We investigated the role of distinct inhibitory processes as 4- to 6-year-olds from the Northeastern United States (N = 48, M[subscript age] = 68.27 months, 22 boys, 26 girls; 63% White, 6% Black, 4% Asian, 2% Hispanic, 8% more than one race, with 17% not reporting) and adults evaluated accurate or deceptive information from human or non-human…

Self-regulation often refers to the executive influence of cognitive resources to alter prepotent responses. The ability to engage cognitive resources as a form of executive process emerges and improves in the preschool-age years while the dominance of prepotent responses, such as emotional reactions, begins to decline from toddlerhood onward.…

The factor structure, measurement invariance, and external validity of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-short (CERQ-short) specific to the COVID-19 pandemic was examined using data from 3,788 adult Filipinos. The nine-factor CERQ-short was confirmed and was tested invariant across gender and age groups. The CERQ factors correlate…

We have limited knowledge as to whether the phenomenological differences between episodic memories, counterfactuals, and future projections show the same pattern across age groups and diverse samples. Here we compared the characteristics of these mental events, reported by younger and older participants in a Turkish (Study 1) and in an American…

Childhood is marked by profound changes in prosocial behaviour. The underlying motivational mechanisms remain poorly understood. We investigated the development of altruistically motivated helping in middle childhood and the neurocognitive and -affective mechanisms driving this development. One-hundred and twenty seven 6-12 year-old children…

Previous experimental work showed that young adults reporting loneliness performed less well on emotion recognition tasks (Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy [DANVA-2]) if they were framed as indicators of social aptitude, but not when the same tasks were framed as indexing academic aptitude. Such findings suggested that undergraduates…

The educational approach of empathy has been prominently mentioned as a possible solution to the dehumanization occurring as a byproduct of the rapid development of science and technology in modern society. This study aims to identify the characteristics of Korean adolescents on the empathy factor, as a core competency of twenty-first century…

The age-related positivity effect--a preference for processing positive stimuli over negative stimuli--is posited by socioemotional selectivity theory to reflect a focus on emotional gratification in older age. Yet, the positivity effect has been investigated with stimuli, such as photographs of faces and visual scenes, that have little (to no)…

When confronted with an emotion prototype (e.g., loss), individuals may experience not only target emotions (e.g., sadness), but also nontarget emotions (emotions that are atypical or incongruent with an emotion prototype; e.g., gratitude in response to loss). What are the cognitive correlates of nontarget emotions? Drawing from models of emotion…

Purpose: The study examined age-related differences in the use of semantic context and in the effect of semantic competition in spoken sentence processing. We used offline (response latency) and online (eye gaze) measures, using the "visual world" eye-tracking paradigm. Method: Thirty younger and 30 older adults heard sentences related…

Delay-induced forgetting refers to the finding that memory for studied material typically decreases as the delay between study and test is increased. The results of 3 experiments are reported designed to examine whether this form of forgetting is primarily caused by interference effects or contextual drift effects when people engage in neutral…

Naturalistic goal-directed behaviours require the engagement and maintenance of appropriate levels of cognitive control over relatively extended intervals of time. In two experiments, we examined preschool children's abilities to maintain top-down control throughout the course of a sequential task. Both 3- and 5-year-olds demonstrated good…

The experiment analyzed reactions of 115 first- to fourth-graders after realizing that they performed worse than they expected in a computer game. Based on the VIOLEX model of expectation violation, we assessed immunization against achievement feedback, assimilation (striving to increase performance), and accommodation (willingness for expectation…

In this paper we investigated the real-time processing of epistemic modals in five-year-olds. In a simple reasoning scenario, we monitored children's eye-movements while processing a sentence with modal expressions of different force ("might/must"). Children were also asked to judge the truth-value of the target sentences at the end of…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine the impact of cognitive load imposed by a speech production task on the speech motor performance of healthy older and younger adults. Response inhibition, selective attention, and working memory were the primary cognitive processes of interest. Method: Twelve healthy older and 12 healthy younger…