Childhood anxiety and attention to emotion faces in a modified stroop task

This study used an emotional face stroop task to investigate the effects of self‐report trait anxiety, social concern (SC), and chronological age (CA) on reaction time to match coloured outlines of angry, happy, and neutral faces (and control faces with scrambled features) with coloured buttons in a community sample of 74 children aged 6 –12 years. The results showed an interference of colour matching for angry (relative to neutral) faces in children with elevated SC. The same effect was not found for happy or control faces. In addition, the results suggest that selective attention to angry faces in children with social concern (SC) was not significantly moderated by age.     

HIPPOCRATES AT PHAEDRUS 270C

At Plato's Phaedrus 270c, Socrates asks whether one can know souls without knowing ‘the whole.’ Phaedrus answers that ‘according to Hippocrates’ the same demand on knowing the whole applies to bodies. What parallel is intended between soul-knowledge and body-knowledge and which medical passages illustrate the analogy have been much debated. Three dominant interpretations read ‘the whole’ as respectively (1) environment, (2) kosmos, and (3) individual soul or body; and adduce supporting Hippocratic passages. But none of these interpretations accounts for the Phaedrus' rhetorical method. A better reading sees the whole as the genos ‘soul,’ as the Phaedrus' taxonomies divide that genus.     

Physical Activity and Social Cognitive Theory: A Test in a Population Sample of Adults with Type 1 or Type 2 Diabetes

The purpose of the study was to test the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT; Bandura, 2004 ) for explaining physical activity (PA) in a large population sample of adults with type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Study objectives: (1) test the fit of the SCT structure in the total sample, and the diabetes sub-types; (2) determine the SCT structural invariance between the type 1 and type 2 groups; and (3) report explained variance and compare strength of association for the SCT constructs in predicting PA for both type 1 and type 2 groups. In all, 2,311 individuals with type 1 or type 2 diabetes were assessed on their self-efficacy, outcome expectancies, impediments, social support, goals, and physical activity at baseline and 1,717 (74.5%) completed these assessments again at 6 months. Multi-group Structural Equation Modeling was conducted. The findings provide evidence for the utility of the SCT in the diabetes samples. The SCT fits individuals with type 1 and type 2 diabetes except for SCT impediments, which appear to be obstructing goal-setting in individuals with type 2 diabetes only. Promotion of health behavior should target self-efficacy to set goals and change behavior. Outcome expectancies and social support are also important factors for setting goals and behavior performance.     

Working Memory in the Acquisition of Vocabulary and Syntax: Putting Language in Good Order

This paper argues that working memory is heavily involved in language acquisition as (a) a major part of language learning is the learning of sequences, (b) working memory allows short-term maintenance of sequence information, and (c) short-term rehearsal of sequences promotes the consolidation of long-term memories of language sequences. It first reviews evidence supporting this position. Next it presents an experiment that demonstrates that subjects encouraged to rehearse foreign language (FL) utterances are better than both silent controls and subjects who are prevented from rehearsal by articulatory suppression at (a) learning to comprehend and translate FL words and phrases, (b) explicit metalinguistic knowledge of the detailed content of grammatical regularities, (c) acquisition of the FL forms of words and phrases, (d) accuracy in FL pronunciation, and (e) some aspects of productive (but not receptive) grammatical fluency and accuracy. Finally, it describes possible mechanisms underlying these effects.