When the happy victimizer says sorry: Children's understanding of apology and emotion

Previous research suggests that children gradually understand the mitigating effects of apology on damage to a transgressor's reputation. However, little is known about young children's insights into the central emotional implications of apology. In two studies, children ages 4–9 heard stories about moral transgressions in which the wrongdoers either did or did not apologize. In Study 1, children in the no‐apology condition showed the classic pattern of ‘happy victimizer’ attributions by expecting the wrongdoer to feel good about gains won via transgression. By contrast, in the apology condition, children attributed negative feelings to the transgressor and improved feelings to the victim. In Study 2, these effects were found even when the explicit emotion marker ‘sorry’ was removed from the apology exchange. Thus, young children understand some important emotional functions of apology.     

Hope as a Predictor of Interpersonal Suicide Risk

The current study hypothesized that (1) hope would negatively predict burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, and acquired capability to enact lethal injury; (2) hope would negatively predict suicidal ideation; and (3) the interpersonal suicide risk factors would predict suicidal ideation. Results indicated that hope negatively predicted burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness, but positively predicted acquired capability to enact suicide. Contrary to our second hypothesis, hope did not predict suicidal ideation, but interpersonal risk factors for suicide predicted suicidal ideation. Results are discussed in terms of implications for hope theory and Joiner's (2005) interpersonal risk factors for suicide, and for clinical practice.     

Comparisons of developmental modeling frameworks and levels of analysis in cognition: connectionist and dynamic systems theories deserve attention,but don’t yet explain attention

In this article, an investigator who is outside of the connectionist / dynamic systems (CD) tradition, but is sympathetic to many of its theoretical stances, considers whether these are separate approaches and what the two approaches mean for the development of information processing. It is argued that these approaches have not been defined in the target articles of this special issue narrowly enough to make them clearly separate approaches. Rather, they appear to emphasize different aspects of a common approach. It is also suggested that they do not form an overarching theory of development but do form an important theoretical approach at one level of analysis. In particular, one may sometimes, but not always, have to get into nonlinear interactions between faculties of the mind to predict and explain behavior. Finally, an attempt is made to challenge the CD approach to become more global by confronting the issue of how attention and conscious awareness should be represented in these models, and how the development of them may occur. Evidence of changes in automatic and attention-related parameters of processing may provide a scaffolding upon which better CD models can be constructed.