Emotions at primary school: Negative achievement emotions and their relation with emotional competencies in ethnic minority and majority students

Scarce attention has been paid to ethnic minority students' emotions and related competencies at school. Nevertheless, theoretical frameworks such as the control–value theory underline the importance of achievement emotions for students' performance and well‐being. We involved minority (n = 63) and majority (n = 103) students attending the first, third, and fifth grade of primary school. We assessed negative achievement emotions (anxiety, anger, embarrassment, boredom, and hopelessness), emotion understanding, and emotion regulation. Factorial analyses supported the goodness of the structure of a questionnaire measuring the five achievement emotions in Italian and mathematics and its invariance across minority and majority students. Analyses of variance indicated that minority students felt more intense anger, embarrassment, and boredom for Italian and anxiety and embarrassment for mathematics. Path analyses revealed that emotion understanding and emotion regulation were significantly related to achievement emotions. Findings are discussed for their theoretical and applied relevance in promoting well‐being at school among minority and majority students.     

Self-projection in middle childhood: a study on the relationship between theory of mind and episodic future thinking

Cognitive Processing - Growing evidence suggests that theory of mind (ToM) and episodic future thinking (EFT) are closely related at both brain and functional level. This study explored the...     

Knowing minds: Linking early perspective taking and later metacognitive insight

Recent metacognitive research using a partial knowledge task indicates that a firm understanding of ‘knowing about knowing’ develops surprisingly late, at around 6 years of age. To reveal the mechanisms subserving this development, the partial knowledge task was used in a longitudinal study with 67 children (33 girls) as an outcome measure at 5;9 (years;months). In addition, first- and second-order false belief was assessed at 4;2, 5;0, and 5;9. At 2;6, perspective taking and executive abilities were evaluated. Metacognition at 5;9 was correlated with earlier theory of mind and perspective taking – even when verbal intelligence and executive abilities were partialled out. This highlights the importance of perspective taking for the development of an understanding of one’s own mind.     

Childhood intelligence and adult health: The mediating roles of education and socioeconomic status

The longitudinal relation between childhood intelligence and various health outcomes in adulthood is now well-established. One mediational model that accounts for this relation proposes that intelligence has cumulative indirect effects on adult health via subsequent educational attainment and adult socioeconomic status (SES). The aim of the present study was to examine whether and the extent to which educational attainment and SES mediate the impact of childhood intelligence on three dimensions of adult health in Luxembourg, a country with high-quality universal public health care. We used data from 745 participants in the Luxembourgish MAGRIP study. At the age of 12, participants completed a comprehensive intelligence test. At the age of 52, they reported their educational careers, SES, and functional, subjective, and physical health status. Using structural equation modeling, we investigated the direct and indirect effects (via educational attainment and adult SES) of childhood intelligence on adult health. We found that higher childhood intelligence predicted better functional, subjective, and physical health in adulthood. These effects were entirely mediated via educational attainment and SES. The mediational processes differed depending on the health dimension under investigation: Whereas SES was crucial in mediating the effect of intelligence on functional and subjective health, educational attainment was crucial in mediating the effect on physical health. These findings held up when considering adult intelligence and were similar for women and men. Our results suggest that even excellent public health care cannot fully offset the cumulative effects of childhood intelligence on adult health. Further studies are needed to investigate the relative importance of different mediators in the intelligence–health relation while including a broader set of objective health measures.     

Placebo effects in spider phobia: an eye-tracking experiment

ABSTRACT

Several eye-tracking studies have revealed that spider phobic patients show a typical hypervigilance-avoidance pattern when confronted with images of spiders. The present experiment investigated if this pattern can be changed via placebo treatment. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 37 women with spider phobia. They looked at picture pairs (a spider paired with a neutral picture) for 7?s each in a retest design: once with and once without a placebo pill presented along with the verbal suggestion that it can reduce phobic symptoms. The placebo was labelled as Propranolol, a beta-blocker that has been successfully used to treat spider phobia. In the placebo condition, both the fixation count and the dwell time on the spider pictures increased, especially in the second half of the presentation time. This was associated with a slight decrease in self-reported symptom severity. In summary, we were able to show that a placebo was able to positively influence visual avoidance in spider phobia. This effect might help to overcome apprehension about engaging in exposure therapy, which is present in many phobic patients.     

Neural correlates of attention to emotional facial expressions in dysphoria

The present study investigated whether dysphoric individuals have a difficulty in disengaging attention from negative stimuli and/or reduced attention to positive information. Sad, neutral and happy facial stimuli were presented in an attention-shifting task to 18 dysphoric and 18 control participants. Reaction times to neutral shapes (squares and diamonds) and the event-related potentials to emotional faces were recorded. Dysphoric individuals did not show impaired attentional disengagement from sad faces or facilitated disengagement from happy faces. Right occipital lateralisation of P100 was absent in dysphoric individuals, possibly indicating reduced attention-related sensory facilitation for faces. Frontal P200 was largest for sad faces among dysphoric individuals, whereas controls showed larger amplitude to both sad and happy as compared with neutral expressions, suggesting that dysphoric individuals deployed early attention to sad, but not happy, expressions. Importantly, the results were obtained controlling for the participants' trait anxiety. We conclude that at least under some circumstances the presence of depressive symptoms can modulate early, automatic stages of emotional processing.     

Notes for a Definition of the Concept of Psychoanalytical Epistemology

The first part of the article describes the epistemic ambiguities that psychoanalysis has generated through both a sometimes unstructured information. Accordingly, a historically out-moded 'scientist' model has erroneously been taken as valid and scientific. The second part illustrates the extent to which predominant psychoanalytical currents now share common ground with epistemology and the cognate sciences, breaking out of the epistemic solipsism which for too long led psycholanalysis to believe it could be self-referential. This critical examination of old and new ground is thus an analysis of the referents on which psychoanalysis has based its theoretical postulates. It is desirable that this analysis be extended to include the whole discipline of psychoanalytical research, thereby becoming a mental given for the psychoanalyst, not least on account of the enormous benefit of epistemic reflexion on the adoption of the instruments of knowledge. Over the last few years this development has allowed psychoanalytical theory to be considered on a par with the results of philosophy and the philosophy of science, thereby ending the false and anti-scientific aristocracy of thought which made psychoanalysis a prisoner of itself for almost a century. approach and a lack of updated epistemological     

Episodic future thinking

Thinking about the future is an integral component of human cognition – one that has been claimed to distinguish us from other species. Building on the construct of episodic memory, we introduce the concept of ‘episodic future thinking’: a projection of the self into the future to pre-experience an event. We argue that episodic future thinking has explanatory value when considering recent work in many areas of psychology: cognitive, social and personality, developmental, clinical and neuropsychology. Episodic future thinking can serve as a unifying concept, connecting aspects of diverse research findings and identifying key questions requiring further reflection and study.