Classroom effects on student motivation: Goal structures, social relationships, and competence beliefs

Psychologists and educators have often conceptualized motivation as an individual difference variable, something that some students simply have more of than other students. This view of motivation can underestimate contextual influences. In this article we consider how characteristics of the school and classroom may influence student motivation, as well as the role of educators in shaping school and classroom climate. We describe three motivational perspectives: achievement goal theory, self-determination theory, and social-cognitive theory. The effects on motivation of social relationships with teachers and peers are also considered.     

A comparison of prebunking and debunking interventions for implied versus explicit misinformation

Psychological research has offered valuable insights into how to combat misinformation. The studies conducted to date, however, have three limitations. First, pre-emptive (“prebunking”) and retroactive (“debunking”) interventions have mostly been examined in parallel, and thus it is unclear which of these two predominant approaches is more effective. Second, there has been a focus on misinformation that is explicitly false, but implied misinformation that uses literally true information to mislead is common in the real world. Finally, studies have relied mainly on questionnaire measures of reasoning, neglecting behavioural impacts of misinformation and interventions. To offer incremental progress towards addressing these three issues, we conducted an experiment (N = 735) involving misinformation on fair trade. We contrasted the effectiveness of prebunking versus debunking and the impacts of implied versus explicit misinformation, and incorporated novel measures assessing consumer behaviours (i.e., willingness-to-pay; information seeking; online misinformation promotion) in addition to standard questionnaire measures. In general, both prebunking and debunking reduced misinformation reliance. We also found that individuals tended to rely more on explicit than implied misinformation both with and without interventions.     

Heartbeat perception in depression

Alterations in bodily awareness have been implicated in depression but there has been little detailed empirical characterisation of the degree and accuracy of body perception in the disorder. The present study examined the objective accuracy of heartbeat perception (using the Schandry mental tracking task) and the subjective degree of bodily focus (using the Bodily Consciousness Questionnaire; BCQ) in healthy control volunteers, a moderately depressed community sample, and a more severely depressed clinic sample (n=18 in each group). The community sample showed less accurate heartbeat perception than the control group as expected. Counter to prediction, however, the more severely depressed clinic sample performed better than the community depressed sample and equivalently to control volunteers on the Schandry task. There were no group differences on subjective bodily awareness. Implications for theories of depression are discussed.     

Levels of specificity of autobiographical memories and of biographical memories of the deceased in bereaved individuals with and without complicated grief

Traumatized individuals experiencing posttraumatic stress have difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories to cue words on the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; J. M. G. Williams & K. Broadbent, 1986). This may represent a generalized, functional avoidance of the personal past. However, such individuals also often report specific intrusive memories of their trauma in the day-to-day. This raises the possibility that memories tied to the source of the person's distress are immune to this putative avoidance process. This was investigated in bereaved individuals with complicated grief (CG) who reported intrusive, specific memories from the life of their deceased loved one, and matched bereaved controls without CG. Participants performed the AMT and two Biographical Memory Tests (BMTs), cueing memories from the life of the deceased (BMT-Deceased) and from a living significant other (BMT-Living). To negative word cues, the CG group showed reduced specificity for the AMT and BMT-Living, relative to controls, but this effect was reversed on the BMT-Deceased. These data support the proposal that memories tied to the source of an individual's distress are immune to the processes that underlie the standard reduced specificity effect.     

The Adjustment Process of Ex-Buddhist Monks to Life After the Monastery

This study explores the adjustment process of five Western ex-Buddhist monks to life after the monastery, using an in depth case study approach and thematic analysis. Participants discussed their initial experience of leaving, the process of creating a new life and their relationship with the past. The findings indicated that while each case was unique, significant common themes emerged as features of the adjustment process. The adjustment had been multi-dimensional, challenging, difficult, confusing, complex and profound for the participants. They had to contend with issues of grief, delayed development, missing out on life experiences, difficulties with intimacy, money, identity, depression, anxiety and confusion. This was combined with the hope and promise of many newly found freedoms involved in establishing a new life and identity. Parallels are drawn to the experience of Catholic priests and nuns who have departed their Orders, Vietnam veterans, ex-cult members and individuals who have left total institutions where their identity and daily lives were highly prescribed. The adjustment experience of ex-Buddhist monks extends the literature on Buddhist monks and provides an example of a life transition of interest to the helping professions because of its potential relevance to a range of major transitions for which clients may seek assistance. Tim Mapel is a lecturer in the Bachelor of Applied Social Sciences degree at the Eastern Institute of Technology in New Zealand. He has a Master’s degree in counseling and works with individuals, couples and groups. He has a passion for the practice of mindfulness and for facilitating a sense of aliveness in people’s lives. He is an advanced Psychodrama trainee and spent 12 years living as an ordained Buddhist monk. Originally from Boston, USA he has lived in the UK, Switzerland, and now considers New Zealand home.     

Contact and other‐race effects in configural and component processing of faces

Other‐race faces are generally recognized more poorly than own‐race faces. There has been a long‐standing interest in the extent to which differences in contact contribute to this other‐race effect (ORE). Here, we examined the effect of contact on two distinct aspects of face memory, memory for configuration and for components, both of which are better for own‐race than other‐race faces. Configural and component memory were measured using recognition memory tests with intact study faces and blurred (isolates memory for configuration) and scrambled (isolates memory for components) test faces, respectively. Our participants were a large group of ethnically Chinese individuals who had resided in Australia for varying lengths of time, from a few weeks to 26 years. We found that time in a Western country significantly (negatively) predicted the size of the ORE for configural, but not component, memory. There was also a trend for earlier age of arrival to predict smaller OREs in configural, but not component, memory. These results suggest that memory for configural information in other‐race faces improves with experience with such faces. However, as found for recognition memory generally, the contact effects were small, indicating that other factors must play a substantial role in cross‐race differences in face memory.     

Spatial working memory maintenance: Does attention play a role? A visual search study

Recent studies have proposed that a common mechanism may underlie spatial attention and spatial working memory. One proposal is that spatial working memory is maintained by attention-based rehearsal [Awh, E., Jonides, J., & Reuter-Lorenz, P. A. (1998). Rehearsal in spatial working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24(3), 780-790], and so a spatial attention shift during the retention interval of a spatial location should impair its memory performance. In the present study, participants engaged in single-item, parallel or serial search tasks while remembering a spatial location. Although memory tended to bias all searches, the need for an attentional shift during the retention interval impaired memory performance only in single-item search, but not in other searches. These findings suggest that previous evidence for the attention-based rehearsal account does not generalize to visual search. Results are discussed with regard to the relationship between spatial attention and spatial working memory.