As a key professional competence of teachers, empathy involves whether teachers can stand in the student's position to pay attention, understand their behavior, and make reasonable judgment and explanation of it. Researchers have discovered that 360° virtual reality (360° VR), a relatively recent form of media, can be particularly powerful in…

As the world is becoming a more connected and interdependent place, a fast growing literature has examined the effects of foreign experiences on cognitive and psychological outcomes. The current research seeks to explore the relationship between living abroad and intellectual humility. To this end, we conducted four methodologically diverse…

People often speak indirectly. For example, "It's cold in here" might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders' inferences about a speaker's intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker's mental states, that is, "mentalizing?" We…

The ability to understand the mental states of other individuals is central to human social behavior, yet some theory of mind capacities are shared with other species. Comparisons of theory of mind skills across humans and other primates can provide a critical test of the cognitive prerequisites necessary for different theory of mind skills to…

The purpose of this study was to identify predictors of friendship quality in adolescents with and without ADHD. The participants were 115 adolescents (61 ADHD, 54 non-ADHD), ages 13-18. The adolescents completed questionnaires assessing the quality of their relationships with their best friends, social perspective taking, anxiety and depression.…

This study examined how factors associated with student development and persistence differ between first-generation and continuing-generation students and how participation in a learning community influences development and persistence. The findings show that first-generation students were less involved in academics and had lower gains in…

This study examines associations between reading comprehension and perspective taking for children who read 2 fictional stories. One story is rich in social and emotional content, describing a girl making new friends and experiencing an intergroup conflict. The other story contains less social content. The study uses hierarchical linear modeling…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

The relationship between diversity and creativity can be seen as paradoxical. A diversity of perspectives should be advantageous for collaborative creativity, yet its benefits are often offset by adverse social processes. One suggestion for overcoming these negative effects is perspective taking. We compared four dyads with low scores on trait…

Single-response situational judgment tests (SRSJTs) differ from multiple-response SJTs (MRSJTS) in that they present test takers with edited critical incidents and simply ask test takers to read over the action described and evaluate it according to its effectiveness. Research comparing the reliability and validity of SRSJTs and MRSJTs is thus far…

Relational Developmental Systems (RDS) provided an integrative framework to examine how college students' intrapersonal attributes, particularly sense of identity in transactions with different educational experiences, were related with self-reported community and political engagement and other intrapersonal dimensions. Students who participated…

We examined the links between perceived parental use of social and material rewards and prosocial behaviors across youth from two countries. Six hundred forty adolescents (297 girls; X-bar age = 15.32 years) from Valencia, Spain, and 552 adolescents (321 girls; X-bar age = 13.38 years) from the United States completed measures of their perceptions…

We investigated the role of sociocultural (between-groups) and individual (within-group) factors on the development of preschoolers' resource-allocation preferences. We tested claims of the "joint impact hypothesis" of social values development that social-emotional understanding skills would predict the transition from simpler…

Children practice their spatial skills when playing with spatial toys, such as construction materials, board games, and puzzles. Sex and SES differences are observed in the engagement in such spatial play activities at home, which relate to individual differences in spatial performance. The current study investigated the effects of explicitly…

The development of college students' civic identity is understudied, but worthy of attention because of its salience to many students and higher education's commitment to fostering an engaged citizenry. Using 45,271 participants from the 2009 Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership, this study uses structural equation modeling to explore…