The role of assembled phonology in reading comprehension

The contribution of assembled phonology to phonological effects in reading comprehension was assessed. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the acceptability of sentences with regular, exception, and nonword homophone substitutions and orthographic controls. Significantly more errors occurred to sentences with regular-word homophones than to exception words, and error rates for nonword homophones were low and not significant. Experiment 2 showed that this was not due to differences in the sentence frames. In Experiment 3, the subjects judged as unacceptable those sentences containing an exception word that sounded correct when read according to spelling-to-sound rules. Significantly higher error rates occurred only for low-frequency exception words. Experiment 4 showed that task conditions affect semantic-categorization error rates for nonword homophones. These results indicate that both assembled and addressed phonology contribute to sentence and word comprehension, but the low error rate for nonwords suggests that an early lexical check may be applied.     

Too exhausted to go to bed: Implicit theories about willpower and stress predict bedtime procrastination

While most people are aware of the importance of sleep for their health, well-being, and performance, bedtime procrastination is a pervasive phenomenon that can be conceptualized as a case of self-control failure (Kroese et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 2014, 1). Two daily diary studies (N₁ = 185, N₂ = 137) investigated beliefs about willpower and stress as interactive predictors of bedtime procrastination. Beliefs about willpower capture whether people think of their willpower as limited resource that gets easily depleted (limited theory) or as something that remains regardless of previous acts of self-control (non-limited theory). Results show that after a stressful day, people with a limited versus non-limited theory procrastinate more on going to bed, while there is no difference in bedtime procrastination on less stressful days. Thus, ironically, limited theorists who should be more concerned with recovering their resources after a stressful day sleep less the following night.     

Effects of orthographic and phonological word length on memory for lists shown at RSVP and STM rates

This article reports 3 experiments in which effects of orthographic and phonological word length on memory were examined for short lists shown at rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and short-term memory (STM) rates. Only visual-orthographic length reduced RSVP serial recall, whereas both orthographic and phonological length lowered recall for STM lists in Experiment 1. Word-length effects may arise from output processes or from the temporal duration of output in recall. In 2 further experiments, output demands were reduced through the use of a recognition test. Recognition accuracy was impaired only by orthographic length for RSVP lists and by phonological length for STM lists in both experiments. The results demonstrate 2 item length effects not simply attributable to increased output time in recall, and implications for theories of STM are considered.     

Sensing sociality in dogs: what may make an interactive robot social?

This study investigated whether dogs would engage in social interactions with an unfamiliar robot, utilize the communicative signals it provides and to examine whether the level of sociality shown by the robot affects the dogs’ performance. We hypothesized that dogs would react to the communicative signals of a robot more successfully if the robot showed interactive social behaviour in general (towards both humans and dogs) than if it behaved in a machinelike, asocial way. The experiment consisted of an interactive phase followed by a pointing session, both with a human and a robotic experimenter. In the interaction phase, dogs witnessed a 6-min interaction episode between the owner and a human experimenter and another 6-min interaction episode between the owner and the robot. Each interaction episode was followed by the pointing phase in which the human/robot experimenter indicated the location of hidden food by using pointing gestures (two-way choice test). The results showed that in the interaction phase, the dogs’ behaviour towards the robot was affected by the differential exposure. Dogs spent more time staying near the robot experimenter as compared to the human experimenter, with this difference being even more pronounced when the robot behaved socially. Similarly, dogs spent more time gazing at the head of the robot experimenter when the situation was social. Dogs achieved a significantly lower level of performance (finding the hidden food) with the pointing robot than with the pointing human; however, separate analysis of the robot sessions suggested that gestures of the socially behaving robot were easier for the dogs to comprehend than gestures of the asocially behaving robot. Thus, the level of sociality shown by the robot was not enough to elicit the same set of social behaviours from the dogs as was possible with humans, although sociality had a positive effect on dog–robot interactions.     

Eudaimonic Orientation Enhances the Well-Being Experienced by Fathers

Applied Research in Quality of Life - The aim of this study was to investigate the potential moderating roles of eudaimonic orientation (prioritizing authenticity, meaning, excellence, growth) and...     

The Influence of Avoidance Temperament and Avoidance‐Based Achievement Goals on Flow

In the present research, we conducted two studies designed to examine the joint influence of avoidance temperament and avoidance‐based achievement goals on the experience of flow on a creativity task. In both a laboratory study (N = 101; M_age = 22.61, SD_age = 4.03; 74.3% female) and a naturalistic study (N = 102; M_age = 16.23, SD_age = 1.13; 48% female), participants high in avoidance temperament were shown to experience greater flow when performance‐avoidance goals were induced; no differences were found in any of the other three achievement goal conditions from the 2 × 2 achievement goal framework. These findings reveal a short‐term benefit for a disposition‐goal match grounded in avoidance motivation, and point to the need for more research on both avoidance‐based matches and the short‐term versus long‐term implications of such matches.     

Trust in alternative and professional media: The case of the youth news audiences in three European countries

Abstract

This exploratory paper applying cross-cultural and developmental perspective analyses and discusses trust in alternative media and its relation to trust in professional media, seeking to identify the national specifics of media trust and its developmental patterns. Employing 2016 survey data of Czech, Estonian and Greek youth (aged 14–25, N = 3654) collected as part of the international CATCH-EyoU project (Horizon 2020), the study outlines the typology of media trust, comprising trust in alternative and professional media, and compares social and political predictors influencing media trust in the three countries. The study illustrates the diversity of relations between the two types of media trust, concluding that differences in selected predictors of media trust and the distribution of media trust types across national sub-samples illuminate the strong role national context plays, illustrating the varying pathways development of media trust follows in these varied contexts along socioeconomic and cultural lines.