Trajectories of scholastic well-being: The effect of achievement emotions and instructional quality in the first year of secondary school (fifth grade)

Social Psychology of Education - Due to their connections with positive educational outcomes, the maintenance of good health and scholastic well-being are highly relevant topics. However, to date,...     

A Pilot Study of Fragile X Syndrome Screening in Pregnant Women and Women Planning Pregnancy: Implementation,Acceptance, Awareness,and Geographic Factors

We report herein results of a study performed in the Balearic Islands which had the following goals: 1) Determine the proportion of pregnant or non-pregnant women planning pregnancy, who would choose to undergo a screening test for Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), if it is accompanied by the appropriate information; 2) Assess satisfaction and any increase in stress among women who participate in screening; 3) Collect epidemiological information about the incidence of the disease in our population; and 4) Collect demographic and health history data and assess participants’ awareness of the disease. Screening was performed on 3,731 pregnant and non-pregnant women of childbearing age and the results indicate: a very high voluntary rate of participation; a high level of self-reported satisfaction and low levels of stress because of the test; a very high incidence of premutation (1/106) in our population; and a low level of awareness about the existence of FXS (25 %). Additional findings indicate no significant correlation between self-reported health history and premutation detection, and the high premutation incidence does not seem to be specific to the indigenous Balearic population. Based on these results, we discuss the pros and cons of an implementation of preconception and pregnant women screening for FXS within a public health screening program.     

Recognition memory and the hippocampus: A test of the hippocampal contribution to recollection and familiarity

It has been suggested that the hippocampus selectively supports recollection and that adjacent cortex in the medial temporal lobe can support familiarity. Alternatively, it has been suggested that the hippocampus supports both recollection and familiarity. We tested these suggestions by assessing the performance of patients with hippocampal lesions on recognition memory tests that differ in the extent to which recollection and familiarity contribute to the recognition decision. When targets and foils are highly similar, prior evidence suggests that, on a forced-choice test in which targets are presented together with highly similar, corresponding foils (the FC-C format), performance is supported primarily by familiarity. By contrast, when targets are presented together with foils that are similar to other targets (the FC-NC format) or when memory is tested in a yes/no (Y/N) format, performance is based much more strongly on recollection. Accordingly, a finding that hippocampal damage impaired both Y/N recognition and FC-NC recognition but spared FC-C recognition would suggest that the hippocampus selectively supports recollection. We administered Y/N, FC-C, and FC-NC tests to five memory-impaired patients with circumscribed hippocampal lesions and 14 controls. The patients were impaired on all three types of recognition test, and there was no indication that the patients were disproportionately benefited or disproportionately impaired on any test. This pattern of performance suggests that the hippocampus supports both recollection and familiarity.The medial temporal lobe (the hippocampus plus the entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices) is essential for the recognition of past experience. The capacity for recognition is widely thought to depend on two distinct processes, recollection and familiarity (Mandler 1980; Yonelinas et al. 2002; Wixted 2007). Recollection involves remembering specific details about the episode in which an item was encountered. Familiarity involves simply knowing that an item was presented, even when no additional information can be retrieved about the learning episode itself. This distinction has been prominent in recent discussions about memory, particularly in relation to its possible anatomical basis. One proposal is that recollection depends on the hippocampus and that familiarity depends on the adjacent medial temporal lobe cortex (Brown and Aggleton 2001; Mayes et al. 2002; Yonelinas et al. 2002). Alternatively, it has been suggested that the hippocampus is important for both recollection and familiarity and that the distinction between these two processes does not illuminate the functional differences between the hippocampus and adjacent cortex (Rutishauser et al. 2006; Wais et al. 2006; Squire et al. 2007; Wixted 2007).To clarify the role of the hippocampus in recognition memory, the performance of memory-impaired patients with hippocampal damage has often been compared to that of controls on tests that differ in the extent to which recollection and familiarity contribute to the recognition memory decision. One such approach involves the use of highly similar targets and foils tested using a yes/no (Y/N) format and a forced-choice corresponding (FC-C) format (Holdstock et al. 2002; Westerberg et al. 2006; Bayley et al. 2008). In the case of the Y/N format, participants see a list of targets intermixed with foils (each similar to one of the targets) and are asked to respond “yes” to the targets and “no” to the foils. In the FC-C format, participants see a target presented together with its corresponding, similar foil and are asked to identify the target. According to an idea advanced by Norman and O''Reilly (2003), familiarity can support FC-C recognition because one can make effective use of small but consistent differences between the familiarity signals triggered by the target and foil items. That is, when targets and foils are highly similar and are presented together in the FC-C format, familiarity for the target is likely to slightly and reliably exceed that of the similar foil, allowing the target to be correctly chosen on the basis of familiarity. By contrast, in the Y/N format, slight differences between the familiarity signals of target items and their corresponding foils no longer provide useful information, because the targets and their corresponding foils are not presented together at test. Accordingly, good performance with the Y/N format is more dependent on recollection than with the FC-C format.The same explanation may account for why performance on FC-C tests sometimes exceeds performance on forced-choice noncorresponding (FC-NC) tests (e.g., Hintzman 1988). In the FC-NC format, target items are presented together with a noncorresponding foil that is similar to another target item from the study list (Fig. 1). Thus, the FC-C and FC-NC tests differ only in that the similar targets and foils are presented together in the former but not in the latter. When the corresponding targets and foils are presented together (in the FC-C format), participants can make effective use of consistent differences in familiarity values (as discussed above). When the corresponding targets and foils are not presented together, participants cannot make use of the small differences that they might detect through a side-by-side comparison.Open in a separate windowFigure 1.Test format and materials for the three kinds of recognition test. For each test, 12 images, either objects (A) or silhouettes (B), were presented at study, and memory was tested in one of three ways. For the forced-choice corresponding test (FC-C), each target (a studied item) was presented together with a highly similar foil (a new item). For the forced-choice noncorresponding test (FC-NC), each target was presented together with a foil that was highly similar to a different target from the study list. Participants were asked to point to exactly the same image they had seen during study. For the yes/no test (Y/N), the 12 targets and the 12 foils (each similar to one of the targets) were intermixed and presented one at a time. Participants were asked to respond “yes” if they had seen exactly the same image before and “no” if they had not. Asterisks identify the target items.A recent study (Migo et al. 2009) provides empirical support for the suggestion that familiarity primarily contributes to the recognition decision in the FC-C format, whereas recollection contributes more strongly in the Y/N format and in the FC-NC format. In the Migo et al. (2009) study, healthy participants received FC-C, FC-NC, and Y/N tests after receiving either standard instructions to make their decisions based on familiarity or recollection or modified instructions to base their decisions on familiarity only. On the FC-NC test and on the Y/N test, performance using familiarity alone was significantly worse than under standard instructions. On the FC-C test, performance using familiarity alone was nearly as good as under standard instructions. This result supports the earlier suggestion that FC-C is primarily supported by familiarity, whereas recollection plays a larger role in FC-NC and Y/N recognition (Norman and O''Reilly 2003).If the hippocampus is critical for recollection but not for familiarity, and if good performance on the FC-C format can be achieved using familiarity alone, then patients with focal hippocampal lesions should be differentially impaired on the Y/N and FC-NC recognition test formats compared with the FC-C format. Three recent studies investigated this issue by assessing the effects of hippocampal damage (or presumed hippocampal damage) on Y/N and FC-C tests that used highly similar targets and foils (the FC-NC format was not used in these earlier studies). All three studies used black-and-white silhouette images of objects, and the FC-C test involved the target item and three similar foils (i.e., multiple-choice with four alternatives). In one study, a single patient with bilateral hippocampal damage (patient Y.R.) was impaired on the test of Y/N recognition but was unimpaired on the test of FC-C recognition (Holdstock et al. 2002). A similar result was reported in patients with a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (Westerberg et al. 2006). These findings have been taken to support the suggestion that the hippocampus selectively supports recollection. However, the study by Holdstock and colleagues (2002) involved a single patient (Y.R.), and findings from a single patient need not agree with findings obtained from a group of patients (see Discussion). In addition, the Westerberg et al. (2006) study involved individuals with a diagnosis of MCI for whom anatomical data were not available. It is therefore not clear what the status of the hippocampus was in these patients. Moreover, a standard Y/N procedure involving 12 study items and 24 test items (as opposed to the 12 study test items and 60 test items used in previous studies [Holdstock et al. 2002; Westerberg et al. 2006; Bayley et al. 2008]) might be better suited to address the question of whether Y/N recognition is selectively impaired in hippocampal patients. Bayley et al. (2008) tested five patients with circumscribed hippocampal damage using the same test materials and procedure as in Holdstock et al. (2002). When all 60 test items of the Y/N test were scored, the patients were found to be more impaired on the Y/N test than on the FC-C test. However, when only the first 24 test items of the Y/N test were scored (according to the standard Y/N procedure), the patients were found to be impaired on both the Y/N and FC-C tests to a similar degree.The earlier studies (Holdstock et al. 2002; Westerberg et al. 2006; Bayley et al. 2008) compared Y/N recognition to four-alternative FC-C recognition in which each target was presented along with three corresponding foils. None of the earlier studies investigated how patients with hippocampal lesions performed on FC-NC recognition. As Migo et al. (2009) point out, FC-C and FC-NC tests are better matched than the FC-C and Y/N tests because they are both forced-choice tests, and both use the same number of test trials. As such, they argue, it would be more useful to compare FC-C recognition performance to FC-NC recognition performance to determine whether patients with hippocampal lesions are intact or impaired on familiarity-based tests.The present study assessed Y/N, two-alternative FC-C, and two-alternative FC-NC recognition, using highly similar targets and foils. The tests were given to five patients with circumscribed hippocampal damage and 14 matched controls. The Y/N test involved an equal number of targets and foils (unlike the design used in the prior studies), and a two-alternative format was used for the forced-choice tests to make them comparable to the Y/N test (i.e., all three tests involved the same number of targets and foils). The FC-C and FC-NC tests were identical except with respect to how the targets and their corresponding foils were paired on the recognition test.To extend our findings beyond the stimuli used in prior studies, we also used color photographs of objects in addition to black-and-white silhouettes. Using these three test formats, we asked the following questions: (1) Does hippocampal damage impair Y/N recognition memory but spare, or disproportionately benefit, FC-C recognition (as suggested by the view that the hippocampus supports recollection and not familiarity)? Or does hippocampal damage impair Y/N and FC-C recognition similarly (as suggested by the view that the hippocampus supports both recollection and familiarity)? (2) Does hippocampal damage disproportionately benefit FC-C recognition relative to FC-NC recognition, or does hippocampal damage impair FC-C and FC-NC recognition similarly?     

The Relationship Between Personality and Peers’ Judgments of the Appropriateness of Accommodations for Individuals With Disabilities1

The purpose of this research was to provide a preliminary evaluation of how the personality characteristics of peers, as defined by the 5‐factor model of personality, explained their judgments of the appropriateness of accommodations given to disabled persons. We hypothesized that both agreeableness and openness to experience would be related positively to judgments of appropriateness and that conscientiousness would be related negatively. We also hypothesized that personality dimensions would interact with disability and accommodation types in determining judgments of appropriateness. We obtained partial support for our hypotheses in that the interactions of Disability × Accommodation × Agreeableness as well as Disability × Accommodation × Openness to Experience were significant, although the personality dimensions themselves did not produce significant results.     

Single-item memory, associative memory, and the human hippocampus

We tested recognition memory for items and associations in memory-impaired patients with bilateral lesions thought to be limited to the hippocampal region. In Experiment 1 (Combined memory test), participants studied words and then took a memory test in which studied words, new words, studied word pairs, and recombined word pairs were presented in a mixed order. In Experiment 2 (Separated memory test), participants studied single words and then took a memory test involving studied word and new words. In a separate test, they studied word pairs and then took a memory test involving studied word pairs and recombined word pairs. In both experiments, patients were impaired at memory for single items as well as memory for associations, suggesting that the hippocampus is important for both of these memory functions. In Experiment 1, patients appeared to be more impaired at associative memory than item memory. In Experiment 2, patients were similarly impaired at associative memory and item memory. These different findings are considered, including the fact that in Experiment 1 the results depended on the fact that controls produced unexpectedly low false-alarm rates to recombined pairs. We discuss single-item and associative memory from the perspective that the hippocampus and adjacent cortex work cooperatively to signal recognition and that simple dichotomies do not adequately describe the division of labor within the medial temporal lobe.     

Metacognitive monitoring of attention performance and its influencing factors

Metacognitive monitoring is a central element of metacognitive processing exerting widespread influences on information processing. Albeit being subject to numerous empirical investigations referring to memory performance, there is little research investigating metacognitive monitoring in other cognitive domains. The present study investigated in 45 healthy students whether factors that are known to influence monitoring of memory performance, i.e. task difficulty, time of assessment, and practice, also exhibit a significant impact on monitoring of attention performance. A multivariate analysis of variance with three within-subject repeated measures factors on two dependent variables (monitoring of (a) time, and (b) errors in an attention task) was conducted. Results showed that monitoring ability significantly decreased with increasing task difficulty, was significantly better for post than for pre-assessment, and significantly increased with practice. Therefore, results suggest that the examined factors influenced monitoring of attention performance equivalent to the influence of these factors found in metamemory research.     

Independent effects of emotion and attention on sensory and affective pain perception

The present study investigated whether attention and emotion independently influence sensory and affective pain ratings. Fifty-four (27 female) participants rated sensory and affective pain in response to painful mechanic pressure stimulation while exposed to positive, neutral and negative slides from the International Affective Picture System. In doing so, participants were assigned to one of three groups, which focused attention either on the pictures or on the sensory or on the affective aspects of the pressure stimulation. Consistent with the motivational priming hypothesis, sensory and affective pain ratings were generally lower during exposure to positive compared to negative and neutral slides. In line with our assumptions, attention modulated sensory pain ratings with lowest ratings in the picture focusing group and highest in the affective pain focusing group. No attention effect for affective pain ratings and no interactions between emotional and attentional effects on pain perception were found.     

What fair procedures say about me: Self-construals and reactions to procedural fairness

Past research has revealed both positive and negative reactions when people receive unfavorable outcomes via fair decision-making procedures. In three laboratory experiments, we reconcile these findings by considering the role of people’s self-identity. Our results suggest that the more that people base their self-identity on their relationships with others—as indexed by a strong interdependent self-construal—the more positively they react to an unfavorable outcome following from fair procedures. Conversely, the more that people base their self-identity on achievement—as indexed by a strong independent self-construal—the more negatively they react to an unfavorable outcome following from fair procedures. Moreover, these results were stronger when the situation primed interdependence and independence, respectively. Our research indicates that people interpret procedural fairness information in a manner that is consistent with defining aspects of the self.     

Teaching Helping Skills Courses: Creative Activities to Reduce Anxiety

Helping skills courses play a vital role in counseling curriculum, but also tend to bring excessive anxiety for students, to the point of impeding their ability to successfully implement skills. This article describes specific creative and experiential activities, aimed at reducing anxiety in a helping skills course for counselors-in-training.     

Sex differences in verbal fluency: the role of strategies and instructions

Sex differences in verbal fluency performance and strategies are highly controversial, nevertheless suggesting a slight female advantage at least for phonemic fluency. A tendency of increased clustering of words into phonemic and semantic subcategories in men and increased switching between those categories in women has been suggested. In spatial tasks, it has been demonstrated that changes in instructions favoring a certain cognitive strategy can alter sex differences in performance. Such an approach has, however, not been attempted previously with verbal tasks. In the present investigation, 19 women in their luteal cycle phase and 23 men performed a phonemic and a semantic fluency task with three different instructions, one neutral, one emphasizing the clustering, and one emphasizing the switching of words. While under neutral instructions no sex differences were observed in verbal fluency performance and strategies, sex differences in switching and overall performance were observed in semantic fluency with an instruction requiring a switching strategy. Furthermore, correlation analyses suggested that the importance of strategies for overall performance differed between women and men. While only switching, but not clustering was related to overall verbal fluency performance in all tasks under all instructions, this relationship was driven by women in the phonemic task, but by men in the semantic task. These results highlight the importance of a consistent methodology in sex difference research. Slight variations in instructions may in part explain inconsistencies regarding sex differences in verbal fluency between previous studies.