Purpose: Marital dissatisfaction and conflict often increase for couples after the birth of a child and are evident in fewer positive family interactions and more negative family interactions. Because exercise is known to increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions, the current study examined the extent to which higher levels of…

In this paper we analyze the effects of the type of collaborative task (elaboration of concept map vs elaboration of expository summary) on the performance and on the level of collaboration achieved by Mexican university students in the multimedia learning of a social sciences content (Communication Psychology). Likewise, the processes of social…

There was a time when community members would talk with one another at the local grocery store, church, or ice cream parlor. However, in today's society, social media such as e-mail blasts and websites, along with blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, and YouTube have replaced communication that was once commonplace in…

Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent-child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents' explanations about those events and children's possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses…

This paper reports on how teachers, from different cities in Brazil, used groups on Facebook and how communication between teachers and students was affected by using such groups. This study is framed under the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) perspective, and is conceived from a methodological background that invites participants to…

When parents talk with their children about lessons learned in school, they are participating in reminiscing of an unshared event. This study sought to understand if pedagogical documentation, from the Reggio Approach to early childhood education, would support and enhance the conversation. Mother-child dyads reminisced two separate times about…

The current study evaluated the play behaviors of children with disabilities (e.g., developmental delays, specific language impairment) who participated in a social communication intervention targeting skills such as initiations, responses, name use, proximity, and turn-taking. Three children who were enrolled in an inclusive classroom met the…

Conversational repairs are an important pragmatic language skill. We identified types of responses to requests for clarification and their frequencies in typically developing 4;0-6;0-year-old Jordanian children. This study was motivated by the fact that there are no Arabic data regarding this issue and by the limited range of forms of requests for…

This study investigates the different learning opportunities enabled by text-based and video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) from an interactionist perspective. Six Chinese-speaking learners of English and six English-speaking learners of Chinese were paired up as tandem (reciprocal) learning dyads. Each dyad participated…

Co-rumination is a dyadic process between relationship partners that refers to excessively discussing problems, rehashing problems, speculating about problems, mutual encouragement of problem talk, and dwelling on negative affect. Although studies have addressed youths' "tendency" to co-ruminate, little is known about the nature of…

Research Findings: This study examined the relation between Chilean parents' narrative participatory styles (i.e., the way in which parents scaffold children's participation in conversations) and children's self-regulation skills. A total of 210 low-income Chilean parent-child dyads participated in the study. Dyads were videotaped talking about a…

Politeness conventions vary across cultures and so is impoliteness and rudeness. In some cases, what is considered rude in one culture or a society is not necessarily rude or impolite in another. This cannot be explained unless more studies on the use of language functions in a specific culture are conducted. The aim of this paper is to…

The purpose of this study was to examine adolescent's hostile attributions of mother's intent and emotional self-expectancies as contributors to expression of emotion between mothers and adolescents. Data were collected from 268 10- to 12-year-olds (133 girls, 135 boys) and their mothers. Each dyad was observed in a conversational activity that…

The significant increase in the numbers of students with autism combined with the need for better trained teachers (National Research Council, 2001) call for research on the effectiveness of alternative methods, such as consultation, that have the potential to improve service delivery. Data from 2 randomized controlled single-blind trials indicate…