When meeting someone at zero acquaintance, we make assumptions about each other that encompass emotional states, personality traits, and even cognitive abilities. Evidence suggests individuals can accurately detect psychopathic personality traits in strangers based on short video clips or photographs of faces. We present an in-depth examination of…

Both formative assessment and growth mindset scholars aim to understand how to enhance achievement. While research on formative assessment focuses on external teaching practices, work on growth mindset emphasises internal psychological processes. This study examined the interplay between three formative assessment strategies (i.e. sharing learning…

Purpose: This study investigates the heritability of language, speech, and nonverbal cognitive development of twins at 4 and 6 years of age. Possible confounding effects of twinning and zygosity, evident at 2 years, were investigated among other possible predictors of outcomes. Method: The population-based twin sample included 627 twin pairs and 1…

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to a set of competencies to process, understand, and reason with affective information. Recent studies suggest ability measures of experiential and strategic EI differentially predict performance on non-emotional and emotionally laden tasks. To explore cognitive processes underlying these abilities further, we…

Dietary intake can affect the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development of young children. Few studies have explored the relationships between dietary intake and the cognitive and socioemotional dimensions of school readiness. This study aimed to investigate the longitudinal associations between children's dietary intake in early…

The associations between sons' challenging behaviour and mothers' anxiety and depression were investigated in four age-subgroups of boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder and their mothers (n = 49). Significant correlations were found only for the 6-yr-old boys' irritability and their mothers' anxiety (r = 0.808) and depression (r = 0.762), and for…

Older adults report being more trusting than young adults, and this may be particularly evident in close social relationships. This is beneficial for well-being when trust is reciprocated, but detrimental when trust is exploited. In a repeated trust game, young (n = 35) and older adults (n = 33) invested real money over repeated interactions with…

To date, cross-cultural studies on Theory of Mind (ToM) have predominantly focused on preschoolers. This study focuses on middle childhood, comparing two samples of mainland Chinese (n = 126) and Australian (n = 83) children aged between 5.5 and 12 years. Strange Stories, the most commonly used measure of ToM, was employed. The study aimed to…

The current study investigated the influence of a play-based curriculum on the development of pretend play skills and oral language in children attending their first year of formal schooling. In this quasi-experimental design, two groups of children were followed longitudinally across the first 6 months of their first year at school. The children…

In this project we test the utility of an adaptive e-learning study tool (LearnSmart) within the context of a large undergraduate psychology course. We measured student usage of the e-learning tool and the effect that this usage has on academic outcomes, while controlling for the effects of intellectual ability and personality traits such as…

Depression is associated with biased interpretations and beliefs that are resistant to change. This kind of cognitive rigidity may depend on two distinct factors--a reduced ability for processing information that conflicts with these interpretations and beliefs and a reduced ability for generating alternative representations. Although depressive…

Purpose: Previous research into the working, declarative, and procedural memory systems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) has yielded inconsistent results. The purpose of this research was to profile these memory systems in children with DLD and their typically developing peers. Method: One hundred four 5- to 8-year-old…

This study investigates multiple intelligences in relation to online video experiences, age, gender, and mode of learning from a rural Australian university. The inter-relationships between learners' different intelligences and their motivations and learning experience with the supplementary online videos utilised in their subjects are…

International research suggests that early mathematical competences predicts later mathematical outcomes. In this paper, we build on our previous study of young children's mathematical competencies (MacDonald & Carmichael, 2015) to explore the relationship between mathematical competencies at 4-5 years, as measured by teacher ratings, and…

This study investigated the relationship between teachers' beliefs about gifted students' characteristics compared to students with average-ability and the teachers' motivation (i.e., enthusiasm, self-efficacy). We investigated pre-service teachers' beliefs and motivational orientations as substantial components of their professional competencies…