Cognitive load occurs when the demands of a task surpass the available processing capacity, straining mental resources and potentially impairing performance efficiency, such as increasing the number of errors in a task. Owing to its ubiquity in real-world scenarios, the existence of offloading strategies to reduce cognitive load is not new to…

This article builds on existing models of motivation regulation in order to examine how students identify and address motivational deficits (e.g., not enough motivation or not the right type of motivation). Integrating perspectives from the achievement motivation, metacognition, and emotion regulation literatures, we propose that metamotivational…

Bowler et al. ("Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders" 44(9):2355-2362. doi:10.1007/s10803-014-2105-y, 2014) have suggested that a specific memory impairment in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) arises from hippocampal failure to consolidate multiple related pieces of information. Twenty-four adults diagnosed with ASD and matched…

In order to determine the processing stage that is responsible for the effect of mood states on the breadth of attentional focus, we recorded event-related potentials from 18 students who performed a flanker task involving adjacent letters. To induce a specific mood state, positive, neutral, or negative affective pictures were presented repeatedly…

One problem common to many Oral Communication (OC) classrooms in universities in Japan and other countries is that English major students often lack the impetus to proactively develop their oral language proficiency. In this paper, we present our investigation into whether regular self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment would promote the use of…

To examine the ontogeny of emotion-attention interactions, we investigated whether infants exhibit adult-like biases in automatic and voluntary attentional processes towards fearful facial expressions. Heart rate and saccadic eye movements were measured from 7-month-old infants (n = 42) while viewing non-face control stimuli, and neutral, happy,…

Recent research has looked at whether the expectancy of an emotion can account for subsequent valence specific laterality effects of prosodic emotion, though no research has examined this effect for facial emotion. In the study here (n = 58), we investigated this issue using two tasks; an emotional face perception task and a novel word task that…

A valid and reliable instrument for measuring affect intensity does not exist for adolescents; such a measure may help to refine understanding of emotion among youths. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the psychometric properties and clinical relevance of a measure of affect intensity adapted for youths. Two hundred five community…

In relating parent-child conversation to children's social cognitive development, we examined how mother-child dyads talked about the psychological world. Seventy mothers and their 3- to 5-year-old children made up a story about a series of pictures depicting a sequence of events involving a false belief. Mother-child talk was coded for the use of…

This study examined the effect of emotional stimuli on 3- to 4-year old children's flexible rule use, as measured by the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS). In Experiment 1, children in two countries (Canada and China) were given 2 versions of the DCCS. The Standard version required children to sort red and blue boats and rabbits first by shape…

The purpose of this study was to examine observable moment-by-moment steps in emotional processing as they occurred within productive sessions of experiential therapy. Global distress was identified as an unprocessed emotion with high arousal and low meaningfulness. The investigation consisted of 2 studies as part of a task analysis that examined…