The Role of Teacher Cognition and Behavior in Children’s Peer Relations

This study explored the role of the classroom teacher in peers’ evaluations of liking and disliking of their classmates. Teacher cognitions about children (teacher liking of students, teacher attributions for aggressive student behavior) and teacher behavior toward children (positive, corrective/negative) were examined as mediators in the link between children’s own behavior (aggression, prosocial behavior) and peer liking and disliking. Participants were 127 second-graders in 12 classrooms (64 males, 63 females). Data on child behavior were collected through peer and teacher report, data on teacher cognitions about children were collected through self report, data on teacher behavior toward children were collected through naturalistic classroom observations, and data on peer liking and disliking were collected through peer nominations. Data were analyzed using path analysis. Results indicated that teacher cognitions about children and corrective/negative teacher behavior toward children mediated the relations between aggressive and prosocial child behavior and peer disliking.     

The time course of object encoding

Four experiments examined the effects of encoding time on object identification priming and recognition memory. After viewing objects in a priming phase, participants identified objects in a rapid stream of non-object distracters; display times were gradually increased until the objects could be identified (Experiments 1-3). Participants also made old/new recognition judgments about previously viewed objects (Experiment 4). Reliable priming for object identification occurred with 150 ms of encoding and reached a maximum after about 300 ms of encoding time. In contrast, reliable recognition judgments occurred with 75 ms of encoding and continued to improve for encoding times of up to 1200 ms. These results suggest that recognition memory may be based on multiple levels of object representation, from rapidly activated representations of low-level features to semantic knowledge associated with the object. In contrast, priming in this object identification task may be tied specifically to the activation of representations of object shape.     

Differences in attentional set between athletes and nonathletes

The purpose of this study was to determine if the ability to set attention is different between athletes and nonathletes. University volleyball players were compared with nonathletes on a spatial cuing task similar to that of C. L. Folk, R. W. Remington, and J. C. Johnston (1992). As expected, both groups showed evidence of entering into a specific attentional set because attentional cuing effects were found only when cues and targets shared a task-relevant feature (onset or color). In addition, the cuing effects when the cues matched the targets were greater for the athletes than for the nonathletes. The results are discussed in terms of the orienting of attention and athletic performance.     

Effects of top-down guidance and singleton priming on visual search

Recent literature suggests that observers can use advance knowledge of the target feature to guide their search but fail to do so whenever the target is reliably a singleton. Instead, they engage in singletondetection mode—that is, they search for the most salient object. In the present study, we aimed to test the notion of a default salience-based search mode. Using several measures, we compared search for a known target when it is always a singleton (fixed-singleton search) relative to when it is incidentally a singleton (multiple-target search). We examined the relative contributions of strategic factors (knowledge that the target is a singleton) and intertrial repetition effects (singleton priming, or the advantage of responding to a singleton target if the target on the previous trial had also been a singleton). In two experiments, singleton priming eliminated all the differences in performance between fixed-singleton and multiple-target search, suggesting that search for a known singleton may be feature based rather than salience based.     

Trait anxiety,sense of coherence and medical school stressors: Observations at three stages

Abstract

Changes in personality characteristics during young adulthood were evaluated in a three-stage study of perceptions of stressors, trait anxiety and sense of coherence among students in a six-year medical school. Data were collected during the orientation program prior to the beginning of the first year of studies, and in the middle of the first and second years.

No differences on perceptions of stressors, anxiety and sense of coherence were found between different classes tested during the same stage in their medical school careers. Changes in these variables were found, however, over the stages. Overall stressor scores increased significantly in the second year (third stage), due primarily to students' assessments of two clusters of stressors as more threatening: academic demands and professional status. Only certain groups of stressors correlated with anxiety and sense of coherence. Anxiety scores increased and sense of coherence scores decreased over time. These results indicate that exposure to a stressful environment during young adulthood, such as the early years of medical school, is manifested in significant personality changes.     

Does effort influence inequity aversion in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus)?

The human sense of fairness entails sensitivity not just to equality, the equal division of resources, but also to merit, the relationship between an individual’s share of resources and how hard they worked for their share. Recent evidence suggests that our sensitivity to equality has deep phylogenetic roots: several nonhuman animal species show an aversion to unequal reward distributions. However, the extent to which nonhuman animals share sensitivity to merit remains poorly understood, largely because previous studies have failed to properly manipulate work effort in inequity aversion tasks. Here, we tested whether cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) would exhibit a differential response to inequity when acquiring rewards was either (1) effortful or (2) effortless. Subjects engaged in a pulling task in which they had an opportunity to deliver a disadvantageously unequal distribution of food to themselves and a partner (one piece for self, four pieces for partner). We made delivery effortful by adding a weight to the pulling handle. Critically, effort was calibrated to each individual. Results show that individuals varied markedly in their response to effort, highlighting the importance of manipulating work effort at the individual level. Overall, subjects showed little aversion to inequity. However, subjects were slightly less likely to accept inequity when doing so was effortful, although this effect was pronounced in only one individual. Our findings suggest a new method for capturing individual variation in effort and for studying the roots of the concept of merit in nonhuman animals.     

The Satisfaction with Life Scale in Adolescent Samples: Measurement Invariance across 24 Countries and Regions,Age, and Gender

Measurement of adolescent life satisfaction across cultures has not received much attention in previous empirical research. The present study evaluated measurement invariance of the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) among adolescents in 24 countries and regions (N = 22,710; age range = 13–19 years; 53% female). A single-factor model with residual covariance between a pair of items tapping past life satisfaction fitted well in 19 countries and regions and showed a partial metric invariance. In a subset of nine countries and regions, partial scalar invariance was supported. Partial metric invariance across all 24 countries and regions was achieved when custom model modifications in five countries and regions were included. Three SWLS items showed evidence of noninvariance across cultures. The measurement model was found to operate similarly across gender and age. Our findings suggest that caution is needed when using the SWLS for measuring life satisfaction among adolescents from different cultures.

     

Tracking speakers’ false beliefs: is theory of mind available earlier for word learning?

Happé and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a 'privileged domain' in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of a protagonist in a story or to learn the meaning of a new word used by the protagonist. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings of better performance in a false belief word-learning task compared to a false belief action-prediction task. However, systematic manipulation of the task parameters in Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that this performance discrepancy disappeared when tasks were equated in their 'referential pull' (Perner, Rendl & Garnham, 2007). We conclude that the notion of a precocious theory of mind for word learning is not required to explain dissociations in performance on false belief tasks.     

Do girls and boys perceive themselves as equally engaged in school? The results of an international study from 12 countries

This study examined gender differences in student engagement and academic performance in school. Participants included 3420 students (7th, 8th, and 9th graders) from Austria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Malta, Portugal, Romania, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The results indicated that, compared to boys, girls reported higher levels of engagement in school and were rated higher by their teachers in academic performance. Student engagement accounted for gender differences in academic performance, but gender did not moderate the associations among student engagement, academic performance, or contextual supports. Analysis of multiple-group structural equation modeling revealed that perceptions of teacher support and parent support, but not peer support, were related indirectly to academic performance through student engagement. This partial mediation model was invariant across gender. The findings from this study enhance the understanding about the contextual and personal factors associated with girls' and boys' academic performance around the world.