Moving Beyond Discrepancies: The Importance of Velocity as a Predictor of Satisfaction and Motivation

Adopting a control theory framework, the authors tested a dynamic perspective which suggests that satisfaction and motivation during goal-striving depends not only on discrepancies (i.e., differences between current and desired states) but also on velocities (i.e., rates at which discrepancies change over time). Two studies with different approaches and methodologies were conducted and support was found for the primary hypothesis that velocity information predicts affective and cognitive reactions incremental to discrepancy information. In addition, a Discrepancy × Velocity interaction influenced task satisfaction, success expectancy, and goal commitment. Results are discussed in relation to the broader context of self-regulation.     

Attention performance in an epidemiological sample of urban children: The role of gender and verbal intelligence

Abstract

We administered a comprehensive attentional battery to an epidemiologically defined sample of 435 first-and second-grade children to assess the influence of gender and verbal intelligence on attention. The battery included three versions of the continuous performance test (CPT), two digit cancellation tasks, three subtests from the WISC-R, and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. The results indicated that both gender and intelligence had an impact on attentional performance. Girls performed better than boys; they made fewer errors on the CPT and obtained higher scores on the digit cancellation task and the Coding subtest of the WISC-R. Children with higher verbal intelligence also performed better on the attentional tests, but this advantage was not observed across measures or levels of performance. For example, children with limited verbal skills performed significantly worse than their peers only in measures with high processing demands (the degraded CPT and the distraction version of the digit cancellation task).     

Classroom Peer Relationships and Behavioral Engagement in Elementary School: The Role of Social Network Equity

Applying social capital and systems theories of social processes, we examine the role of the classroom peer context in the behavioral engagement of low-income students (N = 80) in urban elementary school classrooms (N = 22). Systematic child observations were conducted to assess behavioral engagement among second to fifth graders in the fall and spring of the same school year. Classroom observations, teacher and child questionnaires, and social network data were collected in the fall. Confirming prior research, results from multilevel models indicate that students with more behavioral difficulties or less academic motivation in the fall were less behaviorally engaged in the spring. Extending prior research, classrooms with more equitably distributed and interconnected social ties—social network equity—had more behaviorally engaged students in the spring, especially in classrooms with higher levels of observed organization (i.e., effective management of behavior, time, and attention). Moreover, social network equity attenuated the negative relation between student behavioral difficulties and behavioral engagement, suggesting that students with behavioral difficulties were less disengaged in classrooms with more equitably distributed and interconnected social ties. Findings illuminate the need to consider classroom peer contexts in future research and intervention focused on the behavioral engagement of students in urban elementary schools.     

Tactile Ranschburg effects: facilitation and inhibitory repetition effects analogous to verbal memory

The present paper examines the effect of within-sequence item repetitions in tactile order memory. Employing an immediate serial recall procedure, participants reconstructed a six-item sequence tapped upon their fingers by moving those fingers in the order of original stimulation. In Experiment 1a, within-sequence repetition of an item separated by two-intervening items resulted in a significant reduction in recall accuracy for that repeated item (i.e., the Ranschburg effect). In Experiment 1b, within-sequence repetition of an adjacent item resulted in significant recall facilitation for that repeated item. These effects mirror those reported for verbal stimuli (e.g., Henson, 1998a Henson, R. N. A. (1998a). Item repetition in short-term memory: Ranschburg repeated. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(5), 1162–1181. doi:doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.24.5.1162[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Item repetition in short-term memory: Ranschburg repeated. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(5), 1162–1181. doi:doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.24.5.1162). These data are the first to demonstrate the Ranschburg effect with non-verbal stimuli and suggest further cross-modal similarities in order memory.     

The Science of Emotional Intelligence

ABSTRACT— This article provides an overview of current research on emotional intelligence. Although it has been defined in many ways, we focus on the four-branch model by Mayer and Salovey (1997) , which characterizes emotional intelligence as a set of four related abilities: perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions. The theory provides a useful framework for studying individual differences in abilities related to processing emotional information. Despite measurement obstacles, the evidence in favor of emotional intelligence is accumulating. Emotional intelligence predicts success in important domains, among them personal and work relationships.     

The Black Box effect: sensory stimulation after learning interferes with the retention of long-term object location memory in rats

Reducing sensory experiences during the period that immediately follows learning improves long-term memory retention in healthy humans, and even preserves memory in patients with amnesia. To date, it is entirely unclear why this is the case, and identifying the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning this effect requires suitable animal models, which are currently lacking. Here, we describe a straightforward experimental procedure in rats that future studies can use to directly address this issue. Using this method, we replicated the central findings on quiet wakefulness obtained in humans: We show that rats that spent 1 h alone in a familiar dark and quiet chamber (the Black Box) after exploring two objects in an open field expressed long-term memory for the object locations 6 h later, while rats that instead directly went back into their home cage with their cage mates did not. We discovered that both visual stimulation and being together with conspecifics contributed to the memory loss in the home cage, as exposing rats either to light or to a cage mate in the Black Box was sufficient to disrupt memory for object locations. Our results suggest that in both rats and humans, everyday sensory experiences that normally follow learning in natural settings can interfere with processes that promote long-term memory retention, thereby causing forgetting in form of retroactive interference. The processes involved in this effect are not sleep-dependent because we prevented sleep in periods of reduced sensory experience. Our findings, which also have implications for research practices, describe a potentially useful method to study the neurobiological mechanisms that might explain why normal sensory processing after learning impairs memory both in healthy humans and in patients suffering from amnesia.

One of the most puzzling phenomena of memory is that we forget, and since its beginning as a scientific discipline, psychology has been trying to find out why and how this happens (Ribot 1882; Ebbinghaus 1885; Müller and Pilzecker 1900; Burnham 1903)? Addressing this question, Jenkins and Dallenbach (1924) published a remarkable study in 1924 suggesting that much forgetting arises from continued mental activity caused by ongoing everyday experiencing that normally follows learning in natural settings. Their intriguing findings were not systematically pursued during the next decades, as the focus shifted to exploring the role of prior or subsequent learning on forgetting; that is, effects of proactive or retroactive interference of highly similar material on memory retention. This research program eventually led into a dead end (Tulving and Madigan 1970; Wixted 2004), and interference research in humans slowed down in the 1970s. In recent years, however, interest about the neurobiological bases of interference began to emerge again (Appleby and Wiskott 2009; Bartko et al. 2010; Blake et al. 2010; Butterly et al. 2012; Luu et al. 2012; Martínez et al. 2012; Winocur et al. 2012; Peters et al. 2013; Alber et al. 2014; Censor et al. 2014; Martínez et al. 2014; McDevitt et al. 2014; Albasser et al. 2015; Eugenia et al. 2016; Koen and Rugg 2016; Ge et al. 2019; Peters and Smith 2020).In their original experiment, Jenkins and Dallenbach (1924) used sleep to reduce the amount of interference after learning. They found that when their participants went about their normal (university campus) day after learning a list of nonsense syllables, their ability to recall the lists 1, 2, 4, or 8 h later was always poorer than when instead they slept during the time between learning and test. Jenkins and Dallenbach (1924) concluded that their results “indicate that forgetting is not so much a matter of the decay of old impressions and associations than a matter of the interference, inhibition, or obliteration of the old by the new.” Their findings were replicated by others, confirming that being asleep, compared with being awake and active, indeed improves memory retention (Van Ormer 1932; Ekstrand 1967). However, it remained an open question whether it is the reduction of sensory stimulation and new learning, which would usually occur during wakefulness, that prevents retroactive interference, or whether a specific, possibly sleep-dependent, memory facilitation process was at play (Ekstrand 1967, 1972).Noting that participants in the sleep condition did not immediately fall asleep in the original experiment, but that they experienced increased quiescence shortly after learning, Minami and Dallenbach (1946) tested the retroactive interference explanation of forgetting more directly, by controlling the amount of stimulation after learning in awake animals. This remarkable experiment used Periplaneta americana (American cockroach) and a little treadmill. After learning to suppress their natural tendency to run into a dark shelter box in a bright open alley (encouraged by an electrical shock received in the dark shelter), the cockroaches were either placed on a running treadmill in a transparent box, or in a normally lit circular transparent resting chamber, where they were not able to fall asleep but experienced notably less activity than the cockroaches on the treadmill. The outcome was that cockroaches who were forced to move presented with more forgetting than those who were not, suggesting that sleep—notwithstanding its possible beneficial effect on memory—may not be necessary to promote memory retention; rather, reducing the amount of stimulation and activity after learning may be critical for attenuating retroactive interference and thus forgetting.Some six decades later, a series of experiments picked up this original line of inquiry. Exploring in humans whether memory for short prose, word lists, or spatial knowledge benefits from reduced stimulation after learning, these studies have invariably replicated the main finding that spending a 10-min retention interval in quiet wakefulness in a dimly lit room after learning leads to better memory for the learned material than participating in unrelated cognitive tasks during the retention interval (Dewar et al. 2007, 2010). Increased memory for the acquired material following quiet wakefulness is long-lasting and can be detected up to 7 d after learning (Dewar et al. 2012; Alber et al. 2014). Even in amnesic patients 10 min of reduced sensory stimulation, compared with participating in cognitive tasks, enhances memory retention for verbal material (Cowan et al. 2004; Dewar et al. 2009, 2010). This lends strong support to the suggestion that the memory loss in amnesia arises from an increased vulnerability to interference shortly after encoding (Warrington and Weiskrantz 1974; Hardt et al. 2013)Similar results have been obtained in rodents in studies exploring the role of perirhinal cortex in object recognition memory. Rats with lesions to the perirhinal cortex typically show robust impairments in object recognition tasks (Brown and Aggleton 2001; Mumby et al. 2002, 2007; Norman and Eacott 2005; Albasser et al. 2015). However, if rats are placed into a dark box during the retention interval between the encoding phase and the test phase of an object recognition task, rats with lesions to perirhinal cortex no longer show a memory deficit and perform as well as intact animals (McTighe et al. 2010). Thus, reduction of sensory stimulation between encoding and test appears to enhance memory for objects even in rats with perirhinal cortex lesions. This finding recapitulates the outcomes of the studies with human patients suffering from amnesia after hippocampal damage.The aim of the current experiments was to determine whether reducing sensory stimulation after encoding would also enhance hippocampus-dependent memory in rats. To do this, we used a spontaneous object exploration task that assesses memory for object locations (Ennaceur and Delacour 1988; Hardt et al. 2010; Migues et al. 2016, 2019). Using this approach, we replicated in rats the basic effect that quiet wakefulness promotes memory retention as previously observed in humans. Specifically, here we show that following learning, everyday activity in the home cage with cage mates impairs object location memory in rats, while reducing sensory stimulation in a dark chamber, without sleep, promotes it.     

Big time is not always long: numerical magnitude automatically affects time reproduction

To reproduce the duration of an event precisely, one needs to represent the temporal information without being influenced by other magnitude attributes (e.g., size) of the event. In the present study, however, task-irrelevant numerical magnitude automatically affected participants' reproduction of the duration of a stimulus. In Experiment 1, participants made key-press responses to reproduce the duration of numbers. Reproduced durations were shorter for small numbers (e.g., 1) than for large numbers (e.g., 9). In contrast, in Experiment 2, participants' reproductions of a standard duration were longer when their key-press response was accompanied by visual presentation of a small number than when it was accompanied by presentation of a large number. These results clearly demonstrate that number-time interference extends beyond simple mapping between stimulus categories and response alternatives. The findings support the notion that either a common magnitude representation or closely connected magnitude representations underlie numerical and temporal processing.     

Relationships between right-wing authoritarianism, terrorism threat, and attitudes towards restrictions of civil rights: a comparison among four European countries

The present study tested the role of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), terrorist threat, and sociopolitical 'climate' as predictors of support for governmental anti-terrorism policies and actions. Two dimensions of analysis were defined: the presence versus absence of al-Qaeda attacks, and adherence to surveillance versus anti-surveillance mainstream politics. In order to study the influence of these two contextual dimensions on the expression of attitudes, we selected four European countries that fall into these two dimensions--Poland, Belgium, Spain, and the UK. Results from our study provide support for the contention that attitudes towards restrictions of civil rights are related to RWA independently of the cultural context. Moreover, in the UK sample, we found that the threat of terrorism increases acceptance of limitations of civil liberties, but only among people who hold authoritarian beliefs. However, in Spain, the other country that experienced terrorist attacks, this moderation effect was not found which is interpreted in terms of differences in the sociopolitical climate in both countries. As predicted, we did not find such moderation effect in countries in which threat is relatively low (Poland and Belgium). The results are discussed with reference to the conceptual framework based on the importance of fear experiences, security-focused policies, as well as the specific cultural context in the study of reaction to terrorist threat.     

Organized Community Activity Participation and the Dynamic Roles of Neighborhood Violence and Gender among Latino Adolescents

Relative to their peers, Latino youth are underinvolved in organized community activities (e.g., Boys and Girls Club), and their experiences lack examination. This study employed a neighborhood case‐study approach to examine the experiences of Latino youth in a neighborhood with high levels of violence and their participation in organized community activities. Employing a cluster sampling design (Lohr, Sampling: Design and analysis. Pacific Grove, CA: Nelson Education, 2009), we used quantitative, spatial, and qualitative data to understand adolescents’ participation in organized community activities. Furthermore, to understand how adolescents from the same neighborhood may experience violence differently we examined gender differences. Those who participated in organized community activities witnessed more violence, regardless of gender. General violence (e.g., robberies, shootings) was dispersed throughout the neighborhood, but gender‐specific violence was concentrated along the main street of the neighborhood. In qualitative interviews, adolescents reported this concentration of violence a deterrent to their participation: sexual harassment for girls and gang intimidation for boys. Our findings highlight the unique experiences of youth in violent neighborhoods and the importance of examining differential constraints for those within the same neighborhood.