Promoting socioemotional competence in primary school classrooms: Intervention effects of the EMOscope

The aim of the study was to determine the effectiveness of a brief, teacher-led intervention (EMOscope) developed to promote children’s socioemotional competence. Our sample consisted of 339 Polish pupils and their 16 teachers from 16 third grade classrooms. Teachers in the experimental condition (8 teachers) were trained to deliver the EMOscope intervention. Data were collected at pre-test and post-test. Performance tests were administered to measure children’s social understanding and emotional awareness. Furthermore, peer ratings were used to measure children’s cooperative behaviour and teachers’ reported on children’s prosocial behaviour, hyperactivity, emotional problems, conduct problems, and peer problems. Multilevel regression analysis revealed that children in the experimental condition improved significantly on emotional self- and other-awareness and on social understanding. Moreover, they decreased in teacher-rated hyperactivity, conduct problems, and total difficulties. No effects were found, however, on teacher-rated prosocial behaviour, emotional problems, peer problems, and peer-rated cooperative behaviour.     

The six dimensions of parenting and adolescent psychological adjustment: The mediating role of psychological needs

In accordance with the Self‐determination Theory (SDT), six dimensions of parenting (autonomy support vs. psychological control, structure vs. chaos, warmth vs. rejection) could be defined in their relation to adolescents’ adjustment. However, the mechanisms of these relations need to be further deepened. In accordance with SDT, the aims of this study were: (1) to examine the relationships between the six dimensions of parenting and the three psychological basic needs; (2) to examine the mediation role of basic psychological needs in the relation between parental practices, and positive and negative outcomes in a sample of Italian adolescents. In a sample of 342 adolescents, results suggest that supportive parenting practice (autonomy support, structure, and warmth) promotes need fulfillment and adjustment, while thwarting parenting practice (psychological control, chaos, and rejection) reduces need fulfillment and adjustment. Furthermore, the three psychological basic needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) mediate the relations between parenting and adolescents’ adjustment. These findings highlight the role of parenting in adolescents’ adjustment and in line with SDT provide evidence of the dynamic between parenting, psychological needs and adjustment.     

Viewing a face (especially one's own face) being touched enhances tactile perception on the face

Observing touch on another person's body activates brain regions involved in tactile perception, even when the observer's body is not directly stimulated. Previous work has shown that in some synaesthetes, this effect induces a sensation of being touched. The present study shows that if perceptual thresholds are experimentally manipulated, viewing touch can modulate tactile experience in nonsynaesthetes as well. When observers saw a face being touched by hands, rather than a face being merely approached by hands, they demonstrated enhanced detection of subthreshold tactile stimuli on their own faces. This effect was specific to observing touch on a body part, and was not found for touch on a nonbodily stimulus, namely, a picture of a house. In addition, the effect was stronger when subjects viewed their own faces rather than another person's face. Thus, observing touch can activate the tactile system, and if perceptual thresholds are manipulated, such activation can result in a behavioral effect in nonsynaesthetes. The effect is maximum if the observed body matches the observer's body.     

Promoting foot–leg movements in children with multiple disabilities through the use of support devices and technology for regulating contingent stimulation

The present study assessed the possibility of promoting pre-ambulatory foot–leg movements in children with multiple disabilities by motivating their action through contingent stimulation combined with a support device. Two children aged 10 and 8 years participated. Microswitch technology (i.e., pressure sensors under the shoes or optic sensors at the front–inner side of the shoes) served for detecting the foot–leg movements and providing contingent stimulation on their occurrence. Sensor activation produced 5 s of stimulation during intervention. Data showed that both children had significant increases in foot–leg movements during the intervention phases. Implications of the data in terms of skill acquisition and further intervention prospects are discussed.     

Zeading and reazing: which is faster? The position of the diverging letter in a pseudoword determines reading time

We present evidence that (a) at least some components of the reading process are serial and (b) pseudoword reading is affected by lexical knowledge, even in a transparent orthographic system like Italian. Pseudowords deriving from five-letter words by changing either the first or the fourth letter were presented for reading aloud. Results showed an effect of the position of the diverging letter: Early diverging pseudowords were read more slowly than late diverging pseudowords. The dual-route cascaded (DRC) model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) successfully simulated the behavioural data.     

At the root of embodied cognition: cognitive science meets neurophysiology

Recent experimental research in the field of neurophysiology has led to the discovery of two classes of visuomotor neurons: canonical neurons and mirror neurons. In light of these studies, we propose here an overview of two classical themes in the cognitive science panorama: James Gibson's theory of affordances and Eleanor Rosch's principles of categorization. We discuss how theoretical perspectives and neuroscientific evidence are converging towards the current paradigm of embodied cognition. From this perspective, we discuss the role of action and simulation in cognitive processes, which lead to the perceptual recognition of objects, and actions and to their conceptual categorization.     

Selective improvement of strain-dependent performances of cognitive tasks by food restriction

Temporary food restriction affects strain differences for behavioral phenotypes in the inbred strains of mice C57BL/6 (C57) and DBA/2 (DBA). Since food restriction is a routine procedure to motivate learning, we evaluated its influence on differences for spatial and non-spatial discrimination between these strains of mice by using two non-associative tasks: the Spatial Novelty Test (SNT) and the Spontaneous Object Recognition Test (SORT). The results confirmed the poor performance of the DBA mice in SNT. Nonetheless, DBA mice were perfectly able to recognize the novel object in SORT. By contrast, C57 mice were good performers in SNT but failed to recognize a novel object in SORT. Finally, food restriction selectively improved C57 performance in SNT and DBA performance in SORT. These results support the view that a food restricting procedure enhances strain differences for discrimination of configurational information.     

Updating and inhibition processes in working memory: a comparison between Alzheimer's type dementia and frontal lobe focal damage

A large debate has recently focused on the componential nature of the working-memory system (), as evidenced by functional-imaging studies and by using more sophisticated experimental paradigms. The present work aims at further disentangling the role and effects of central executive (CE) and of phonological loop (PL). It is suggested that maintaining active verbal information mostly relates to an intact PL, while the inhibition of interfering information preponderantly involves the CE. To distinguish these effects, two groups of brain damaged patients were administered with an updating task. Frontal lobe patients showed major difficulties in inhibiting interfering information, an ability requiring an involvement of the CE component. In contrast, Alzheimer's dementia patients evidenced a relative impairment in maintaining relevant information, requiring the intervention of the PL.     

Evidence for a double dissociation between spatial-simultaneous and spatial-sequential working memory in visuospatial (nonverbal) learning disabled children

The paper describes the performance of three children with specific visuospatial working memory (VSWM) impairments (Study 1) and three children with visuospatial (nonverbal) learning disabilities (Study 2) assessed with a battery of working memory (WM) tests and with a number of school achievement tasks. Overall, performance on WM tests provides evidence of a double dissociation between spatial-simultaneous processes, underpinning the memorization item positioning in a spatial configuration, and spatial-sequential processes, which allow memorization of the presentation order. In both groups of children of the two studies, a selective impairment either on spatial-sequential or on spatial-simultaneous working memory tasks was observed. These data support the existence of -simultaneous and -sequential modality-dependent processes in visuospatial working memory and confirm the importance of distinguishing between different subtypes of visuospatial (nonverbal) learning-disabled children.     

Rethinking the ontogeny of mindreading

We propose a mentalistic and nativist view of human early mental and social life and of the ontogeny of mindreading. We define the mental state of sharedness as the primitive, one-sided capability to take one's own mental states as mutually known to an interactant. We argue that this capability is an innate feature of the human mind, which the child uses to make a subjective sense of the world and of her actions. We argue that the child takes all of her mental states as shared with her caregivers. This allows her to interact with her caregivers in a mentalistic way from the very beginning and provides the grounds on which the later maturation of mindreading will build. As the latter process occurs, the child begins to understand the mental world in terms of differences between the mental states of different agents; subjectively, this also corresponds to the birth of privateness.