The development of emotion recognition from facial expressions and non‐linguistic vocalizations during childhood

Sensitivity to facial and vocal emotion is fundamental to children's social competence. Previous research has focused on children's facial emotion recognition, and few studies have investigated non‐linguistic vocal emotion processing in childhood. We compared facial and vocal emotion recognition and processing biases in 4‐ to 11‐year‐olds and adults. Eighty‐eight 4‐ to 11‐year‐olds and 21 adults participated. Participants viewed/listened to faces and voices (angry, happy, and sad) at three intensity levels (50%, 75%, and 100%). Non‐linguistic tones were used. For each modality, participants completed an emotion identification task. Accuracy and bias for each emotion and modality were compared across 4‐ to 5‐, 6‐ to 9‐ and 10‐ to 11‐year‐olds and adults. The results showed that children's emotion recognition improved with age; preschoolers were less accurate than other groups. Facial emotion recognition reached adult levels by 11 years, whereas vocal emotion recognition continued to develop in late childhood. Response bias decreased with age. For both modalities, sadness recognition was delayed across development relative to anger and happiness. The results demonstrate that developmental trajectories of emotion processing differ as a function of emotion type and stimulus modality. In addition, vocal emotion processing showed a more protracted developmental trajectory, compared to facial emotion processing. The results have important implications for programmes aiming to improve children's socio‐emotional competence.     

Warriors,authors and baseball coaches: the meaning of metaphor in theories of family therapy

This article examines the metaphors family therapists use in their theories to reveal aspects of the theories which are not explicitly stated, using Whitaker's symbolic experiential therapy, Minuchin's structural therapy and White's narrative therapy as examples. Such examination, drawing on social constructivist understandings of metaphor and meaning making, reveals that Minuchin's metaphors of family as organism and therapist as artist and warrior emphasize the family as relatively holistic and the therapist as relatively interventionist. In contrast, Whitaker's metaphor of family as ecological system or team and therapist as coach emphasizes the interdependence and context sensitivity of the family and relative powerlessness of the therapist to impose change. Finally, White, reflecting his explicitly post‐structural commitment, uses the metaphor of therapy as a journey undertaken with a map and as therapy as an act of re‐narrating a story.     

Using Linguistic Corpora as a Philosophical Tool

The central aims of this paper are to show how linguistic corpora have been used and can be used in philosophy and to argue that linguistic corpora and corpus analysis should be added to the philosopher’s toolkit of ways to address philosophical questions. A linguistic corpus is a curated collection of texts representing language use that can be queried to answer research questions. Among many other uses, linguistic corpora can help answer questions about the meaning of words and the structure of discourse. Through a discussion of examples, the paper shows that there are many philosophical questions that can be addressed by using a linguistic corpus. However, linguistic corpora need not (and often cannot) replace traditional philosophical methods. Lastly, it argues that the special properties of linguistic corpora, including their independence and the current ease and cheapness of access, make them an indispensable resource for philosophers.     

Work–family enrichment,job satisfaction,and work engagement: The mediating role of subjective career success

Objective: The aim of the study was to explore the possible indirect effect of subjective career success on the relationship between work–family enrichment and job satisfaction and work–family enrichment and work engagement. Method: A cross-sectional, quantitative research design approach was followed using a convenience sample (N = 334). Results: Results revealed that work–family enrichment was not only positively related to subjective career success, job satisfaction and work engagement, but also predictive of the mentioned constructs. Furthermore, subjective career success was found to indirectly effect the relationship between work–family enrichment and job satisfaction and work engagement. Conclusion: Using the resource-gain-development framework, new insights are provided into the processes and mechanisms relating to work–family enrichment. Our findings suggest that resources are creating positive affect in not only the work and career domains of employees, but also leading to more engaged and satisfied employees. (i.e., the indirect effect of subjective career success). Organisations can benefit when they enhance work environments (e.g., by providing relevant resources) to promote work–family enrichment and, by implication, subjective career success and positive work outcomes such as job satisfaction and work engagement.     

"易卦"的序结构数学模型在对策理论中的应用

通过分析人类的基本行为元素,并借助于"卦象"序结构数学模型的建立,从而初步讨论了一般谋略方法的产生和起源,以及谋略对策的系统核心元素结构;最后讨论了它们在应用中的初步分类.     

Modeling the effects of within-person characteristic and goal-level attributes on personal project pursuit over time

The current study aims to overcome methodological constraints of previous goal pursuit research by exploring how people simultaneously rely upon person-level characteristic adaptations and unique goal-level attributes to pursue their personal projects. Undergraduate participants identified 10 projects they would pursue over an academic quarter and rated project meaningfulness, effort exerted, patience employed, and progress satisfaction at five time points. Multilevel structural equation models revealed the relative influence of person-level and project-level attributes on project appraisals. Person-level adaptations accounted for a large portion of variance in project pursuit appraisals, though significant project-specific trends were found over time as well, including mutual positive cross-lag influences between meaning, patience, and effort, and a negative predictive effect of progress satisfaction on meaning.     

Participatory action research: towards (non-ideal) epistemic justice in a university in South Africa

ABSTRACT

The paper explores the possibilities for promoting epistemic justice in a South African university setting through a participatory action-based photovoice research project in which university researchers worked alongside undergraduate students with no prior experience of doing research. The student voices are employed to understand how learning as capability development and agency expansion can advance epistemic justice in a university setting of hierarchical relationships that make participatory action research challenging. The paper considers how, in this project, spaces of epistemic democracy intersected with the expansion of multidimensional functionings, resulting in more epistemic justice for the student-researchers. The paper considers the possibilities for change through a participatory project toward promoting epistemic justice at the individual level. It also explores some criticisms of the limits of such individual development in the face of structural challenges.     

Encouraging pointing with the right hand,but not the left hand,gives right-handed 3-year-olds a linguistic advantage

Previous research has shown a strong positive association between right-handed gesturing and vocabulary development. However, the causal nature of this relationship remains unclear. In the current study, we tested whether gesturing with the right hand enhances linguistic processing in the left hemisphere, which is contralateral to the right hand. We manipulated the gesture hand children used in pointing tasks to test whether it would affect their performance. In either a linguistic task (verb learning) or a non-linguistic control task (memory), 131 typically developing right-handed 3-year-olds were encouraged to use either their right hand or left hand to respond. While encouraging children to use a specific hand to indicate their responses had no effect on memory performance, encouraging children to use the right hand to respond, compared to the left hand, significantly improved their verb learning performance. This study is the first to show that manipulating the hand with which children are encouraged to gesture gives them a linguistic advantage. Language lateralization in healthy right-handed children typically involves a dominant left hemisphere. Producing right-handed gestures may therefore lead to increased activation in the left hemisphere which may, in turn, facilitate forming and accessing lexical representations. It is important to note that this study manipulated gesture handedness among right-handers and does therefore not support the practice of encouraging children to become right-handed in manual activities.

Research Highlights

• Right-handed 3-year-olds were instructed to point to indicate their answers exclusively with their right or left hand in either a memory or verb learning task.
• Right-handed pointing was associated with improved verb generalization performance, but not improved memory performance.
• Thus, gesturing with the right hand, compared to the left hand, gives right-handed 3-year-olds an advantage in a linguistic but not a non-linguistic task.
• Right-handed pointing might lead to increased activation in the left hemisphere and facilitate forming and accessing lexical representations.

     

‘Grandpa,Do You Like Roller Coasters?’: Identifying Age‐Appropriate Personality Indicators

Personality development research heavily relies on the comparison of scale means across age. This approach implicitly assumes that the scales are strictly measurement invariant across age. We questioned this assumption by examining whether appropriate personality indicators change over the lifespan. Moreover, we identified which types of items (e.g. dispositions, behaviours, and interests) are particularly prone to age effects. We reanalyzed the German Revised NEO Personality Inventory normative sample (N = 11,724) and applied a genetic algorithm to select short scales that yield acceptable model fit and reliability across locally weighted samples ranging from 16 to 66 years of age. We then examined how the item selection changes across age points and item types. Emotion‐type items seemed to be interchangeable and generally applicable to people of all ages. Specific interests, attitudes, and social effect items—most prevalent within the domains of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness—seemed to be more prone to measurement variations over age. A large proportion of items were systematically discarded by the item‐selection procedure, indicating that, independent of age, many items are problematic measures of the underlying traits. The implications for personality assessment and personality development research are discussed. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology