Supporting teachers' attention and responsiveness to the substance of student thinking is increasingly emphasized across disciplines. Yet studies demonstrate how such responsiveness, in practice, is highly contextualized and often fleeting. This study conceptualizes and examines what functioned as "resources for responsiveness" within…

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…

Background: Within team sports, players' ability to inhibit inappropriate behavioral responses and flexibly adapt to upcoming challenges relates significantly to their game performance. As such, there have been calls for cognitively fostering programs to form the basis of game teaching and coaching practice. However, only few studies have tested…

This study aimed to describe problem behaviors and psychosocial strengths, examine the problem-strength interrelations, and evaluate profiles of problems and strengths in youth with Down syndrome (DS). The community-based sample consisted of 67 parents of children with DS aged between 4 and 19 years. Parents reported about the developmental age…

Discussions on how to conserve and provide enough water has become one of the most highly debated issues in modern society. Although many Extension efforts have engaged the public in understanding behavior and attitudes toward water conservation, limited research has focused on understanding how agriculturalists respond to water conservation…

Instructors' use of humor is generally a positive influence on student outcomes. However, examinations of humor have found that specific types of messages may not impact, or may even reverse, its positive effect. Instructional humor processing theory (IHPT) has been used to explain how humor impacts student learning. The current study sought to…

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and International Classification of Diseases classify mental health disorders on the basis of their putatively distinct symptom profiles. Although these nosologies are highly influential, they also have been derided as mere "field guides" because they focus solely on the…

The emerging literature on embodied cognition highlights the role that the body plays in cognitive and affective processes. We investigated whether different body postures, specifically leaning postures thought to reflect different states of cognitive focus, can impact cognitive focus and task performance. In three experiments we confirmed that…

This study investigated whether major depression in adolescence is characterized by neurocognitive deficits in attention, affective decision making, and cognitive control of emotion processing. Neuropsychological tests including the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, the Continuous Performance Test-Identical Pairs, the Attention Network…

A large and growing number of studies support the notion that arousing positive emotional states expand, and that arousing negative states constrict, the scope of attention on both the perceptual and conceptual levels. However, these studies have predominantly involved the manipulation or measurement of conscious emotional experiences (e.g.,…

Preliminary data supports the effectiveness of Cognitive Orientation to (daily) Occupational Performance (CO-OP) for children with Asperger syndrome (AS). Children with AS often experience social and organizational difficulties spanning daily occupations. This case study explored the pattern of Global Strategies and Domain-Specific Strategies…

This study examines 2 aspects of cognitive processing in person perception--attention and decision making--in classroom-relevant contexts. Teachers completed 2 implicit, performance-based tasks that characterized attention to and utilization of 4 student characteristics of interest: ethnicity, facial affect, body size, and attractiveness. Stimuli…

Seven-year-old children (N=65) participating in a study of the influence of infant temperament on socioemotional development performed an auditory selective attention task involving words that varied in both affective (positive vs. negative) and social (social vs. nonsocial) content. Parent report of contemporaneous child temperament was also…

Evidence that the vigor of the startle reflex varies systematically with the organism's emotional state is reviewed. A theory elucidating this relationship suggests how amplitude of eyeblink response to a probe may be modulated by affective content of perception and thought. Implications for research on emotion are outlined. (SLD)

Seven-year-olds completed a Posner cued attention task, under both neutral and affectively charged conditions. Compared to the traditional (affect-neutral) Posner task, performance in the affective Posner task was marked by dramatic decreases in reaction times (RTs), an increase in errors, an increased validity effect (difference in RTs to the…