Empathy deficits in autism, particularly cognitive empathy, have been a long-held, but much debated assumption. An alternative perspective challenging this deficit model is the 'double empathy problem', proposing that empathy difficulties are bidirectional between autistic and non-autistic people. Despite this view gaining popularity, there has…

Children with a history of behaviorally inhibited (BI) temperament face a heightened risk for anxiety disorders and often use control strategies that are less planful. Although these relations have been observed concurrently in early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence, few studies leverage longitudinal data to examine long-term…

Evaluating other people's moral character is a crucial social cognitive task. However, the cognitive processes by which people seek out, prioritize, and integrate multiple pieces of character-relevant information have not been studied empirically. The first aim of this research was to examine which character traits are considered most important…

Semantic distance is increasingly used for automated scoring of originality on divergent thinking tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Despite some psychometric support for semantic distance -- including positive correlations with human creativity ratings -- additional work is needed to optimize its reliability and validity, including…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by profound difficulties in empathic processing and executive control. Whilst the links between these processes have been frequently investigated in populations with autism, few studies have examined them at the subclinical level. In addition, the contribution of alexithymia, a trait characterised by…

After more than 100 years of interest and study, knowledge transfer remains among the most challenging, contentious, and important issues for both psychology and education. In this article, we review and discuss many of the more important ideas and findings from the existing research and attempt to bridge this body of work with the exciting new…

Major depressive disorder aggregates within families, although the mechanisms of transfer across generations are not well understood. In light of converging biological and behavioral evidence that depressive symptoms are associated with impaired reward processing, we examined whether adolescent girls with a parental history of depression would…

In one of the first open diffusion experiments with young children, a tool-use task that afforded multiple methods to extract an enclosed reward and a child model habitually using one of these methods were introduced into different playgroups. Eighty-eight children, ranging in age from 2 years 8 months to 4 years 5 months, participated. Measures…

This study investigated the effects of perceived controllability on information processing within Weiner's (1985, 1986) attributional model of learning. Attributional style was used to identify trait patterns of controllability for 37 university students. Task-relevant feedback on an information-processing task was then manipulated to test for…

In this cross-sectional study, we investigated whether the combination of the presence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits and emotional deficits to distressing stimuli, assessed by a computerized dot-probe task, enhanced the statistical prediction of aggression and delinquency in a sample of 88 detained and predominantly African-American (68%)…

Cognitive-based approaches to social and personality psychology have studied the structure of trait constructs in memory. The bipolar view of traits suggests that the activation of a trait construct such as "hostile" should be associated with the simultaneous activation of its semantic opposite "kind." The unipolar view, in…