Narratives often provide readers with opportunities to encode their preferences for particular outcomes. Our project examines some origins of such outcome preferences. For example, past literature suggests that readers tend to prefer positive outcomes for "good" characters and negative outcomes for "bad" characters. To extend…

Although ITSs are supposed to adapt to differences among learners, so far, little attention has been paid to how they might adapt to differences in how students learn from help. When students study with an Intelligent Tutoring System, they may receive multiple types of help, but may not comprehend and make use of this help in the same way. To…

To investigate children's theories of motivation, we asked 166 children (8-12 years of age) to rate the effect of various motivational strategies on task interest, over the short and long terms, in activities described as appealing or unappealing. Children viewed the rewards strategy as resulting in greatest interest except when implemented over…

This pilot study examines the face work in two students' e-mail requests for letters of recommendation, to investigate whether and how the type and amount of face work differs in requests written in English and Spanish by native speakers of each language. The results do not conform to those of previous comparisons of requestive behavior between…

Statistical prediction remains an important tool for decisions in a variety of disciplines. An equally important issue is identifying factors that contribute to more or less accurate predictions. The time series literature includes well developed methods for studying predictability and volatility over time. This article develops…

The California Psychological Inventory's Dominance scale was investigated for inconsistencies in item-trait associations across four samples (one American normative and three culturally dissociated manager groupings). The Kim, Cohen, and Park procedure was used, enabling simultaneous multigroup comparison in addition to the traditional…

We here report two studies exploring associations between inhibitory control (measured with the Sustained Attention to Response Task, SART) on the one hand, and self-reports of trait cooperativeness and empathy on the other. A coherent picture was obtained in women whose inhibitory control proficiency predicted higher scores on the Temperament and…

Acculturative stress is a common experience for international students and is associated with psychological and physical problems. In a previous study (Tavakoli "et al. Journal of Counseling Psychology 56":590-596, "2009"), the authors reported that two stress reduction interventions--expressive writing (EW) and assertiveness training (AT)--had…

In this study, we compared measured maximal heart rate (HRmax) to two different HRmax prediction equations [220-age and 208-0.7(age)] in 52 children ages 7-17 years. We determined the relationship of chronological age, maturational age, and resting HR to measured HRmax and assessed seated resting HR and HRmax during a graded exercise test.…

Source monitoring is made difficult when the similarity between candidate sources increases. The current work examines how individual differences in social intelligence and perspective-taking abilities serve to increase source similarity and thus negatively impact source memory. Strangers first engaged in a cooperative storytelling task. On each…

The current study examined the accuracy of the multiple-stimulus without replacement (MSWO) preference assessment for identifying preferred common classroom activities as reinforcers with children with behavioral disorders. The accuracy of predictions from the MSWO regarding high, medium, and low stimulus preference was tested by providing…

This study investigated differences between attributional style and student adaptation to college for students with and without disabilities. In terms of attributional style, the students with disabilities demonstrated a more internal, stable, and global attributional style for both positive events and negative events. In terms of student…

Social scientists have predicted that individuals who occupy socially privileged positions or who have conservative political orientations are most likely to endorse the idea that genes are the root cause of differences among individuals. Drawing on a nationally representative sample of the US population, this study examines belief in the…

This article reviews current methods for evaluating models in the cognitive sciences, including theoretically based approaches, such as Bayes factors and minimum description length measures; simulation approaches, including model mimicry evaluations; and practical approaches, such as validation and generalization measures. This article argues…

Recent research calls into question the generally accepted conclusion that people believe themselves to be better than average. This paper reviews the new theories that have been proposed to explain the fact that better-than-average effects are isolated to common behaviors and abilities, and that people believe themselves to be below average with…