Comprehensive understanding of complex biological systems necessitates the use of computational models because they facilitate visualisation and interrogation of system dynamics and data-driven analysis. Computational model-based (CMB) activities have demonstrated effectiveness in improving students' understanding and their ability to use and…

Introduction: The article contributes to the conceptual studies of affective factors in information seeking by examining Kuhlthau's information search process model. Method: This random-digit dial telephone survey of 253 people (75% female) living in a rural, medically under-serviced area of Ontario, Canada, follows-up a previous interview study…

In times of growing importance and emphasis on improving academic outcomes for young people, their academic selves/lives are increasingly becoming more central to their understanding of their own wellbeing. How they experience and perceive their academic successes or failures, can influence their perceived self-efficacy and eventual academic…

The cadaver dissection course remains a time-honored tradition in medical education, partly because of its importance in cultivating professional attitudes in students. This study aims to investigate students' attitudes--specifically characterized as "detached concern"--in a cadaver dissection course. An interpretative phenomenological…

Why is a face with a smile but non-happy eyes likely to be interpreted as happy? We used blended expressions in which a smiling mouth was incongruent with the eyes (e.g., angry eyes), as well as genuine expressions with congruent eyes and mouth (e.g., both happy or angry). Tasks involved detection of a smiling mouth (perceptual), categorization of…

The public expression of opinions (and related communicative activities) hinges upon the perception of opinion consensus. Current explanations for opinion consensus perceptions typically focus on egocentric and other biases, rather than functional cognitions. Using self-categorization theory we showed that opinion consensus perceptions flow from…

Schizophrenia as mental illness is defined in terms of diagnostic criteria which do not include the full range of psychosocial difficulties that shape the lived experience of persons with this diagnosis and affect their quality of life. The biopsychosocial approach found in the World Health Organization's International Classification of…

Working memory (WM) and emotion classification are amongst the cognitive domains where specific deficits have been reported for patients with schizophrenia. In healthy individuals, the capacity of visual working memory is enhanced when the material to be retained is emotionally salient, particularly for angry faces. We investigated whether…

Recent research has looked at whether the expectancy of an emotion can account for subsequent valence specific laterality effects of prosodic emotion, though no research has examined this effect for facial emotion. In the study here (n = 58), we investigated this issue using two tasks; an emotional face perception task and a novel word task that…

Categorical perception, demonstrated as reduced discrimination of within-category relative to between-category differences in stimuli, has been found in a variety of perceptual domains in adults. To examine the development of categorical perception in the domain of facial expression processing, we used behavioral and event-related potential (ERP)…

This paper presents a series of experiments that tested the usefulness of teaching Spanish mood using an approach to Cognitive Grammar specifically developed for the foreign language classroom: "Operational Grammar." Mood selection is one of the most difficult aspects of learning Spanish as a FL, and it is one of the last features…

People are capable of thinking about the future, the past, remote locations, another person's perspective, and counterfactual alternatives. Without denying the uniqueness of each process, it is proposed that they constitute different forms of traversing psychological distance. Psychological distance is egocentric: Its reference point is the self…

A picture-word version of the Stroop task was used to test the automatic activation of psychological distance by words carrying various senses of psychological distance: temporal (tomorrow, in a year), social (friend, enemy), and hypotheticality (sure, maybe). The pictures implied depth, with the words appearing relatively close to or distant from…

This paper presents cognitive strategies as one major approach to pain management. They are discussed as part of a trimodal system of pain management that also includes behavioral manipulations and physical intervention. The need for a standardized classification to deal with terminological inconsistency in the literature on cognitive management…

The efficacy of gating in the processing of simple, multidimensional stimuli was investigated. In Experiment 1, a continuous classification task was used, with subjects sorting cards according to binary dimensions of line orientation and location. Results suggested that orientation and location are integral dimensions, facilitation occurring with…