This article analyzes the magnitude of individual differences in academic achievement and their growth over the first 9 years of schooling. The author anchors the widening-gap phenomenon on the theoretical recognition of large individual differences in learning pace, which logically leads over time to an increasing gap in knowledge and skills…

Educationists and researchers who consider the use of the learning style concept to address individual differences in learning are often daunted by the multitude of definitions, models, and instruments. It is difficult to make an informed choice. The confusion with cognitive style, a term often used as a synonym, makes it even more complicated.…

Purpose: This study investigated whether child care providers could learn to facilitate peer interactions by using verbal support strategies (e.g., prompts, invitations, or suggestions to interact) during naturalistic play activities. Method: Seventeen caregivers were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups, stratified by center so…

This article focuses on the problems of adults who in secondary school were high ability learners. The main point of interest of the research presented here is job satisfaction among gifted people and their temperament structure. The authors are interested whether there exist correlations between the investigated variables both in the entire group…

Category learning can be characterized as a process of discovering the dimensions that represent stimuli efficiently and effectively. Categories that are overlapping when represented in 1 dimensionality may be separate in a higher dimensional cue set. The authors report 2 experiments in which participants were shown an additional cue after…

We examined the association between reading and general cognitive ability (g) in a population-based sample of 6,476 pairs of 7-year-old twins. Additive genetic influences largely accounted for individual differences in reading and the covariation between reading and g. Furthermore, both genetic and shared environmental influences on reading and g…

This paper argues that creative behavior requires an employee to be willing to engage risk. Aside from the discussion of risk propensity as an individual difference, a new situational variable will be developed and tested: willingness to take risks (WTR). WTR captures the employee's willingness to engage risks in their work and is positioned as an…

Biological reactivity to psychological stressors comprises a complex, integrated system of central neural and peripheral neuroendocrine responses designed to prepare the organism for challenge or threat. Developmental experience plays a role, along with heritable variation, in calibrating the response dynamics of this system. This calibration…

We examined need for cognition, social desirability, and communication apprehension for their influence on the mention and repetition of shared and unshared information in 8-person decision-making groups. Both need for cognition and social desirability influenced the discussion of shared and unshared information in decision-making groups. The…

The author comments on the article "The Primacy of Cognition in Schizophrenia," by R. W. Heinrichs and states that to the pursuit of schizophrenic/normal differences, there is no end. Heinrichs used meta-analyses to argue persuasively for the primacy of cognition for this role. His conclusion not only elicited agreement from both researchers and…

Recent research demonstrates neurologic and behavioral differences in people's responses to the space that is within and beyond reach. The present studies demonstrated a perceptual difference as well. Reachability was manipulated by having participants reach with and without a tool. Across 2 conditions, in which participants either held a tool or…

The study investigated children's intention understanding using a longitudinal design. Thirty-two Italian children were tested on the "Demonstration of Intention" in the Re-enactment paradigm devised by Meltzoff (1995a), at two ages. Mean age was 12 months at the first session and 15 months at the second session. Previous research by…

A retrospective cohort of discharged patients from all public psychiatric hospitals in Hong Kong (1997-1999) was linked to suicide data from Coroner's court. Patients hospitalized shorter than 15 days had significantly lower suicide rates than longer stay patients. The results were fairly consistent across immediate/late post discharge periods,…

The executive attention theory of working memory capacity (WMC) proposes that measures of WMC broadly predict higher order cognitive abilities because they tap important and general attention capabilities (R. W. Engle & M. J. Kane, 2004). Previous research demonstrated WMC-related differences in attention tasks that required restraint of habitual…

Visual perceptual skills of deaf and normal hearing adults were measured using the Eriksen flanker task. Participants were seated in front of a computer screen while a series of target letters flanked by similar or dissimilar letters was flashed in front of them. Participants were instructed to press one button when they saw an "H," and another…