Facial age cues and emotional expression interact asymmetrically: age cues moderate emotion categorisation

Facial attributes such as race, sex, and age can interact with emotional expressions; however, only a couple of studies have investigated the nature of the interaction between facial age cues and emotional expressions and these have produced inconsistent results. Additionally, these studies have not addressed the mechanism/s driving the influence of facial age cues on emotional expression or vice versa. In the current study, participants categorised young and older adult faces expressing happiness and anger (Experiment 1) or sadness (Experiment 2) by their age and their emotional expression. Age cues moderated categorisation of happiness vs. anger and sadness in the absence of an influence of emotional expression on age categorisation times. This asymmetrical interaction suggests that facial age cues are obligatorily processed prior to emotional expressions. Finding a categorisation advantage for happiness expressed on young faces relative to both anger and sadness which are negative in valence but different in their congruence with old age stereotypes or structural overlap with age cues suggests that the observed influence of facial age cues on emotion perception is due to the congruence between relatively positive evaluations of young faces and happy expressions.     

Diversité du sens de l’orientation des collégien(ne)s orienté(e)s vers la 3e préparatoire aux formations professionnelles (3e PFP) : le rôle de l’expérience scolaire antérieure

Professional exploration modules are offered to the secondary school students attending a Preparatory to Vocational Training (3rd PVT). They are aimed at the academically weak pupils’ remobilization through the development of a training project in vocational education. Based on the model of plural and active socialization (Malrieu, 2003), this article aims to understand the processes of inter-significance between the meaning of school experience, the relation to learning and the relation to the future which underlines the building of the meaning of orientation of middle school students to the PVT program. One hundred and ninety-nine middle school students from 14 to 16 years old who attend the PVT in vocational schools underwent a computerized questionnaire including 96 items. A hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) differentiates three typical profiles of college students. Though the orientation in the PVT program remains characterized by strong social determinisms (school history and social origin), it seems for a majority of students built on positive representations dependent on the meaning of the previous school experience more than on a projection to the future.     

Pedestrian behaviour of 6th grade Estonian students: Implications of social factors and accident-prevention education at school

Children as pedestrians are one of the most vulnerable groups of road users. Therefore factors associated with risky pedestrian behaviour should be carefully studied. The aim of this article is to clarify how the traffic behaviour of 6th grade students as pedestrians is associated with the behaviour of their traffic companions and prevention activities at school, also taking gender into consideration. The research was conducted based on a randomly-selected sample of 1033 6th-grade students with the mean age of 12.77 ± 0.38 (SD) years. The results showed that compared to girls boys take significantly more risks as pedestrians: they rarely use reflectors during periods of darkness and often cross the road against the red light. The most important role models for adolescents in traffic behaviour are their parents. The role model behaviour with the strongest effect on adolescent high-risk behaviour in traffic is the role model not using crosswalks to cross the street. The results also showed that higher-risk traffic behaviour by adolescent pedestrians is predicted by higher-risk behaviour on the part of their companions (parents, teachers), walking alone on the street, as well as by an adolescent’s lower involvement in the less active prevention activities in the classroom. To improve adolescent pedestrians’ traffic behaviour social environment and school-based factors should be considered more thoroughly in prevention work at school.     

Validation de l’inventaire des habiletés politiques auprès d’une population occupant un poste de directions d’établissement scolaire

A single instrument was listed to measure political skills, defined as the understanding of others and the use of that knowledge to influence their actions. It was validated with employees, although political skills were more relevant to managers and, in particular, to school principals. A single study validated the psychometric properties of the instrument with managers showing that the dimensional structure would deploy in 5 factors unlike what is observed among employees, which is deployed in 4 factors. The purpose of this study is to verify whether the tool is reliable and has a distinct structure when employed with a population occupying a management position and more particularly school principals. A total of 304 school principals completed an electronic questionnaire. The results suggest a satisfactory dimensional structure in four factors and good fidelity, which invalidates the use of a separate structure for manager including school principal, as reported by Snell et al. (2013).     

Utilitarian and emotion-related components of moral judgement: Gender and age effects and the relationship with prosocial and hostile roles in bullying

This study investigated the utilitarian and emotion-related components of morality, both as a function of gender and age and in relation to hostile vs. pro-social behaviors in bullying. We presented 45 primary and 62 middle school students with different types of moral and control dilemmas to assess their acceptance of utilitarian behaviors that did or did not violate moral norms (with high or low emotional involvement) in relation to their propensity to assume hostile and/or pro-social roles. We found greater acceptance of utilitarian solutions to dilemmas in boys, older children and those inclined to take on hostile roles. An inverse association was found between utilitarian styles and pro-social roles, particularly when utilitarian thinking violated a moral norm with high emotional involvement. We discuss these results in terms of different functioning styles in typically developing children.     

小学傣汉双语者汉语词汇形音的语义通达特点

采用语义启动研究范式,探讨傣族小学2、4、6年级汉语词汇和语音的语义通达特点。结果表明：1）对图片语义的提取存在学习年龄效应,2年级的反应时显著长于4、6年级;2）汉语词汇和语音都能显著促进图片语义的提取,但语音促进作用更明显;3）汉语词汇对图片语义提取的促进作用随年级的升高而增加,汉语语音的促进作用随年级的升高而减少。     

Operational Noology as a new methodology for the study of thought and language: theoretical aspects and possible practical applications

In this article, the author presents a new methodology for the study of two fundamental components of consciousness, that is thought and language. The fundamental presupposition that forms the basis of this methodology is that thought is not simply a passive "reflection" of an external "reality", but also (and especially) something active, i.e. that the fundamental components of thought are sequences of operations, amongst which the ones of attention play a key role. These sequences of elementary mental operations are called mental categories, and are the meanings of all the words that do not seem to indicate something physical (first of all, all the "grammatical" words, that is conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns, fundamental verbs like "to be", "to have" etc., the main adverbs, and, in the large number of languages that have a more or less rich morphology, all morphemes (the ones which indicate cases, in languages that have cases, the number and the gender of nouns and adjectives, moods and tenses of the verb etc.). The author proposes a list of these elementary mental operations and he shows how it is possible, basing ourselves on them, to identify the meanings of these words, which are indispensable for any linguistic expression. The author also mentions a possible short-term practical application of these theories, i.e. a device in order to improve the quality of machine translation. He also formulates the hypothesis that these theories could allow us to look in a new way at the problem of the (partial) artificial reproduction of the human activity of thought and language.     

Pilocarpine seizures cause age-dependent impairment in auditory location discrimination

Children who have status epilepticus have continuous or rapidly repeating seizures that may be life-threatening and may cause life-long changes in brain and behavior. The extent to which status epilepticus causes deficits in auditory discrimination is unknown. A naturalistic auditory location discrimination method was used to evaluate this question using an animal model of status epilepticus. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were injected with saline on postnatal day (P) 20, or a convulsant dose of pilocarpine on P20 or P45. Pilocarpine on either day induced status epilepticus; status epilepticus at P45 resulted in CA3 cell loss and spontaneous seizures, whereas P20 rats had no cell loss or spontaneous seizures. Mature rats were trained with sound-source location and sound-silence discriminations. Control (saline P20) rats acquired both discriminations immediately. In status epilepticus (P20) rats, acquisition of the sound-source location discrimination was moderately impaired. Status epilepticus (P45) rats failed to acquire either sound-source location or sound-silence discriminations. Status epilepticus in rat causes an age-dependent, long-term impairment in auditory discrimination. This impairment may explain one cause of impaired auditory location discrimination in humans.     

School Mobility and Achievement: Longitudinal Findings From an Urban Cohort

This study investigated the effects of school mobility on reading and math achievement for 1,087 low-income Black children in the Chicago Longitudinal Study. Between kindergarten and seventh grade, 73% of the students changed schools at least once during elementary school and 21% changed schools three or more times. The prospective longitudinal design of the Chicago Longitudinal Study allowed for controlled analyses of both the predictors and the consequences of school mobility. The significant predictors of the number of moves included prior achievement, the number of years of preschool participation in an education intervention program, and parent education. Although the students who changed schools frequently between kindergarten and seventh grade performed approximately one year behind their nonmobile peers on reading and mathematics achievement tests taken at the end of seventh grade, only one half of this difference appears attributable to frequent mobility. The remaining portion is due to the fact that the mobile students were lower achieving even before they started to change schools. The negative consequences of past school mobility are lower for students who moved into better quality schools such as magnets or academic academies. Findings indicate that it is frequent, rather than occasional, mobility that significantly increases the risk of underachievement.     

Relation of Age of Onset to the Type and Severity of Child and Adolescent Conduct Problems

In a cross-sectional household sample of 9-through 17-year-old youths from 4 U.S. communities, youths with earlier ages of onset of conduct problems engaged in more conduct problems than youths with later ages of onset when current age and gender were controlled. Specifically, youths with earlier ages of onset were more likely to engage in several types of physical aggression, frequent lying, theft, and vandalism and were less likely to engage in only truancy. There also was an inverse relation between age of onset and level of functional impairment, mental health service use, and meeting diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder. Within the limits of cross-sectional data, these results support the hypothesis that key aspects of the heterogeneity of conduct problems among youths are related to the age of onset of conduct problems.