Emotional display rules and emotion self‐regulation: Associations with bullying and victimization in community‐based after school programs

We explored linkages among different components of emotional competence and bullying and victimization in children enrolled in community after school programs. Seventy‐seven children were recruited from after school programs and their display rule knowledge for sadness and anger was evaluated. Their emotion self‐regulation skills and bullying experiences were also assessed. Knowledge of display rules for sadness was a negative predictor of physical victimization whereas emotional lability/negativity was positively related to bullying. Boys bullied more than girls and family income was negatively related to bullying and emotional lability/negativity and positively associated with emotion self‐regulation. Emotion self‐regulation mediated the relation between family income and bullying. Analyses also suggested that bullies and bully‐victims had poorer emotion self‐regulation skills than non‐bullies/victims or victims. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Post‐It® Note Persuasion: A Sticky Influence

Four studies examine the influence of attaching a seemingly insignificant Post‐it^® note to a survey packet on the likelihood of completing the survey. Participants who received a packet with an affixed Post‐it note request had significantly higher return rates than participants who received the identical survey with (a) no sticky note, (b) the same message written on the cover sheet but without a Post‐it, or (c) a blank Post‐it with no message provided. Furthermore, they returned the materials more promptly with higher quality responses. A more personalized Post‐it appeal increased returns when the survey was long and time consuming but was no more effective than a nonpersonalized Post‐it when the survey was easy to complete. Results suggest that the Post‐it leads the request to be interpreted as a solicitation for a personal favor, facilitating a normative compliance response.     

Hope for the Worst: Occasional Reinforced Extinction and Expectancy Violation in the Treatment of OCD

An inhibitory learning conceptualization of treatment mechanisms in exposure-based therapy appears to better account for durability of symptom reduction and index overall learning. Presented here is an overview of two core elements of inhibitory learning, expectancy violation and occasional reinforced extinction, as they are thought to function in exposure and response prevention (ERP) for OCD. The overview is then followed by case examples illustrating these processes at work in a naturalistic clinical setting. Implications for treatment are broadly discussed.     

Effects of threat cues on attentional shifting, disengagement and response slowing in anxious individuals

According to cognitive models of anxiety, attentional biases for threat may cause or maintain anxiety states. Previous research using spatial cueing tasks has been interpreted in terms of difficulty in disengaging attention from threat in anxious individuals, as indicated by contrasts of response times (RTs) from threat cue versus neutral cue trials. However, on spatial cueing tasks, differences in RT between threat cue and neutral cue trials may stem from a slowing effect of threat on RT, as well as effects on allocation of visuospatial attention. The present study examined the effects of threat cues on both attentional cueing and response slowing. High and low anxious individuals completed a central cue task, which assessed threat-related response slowing, and a spatial cueing task, which assessed attentional biases for angry, happy and neutral faces. Results indicated that interpretation of the anxiety-related bias for threat depended on whether the effect of response slowing was taken into account. The study illustrates an important problem in using the modified spatial cueing task to assess components of threat-related attentional bias. As this experimental method may reflect both threat-related attentional cueing and response slowing effects, it cannot be assumed to provide pure measures of shift or disengagement components of attention bias.     

Child and family correlates of toddlers' emotional and behavioral responses to a mishap

This study evaluated the unique and joint contributions of internal state language, externalizing behavior, and maternal talk about emotions to the prediction of toddlers' empathy‐related responsiveness. The empathy‐based guilt reactions of 47 toddlers (27 boys) were observed in response to distress that they thought they had caused. In addition, mothers reported on the children's internal state language, externalizing behavior, and empathy‐based guilt. In a separate observation, the mothers discussed emotional expressions with their children, and the functional significance of their emotional discourse was considered. Results revealed that toddlers' internal state language ability was positively related to their attempts to comprehend another's affective state and to maternal reports of children's sympathy reactions. There was also an unexpected inverse relation between externalizing behavior and arousal level. In terms of the parent measures, maternal explanations of emotions were positively related to children's attempts to comprehend another's affective state, whereas mothers' directives for children to label emotions were positively related to children's expressed emotional concern for others. The implications of these findings for understanding empathy and guilt development in young children are discussed. ©2003 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

The role of configuration in the identification of visually degraded words

Two experiments were carried out in which reaction time for identification of words in sets of four was measured. The words were of three letters, with dichotomous variation of the first and third letters, in either upper- or lowercase, with letters chosen to give maximum variation in word configuration in lowercase. Four types of display were used, differing in size and masking. In Experiment 1, the words were easy to identify in uppercase as well as in lowercase, because the letters were easily discriminable in either case, and the results showed no advantage to lowercase words at any level of degradation. In Experiment 2, the letters were more difficult to discriminate in uppercase, and with the most severe degradation, the words in lowercase were identified more rapidly than those in uppercase. Thus the reaction time results showed an advantage of the configural properties available in lowercase only with words difficult to identify in uppercase and with extreme amounts of degradation. Error analyses of both experiments showed that errors were made to individual letters, not on the basis of the configuration, for words in both cases. It is concluded that letter processing occurs even when there is evidence for the use of configural information, thus implying a predominant role of letter perception in word identification. Some reservation is expressed whether whole-word configuration is the only pertinent configural property and whether the results from such simple identification tasks are appropriate to an understanding of natural reading.     

The effect of goodness onencoding time in visual pattern discrimination

Previous results have implied that pattern goodness, as defined by rotation/reflection equivalence set size, is a determinant of encoding time. A direct test of this implication was made via a discrete RT task using good and poor dot patterns in a two-stimulus discrimination. The following discrimination conditions were used: (1) good vs good; (2) poor vs poor; and (3) good vs poor. Overall RTs for Conditions 1 and 3 were equal, but each was significantly faster than Condition 2. In the first two conditions, there was no difference in RT within pairs and no consistent transitive ordering of the patterns. In Condition 3, however, the good pattern consistently produced the smaller RT. These results indicate that patterns of equal goodness are equally encodable, and the better the pattern, the faster it is encoded. In addition, there was evidence that pattern similarity affects RT.