Assessing variations in the expression of gratitude in youth: A three-cohort replication in southern Brazil

Children are not born grateful; their understanding and expression of gratitude develops during childhood and adolescence. We used a qualitative measure designed to assess how youth would respond to a benefactor, hypothesizing that their types of responses would systematically alter with age, and were able to test the reliability of this measure via replication across three cohorts. Participants (N = 1101) aged 7 to 14 constituted three independent cohorts (2008, 2012, and 2015–2017) from the same southern Brazilian city. Participants’ responses were reliably coded into three types of gratitude (verbal, concrete, and connective); across samples, older youth were more likely to express verbal and connective gratitude; younger youth were more likely to express concrete gratitude. The age-related patterns of expression were very similar in each of the three samples (one discrepant result from nine possible), suggesting that it is a reliable measure with which to assess age-related changes in the expression of youth gratitude. Gratitude, we suggest, is not simply a unidimensional construct allowing judgments of how grateful individuals are; instead, our research suggests that youth of different ages express different types of gratitude, increasingly more complex, the most sophisticated of which comes closest to gratitude as a virtue.

     

The impact of COVID-19 triggered changes to instruction and assessment on university students’ self-reported motivation,engagement and perceptions

Social Psychology of Education - During the northern hemisphere Winter 2020 academic term, university students had to adjust to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This abrupt...     

Infusion of protein synthesis inhibitors in the entorhinal cortex blocks consolidation but not reconsolidation of object recognition memory

Memory consolidation and reconsolidation require the induction of protein synthesis in some areas of the brain. Here, we show that infusion of the protein synthesis inhibitors anisomycin, emetine and cycloheximide in the entorhinal cortex immediately but not 180 min or 360 min after training in an object recognition learning task hinders long-term memory retention without affecting short-term memory or behavioral performance. Inhibition of protein synthesis in the entorhinal cortex after memory reactivation involving either a combination of familiar and novel objects or two familiar objects does not affect retention. Our data suggest that protein synthesis in the entorhinal cortex is necessary early after training for consolidation of object recognition memory. However, inhibition of protein synthesis in this cortical region after memory retrieval does not seem to affect the stability of the recognition trace.     

Remembering intentions: testing a new method of investigation

The paper examines some of the methodological difficulties associated with the investigation of remembering intentions in a laboratory and reports the development of a new and easily administered naturalistic task. The task requires participants to act as a narrator and read aloud a story that they are informed will help the experimenter to obtain necessary test material for another study. Remembering intentions (‘prospective memory’) is examined by presenting a plausible cover story requiring to make a correct substitution for a ‘target’ word which appears on several occasions during the story. This method seems to capture adequately the nature of prospective remembering and preclude the occurrence of ceiling, floor and practice effects in performance. By distinguishing late responses from on-time or successful prospective memory responses it also stresses the importance of taking into account the speed with which one recovers from his or her prospective memory failures. Finally, this task enables us to collect reliable and consistent quantitative measures of remembering intentions and to investigate a variety of methodologically and theoretically important problems. The results of Experiments 1a and 1b (Study 1) suggest that both the type of prospective memory task (main versus extra) and subjects' awareness of the phenomenon under investigation are important influences on performance. On the other hand, no effects of (1) a short 5-minute delay between prospective memory instruction and onset of background activity and (2) information about the frequency of target word were revealed (Study 2). The design of a popular experimental paradigm (Einstein and McDaniel, 1990) is examined in the light of these findings. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Efficiency and accuracy of visual search develop at different rates from early childhood through early adulthood

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Most studies of visual search across the life span have focused on classic feature and conjunction searches in which observers search for a fixed, simple shape...     

Constructions of Participatory Democracy Institutions and Same-Sex Union Rights in Online Public Deliberation in Greece

This article aims to explore the argumentative lines employed in an online public deliberation concerned with legislation on same-sex civil union in Greece. Drawing on rhetorical and discursive developments in political social psychology and sexual citizenship debates, the article focuses on arguments regarding the relevance and the implications of public deliberation on the construction of LGBTQI+ claims and rights. The analytic corpus consisted of 1,000 comments, analyzed with the concepts and tools of Rhetorical and Critical Discursive Social Psychology. A recurring line of arguing against the legislation questioned the democratic quality of public deliberation, representing it as a means used to legitimize predetermined decisions. Moreover, overtly discriminatory arguments were predicated on the values of participatory democracy. Accounts in favor of the legislation, though, challenged public deliberation on the grounds that it allows room for the dispute of universal human rights. The potential contribution of these findings to the understanding of the dilemmas of participatory democracy, the reproduction of heteronormativity, and the assimilation of LGBTQI+ claims is discussed.     

Human agency and associative learning: Pavlovian principles govern social process in causal relationship detection

Estimates of a worker's causal relationship (CR) to production obeyed associative principles, despite the participants' a priori beliefs that workers are responsible or "at cause" for production. In three experiments, social analogues of conditioned stimuli (workers) and unconditioned stimuli (company production information) were manipulated in familiar Pavlovian paradigms. The findings included (1) CR acquisition, (2) unconditioned stimulus-intensity effects, and (3) CR blocking. The research plan employed an approach that Neal Miller (1959) termed "extension of liberalized S-R theory" and drew on the Rescorla-Wagner model to integrate the experimental results, to illuminate the empirical data of social attribution research, and to guide the study of causal relationship detection using social stimuli.     

Are you feeling successful?: Examining postsecondary student perceptions of success with an expectancy value theory lens

Expectancy Value Theory (EVT) is a prominent theory on student motivation. To add to the growing research in this area, we investigated students within a large, mandatory course outside of the STEM areas, to examine perceptions of success utilizing an EVT lens. The aim of our study was twofold. First, to examine students' open-ended responses about what makes them feel successful. Second, to determine if students’ indorsement of expectancy, value, and control could predict their feelings of success. The study consisted of 210 students who completed an online questionnaire with items related to demographics, EVT components, and questions about their success in the course. Deductive coding was utilized to examine their feelings of success based on the EVT components. Regression analysis was utilized to predict perceptions of success. Students identified several components of their course that were associated with expectancy, value, and cost. Students' perceptions of success were positively predicted by expectancy and negatively predicted by cost while value was not a significant predictor. Our results speak to the importance of expectancy, value, and cost when designing large, mandatory courses. We provided several recommendations for instructors when designing courses, and also highlight limitations and future research directions.

     

The role of emotions arising from instability in investment behaviour / El papel de la carga emocional de la inestabilidad en el comportamiento de inversión

Abstract

Clear empirical evidence has been found on how significant changes to a person’s environment can alter their behaviour. This is important when considering investments made on the stock exchange as the variations that occur in stock market prices are frequent and continuous. This study analyses the role instability has on individual investors’ behaviour when investing in the stock market. The results suggest that instability in investment situations plays a significant role in individual investors’ behaviour, probably due to the emotional effect provoked by the possibility of suddenly losing savings. This would modify the perception investors have about investing as well as their intentions, attitudes and feelings of control in regards to investment in financial markets, thus hindering the capacity to predict their behaviour.     

Assessing hopelessness in terminally ill cancer patients: development of the Hopelessness Assessment in Illness Questionnaire

Hopelessness has become an increasingly important construct in palliative care research, yet concerns exist regarding the utility of existing measures when applied to patients with a terminal illness. This article describes a series of studies focused on the exploration, development, and analysis of a measure of hopelessness specifically intended for use with terminally ill cancer patients. The 1st stage of measure development involved interviews with 13 palliative care experts and 30 terminally ill patients. Qualitative analysis of the patient interviews culminated in the development of a set of potential questionnaire items. In the 2nd study phase, we evaluated these preliminary items with a sample of 314 participants, using item response theory and classical test theory to identify optimal items and response format. These analyses generated an 8-item measure that we tested in a final study phase, using a 3rd sample (n = 228) to assess reliability and concurrent validity. These analyses demonstrated strong support for the Hopelessness Assessment in Illness Questionnaire providing greater explanatory power than existing measures of hopelessness and found little evidence that this assessment was confounded by illness-related variables (e.g., prognosis). In summary, these 3 studies suggest that this brief measure of hopelessness is particularly useful for palliative care settings. Further research is needed to assess the applicability of the measure to other populations and contexts.