A review of psychological factors related to bullying victimization in schools

School bullying is a serious problem affecting the victims, their daily life, and society in general. An increasing amount of research on school bullying has recently been published which calls for an updated review on the literature. The objective of this article is to review psychological variables which may explain individual reactions to bullying victimization in school-aged children. The selected psychological variables are coping, social support, attachment, negative affectivity/neuroticism, and somatization. The strengths and limitations of the reviewed research are discussed, and future research directions focusing on a more dynamic understanding of personal factors are suggested.     

Context-Specific Motivations to Read for Adolescent Struggling Readers: Does the Motivation for Reading Questionnaire Tell the Full Story?

Commonly used literacy motivation assessments do not specifically explore literacy motivation in school. These context-general assessments may be problematic for struggling adolescent readers, as qualitative research documents that these adolescents exhibit different levels of cross-context motivation. The present study explores whether an in-school measure predicts additional variance in reading performance beyond a non-context-specific measure. One hundred and fifteen fifth graders were administered the Motivation for Reading Questionnaire, an in-school reading motivation daily log, a demographic survey, and standardized reading assessments. Findings indicate that the in-school reading motivation measure predicted performance for struggling readers and the non-context-specific measure did not.     

A Social Interpolation Model of Group Problem-Solving

How do people use information from others to solve complex problems? Prior work has addressed this question by placing people in social learning situations where the problems they were asked to solve required varying degrees of exploration. This past work uncovered important interactions between groups' connectivity and the problem's complexity: the advantage of less connected networks over more connected networks increased as exploration was increasingly required for optimally solving the problem at hand. We propose the Social Interpolation Model (SIM), an agent-based model to explore the cognitive mechanisms that can underlie exploratory behavior in groups. Through results from simulation experiments, we conclude that “exploration” may not be a single cognitive property, but rather the emergent result of three distinct behavioral and cognitive mechanisms, namely, (a) breadth of generalization, (b) quality of prior expectation, and (c) relative valuation of self-obtained information. We formalize these mechanisms in the SIM, and explore their effects on group dynamics and success at solving different kinds of problems. Our main finding is that broad generalization and high quality of prior expectation facilitate successful search in environments where exploration is important, and hinder successful search in environments where exploitation alone is sufficient.     

Head and eye movements affect object processing in 4‐month‐old infants more than an artificial orientation cue

This study investigates the effects of attention‐guiding stimuli on 4‐month‐old infants' object processing. In the human head condition, infants saw a person turning her head and eye gaze towards or away from objects. When presented with the objects again, infants showed increased attention in terms of longer looking time measured by eye tracking and an increased Nc amplitude measured by event‐related potentials (ERP) for the previously uncued objects versus the cued objects. This suggests that the uncued objects were previously processed less effectively and appeared more novel to the infants. In a second condition, a car instead of a human head turned towards or away from objects. Eye‐tracking results did not reveal any significant difference in infants' looking time. ERPs indicated only a marginally significant effect in late slow‐wave activity associated with memory encoding for the uncued objects. We conclude that human head orientation and gaze direction affect infants' object‐directed attention, whereas movement and orientation of a car have only limited influence on infants' object processing.