To further develop tailored interventions, their working mechanisms must be identified. In the present study, three tailored messages that each contained one potential working mechanism--personalization, adaptation or feedback--were compared with a standard information condition. Two hundred and two students who smoked tobacco daily were randomly…

Despite the importance of understanding the emotional aspects of organizational decision making, prior research has paid scant attention to the role of emotion in escalation of commitment. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the relationship between negative affect and escalation of commitment. Results showed that regardless of…

Background: Although reward processing is considered an important part of affective functioning, few studies have investigated reward-related decisions or responses in young people with affective disorders. Depression is postulated to involve decreased activity in reward-related affective systems. Methods: Using functional magnetic resonance…

This article reviews how and why the authors have used the cross-cultural simulation BAFA BAFA in a 1st-year social sciences inquiry course on social identity. The article discusses modifications made to Shirts's original script for BAFA BAFA, how the authors conduct the postsimulation debriefing, key aspects of the student-written reflection of…

Over the last 15 years, the role of emotions in children's peer relations has received greater attention. The purpose of the meta-analytic review was to determine the magnitude of the relation between negative emotionality (NE) and positive emotionality (PE) and social status. Based on 54 independent samples, the overall effect size for the…

Two dimensions of students' beliefs about meaning construction in reading processes, transmission and transaction beliefs, were studied. According to transmission beliefs, the reader's task is to understand the author's intended meaning, while transaction beliefs assign to the reader the role of active meaning constructor. Students' beliefs were…

In this paper, the efficiency of conditional maximum likelihood (CML) and marginal maximum likelihood (MML) estimation of the item parameters of the Rasch model in incomplete designs is investigated. The use of the concept of F-information (Eggen, 2000) is generalized to incomplete testing designs. The scaled determinant of the F-information…

A cosmopolitan education must help us identify with those who are unlike us. In Martha Nussbaum's words, students must learn "enough to recognize common aims, aspirations, and values, and enough about these common ends to see how variously they are instantiated in the many cultures and their histories." It is commonly thought that reading serious…

Self-discrepancy (SD) theories and self-enhancement (SE) theories have focused primarily on people's motivations to seek either self-consistent or self-enhancing feedback. The two sets of theories, however, also suggest different reactions to the feedback people receive from others. SE theories suggest that people react negatively to evaluations…

Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is an innovative pedagogy that enables faculty to increase interactivity in the classroom and engage students in learning. By creating a feedback loop between students' work at home and the classroom setting, time on task is improved in both quality and quantity. This paper includes an introduction to JiTT and evidence…

We report on implementations of online homework systems at two moderately-sized state universities. These implementations were created with the intention of supporting student engagement outside of the classroom by mimicking the attempt-feedback-reattempt sequence of events which often occurs in a teacher's presence. Evidence is presented which…

This article considers power in text-based collaborations and proposes that in order for criticality to be directed towards the power structures at play in the discourse of collaborations, the interpretive strategies of participants need to hold in the balance the explicit or overt intentions of those with whom they are collaborating, and the…

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are becoming more common in UK psychology departments and the need to assess their reliability is apparent. Having examined the reliability of MCQs in our department we faced many questions from colleagues about why we were examining reliability, what it was that we were doing, and what should be reported when…

In higher education, students are exposed to regular feedback about their performance, and a prominent aspect of students' attention to feedback concerns the extent to which grades are consistent with what a student has expected to receive. Any discrepancies that arise can result in negative justice perceptions, which research has shown are…

Background: People with autism or Asperger Syndrome (AS) show altered patterns of brain activity during visual search and emotion recognition tasks. Autism and AS are genetic conditions and parents may show the "broader autism phenotype." Aims: (1) To test if parents of children with AS show atypical brain activity during a visual search…