Move2Love and Vibrancy: Community Dance/Fitness

The Move2Love program demonstrates the feasibility of establishing community-based programs involving dance and exercise to support physical and social well-being in older women. The social fitness program has been running continuously for 23 years. It currently involves 125 to 175 women between the ages of 54 and 94 in weekly rhythmic training sessions. In addition to meeting the initial goals of addiction avoidance in an at-risk population, this program has contributed to the well-being of participants, both by lowering disease burden, and by increasing physical, social, and psychological fitness. This article describes the program and explores the reasons that it has continued to work for over two decades. It also demonstrates the value experienced by participants in their own words. The Move2Love program could serve as a feasibility pilot for other communities wishing to create sustainable, salutary activity programming to enhance the well-being of senior women.     

The detection of fear-relevant stimuli: are guns noticed as quickly as snakes?

Potentially dangerous stimuli are important contenders for the capture of visual-spatial attention, and it has been suggested that an evolved fear module is preferentially activated by stimuli that are fear relevant in a phylogenetic sense (e.g., snakes, spiders, angry faces). In this study, a visual search task was used to test this hypothesis by directly contrasting phylogenetically (snakes) and ontogenetically (guns) fear-relevant stimuli. Results showed that the modern threat was detected as efficiently as the more ancient threat. Thus, both guns and snakes attracted attention more effectively than neutral stimuli (flowers, mushrooms, and toasters). These results support a threat superiority effect but not one that is preferentially accessed by threat-related stimuli of phylogenetic origin. The results are consistent with the view that faster detection of threat in visual search tasks may be more accurately characterized as relevance superiority effects rather than as threat superiority effects.     

Representation of principled connections: a window onto the formal aspect of common sense conception

Nominal concepts represent things as tokens of types. Recent research suggests that we represent principled connections between the type of thing something is (e.g., DOG) and some of its properties (k-properties; e.g., having four legs for dogs) but not other properties (t-properties; e.g., being brown for dogs). Principled connections differ from logical, statistical, and causal connections. Principled connections license (i) the expectation that tokens of the type will generally possess their k-properties, (ii) formal explanations (i.e., explanation of the presence of k-properties in tokens of a type by reference to the type of thing it is), and (iii) normative expectations concerning the presence of k-properties in tokens of the type. The present paper investigates the hypothesis that representing principled connections requires representing properties as aspects of being the relevant kind of thing (Aspect Hypothesis). Experiment 1 provides a direct test of the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiments 2 and 3 provide indirect tests of the Aspect Hypothesis. All three experiments provide support for the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiment 4 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the manner in which formal explanations are licensed by principled connections. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the nature of the normative expectations licensed by principled connections. Together these results provide strong evidence for the idea that representing principled connections involves representing a property as being an aspect of being a given kind of thing. The results also help clarify the manner in which formal explanation differs from other modes of explanation. Finally, the results of the experiments are used to motivate a proposal concerning the formal structure of the conceptual representations implicated by principled connections. This structure provides a domain-general way of structuring our concepts and embodies the perspective we take when we think and talk of things as being instances of a kind.     

Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others

ABSTRACT— Positive self-statements are widely believed to boost mood and self-esteem, yet their effectiveness has not been demonstrated. We examined the contrary prediction that positive self-statements can be ineffective or even harmful. A survey study confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective. Two experiments showed that among participants with low self-esteem, those who repeated a positive self-statement ("I'm a lovable person") or who focused on how that statement was true felt worse than those who did not repeat the statement or who focused on how it was both true and not true. Among participants with high self-esteem, those who repeated the statement or focused on how it was true felt better than those who did not, but to a limited degree. Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who "need" them the most.     

Synthesising affect and cognition in teaching and learning

Teachers often approach teaching with an energy and enthusiasm to inspire their students with their skills and knowledge. However, when faced with students who are not fully engaged in their learning, teachers sometimes find it difficult and frustrating to communicate the subject knowledge. This paper looks at the importance of teachers reflecting regularly on their teaching with thoughts not just about the communication of subject knowledge, but combining this with the emotions and affective experiences of themselves and their students. We interviewed 11 new secondary science teachers about their first 3 years of teaching and in particular, questions were directed at their relationships in school, communication with students, the ideal lesson and reflection. Our findings revealed that teachers who were most successful when faced with adversities in the classroom, were those who appreciated that, as well as communicating subject knowledge, there is also a need for affective communication with the student. Many of the teachers we spoke to emphasised the importance of establishing a rapport with their students, and especially when they were disengaged and disinterested in learning. The data highlight the importance of conceptualising teaching and learning as encompassing both affect and cognition in order to have a balanced and healthy view of teaching, learning, the student and the school.

There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul. Arnold Bennett (1867–1931)

A common mechanism in verb and noun naming deficits in Alzheimer’s patients

We tested the ability of Alzheimer’s patients and elderly controls to name living and non-living nouns, and manner and instrument verbs. Patients’ error patterns and relative performance with different categories showed evidence of graceful degradation for both nouns and verbs, with particular domain-specific impairments for living nouns and instrument verbs. Our results support feature-based, semantic representations for nouns and verbs and support the role of inter-correlated features in noun impairment, and the role of noun knowledge in instrument verb impairment.     

Comparing the apple of my eye: Parental reactions to academic social comparisons of their elementary school-aged children

The current study examines parents’ reactions to making social comparisons of their children on school-related domains. Parents (N = 117; ages 25 to 49; 94% women) of elementary school-age children (ages 5 to 10; 57.3% girls) were recruited online from Facebook parenting groups and several school districts in Atlantic Canada. Participants were randomly assigned to make either an upward, a downward, or a lateral social comparison about their child’s ability in school. Participants reported the time since the event in comparison, their emotional reactions, their evaluations of their child’s ability in the domain, and how important they perceived the domain to be for their child’s future. Domain importance and evaluations of the child’s abilities also were measured prior to making the comparison. Significant differences based on social comparison condition were found for temporal distance, post-comparison domain importance, and post-comparison assessments of the child’s ability in the domain. The effect of social comparison on post-comparison domain importance was not mediated by post-comparison assessments of the child’s ability, suggesting a direct effect of comparisons on perceived domain importance. These findings suggest that the act of social comparison caused parents to reevaluate the importance of the domain of comparison and their child’s abilities in that domain. Implications for parents and educators are discussed.     

Triangulating Creativity: Examining Discrepancies Across Self-Rated,Quasi-Expert-Rated and Verbalized Creativity in Arts-based Learning

This convergent mixed methods study examined the triangulation of self-rated, quasi-expert-rated and verbalized creativity in students enrolled in a year-long photography program. The quantitative data included self-report scales in creativity, and ratings of creativity in students’ photography. The qualitative data included student interviews reflecting on their photographs and verbalizing their beliefs about creativity. The data were first analyzed separately and then merged for analysis to determine possible relationships between these three data sources. Merging quantitative and qualitative data highlighted two key discrepancies between students’ actual creative performance and their perceptions as creative individuals. Possible explanations of these disceprancies are discussed in light of research on creative self-efficacy and creative mindsets.     

The abused child as parent: Perception of self and other

Although not all abused children grow up to be abusive parents, it is well known that people who were severely mistreated by their parents as compared to those who were not are at higher risk for mistreating their children. It has also been shown that abusive parents often have unrealistic expectations for their children—expectations based on distorted perceptions of their children's needs, feelings, and abilities. In this paper, we examine the utility of new methods developed in social psychology to study: (1) the impact of abuse on the structure and content of interpersonal and self-perception and (2) the interrelationships among an abused mother's social and self-perception, the quality of her interactions with her child, and the child's development. Case studies will be presented to illustrate how these new methods reflect risk for abuse as predicted independently by clinicians treating the cases.