Effect of anxiety reduction on children's school performance and social adjustment

This study tested the effect of reductions in children's anxiety over time on improvements in school performance and social functioning in the context of participation in a cognitive-behavioral intervention program. Participants included 40 children with high anxiety (6-13 years of age). Independent evaluators, children, and parents rated child anxiety; parents rated school performance; and children and parents rated social functioning. Measures were completed at preintervention, midintervention, and postintervention. Fixed-effects regression analyses and random-effects regression analyses indicated that decreased anxiety was predictive of improved school performance and social functioning over the course of the intervention. These findings suggest that changes in anxiety influence trajectories of children's scholastic and social functioning.     

The effect of age and role information on expectations for big five personality traits

In four studies, the authors investigated the extent to which expectations for personality traits in age-graded roles correspond to patterns of personality trait change across the life course. In Studies 1 (N = 43) and 2 (N = 126), the authors examined the age-graded roles of high school student, college student, parent, and grandparent and found that expectations for how people behave in these age-graded roles showed strong parallels to the documented pattern of personality trait development and that this pattern of expectations was largely shared by younger and older participants. In Studies 3 (N = 252) and 4 (N = 123), the authors separated age and role information (e.g., marital, parental, and employment status) and found that people use both sources of information independently in forming expectations of others. The implications for understanding the interplay of expectations and personality trait development are discussed.     

Learning disability subtypes: classification of high functioning hyperlexia

This study examined 30 children with hyperlexic reading patterns and average intelligence to determine if established learning disability subtypes could be applied to these children with hyperlexia. Two groups emerged. One type showed language learning disorder patterns with good visual memory. This group also showed a high percentage of phonetic word errors. A second hyperlexic group showed signs of nonverbal learning disorder with visual spatial deficits and impaired visual memory. This latter subgroup showed few phonetic errors with more sight word errors. These findings suggest subtypes of high functioning hyperlexia, one showing language deficits characteristic of dysphasia and one showing patterns similar to visual spatial dyslexia.     

The universal SNARC effect: the association between number magnitude and space is amodal

It is thought that number magnitude is represented in an abstract and amodal way on a left-to-right oriented mental number line. Major evidence for this idea has been provided by the SNARC effect (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993): responses to relatively larger numbers are faster for the right hand, those to smaller numbers for the left hand, even when number magnitude is irrelevant. The SNARC effect has been used to index automatic access to a central semantic and amodal magnitude representation. However, this assumption of modality independence has never been tested and it remains uncertain if the SNARC effect exists in other modalities in a similar way as in the visual modality. We have examined this question by systematically varying modality/notation (auditory number word, visual Arabic numeral, visual number word, visual dice pattern) in a within-participant design. The SNARC effect was found consistently for all modality/notation conditions, including auditory presentation. The size of the SNARC effect in the auditory condition did not differ from the SNARC effect in any visual condition. We conclude that the SNARC effect is indeed a general index of a central semantic and amodal number magnitude representation.     

Visual working memory for observed actions

Human society depends on the ability to remember the actions of other individuals, which is information that must be stored in a temporary buffer to guide behavior after actions have been observed. To date, however, the storage capacity, contents, and architecture of working memory for observed actions are unknown. In this article, the author shows that it is possible to retain information about only 2-3 actions in visual working memory at once. However, it is also possible to retain 9 properties distributed across 3 actions almost as well as 3 properties distributed across 3 actions, showing that working memory stores integrated action representations rather than individual properties. Finally, the author shows that working memory for observed actions is independent from working memory for object and spatial information. These results provide evidence for a previously undocumented system in working memory for storing information about actions. Further, this system operates by the same storage principles as visual working memory for object information. Thus, working memory consists of a series of distinct yet computationally similar mechanisms for retaining different types of visual information.     

Looking at the sunny side of life: age-related change in an event-related potential measure of the negativity bias

Studies of the negativity bias have demonstrated that negative information has a stronger influence than positive information in a wide range of cognitive domains. At odds with this literature is extensive work now documenting emotional and motivational shifts that result in a positivity effect in older adults. It remains unclear, however, whether this age-related positivity effect results from increases in processing of positive information or from decreases in processing of negative information. Also unknown is the specific time course of development from a negative bias to an apparently positive one. The present study was designed to investigate the negativity bias across the life span using an event-related potential measure of responding to emotionally valenced images. The results suggest that neural reactivity to negative images declines linearly with age, but responding to positive images is surprisingly age invariant across most of the adult life span.     

Predicting Happiness: How Normative Feeling Rules Influence (and Even Reverse) Durability Bias

Consumers’ purchase decisions are often influenced by a simple assessment of how long they expect an anticipated purchase (e.g., buying a sports car or a new outfit) will make them happy. Unfortunately, affective forecasts are prone to durability bias (i.e., the overes‐timation of the duration of felt emotions in response to a future event). Here, this article suggests that normative beliefs, or “feeling rules,” often underlie emotion forecasts. This account suggests that affective forecasts can be influenced by external normative communications and that conditions exist where affect duration may be underestimated rather than overestimated—thus demonstrating a reversal of durability bias. Such reversals occur when existing norms advocate attenuated emotional responses (e.g., one should not be overly impacted by minor setbacks or small imperfections). This article discusses how marketers can influence consumers’ happiness forecasts by modifying salient norms for consumer groups or product categories.     

Experiences of time loss among videogame players: an empirical study.

Playing videogames is now a major leisure pursuit, yet research in the area is comparatively sparse. Previous correlational evidence suggests that subjective time loss occurs during playing videogames. This study examined experiences of time loss among a relatively large group of gamers (n = 280). Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through an online survey. Results showed that time loss occurred irrespective of gender, age, or frequency of play, but was associated with particular structural characteristics of games such as their complexity, the presence of multi-levels, missions and/or high scores, multiplayer interactions, and plot. Results also demonstrated that time loss could have both positive and negative outcomes for players. Positive aspects of time loss included helping players to relax and temporarily escape from reality. Negative aspects included the sacrificing of other things in their lives, guilty feelings about wasted time, and social conflict. It is concluded that for many gamers, losing track of time is a positive experience and is one of the main reasons for playing videogames.     

On the relation between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and the conceptual distinction between one and more than one

We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and children's representation of the distinction between singular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using the manual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson & Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but not four objects from one. Thus, they failed to represent four objects as 'plural' or 'more than one'. Experiment 2 found that children continued to fail at the 1 vs. 4 manual-search task at 20 months of age, even when told, via explicit morpho-syntactic singular-plural cues, that one or many balls are being hidden. However, 22- and 24-month-olds succeeded both with and without verbal cues. Parental report data indicated that most 22- and 24-month-olds, but few 20-month-olds, had begun producing plural nouns in their speech. Also, the success among the older children was due to those children who had reportedly begun producing plural nouns. We discuss a possible role for language acquisition in children's deployment of set-based quantification and the distinction between singular and plural sets.