The Role of School-based Group Mentoring in Promoting Resilience among Vulnerable High School Students

This study examined the role of participation in a year-long school-based group mentoring program, Project Arrive (PA), on increasing resilience during the first year of high school among students identified as being at high risk for school dropout. Participants were 114, ninth grade students taking part in one of 32 PA mentoring groups, and 71 statistically matched comparison students (53% male, 75% eligible for free/reduced-price lunch, 62% Latinx). Using a propensity score with inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to reduce selection bias, and a multi-level model to account for non-independence of data within mentoring groups, we examined changes from pre-test to program exit on seven external resilience resources (developmental supports and opportunities) and four internal resilience assets (personal strengths). At program exit, PA participants had higher adjusted means than comparisons on six external resources, including school support, school belonging, school meaningful participation, peer caring relationships, prosocial peers, and home meaningful participation. PA participants also had higher adjusted means on one internal asset, problem solving. Results point to the promise of group mentoring as an approach for increasing resilience among academically vulnerable adolescents.     

I thought that I heard you laughing: Contextual facial expressions modulate the perception of authentic laughter and crying

It is well established that categorising the emotional content of facial expressions may differ depending on contextual information. Whether this malleability is observed in the auditory domain and in genuine emotion expressions is poorly explored. We examined the perception of authentic laughter and crying in the context of happy, neutral and sad facial expressions. Participants rated the vocalisations on separate unipolar scales of happiness and sadness and on arousal. Although they were instructed to focus exclusively on the vocalisations, consistent context effects were found: For both laughter and crying, emotion judgements were shifted towards the information expressed by the face. These modulations were independent of response latencies and were larger for more emotionally ambiguous vocalisations. No effects of context were found for arousal ratings. These findings suggest that the automatic encoding of contextual information during emotion perception generalises across modalities, to purely non-verbal vocalisations, and is not confined to acted expressions.     

A comparison of visual tilt illusions measured by the techniques of verticle setting, parallel matching, and dot alignment.

The tilt illusion (TI) was investigated by using both short (19 min) and long (2 deg 6 min) test lines, at three angles of test line-inducing line separation (15 degrees, 45 degrees, and 75 degrees). Three groups of ten observers each provided data under one of three task conditions: vertical judgment, parallel matching, and dot alignment on a common visual display. The main result was that both the vertical judgment and the parallel matching task provided similar, classic TI angular functions with the means ordered 15 degrees greater than 45 degrees greater than 75 degrees and with small attraction effects at 75 degrees in three of the four relevant functions. The third task, dot alignment, yielded results different from the average of the other two: no attraction effects occurred and, with the short test line, the obtained mean illusion at 45 degrees exceeded those at the other intersect angles. These results are consistent with alignment data reported by others. One explanation is that the inducing line produces an apparent bowing of the test line which would be reflected in dot alignments but not in vertical setting or in parallel matching. However, direct evidence does not support this hypothesis. An alternate hypothesis, for which independent evidence exists, is that alignment errors reflect perceptual mistracking but that the origin of these errors is not the tip of the test line but within it. Although this does not explain dot alignment errors, it highlights their complexity and the need to interpret them with caution.     

Successive independence and behavioral contrast in a closed economy.

Two pigeons had access to multiple concurrent schedules of reinforcement for 24 hours per day in their home cages. The variable-interval schedules comprising the multiple concurrent schedules were varied across 16 conditions. In three sets of conditions, one schedule was varied while its concurrent alternative and the concurrent schedules in the other component were held constant. Behavioral contrast was observed; that is, as the rate of reinforcement arranged by the varied schedule decreased, response rates on the constant schedules typically increased. These conditions formed part of two larger sets of conditions in which the concurrent schedules in one multiple-schedule component remained constant while the concurrent schedules in the other component were varied. Successive independence was found, in that behavior allocation during the constant component did not vary as a function of the reinforcer ratios in the varied component. Successive independence between components in multiple concurrent schedules is a robust result that occurs in closed economies and under conditions that promote behavioral contrast.     

Semantic priming in young and older adults: evidence for age constancy in automatic and attentional processes

Automatic and attentional components of semantic priming and the relation of each to episodic memory were evaluated in young and older adults. Category names served as prime words, and the relatedness of the prime to a subsequent lexical decision target was varied orthogonally with whether the target category was expected or unexpected. At a prime-target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of 410 ms, target words in the same category had faster lexical decision latencies than did different category targets. This effect was not significant at a 1,550-ms SOA and was attributed to automatic processes. Expected category targets had faster latencies than unexpected category targets at the 410-ms SOA, and the magnitude of the effect increased at the 1,550-ms SOA. This effect was attributed to attentional processes. These patterns of priming were obtained for both age groups, but in a surprise memory test older adults had poorer recall of primes and targets. We discuss the implications of these results for the hypothesis that older adults suffer deficits in selective attention and for the related hypothesis that attentional deficits impair semantic processing, which causes memory decrements in old age.