Impairment in social communication is one of the diagnostic hallmarks of autism spectrum disorders, and a large body of research has documented aspects of impaired social cognition in autism, both at the level of the processes and the neural structures involved. Yet one of the most common social communicative abilities in everyday life, the…

This study used fMRI to measure brain activity during adult processing of cries of infants with autistic disorder (AD) compared to cries of typically developing (TD) infants. Using whole brain analysis, we found that cries of infants with AD compared to those of TD infants elicited enhanced activity in brain regions associated with verbal and…

Exploring how people represent natural categories is a key step toward developing a better understanding of how people learn, form memories, and make decisions. Much research on categorization has focused on artificial categories that are created in the laboratory, since studying natural categories defined on high-dimensional stimuli such as…

Historically, researchers have never quite been able to agree as to the role of emotions, if any, when behavior is selected by its consequences. A brief review of findings from several fields suggests that in contingency-shaped behavior, motivating events, often unconscious, seem needed for reinforcement to select behavior. In rule-governed…

Studies have shown that parents reduce control and support in response to youths' drinking. Why they react this way, however, is still unknown. From cognitive dissonance theory, we derived hypotheses about parents' reactions. We used a longitudinal, school-based sample of 494 youths (13 and 14 years, 56% boys) and their parents. General Linear…

This research tests whether mood affects semantic processing during discourse comprehension by facilitating integration of information congruent with moods' valence. Participants in happy, sad, or neutral moods listened to stories with positive or negative endings during EEG recording. N400 peak amplitudes showed mood congruence for happy and sad…

This paper will consider the significance of emotion in assessment through reflective or experiential writing in the context of professional practice-based learning. It is based on a 12 month study conducted with undergraduate social work students undertaking what are referred to as "reflective writing" assessments. This form of assessment is a…

Little is known about bicultural adolescents' emotional competence. The aim of the present study was to examine anger communication by comparing thirty-eight 16-year-old Moroccan-Dutch adolescents with 40 Dutch and 40 Moroccan peers using hypothetical anger-eliciting vignettes. Findings show that although Moroccan and Dutch adolescents were…

This study examined effects of the autonomy-connectedness components sensitivity to others, self-awareness and capacity for managing new situations on anger experience versus anger expression in adolescent boys and girls. One hundred thirty-one high school students were randomly assigned to an anger-inducing or neutral condition using the Dictator…

In this paper I develop my contention that reality is experienced polymorphically at different levels along a concrete-abstract continuum. At the more abstract and psychic level the internal representations of primary reality are, to varying degrees, verbally labelled. However, for various reasons, this verbal symbolisation is rarely adequate or…

Eudaimonic notions of well-being have increasingly figured in the well-being literature. The impact of such constructs in the organizational psychology literature has been more limited. Within an Organizational Health Research Framework (OHRF), we present findings that demonstrate the importance of eudaimonic, or psychological well-being (PWB),…

The Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) constitutes an instrument for assessing subjective happiness. This study aims to present the validation of the SHS in a Portuguese adult population. A large representative sample (1,017 participants), from five different age groups was considered. Configurational invariance of the unidimensional structure of…

Mobile phone addiction is now a common phenomenon in the 21st century, especially among teenagers due to the unusual cravings in the use of technological devices. In view of this phenomenon, the study examined the socio-psychological dimensions of mobile phone addiction and usage patterns amongst teenagers in three Higher Institutions of Learning…

Premenstrual syndrome (PMS), which includes physical, psychological and emotional symptoms that occur during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, has a negative impact on the quality of the relationship among married couples. The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of educating married men by two methods, pamphlet and short…

Whether an individual lives in a rural or urban setting may have direct impact on a wide variety of psychological patterns adopted by students. In this study, the effects of positive and negative social behaviors on the relationship between social and emotional learning needs and skills gaps of students who reside in both rural and urban areas…