Attention to context: U.S. and Japanese children's emotional judgments

A growing number of studies suggest cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggest that Westerners typically focus on a central single object in a scene while Easterners often integrate their judgment of the focal object with surrounding contextual cues. There are few studies of whether such cultural differences are evident in children. This study examined 48 monolingual Japanese-speaking children residing in Japan and 48 monolingual English-speaking children residing in the U.S.A. (40 to 60 month-olds) in a task asking children to complete a picture by adding the proper emotional expression to a face. The key variable was the context and shift in context from the preceding trial for the same pictured individual. Japanese children were much more likely to shift their judgments with changes in context whereas children from the United States treated facial expression in a more trait-like manner, maintaining the same expression for the individual across contexts.     

Connecting instances to promote children's relational reasoning

The practice of learning from multiple instances seems to allow children to learn about relational structure. The experiments reported here focused on two issues regarding relational learning from multiple instances: (a) what kind of perceptual situations foster such learning and (b) how particular object properties, such as complexity and similarity, interact with relational learning. Two kinds of perceptual situations were of interest here: simultaneous view, where instances are viewed at once, and sequential view, where instances are viewed one at a time (one right after the other). We examined the influence of particular perceptual situations and object properties using two tests of relational reasoning: a common match-to-sample task, where new instances are compared with a common sample, and a variable match-to-sample task, where new instances are compared with a sample that varies on each trial. Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that simultaneous presentation of even highly dissimilar instances, one simple and one complex, effectively connects them together and improves relational generalization in both match-to-sample tasks. Experiment 3 shows that simple samples are more effective than complex ones in the common match-to-sample task. However, when one instance is not used a common sample and various pairs of instances are simply compared, as in Experiment 4, simple and rich instances are equally effective at promoting relational learning. These results bear on our understanding of how children connect instances and how those initial connections affect learning and generalization.     

Religiosity, psychological resources, and physical health

Various explanations have been given for the positive association between religiosity and physical health. Using data from two waves of the National Survey of Midlife in the United States (1995, 2005) and retrospective data on the importance of religion in the home in which respondents were raised we find that psychological resources, operationalized by measures of emotional and psychological well-being, mediate the effect of this early exposure to religion but only on self-rated health and physical symptomatology; chronic illnesses and health limitations on activities of daily living are unaffected.     

Instructed Hand Movements Affect Students’ Learning of an Abstract Concept From Video

Producing content-related gestures has been found to impact students’ learning, whether such gestures are spontaneously generated by the learner in the course of problem-solving, or participants are instructed to pose based on experimenter instructions during problem-solving and word learning. Few studies, however, have investigated the effect of (a) performing instructed gestures while learning concepts or (b) producing gestures without there being an implied connection between the gestures and the concepts being learned. The two studies reported here investigate the impact of instructed hand movements on students’ subsequent understanding of a concept. Students were asked to watch an instructional video—focused on the concept of statistical model—three times. Two experimental groups were given a secondary task to perform while watching the video, which involved moving their hands to mimic the placement and orientation of red rectangular bars overlaid on the video. Students were told that the focus of the study was multitasking, and that the instructed hand movements were unrelated to the material being learned. In the content-match group the placement of the hands reinforced the concept being explained, and in the content-mismatch group it did not. A control group was not asked to perform a secondary task. In both studies, findings indicate that students in the content-match group performed better on the posttest, and showed less variation in performance, than did students in the content-mismatch group, with control students falling in between. Instructed hand movement—even when presented as an unrelated, secondary task—can affect students’ learning of a complex concept.