Middle- and Working-Class Black and White Children's Speech During a Picture-Labeling Task

The speech of 9 middle-class Black, 9 middle-class White, 9 working-class Black, and 9 working-class White preschool children was examined during a picture labeling task. The groups were found to be similar in levels and forms of labeling. There were class differences and race differences among the children: Middle-class and White children labeled more and provided more information about objects. Existing data from the children's parents indicate that there are many ways in which the groups of children resemble and differ from their parents in their labeling. The present findings demonstrate the influence of social context in shaping children's labeling and the simultaneous influence of the children's independent structuring of their labeling.     

The Problem of Rehearsal or Mental Practice

The present study examines several methodological and conceptual problems which in the past have made it difficult to accept the hypothesis that mental practice facilitates behavioral skill. An experiment on skill in speech production is then reported which overcomes the methodological problems. Subjects practiced producing a sentence at maximal rate either mentally (mental practice) or overtly (physical practice) and then produced a transfer sentence which was either related or unrelated to the practiced sentence. The maximal rate of speech was faster for related than unrelated transfer sentences, and the degree of transfer for the mental and physical practice conditions was equivalent.

A theory was developed to explain these results and overcome the conceptual problems outlined in the introduction. Implications of the theory for several related phenomena are discussed: rehearsal, errors in action, automatization, control processes in motor skills, speed-up as a function of practice, the relative advantages of physical vs. mental practice, and the evoked potentials accompanying mental rehearsal of an action.     

Criterion Development and Validity of the CQT in Field Application

Two experiments evaluated the competing interpretations of cognitive dissonance and impression management theories regarding the pill and misattribution studies of attitude change in the forced compliance situation. Attitude change was eliminated when subjects were told about the tension side effects of taking a placebo, replicating the usual effect. Attitude change was also eliminated, however, when subjects took the pill following counterattitudinal behavior. In one condition of the second experiment, subjects were given instructions about tension side effects but were also told that the drug would not affect their moral judgment or behavior. These instructions eliminated attitude change in a standard pill condition. The typical finding of attitude change was manifested in the misattribution/no-excuse condition. The primary and secondary data from both studies provided more support for the impression management interpretation of the standard misattribution manipulations than for a theory of misattribution of dissonance-produced arousal.     

The development and analysis of tutorial dialogues in AutoTutor Lite

The goal of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that interact in natural language is to emulate the benefits that a well-trained human tutor provides to students, by interpreting student answers and appropriately responding in order to encourage elaboration. BRCA Gist is an ITS developed using AutoTutor Lite, a Web-based version of AutoTutor. Fuzzy-trace theory theoretically motivated the development of BRCA Gist, which engages people in tutorial dialogues to teach them about genetic breast cancer risk. We describe an empirical method to create tutorial dialogues and fine-tune the calibration of BRCA Gist’s semantic processing engine without a team of computer scientists. We created five interactive dialogues centered on pedagogic questions such as “What should someone do if she receives a positive result for genetic risk of breast cancer?” This method involved an iterative refinement process of repeated testing with different texts and successively making adjustments to the tutor’s expectations and settings in order to improve performance. The goal of this method was to enable BRCA Gist to interpret and respond to answers in a manner that best facilitated learning. We developed a method to analyze the efficacy of the tutor’s dialogues. We found that BRCA Gist’s assessment of participants’ answers was highly correlated with the quality of the answers found by trained human judges using a reliable rubric. The dialogue quality between users and BRCA Gist predicted performance on a breast cancer risk knowledge test completed after exposure to the tutor. The appropriateness of BRCA Gist’s feedback also predicted the quality of answers and breast cancer risk knowledge test scores.     

Conceptual constraints and mechanisms in children's selective learning

Although we can support Heyes’ call for more research on mechanisms, we disagree that the problem has been ignored as Heyes suggests. We also doubt that basic learning mechanisms are alone sufficient to account for the broad range of findings in the selective social learning literature. Although phylogenetically shared learning mechanisms must support selective social learning, we believe that they must also be guided by top‐down conceptual considerations that may be special to humans. Research to date has been focused on establishing the boundary conditions on selective social learning, with the goal of making generalizations that will constrain theorizing about the character of that special knowledge. This is critical to our understanding of both why and how selective social learning manifests in children.     

Women in the midluteal phase of the menstrual cycle have difficulty suppressing the processing of negative emotional stimuli: An event-related potential study

Emotion regulation deficits have been implicated in anxiety and depressive disorders, and these internalising disorders are more prevalent in women than men. Few electrophysiological studies have investigated sex differences in emotional reactivity and emotion regulation controlling for menstrual phase. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 28 early follicular women, 29 midluteal women, and 27 men who completed an emotion regulation task. A novel finding of increased N2 amplitude during suppression was found for midluteal women compared with men. These findings suggest midluteal women may be significantly less able to suppress cortical processing of negative stimuli compared to men. This ERP finding was complemented by behavioral ratings data which revealed that while both early follicular and midluteal women reported more distress than men, midluteal women also reported greater effort when suppressing their responses than men. P1 and N1 components were increased in midluteal women compared to men regardless of instructional set, suggesting greater early attentional processing. No sex or menstrual phase differences were apparent in P3 or LPP. This study underscores the importance of considering menstrual phase when examining sex differences in the cortical processing of emotion regulation and demonstrates that midluteal women may have deficits in down-regulating their neural and behavioural responses.     

Racialized physical space as cultural product

We argue for incorporating physical space into the psychological study of race. Specifically, we review historical and sociological work explaining how physical space (e.g., houses, rivers, neighborhoods, and nations) has been used to construct race and racial hierarchy, leaving physical space structurally racialized. This structural racialization, we propose, has led people to think of physical space in racial terms, creating mental images of race that include physical space characteristics. We explain how these mental images may influence race‐related psychological processes (e.g., person perception and social identity threat). We also detail evidence that these mental images of racialized space shape how people perceive and interact with space, in ways that likely reinforce its structural racialization. We therefore frame physical space as a cultural product, situating it within the mutually constitutive nature of culture and psyche. This expanded approach to studying race can facilitate a fuller understanding of all the ways in which psychological processes contribute to racial inequality.     

In the Same Ballpark or a Whole New Ball Game? Staff as Raters of Youth Behavior

There is a lack of psychometrically sound tools for measuring youth outcomes in out-of-school time (OST) settings. Consequently, behavior ratings completed by OST staff are being scored as though the raters were teachers, even though cross-informant correlations are notoriously low (meta-analysis r?=?.27). Across 26 schools, 227 students were assessed by both teachers and OST staff using the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA) to measure Social Emotional Competence. These 4th and 5th grade students were 50% male; 53% 5th graders; and 51% Latino, 20% Mixed/Other, 11% Black, 11% Asian, and 7% White. In the full sample, OST staff rated children’s behavior more harshly than teachers (p?<?.001; d?=?.32), although the scores were associated (r?=?.31, p?<?.001). Among the ratings completed within the same week, teacher and staff distributions were not statistically different. Teacher and staff ratings had a “medium” correlation (r?=?.42; p?=?.01) and a classification consistency (88%) that exceeded chance by a “moderate” amount (κ?=?.43). Few, if any, studies have previously compared the ratings of the same children by teachers and OST providers. Cross-informant inter-rater reliability between teachers and OST staff was higher than expected on the DESSA.     

Intuition, reason, and metacognition

Dual Process Theories (DPT) of reasoning posit that judgments are mediated by both fast, automatic processes and more deliberate, analytic ones. A critical, but unanswered question concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking? We hypothesised that initial, intuitive answers are accompanied by a metacognitive experience, called the Feeling of Rightness (FOR), which can signal when additional analysis is needed. In separate experiments, reasoners completed one of four tasks: conditional reasoning (N = 60), a three-term variant of conditional reasoning (N = 48), problems used to measure base rate neglect (N = 128), or a syllogistic reasoning task (N = 64). For each task, participants were instructed to provide an initial, intuitive response to the problem along with an assessment of the rightness of that answer (FOR). They were then allowed as much time as needed to reconsider their initial answer and provide a final answer. In each experiment, we observed a robust relationship between the FOR and two measures of analytic thinking: low FOR was associated with longer rethinking times and an increased probability of answer change. In turn, FOR judgments were consistently predicted by the fluency with which the initial answer was produced, providing a link to the wider literature on metamemory. These data support a model in which a metacognitive judgment about a first, initial model determines the extent of analytic engagement.     

Developmental reversals in false memory: now you see them, now you don't!

A developmental reversal in false memory is the counterintuitive phenomenon of higher levels of false memory in older children, adolescents, and adults than in younger children. The ability of verbatim memory to suppress this age trend in false memory was evaluated using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Seven and 11-year-old children studied DRM lists either in a standard condition (whole words) that normally produces high levels of false memory or in an alternative condition that should enhance verbatim memory (word fragments). Half the children took 1 recognition test, and the other half took 3 recognition tests. In the single-test condition, the typical age difference in false memory was found for the word condition (higher false memory for 11-year-olds than for 7-year-olds), but in the word fragment condition false memory was lower in the older children. In the word condition, false memory increased over successive recognition tests. Our findings are consistent with 2 principles of fuzzy-trace theory's explanation of false memories: (a) reliance on verbatim rather than gist memory causes such errors to decline with age, and (b) repeated testing increases reliance on gist memory in older children and adults who spontaneously connect meaning across events.