Intrinsic and extrinsic school motivation as a function of age: the mediating role of autonomy support

The main purpose of the present research was to investigate school intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and amotivation as a function of age in a sample of 1,600 elementary and high school students aged 9–17 years. First, results revealed a systematic decrease in intrinsic motivation and self-determined extrinsic motivation from age 9 to 12 years, a slow stabilization until 15 years old, followed by an increase after that point. Second, non self-determined extrinsic motivation showed a decrease up to 12 years old and a slow stabilization after that point. Finally, amotivation was relatively low and stable from age 9 to 17 years. Of importance is that the present results also revealed that teacher autonomy support mediated the age-school motivation relationships. The present results underscore the importance of a better understanding of the mechanisms through which lower intrinsic motivation and self-determined extrinsic motivation in older students take place, eventually leading to appropriate interventions and optimal motivation in students of all ages.     

Validating an interlingual metanorm for emotional analysis of texts

In this article, we present a set of 12 norms that characterize emotional terms in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Finnish. The high correlation between the norm values in the two emotional dimensions of valence and arousal suggests an interlingual homogeneity of emotional representations and allows a significant metanorm??EMONORM??to be established with 6,383 terms characterized in valence and 4,345 terms characterized in arousal. This metanorm is a resource for creating experimental materials in studies on language and emotions. Furthermore, we perform three tests using EMONORM, with the objectives of (1) identifying basic emotions from their valence and arousal values, (2) determining the orientation of texts referring to positive and negative emotions, and (3) evaluating the intensity of emotions expressed in texts. The results are highly similar to those for human judgments. Finally, we present EMOVAL/SEMOTEX, a Web application for static and dynamic valence and arousal emotional analysis of texts using EMONORM (http://www.semotex.fr).     

The Berlin School of Logical Empiricism and its Legacy

What has become generally known as the Berlin School of Logical Empiricism constitutes a philosophical movement that was erected on foundations laid by Albert Einstein. His revolutionary work in physics had a profound impact on philosophers interested in scientific issues, prominent among them Paul Oppenheim and Hans Reichenbach, the founding fathers of the school, who joined in viewing him as their hero among philosopher–scientists. Overall the membership of this school falls into three groups. The founding generation was linked by the circumstance that both Grelling and Reichenbach were collaborators of Oppenheim; the middle generation by the fact that both Hempel and Helmer were students of Reichenbach’s in Berlin; and the younger generation by the fact that all of its members were students and (at least in their early years) disciples either of Reichenbach’s or of Hempel’s in the USA. Three stages are at issue: an initial phase in Berlin, a transatlantic migration, and a continuation in the U.S.A.—principally in Pittsburgh.     

Fundamental properties of the N2pc as an index of spatial attention: effects of masking.

Masking is an important tool in many paradigms used to study the cognitive architecture. The N2pc is an electrophysiological event-related potential (ERP) that has been used as a tool to study the deployment of visual spatial attention. The aim of this paper was to study the effects of masking on the N2pc. Two stimuli were presented on the screen, one to left and one to right of fixation, and subjects reported the identity of one of them. The targets could be discriminated both by their category (letters vs. digit) and by their colour (pink vs. green). Backward masking was produced by presenting a second pair of bilateral stimuli after the offset of the first pair. The second pair of stimuli consisted of characters of the same colour and category as in the first pair. Forward masking was produced by using the very same stimuli as in the backward masking condition, but by instructing subjects to report the second stimulus. The forward mask trials had longer response times compared to no-mask trials, and backward mask trials had even longer response times, and also a higher error rate. Although the different masking procedures lead to clear behavioural effects, the N2pc was not affected, suggesting that the deployment of visual spatial attention, per se, was not affected by pattern masking. A sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN) following the N2pc was also found (300 ms post-target, and beyond), and the amplitude of the SPCN was strongly modulated by the number of presented stimuli and the duration of the SPCN was positively correlated with RT in the behavioural task. We hypothesize that the SPCN reflects neural activity associated with the passage of information through visual short-term memory.     

Perceptions of Major Roles by College Students

This study concerns women's and men's perceptions of five roles and role combinations: worker, spouse, parent, worker-spouse, and worker-parent. Undergraduates wrote stories to relevant projective cues. A variation of the Thematic Apperception Test was used. Protocols were coded for degree of (a) conflict, (b) positive outcome, and (c) positive affect, with inter-rater agreement at least 77% for each category. Sex and role differences were analyzed. Results indicate minimal sex differences. The tentative nature of the results is stressed.     

Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods

Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit--that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same) and only later on in development evolving into more complex ones (e.g., equity: distributions match contributions). Here, we report 2 experiments with 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 195) that contradict this constructivist account. Our results demonstrate that children as young as 3 years old are able to take merit into account by distributing tokens according to individual contributions but that this ability may be hidden by a preference for equality.