In two studies, infants saw happy and angry expressions on a face or a dot display of a face and heard either a happy or angry vocalization. Except for infants who saw the dot display face in Study 1, infants looked more at the face which coincided with the vocal expression. (BC)

The behavioral and cortisol responses of Japanese and Caucasian American infants, four months of age, were observed during and following routine inoculation. The Caucasian American group showed a more intense initial affective response and a longer latency to quiet than the Japanese group; the Japanese group showed a greater cortisol response than…

The goal of this investigation was to study the regulatory retention effects of an adult's emotional displays on infant behavior. In Study 1, 11- and 14-month-old infants were tested in a social-referencing-like paradigm in which a 1-hr delay was imposed between the exposure trials and the test trial. In Study 2, 11-month-olds were tested in the…

Due to the alarming signals of declining proficiency level among English Language learners in Malaysia, this study set out to learn more about the learners' perceptions of the teachers' code-switching in English Language classrooms. The objectives of this study were to investigate: a) learners' perceptions of teachers' code-switching, b) the…

This study assesses reading processes and/or strategies needed to deploy deep processing that could push learners towards syntactic-based constructions in L2 classrooms. Research has found L2 acquisition to present varying degrees of success and/or fossilization (Bley-Vroman 1989, Birdsong 1992 and Sharwood Smith 1994). For example, learners have…

Stress generation is a process in which individuals, through their depressive symptoms, personal characteristics, and/or behaviors, contribute to the occurrence of stressful life events. While this process has been well documented in adults, few studies have examined it in children. The present study examines whether cognitive and interpersonal…

Stress-related growth is defined as the perception or experience of deriving benefits from encountering stressful circumstances and, thus, has been identified as a protective factor against stress. The current study revised and subsequently validated scores on an existing measure of stress-related growth in a sample of racial/ethnic minority…

A sample of 196 participants (mean age 45.94 years, 54% women) completed inventories assessing upward and downward positive and negative social comparisons and general well-being. Widows and widowers were higher on upward negative comparisons than divorced or married persons while being lower on well-being measures of life satisfaction and…

The present study investigated the degree of convergence between three different measures of vicarious affective responsiveness (affective empathy)--verbal self-report, facial expression and change in heart rate--in typically developing children (N=29, aged 8-10 years), when presented with an emotionally evocative film. Although convergence…

We sought to clarify the nature of the face processing strength commonly observed in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) by comparing the face recognition ability of persons with WS to that of persons with autism and to healthy controls under three conditions: Upright faces with neutral expressions, upright faces with varying affective…

A deficit in empathy has consistently been cited as a central characteristic of Asperger syndrome (AS), but previous research on adults has predominantly focused on cognitive empathy, effectively ignoring the role of affective empathy. We administered the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a multi-dimensional measure of empathy, and the Strange…

Recent advances in neuroscience are highlighting connections between emotion, social functioning, and decision making that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the role of affect in education. In particular, the neurobiological evidence suggests that the aspects of cognition that we recruit most heavily in schools, namely…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether a video-induced positive and negative mood has a differential effect on subsequent problem-solving activities in a web-based environment. The study also examined whether task conditions (task demands) moderated the mood effect. As in traditional experimental mood-effect studies, the affective video…

The humor response has long been considered mysterious, and it is given relatively little attention in modern experimental psychology, in spite of the fact that numerous studies suggest that it has substantial benefits for mood and health. Existing theories of humor fail to account for some of the most basic humor phenomena. On most occasions when…

Does autism involve a deficit in intersubjective engagement with other persons? We studied nonverbal communication in children and adolescents with and without autism (n = 12 per group), group-matched for chronological age and verbal mental age, during 3 min of a videotaped interview. In keeping with previous studies, there were only subtle but…