Learning new meanings for old words: effects of semantic relatedness

Changes to our everyday activities mean that adult language users need to learn new meanings for previously unambiguous words. For example, we need to learn that a "tweet" is not only the sound a bird makes, but also a short message on a social networking site. In these experiments, adult participants learned new fictional meanings for words with a single dominant meaning (e.g., "ant") by reading paragraphs that described these novel meanings. Explicit recall of these meanings was significantly better when there was a strong semantic relationship between the novel meaning and the existing meaning. This relatedness effect emerged after relatively brief exposure to the meanings (Experiment 1), but it persisted when training was extended across 7?days (Experiment 2) and when semantically demanding tasks were used during this extended training (Experiment 3). A lexical decision task was used to assess the impact of learning on online recognition. In Experiment 3, participants responded more quickly to words whose new meaning was semantically related than to those with an unrelated meaning. This result is consistent with earlier studies showing an effect of meaning relatedness on lexical decision, and it indicates that these newly acquired meanings become integrated with participants' preexisting knowledge about the meanings of words.     

Controlling your environment and yourself: Implications for career success

Given the complex and rapidly changing nature of the current work environment, individuals' capabilities to effectively influence their environment and regulate their behavior may be critical to career success. Drawing from the model of emergent interactive agency (Bandura, 1989), the current research examines this perspective, focusing on proactive personality and self-control as predictors of extrinsic and intrinsic career success. Although some studies have investigated proactive personality as a predictor of success, less research has focused on factors involved in this relationship and very little work has examined self-control in the context of career success. Study 1 involved a cross-sectional design with 249 full-time employees who completed measures assessing personality and career-related variables. Study 2 involved a longitudinal design with 1568 individuals who were rated on self-control during childhood and completed career-related measures approximately 20 years later. Study 1 results indicated proactive personality and self-control related to extrinsic career success (salary and occupational prestige) through educational attainment. Study 2 results indicated self-control related to extrinsic career success (salary and occupational prestige) through educational attainment and intrinsic career success (career satisfaction) through occupational opportunity for achievement. These findings contribute to the knowledge base regarding career success by highlighting the relevance of active control tendencies that are externally focused (proactive personality) as well as those that are internally focused (self-control) and identifying key factors linking these traits to career success.     

Recognizing prosody across modalities, face areas and speakers: examining perceivers' sensitivity to variable realizations of visual prosody

Prosody can be expressed not only by modification to the timing, stress and intonation of auditory speech but also by modifying visual speech. Studies have shown that the production of visual cues to prosody is highly variable (both within and across speakers), however behavioural studies have shown that perceivers can effectively use such visual cues. The latter result suggests that people are sensitive to the type of prosody expressed despite cue variability. The current study investigated the extent to which perceivers can match visual cues to prosody from different speakers and from different face regions. Participants were presented two pairs of sentences (consisting of the same segmental content) and were required to decide which pair had the same prosody. Experiment 1 tested visual and auditory cues from the same speaker and Experiment 2 from different speakers. Experiment 3 used visual cues from the upper and the lower face of the same talker and Experiment 4 from different speakers. The results showed that perceivers could accurately match prosody even when signals were produced by different speakers. Furthermore, perceivers were able to match the prosodic cues both within and across modalities regardless of the face area presented. This ability to match prosody from very different visual cues suggests that perceivers cope with variation in the production of visual prosody by flexibly mapping specific tokens to abstract prosodic types.     

A Picture-Based Activity Schedule Intervention to Teach Adults with Mild Intellectual Disability to Use an iPad During a Leisure Activity

Individuals with developmental disabilities have limited opportunities to participate in leisure activities, frequently due to lack of skills. The purpose of the current study was to teach three adults diagnosed with mild intellectual disability to use an iPad in the context of playing the video game Angry Birds. We used an adapted multiple baseline across participants research design to teach the task, which included opening the cover of the iPad, unlocking the device, opening Angry Birds, playing the game, and putting the iPad away. Instruction took place during breaks in a private room at a sheltered workshop. During intervention, participants had access to an activity schedule to aid in completion of the task. In some cases, extra prompts were provided to increase attention to the activity schedule. All three participants showed improvement in the target skill with intervention and gains were sustained during the maintenance phase.     

Caregiving Arrangements and Caregiver Well-being when Infants are Born to Mothers in Prison

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Each year in the United States, over 1000 women give birth while in prison. Little is known about who cares for the infants after they are separated from their...     

Subjective Well-Being Predictors of Academic Citizenship Behavior

Two studies tested the hypothesis that SWB predicts unique variance in academic citizenship attitudes, even while accounting for personality traits. In Study 1, participants (n?=?2,566) completed an online questionnaire assessing their positive and negative affect, ACBs and personality. The results indicated that positive affect predicted consideration, civic virtue, and conscientiousness, whereas negative affect predicted citizenship conscientiousness and sportsmanship while controlling for personality. In Study 2, participants (n?=?260) completed measures of life satisfaction, ACBs and personality. The results showed that life satisfaction predicted all ACBs while controlling for personality. Based on these results, it can be concluded that SWB is an important predictor of ACBs. Implications for the selection of student aids in academic settings are discussed.     

Strategies for the Control of Unwanted Thoughts in Adolescents: The Adolescent Thought Control Questionnaire (TCQ-A)

A paucity of research on thought suppression exists among adolescents. The present study describes the preliminary psychometrics of the Adolescent Thought Control Questionnaire (TCQ-A) and its relationships with internalizing symptomatology in adolescents. Adolescents between 12 and 18 years of age completed the TCQ-A and other self-report instruments. Principal components analysis yielded five-factors theoretically derived from an adult measure: distraction, social, re-appraisal, worry, and punishment control strategies. The five-factor structure was well fitted to the data in a confirmatory factor analysis. Adequate evidence of reliability was obtained; however, internal consistency of the punishment factor was not adequate in the sample. The TCQ-A evidenced convergent and divergent validity with internalizing and externalizing symptomatology respectively. Future research applications of the TCQ-A, suggestions for further analyses, and refinement of the instrument are also discussed.     

The Positive Influence of Creating a Holistic Facial Composite on Video Line‐up Identification

Witnesses to a crime may be asked to create a facial composite of the offender from memory. They may then view a suspect in a police line‐up. Previous research on this topic has found both recognition impairment and enhancement following composite construction. In Experiment 1, creator‐participants employed the holistic facial composite system system EFIT‐V or the feature‐based E‐FIT system to create a single composite, and in Experiment 2, creators constructed up to three EFIT‐Vs. In both experiments, facial composite creators were one‐and‐a‐half times more likely than non‐composite creating controls to make correct target identifications from a video line‐up. No between condition effects were found in target‐absent trials in Experiment 1. The development of holistic facial composite systems has enhanced suspect identification rates in police investigations, and these results suggest that the use of such a system can also have a positive influence on a composite‐creating witness' later recognition of the suspect. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A flexible and accurate method to estimate the mode and stability of spontaneous coordinated behaviors: The index-of-stability (IS) analysis

Patterns of coordination result from the interaction between (at least) two oscillatory components. This interaction is typically understood by means of two variables: the mode that expresses the shape of the interaction, and the stability that is the robustness of the interaction in this mode. A potent method of investigating coordinated behaviors is to examine the extent to which patterns of coordination arise spontaneously. However, a prominent issue faced by researchers is that, to date, no standard methods exist to fairly assess the stability of spontaneous coordination. In the present study, we introduce a new method called the index-of-stability (IS) analysis. We developed this method from the phase-coupling (PC) analysis that has been traditionally used for examining locomotion–respiration coordinated systems. We compared the extents to which both methods estimate the stability of simulated coordinated behaviors. Computer-generated time series were used to simulate the coordination of two rhythmic components according to a selected mode m:n and a selected degree of stability. The IS analysis was superior to the PC analysis in estimating the stability of spontaneous coordinated behaviors, in three ways: First, the estimation of stability itself was found to be more accurate and more reliable with the IS analysis. Second, the IS analysis is not constrained by the limitations of the PC analysis. Third and last, the IS analysis offers more flexibility, and so can be adapted according to the user’s needs.