by emotion regulation and affective dynamics during family interactions

Recent research has highlighted the potential role of attention bias for emotional stimuli as a possible cognitive risk factor for depression in youth. However, differences in youth emotion regulation or maternal affect may moderate the association between maternal and youth depression and youth attention biases. The current study investigated the relationship between maternal and youth depressive symptoms and youth (aged 11–17 years) attention bias for sad and happy faces in 59 mother–youth dyads, examining whether positive and negative maternal affect observed during structured interaction tasks or youth emotion regulation tendencies moderated associations between maternal and youth depression and attention biases. Youth suppression interacted with maternal and youth depression to predict sad attentional biases in youth, while maternal positive affect interacted with maternal depression to predict happy attention biases in youth.     

Time does not flow without language: Spatial distance affects temporal duration regardless of movement or direction

Much evidence has suggested that people conceive of time as flowing directionally in transverse space (e.g., from left to right for English speakers). However, this phenomenon has never been tested in a fully nonlinguistic paradigm where neither stimuli nor task use linguistic labels, which raises the possibility that time is directional only when reading/writing direction has been evoked. In the present study, English-speaking participants viewed a video where an actor sang a note while gesturing and reproduced the duration of the sung note by pressing a button. Results showed that the perceived duration of the note was increased by a long-distance gesture, relative to a short-distance gesture. This effect was equally strong for gestures moving from left to right and from right to left and was not dependent on gestures depicting movement through space; a weaker version of the effect emerged with static gestures depicting spatial distance. Since both our gesture stimuli and temporal reproduction task were nonlinguistic, we conclude that the spatial representation of time is nondirectional: Movement contributes, but is not necessary, to the representation of temporal information in a transverse timeline.     

‘Big Five’ personality dimensions and social attainment: Evidence from beyond the campus

Research on the contribution of personality traits to attainment has focused heavily on grades among college students. Conscientiousness emerges consistently as the most powerful personality dimension. However, while university students are a convenient group to study, there remain questions about the generalizability, and utility of examining the link between personality and attainment, in a group that consists mainly of educational high-achievers who have not yet earned an income. In this study, data were instead drawn from a more diverse and representative sample gathered in the British National Child Development Study (NCDS). Regression analyses indicated that, in the general population compared to student samples, Openness and Emotional Stability are stronger predictors of educational attainment and earnings than conscientiousness.     

A taste of words: linguistic context and perceptual simulation predict the modality of words

Previous studies have shown that object properties are processed faster when they follow properties from the same perceptual modality than properties from different modalities. These findings suggest that language activates sensorimotor processes, which, according to those studies, can only be explained by a modal account of cognition. The current paper shows how a statistical linguistic approach of word co-occurrences can also reliably predict the category of perceptual modality a word belongs to (auditory, olfactory-gustatory, visual-haptic), even though the statistical linguistic approach is less precise than the modal approach (auditory, gustatory, haptic, olfactory, visual). Moreover, the statistical linguistic approach is compared with the modal embodied approach in an experiment in which participants verify properties that share or shift modalities. Response times suggest that fast responses can best be explained by the linguistic account, whereas slower responses can best be explained by the embodied account. These results provide further evidence for the theory that conceptual processing is both linguistic and embodied, whereby less precise linguistic processes precede precise simulation processes.     

Modality switching costs emerge in concept creation as well as retrieval

Theories of embodied cognition hold that the conceptual system uses perceptual simulations for the purposes of representation. A strong prediction is that perceptual phenomena should emerge in conceptual processing, and, in support, previous research has shown that switching modalities from one trial to the next incurs a processing cost during conceptual tasks. However, to date, such research has been limited by its reliance on the retrieval of familiar concepts. We therefore examined concept creation by asking participants to interpret modality-specific compound phrases (i.e., conceptual combinations). Results show that modality switching costs emerge during the creation of new conceptual entities: People are slower to simulate a novel concept (e.g., auditory jingling onion) when their attention has already been engaged by a different modality in simulating a familiar concept (e.g., visual shiny penny). Furthermore, these costs cannot be accounted for by linguistic factors alone. Rather, our findings support the embodied view that concept creation, as well as retrieval, requires situated perceptual simulation.