The tenacious nature of memory binding for arousing negative items

In two experiments, we investigated whether people are better or worse at updating memory for the location of emotional pictures than of neutral pictures. We measured participants’ memories for the locations of both arousing negative pictures and neutral pictures while manipulating practice (encountering the same event repeatedly) and interference (encountering the same picture in a different location). Memory for the context of emotional items was less likely to be corrected when erroneous and was less likely to be correctly updated when the context changed. These results suggest that initial item-context binding is more tenacious for emotional items than for neutral items, even when such binding is incorrect.     

Interstimulus interval and delivery cues influence timed conditioned responding in rats

Appetitive contextual excitation supported by intertrial unconditioned stimuli was more easily overcome by timed conditioned responding in rats using quiet (Experiment 1) rather than noisy (Experiment 2) food pellet deliveries. Head-entry responding in acquisition peaked above the contextual baseline when pellet delivery occurred 10, 30, 60, or 90 s after the onset of the 120-s white-noise conditioned stimulus (CS). Special tests in extinction revealed CS onset and offset were conditioned by pellet delivery at 0 and 120 s, respectively. Responding was not undermined in Experiment 3 when noisy pellet deliveries replaced quiet pellet deliveries. Our results suggest that micro-stimuli occasioned at different times during the CS are vulnerable to overshadowing, but do not lose strength if they are already predictive.     

Split-Brain: What We Know Now and Why This is Important for Understanding Consciousness

Neuropsychology Review - Recently, the discussion regarding the consequences of cutting the corpus callosum (“split-brain”) has regained momentum (Corballis, Corballis, Berlucchi,...     

Associations between young children's emotion attributions and prediction of outcome in differing social situations

Associations between young children's attributions of emotion at different points in a story, and with regard to their own prediction about the story's outcome, were investigated using two hypothetical scenarios of social and emotional challenge (social entry and negative event). First grade children (N=250) showed an understanding that emotions are tied to situational cues by varying the emotions they attributed both between and within scenarios. Furthermore, emotions attributed to the main protagonist at the beginning of the scenarios were differentially associated with children's prediction of a positive or negative outcome and with the valence of the emotion attributed at the end of the scenario. Gender differences in responses to some items were also found.     

Goals and values in school: a model developed for describing,evaluating and changing the social climate of learning environments

This paper defines a broad model of the psychosocial climate in educational settings. The model was developed from a general theory of learning environments, on a theory of human values and on empirical studies of children’s evaluations of their schools. The contents of the model are creativity, stimulation, achievement, self-efficacy, creativity, safety, control, helpfulness, participation, responsibility and influence; they are hypothesised to be structured in a circular model. The contents are defined and related to existing theories and research in education, special education, educational psychology and sociology, on the basis of reviews of literature. The model underlies the Goals, Attitudes and Values in School questionnaire, developed to assess the characteristics of educational settings. The model can be a practical tool in understanding and appreciating differences between learning environments in research and assessment and it could represent a guideline for interventions aimed to analyse and improve the social climate of learning environments.     

Competing for Happiness: Attitudes to Competition,Positional Concerns and Wellbeing

Competition is one of the driving forces of the market, but the actual effects that a competitive behavior can produce, especially on well-being, depend on how competition is perceived by economic agents. In this paper we empirically study the relationship among different attitudes to competition, positional concerns, and happiness. Using microdata from an ad-hoc survey administered to all first-year undergraduate students attending courses in economics and sociology at a medium-sized university in the North of Italy, we find a high degree of positionality for several items, especially income. Furthermore, the attitude to competition matters for both positionality and wellbeing: while a negative perception of competition increases the probability of being positional, a positive perception of competition increases life satisfaction. Results by gender highlight that a negative perception of competition is detrimental particularly for women. These results are robust to alternative definitions of the competition indicators and to alternative ways to control for potential endogeneity.