Loving and angry? Happy and sad? Understanding and reporting of mixed emotions in mother–child relationships by 6‐ to 12‐year‐olds

The Evaluative Space Model of emotions allows for the coactivation of positive‐appetitive and negative‐avoidant systems, but few studies have examined mixed emotions in child development. Existing research suggests children's understanding of opposite valence emotion combinations emerges by approximately 11 years of age. However, it is not yet clear whether various opposite valence combinations are understood at different ages, nor whether children can understand them in others before they have experienced such mixed emotions themselves. Semi‐structured interviews with 97 children investigated whether they regarded six combinations of opposite valence mixed emotions as possible, could provide reasons for them, and report their own experience of each in the context of mother–child relationships. Both understanding that such combinations are possible and ability to provide reasons for them increased after age 6 and up to age 11, but were still incomplete in 12‐year‐olds. Understanding of different opposite valence combinations developed at different rates. At each age, fewer children who showed understanding of these combinations in others reported having had a similar experience themselves. The findings suggest a need to systematically examine a range of mixed emotions in order to develop a comprehensive theory of the development of mixed emotion understanding. They also suggest extending research into adolescence.     

The effects of self‐explaining when learning with text or diagrams

Self‐explaining is an effective metacognitive strategy that can help learners develop deeper understanding of the material they study. This experiment explored if the format of material (i.e., text or diagrams) influences the self‐explanation effect. Twenty subjects were presented with information about the human circulatory system and prompted to self‐explain; 10 received this information in text and 10 in diagrams. Results showed that students given diagrams performed significantly better on post‐tests than students given text. Diagrams students also generated significantly more self‐explanations that text students. Furthermore, the benefits of self‐explaining were much greater in the diagrams condition. To discover why diagrams can promote the self‐explanation effect, results are interpreted with reference to the multiple differences in the semantic, cognitive and affective properties of the texts and diagrams studied.     

The heterogeneity of attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms and conduct problems: Cognitive inhibition,emotion regulation,emotionality, and disorganized attachment

This study examined the contributions of several important domains of functioning to attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and conduct problems. Specifically, we investigated whether cognitive inhibition, emotion regulation, emotionality, and disorganized attachment made independent and specific contributions to these externalizing behaviour problems from a multiple pathways perspective. The study included laboratory measures of cognitive inhibition and disorganized attachment in 184 typically developing children (M age = 6 years, 10 months, SD = 1.7). Parental ratings provided measures of emotion regulation, emotionality, and externalizing behaviour problems. Results revealed that cognitive inhibition, regulation of positive emotion, and positive emotionality were independently and specifically related to ADHD symptoms. Disorganized attachment and negative emotionality formed independent and specific relations to conduct problems. Our findings support the multiple pathways perspective on ADHD, with poor regulation of positive emotion and high positive emotionality making distinct contributions to ADHD symptoms. More specifically, our results support the proposal of a temperamentally based pathway to ADHD symptoms. The findings also indicate that disorganized attachment and negative emotionality constitute pathways specific to conduct problems rather than to ADHD symptoms.     

Typical delay determines waiting time on periodic-food schedules: Static and dynamic tests

Pigeons and other animals soon learn to wait (pause) after food delivery on periodic-food schedules before resuming the food-rewarded response. Under most conditions the steady-state duration of the average waiting time, t, is a linear function of the typical interfood interval. We describe three experiments designed to explore the limits of this process. In all experiments, t was associated with one key color and the subsequent food delay, T, with another. In the first experiment, we compared the relation between t (waiting time) and T (food delay) under two conditions: when T was held constant, and when T was an inverse function of t. The pigeons could maximize the rate of food delivery under the first condition by setting t to a consistently short value; optimal behavior under the second condition required a linear relation with unit slope between t and T. Despite this difference in optimal policy, the pigeons in both cases showed the same linear relation, with slope less than one, between t and T. This result was confirmed in a second parametric experiment that added a third condition, in which T + t was held constant. Linear waiting appears to be an obligatory rule for pigeons. In a third experiment we arranged for a multiplicative relation between t and T (positive feedback), and produced either very short or very long waiting times as predicted by a quasi-dynamic model in which waiting time is strongly determined by the just-preceding food delay.     

Discrimination learning in a foraging situation

Rats were allowed to forage in a simulated natural environment made up of eight food sources (patches) each containing a fixed number of pellets. Two of the eight contained an extra supply of peanuts. The peanut patches were signaled by an olfactory/visual cue located at the bottom of the ladder leading to the patch. In successive phases the number of sessions per day, height of the patches, and availability of peanuts were manipulated. Subjects showed evidence of discrimination learning under these conditions, although the degree of discriminatory behavior varied as a function of environmental manipulations. Assessment of behavior within foraging sessions showed that subjects systematically changed their patterns of utilization of patches across time. Sampling or exploration, as well as food reinforcement, seem implicated in these results.     

Pigeons can discriminate locations presented in pictures

The present experiments were designed to teach pigeons to discriminate two locations represented by color photographs. Two sets of photographs were taken at two distinctive locations on a university campus. These sets represented several standpoints at each location. For the true-discrimination group, pictures from the two locations were differentially associated with reward; for the pseudodiscrimination group, half of the views from each location were arbitrarily but consistently associated with reward. The former group acquired the discrimination much more rapidly. These birds also showed good transfer to new views from the standpoints used in training and to a new standpoint at each location not used in training. In a second experiment, another group of pigeons could terminate any training trial by pecking an “advance” key. Three of 4 subjects used this option to reduce the duration of trials in which pictures from the negative location were presented. These data suggest that pigeons can integrate views shown in pictures into a “concept” of a location. The method used here may be the experimental analogue of a common, natural process by which animals learn to identify locations.     

Stimulus effects on concurrent performance in transition

Six experimentally naive pigeons were exposed to concurrent variable-interval variable-interval schedules in a three-key procedure in which food reinforcement followed pecks on the side keys and pecks on the center key served as changeover responses. In Phase 1, 3 birds were exposed to 20 combinations of five variable-interval values, with each variable-interval value consistently associated with a different color on the side keys. Another 3 pigeons were exposed to the same 20 conditions, but with a more standard procedure that used a nondifferential discriminative stimulus on the two side keys throughout all conditions. In Phase 2, the differential and nondifferential stimulus conditions were reversed for each pigeon. Each condition lasted for one 5-hr session and one subsequent 1-hr session. In the last 14 conditions of each phase, the presence of differential discriminative stimuli decreased the time necessary for differential responding to develop and increased the sensitivity of behavior to reinforcement distribution in the 1st hr of training; during the last hours of training in each condition, however, the effects of the differential discriminative stimuli could not be distinguished from the effects of reinforcement distribution per se. These results show the importance of studying transitions in behavior as well as final performance. They may also be relevant to discrepancies in the results of previous experiments that have used nonhuman and human subjects.     

Criterion-related construct validity

Established results on latent variable models are applied to the study of the validity of a psychological test. When the test predicts a criterion by measuring a unidimensional latent construct, not only must the total score predict the criterion, but the joint distribution of criterion scores and item responses must exhibit a certain pattern. The presence of this population pattern may be tested with sample data using the stratified Wilcoxon rank sum test. Often, criterion information is available only for selected examinees, for instance, those who are admitted or hired. Three cases are discussed: (i) selection at random, (ii) selection based on the current test, and (iii) selection based on other measures of the latent construct. Discriminant validity is also discussed.This work was supported in part by Grant SES-87-01890 from the Measurement Methods and Data Improvement Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation.