Background: The risk of childhood behavioural and psychiatric diseases could be substantially reduced if modifiable risk factors for these disorders were identified. The critical period for many of these exposures is likely to be in utero as this is the time when brain development is most rapid. However, due to confounding and other limitations of…

The aim of the study was to obtain adolescents' perspectives about why young people offend. Twenty-four Australian male and female offenders and non-offenders offered insights about what, according to them, motivates young people to become involved in crime. Without the use of sophisticated language, participants offered explanations that were…

The authors consider the analysis of the literature on play research by Lillard and others in the January 2013 "Psychological Bulletin," an analysis that questioned the prevailing assumption of a causal relationship between play and child development, especially in the areas of creativity, reasoning, executive function, and regulation of…

Research suggests that a personal sense of autonomy supports individuals' success in a variety of domains, but information regarding these processes remains unclear. This paper attempts to establish a link between personal autonomy and cognitive processes, in the form of attributions for success and failure, in establishing a sense of subjective…

The authors examined the relationship between number of siblings and false belief understanding (FBU) in 94 low-income 4-5-year-olds. Previous research with middle-income children has shown a positive association between number of siblings and FBU. However, it is unclear whether having multiple siblings in low-income families is related to better…

Implicit approach associations are well documented for substances such as alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs. This study reports two experiments designed to establish and modify such associations specifically in the food craving domain. Experiment 1 used a pictorial implicit association task to examine approach-avoidance associations with…

Two experiments examined three- to six-year-olds' use of frequency and intention information to make trait attributions and behavioral predictions. In experiment 1, participants were told a story about an actor who behaved positively once or four times on purpose or incidentally. Children were most likely to make trait-consistent behavioral…

Escalation of commitment is the voluntary continuation of investing resources into what appears to be a failing course of action whose outcome is uncertain. Investigation into the escalation of commitment phenomenon is important to organizations because such behavior could result in grave economic loss. This research investigates two cognitive…

Research indicates that Americans believe instructor political bias to be a serious problem in the college classroom, as many professors are considered a liberal elite. In light of scholarship suggesting that characteristics students bring with them to the classroom may influence their perception of instructor communication behaviors, the present…

Attribution theory (Weiner, 1985) and self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) have been explored as contributors to L2 motivation (cf. Dörnyei, 2001) but have never been studied quantitatively in concert. In addition, students' attributions for success in learning a foreign language have never been measured through the use of a…

The paper seeks to understand the trajectories of students who defer entry to university. The study was conducted in Lithuania, a former Soviet Union republic. The phenomenon of a "gap year" is usually associated with young people, who decide not to enter higher education schools immediately after receiving secondary education, instead…

Research on the effects of grading on participation behavior is mixed. This study adds to the literature by analyzing the motivational effects of a policy that incorporates student self-assessment, flexible course weighting of the participation grade, and an expanded definition of participation. The results suggest that in some classes, more than…

The purpose of this article is to build upon previous efforts evaluating the degree to which the discrepancy between student expectations and experiences can result in greater rates of attrition in education. Data were collected from 225 students at a large Midwestern public university and analyzed to assess the discrepancy between expectations…

We surveyed 139 (88 traditional, 51 nontraditional) students on various motivational measures of self-determination, attribution, and expectancy-value to (a) investigate motivational differences by student status and (b) identify the motivational variables that best predict academic achievement by student status. Results of a multivariate analysis…

This article reports findings from a 3-year qualitative study exploring the experiences of African American preservice teachers as they prepared for the Praxis "basic skills" teacher-licensure exam, a gatekeeper to many teacher-education programs. Using the construct of self-efficacy, results illustrate how students assess their Praxis…