This study investigated whether young adults with ASD (n = 29) had impairments in Cognitive Empathy (CE), Affective Empathy (AE) or Empathic Accuracy (EA; the ability to track changes in others' thoughts and feelings) compared to typically-developing individuals (n = 31) using the Empathic Accuracy Task (EAT), which involves watching narrators…

Academic stress, an endemic phenomenon in higher education, presents a multifaceted challenge, manifesting as cognitive overload, affective dysregulation and physiological destabilisation. It leads to recurrent feedback loops that reinforce anxiety and frustration, intensifying maladaptive stress responses. This study examines the extent to which…

According to previous studies of theory of mind (ToM), social environment and cultural background affect individuals' cognitive ability to understand other people's minds. There are cross-group differences in ToM. The present study aimed to examine whether social environment and culture affect the ToM in Uygur and Han groups and whether the…

This study examined whether instructional humor (IH) was not just another type of seductive detail when covariates such as humor pre-disposition, prior-knowledge, and working memory capacity were controlled. Participants were students (N = 228) from universities who were randomly assigned two stimuli conditions in the classic experimental design.…

Virtual reality (VR) has a high potential to facilitate education. However, the design of many VR learning applications was criticized for lacking the guidance of explicit and appropriate learning theories. To advance the use of VR in effective instruction, this study proposed a model that extended the cognitive-affective theory of learning with…

The present study examined the longitudinal associations among birth weight status, maternal warmth, and children's cognitive competence within an at-risk sample (N = 1809) drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study. Of particular interest was whether birth weight moderated the associations between maternal warmth and indicators of…

There has been considerable interest in cognitive load in recent years, but the effect of affective load and its relationship to mental functioning has not received as much attention. In order to investigate the effects of affective stimuli on cognitive function as manifest in the ability to remember foreign language vocabulary, two groups of…

The changing of the English profile to English as an International Language (EIL) has broadened the definition of competent users of English around the world to include the ability to shuffle between English in local contexts (Canagarajah, 2013). However, Thai EFL learners continue to show an inability to understand and use English in…

Previous research has clearly demonstrated that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involves deficits in multiple neuropsychological functions, such as executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). A conceptual distinction is commonly made between cool and hot EF. In ASD, continued attention has been paid to the cool areas of executive dysfunction.…

Researchers have struggled for decades to determine whether ability grouping is helpful or harmful; however, study findings have been inconsistent. To assess the effect of grouping and program type on scholastic and affective outcomes, three grouping types (gifted separate-class enrichment, pull-out gifted enrichment, and no enrichment), three…

The purpose of this study is to identify academically at-risk students in first-semester general chemistry using affective characteristics via cluster analysis. Through the clustering of six preselected affective variables, three distinct affective groups were identified: low (at-risk), medium, and high. Students in the low affective group…

Problem: The problem of this study was to determine the differences between two groups of learners across four specified learner variables. The two groups were students using mobile phones and students without the use of mobile phones in youth Bible studies in selected Southern Baptist churches. The four learner variables were cognitive test…

Children with autism achieve mirror self-recognition appropriate to developmental age, but are nonetheless reported to have problems in other aspects of a sense of self. We observed behaviour in the mirror in 12 pre-school children with autism, 13 pre-school children with Down syndrome (DS) and 13 typically developing (TD) toddlers. Reliable…

Objective: The study investigates behavioural, academic, cognitive, and motivational aspects of functioning in school-age children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with and without an executive function deficit (EFD). Method: Children with ADHD - EFD (n = 22) and children with ADHD + EFD (n = 26) were compared on aspects of…

Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) is a methylation enzyme that catalyzes the degradation pathway and inactivation of dopamine. It is accepted widely as being involved in the modulation of dopaminergic physiology and prefrontal cortex (PFC) function. The COMT Val158Met polymorphism is associated with variation in COMT activity. COMT 158Met allele…