When School Fits Me: How Fit Between Self-Beliefs and Task Benefits Boosts Math Motivation and Performance

We hypothesized that college students would engage more and perform better in math when the benefits of learning it were described in a manner that fit their self-beliefs, such as whether they view themselves as interdependent or as independent and unique. In three studies, fit predicted greater performance on math problems. Fit also predicted greater use of tutorials after answering problems incorrectly, and choosing to work on problems framed in the service of students' beliefs. Results highlight the potential power for strengthening math motivation and performance by creating a fit between the portrayal of math's utility and students' self-beliefs.     

The relativity of time perception produced by facial emotion stimuli

Insults elicit intense emotion. This study tests the hypothesis that one's social image, which is especially salient in honour cultures, influences the way in which one reacts to an insult. Seventy-seven honour-oriented and 72 non-honour oriented participants answered questions about a recent insult episode. Participants experienced both anger and shame in reaction to the insult. However, these emotions resulted in different behaviours. Anger led to verbal attack (i.e., criticising, insulting in return) among all participants. This relationship was explained by participants’ motivation to punish the wrongdoer. Shame, on the other hand, was moderated by honour. Shame led to verbal disapproval of the wrongdoers behaviour, but only among the honour-oriented participants. This relationship was explained by these participants’ motivation to protect their social image. By contrast, shame led to withdrawal among non-honour-oriented participants.     

Coping with the 10th anniversary of 9/11: Muslim Americans' sadness,fear, and anger

The events of 9/11 marked an increase in prejudice, discrimination, and other forms of unfair treatment toward Muslim Americans. We present a study that examined the emotions of Muslim Americans in the days preceding the ten-year 9/11 anniversary. We measured the antecedents (concerns) and consequences (coping) of sadness, fear, and anger. The 9/11 anniversary precipitated intense concerns with loss and discrimination, and intense feelings of sadness, fear, and anger. We measured three coping responses: rumination, avoidance of public places, and religious coping. Participants engaged in all three coping responses, with seeking solace in one's religion being the most frequent response. Moreover, emotions mediated the relationship between concerns and coping responses. Sadness accounted for the association between concern with loss and rumination. Fear explained the association between concern with discrimination and avoidance. Anger accounted for the association between concern with discrimination and religious coping.     

Standard Gödel Modal Logics

We prove strong completeness of the □-version and the ?-version of a Gödel modal logic based on Kripke models where propositions at each world and the accessibility relation are both infinitely valued in the standard Gödel algebra [0,1]. Some asymmetries are revealed: validity in the first logic is reducible to the class of frames having two-valued accessibility relation and this logic does not enjoy the finite model property, while validity in the second logic requires truly fuzzy accessibility relations and this logic has the finite model property. Analogues of the classical modal systems D, T, S4 and S5 are considered also, and the completeness results are extended to languages enriched with a discrete well ordered set of truth constants.     

Skilled Observation and Change Blindness: A Comparison of Law Enforcement and Student Samples

Some evidence suggests that expertise and observational skills training can reduce attentional errors, such as change blindness. Laypeople typically assume that law enforcement officers possess acute observational skills, but no research to date has compared law enforcement and lay samples on their susceptibility to change blindness. In the present study, student and law enforcement samples completed a change blindness task and attempted to identify the target(s) from four line‐ups. Law enforcement officers and students were equally susceptible to change blindness regarding the switch in the target's identity, but students were more likely than officers to detect changes in the target's clothing. Students also performed better on the line‐up task, overall, than officers. Additionally, whereas students' confidence was positively correlated with identification accuracy under some circumstances, officers' confidence was either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest some factors accounting for law enforcement officers' relatively poor performance on these tasks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Time but not force is transferred between ipsilateral upper and lower limbs

The authors compared the force and time endpoint accuracy of goal-directed ipsilateral upper and lower limb isometric contractions and determined the components of motor performance that can be transferred from 1 limb to the other after practice. Ten young adults (27.4 +/- 4.4 years) performed 100 trials that involved their matching peak force to a force-time target with ankle dorsiflexor and elbow flexor muscles. The peak force error and variability was greater for ankle dorsiflexor contractions than for elbow flexor contractions, whereas the timing error and variability did not significantly vary with limb. There was transfer of timing, but not force, of motor output between upper and lower limbs. The timing error of the elbow flexor contractions decreased by 23% when those contractions were preceded by ankle dorsiflexor contractions, and the timing error of the ankle dorsiflexors decreased by 24% when those contractions were preceded by elbow flexor contractions. These finding therefore suggest that timing of an aiming isometric contraction may be organized at a common part of the brain for the upper and lower limbs.     

Teaching children with autism to request help with difficult tasks

We taught three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder to request help using an interrupted chain procedure during which we manipulated task materials such that the child was either incapable or capable of independently completing a link of a behavior chain. We initially observed undesirable generalization of requests for help during capable trials when teaching was introduced during incapable trials for two participants and to a lesser extent for the third participant. However, with repeated exposure to differential prompting and reinforcement across incapable and capable trials, differential responding was observed across EO‐present and EO‐absent trials for all three participants during both teaching sets and one generalization set that was never exposed to teaching procedures. These findings suggest that it is important to consider the antecedent conditions under which the response should occur when teaching children to request help.