The brain basis of emotion: a meta-analytic review

Researchers have wondered how the brain creates emotions since the early days of psychological science. With a surge of studies in affective neuroscience in recent decades, scientists are poised to answer this question. In this target article, we present a meta-analytic summary of the neuroimaging literature on human emotion. We compare the locationist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions) with the psychological constructionist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to those categories) to better understand the brain basis of emotion. We review both locationist and psychological constructionist hypotheses of brain-emotion correspondence and report meta-analytic findings bearing on these hypotheses. Overall, we found little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions. Instead, we found evidence that is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to the mind: A set of interacting brain regions commonly involved in basic psychological operations of both an emotional and non-emotional nature are active during emotion experience and perception across a range of discrete emotion categories.     

Gender Differences in Contextual Predictors of Urban,Early Adolescents' Subjective Well‐Being

Gender differences in predicting subjective well‐being (SWB) were examined in 168 urban adolescents. School satisfaction predicted life satisfaction for boys; for girls, family satisfaction predicted life satisfaction and neighborhood satisfaction predicted negative affect. Self‐esteem predicted positive affect for both genders, but friends satisfaction and ethnic identity failed to predict SWB. Se examinaron las diferencias de género al predecir el bienestar subjetivo (SWB, por sus siglas en inglés) de 168 adolescentes urbanos. La satisfacción escolar predijo la satisfacción vital en los chicos; en las chicas, la satisfacción familiar predijo la satisfacción vital, y la satisfacción en el vecindario predijo los sentimientos negativos. La autoestima predijo sentimientos positivos en ambos géneros, pero la satisfacción con los amigos y la identidad étnica no fueron predictores del SWB.     

Preference for Violent Electronic Games and Aggressive Behavior among Children: The Beginning of the Downward Spiral?

A one-year longitudinal study with 324 German third and fourth graders was conducted in order to find out whether a preference for violent electronic games socializes children to become more aggressive or whether aggressive individuals tend to select this type of game. Cross-lagged panel analyses suggest that children who were rated as openly aggressive at Time 1 intensified their preference for violent electronic games over time. We determined that it could be ruled out that this selection effect was due to a number of underlying variables ranging from ecological variables (neighborhood) to family variables (migration status, older brother) and child variables (gender, self-esteem, level of achievement). Discussion focuses on the emerging preference for violent electronic games among children.     

Preservice Teachers' Personality Traits and Engagement in Creative Activities as Predictors of Their Support for Children's Creativity

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships among preservice teachers' personality traits, their own engagement in creative activities, and their beliefs about the teaching practices that have been shown to support children's creativity. A total of 302 early childhood and elementary preservice teachers participated in this study. The Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), the Creative Behavior Inventory (CBI), and the Creativity-Fostering Teacher Behavior Index (CFTI) were used to measure the preservice teachers' personality traits (Five-Factor Model), creativity-related experiences, and their creativity-fostering teaching practices. A conceptual model was hypothesized, tested, and supported by the results using multiple regression analyses and Sobel mediator tests. Findings indicate that preservice teachers who had higher scores on the openness to experience personality trait had more engagement in creativity-related experiences; those who had higher scores on the openness trait and who had more creativity-related experiences were more likely to espouse creativity-fostering teaching styles; and preservice teachers' own creativity-related experiences fully/partially mediated the relationship between the openness trait and their beliefs about specific creativity-fostering teaching practices. Implications for teacher education are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research on the relationships between teacher attributes and the use of teaching behaviors, which support children's creative development.     

Methods of Cheating and Deterrents to Classroom Cheating: An International Study

This study examines the methods students use to cheat on class examinations and suggests ways of deterring using an international sample from Australia, China, Ireland, and the United States. We also examine the level of cheating and reasons for cheating that prior research has highlighted as a method of demonstrating that our sample is equivalent to those in prior studies. Our results confirm the results of prior research that primarily employs students from the United States. The data indicate that actions such as having multiple versions of the examination and scrambling the questions on these versions would deter cheating. In addition, given the increased level of cheating and students' increased perception of the social acceptability of cheating in college, the data provided by our international sample also suggest that some relatively simple precautions by instructors could dramatically reduce the level of cheating on in-class examinations.     

Age-Related Differences in Acquisition of Perceptual-Motor Skills: Working Memory as a Mediator

ABSTRACT

Aging is associated with reduced performance on information processing speed, memory, and executive functions tasks. Although older adults are also less apt in acquiring new perceptual-motor skills, it is unclear whether and how skill acquisition difficulties are associated with age-related general cognitive differences. We addressed this question by examining structural relations among measures of cognitive resources (working memory) and indices of perceptual-motor skill acquisition (pursuit rotor and mirror tracing) in 96 healthy adults aged 19–80 years of age. Three competing structural models were tested: a single (common) factor model, a dual correlated factors model, and a hierarchical dual-factor model. The third model provided the best fit to the data, indicating age differences in simple perceptual-motor skill are partially mediated by more complex abilities.     

Interactive effects of proactive personality and display rules on emotional labor in organizations

Emotional labor is the management of emotional displays that happens in the context of a work role. Past research has shown that organizational display rules (standards for emotions that should be shown and hidden from customers) influence emotional labor, but little research has examined the individual differences that make employees more or less responsive to these display rules. The present study draws on concepts from the control theory model of emotional labor to address this limitation by examining the moderating role of proactive personality. Results indicate that proactive individuals are highly responsive to different types of display rules that prompt the use of different emotional labor strategies, highlighting the importance of how display expectations are framed for employees.     

On the parity of structural persistence in language production and comprehension

Structural priming creates structural persistence. That is, differences in experience with syntax can change subsequent language performance, and the changes can be observed in both language production and comprehension. However, the effects in comprehension and production appear to differ. In comprehension, persistence is typically found when the verbs are the same in primes and targets; in production, persistence occurs without verb overlap. The contrast suggests a theoretically important hypothesis: parsing in comprehension is lexically driven while formulation in production is structurally driven. A major weakness in this hypothesis about comprehension-production differences is that its empirical motivation rests on the outcomes of experiments in which the priming manipulations differ, the primed sentence structures differ, and the measures of priming differ. To sharpen the comparison, we examined structural persistence with and without verb overlap in both reading comprehension and spoken production, using the same prime presentation procedure, the same syntactic structures, the same sentences, and the same participants. These methods yielded abstract structural persistence in comprehension as well as production. A measure of the strength of persistence revealed significant effects of priming and verb overlap without significant comprehension—production differences. This argues for uniformity in the structural mechanisms of language processing.