Mental verb input for promoting children's theory of mind: A training study

An experimental study investigated the effect of the type of mental verb input (i.e., input with think, know, and remember) on preschoolers’ theory of mind development. Preschoolers (n = 72) heard 128 mental verb utterances presented in video format across four sessions over two weeks. The training conditions differed only in the way the mental verbs were presented: the form (statement or question), the referent (first person or other person), and the interaction style (overheard or interactive). Children who overheard the characters discussing the mental states of someone else, either in statement or question form, significantly improved in their false belief understanding. These experimental findings demonstrate mental verb utterances about other people, even when not directed to the child, scaffold children's attention to differing perspectives, thus more efficiently promoting some aspects of their ToM development.     

Change and Stability in Active and Passive Social Influence Dynamics during Natural Drinking Events: A Longitudinal Measurement-Burst Study

We examined the link between social norms and active social influences occurring during natural social drinking contexts. Across 4 yearly measurement-bursts, college students (N = 523) reported daily for 30-day periods on drinking norms, drinking offers, how many drinks they accepted, and personal drinking levels during social drinking events. In contexts where drinking norms were higher, students were more likely to both receive and comply with drinking offers. These acute social influences were highly stable throughout college, but affected men and women differently across time: Women received more drinking offers than men, especially at the beginning of college and when norms were higher, but men complied with more drinking offers per occasion. These effects were not attributable to between-person differences in social drinking motives or drinking levels, nor to within-person patterns of situation-selection. The present work suggests that context-specific drinking norms catalyze active social influence attempts, and further promote compliance drinking.     

Hyperactivity in boys with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): the association between deficient behavioral inhibition, attentional processes, and objectively measured activity

Contemporary models of ADHD hypothesize that hyperactivity reflects a byproduct of inhibition deficits. The current study investigated the relationship between children's motor activity and behavioral inhibition by experimentally manipulating demands placed on the limited-resource inhibition system. Twenty-two boys (ADHD = 11, TD = 11) between the ages of 8 and 12 years completed a conventional stop-signal task, two choice-task variants (no-tone, ignore-tone), and control tasks while their motor activity was measured objectively by actigraphs placed on their nondominant wrist and ankles. All children exhibited significantly higher activity rates under all three experimental tasks relative to control conditions, and children with ADHD moved significantly more than typically developing children across conditions. No differences in activity level were observed between the inhibition and noninhibition experimental tasks for either group, indicating that activity level was primarily associated with basic attentional rather than behavioral inhibition processes.     

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.     

Research productivity and scholarly impact of APA-accredited school psychology programs: 2005-2009

This study examined the research productivity and scholarly impact of faculty in APA-accredited school psychology programs using data in the PsycINFO database from 2005 to 2009. We ranked doctoral programs on the basis of authorship credit, number of publications, and number of citations. In addition, we examined the primary publication outlets of school psychology program faculties and the major themes of research during this time period. We compared our results with those of a similar study that examined data from a decade earlier. Limitations and implications of this study are also discussed.