Cost and time constraints make it challenging to include hands-on laboratory experiences in psychology courses, yet engaging laboratory experiences can increase scientific literacy and appreciation. The present study tested whether learning by observing could also increase scientific literacy (knowledge of social neuroscience). We additionally…

Although negative interparental conflict predicts elevated externalizing problems for children, there are individual differences in this association. Theoretically, children's abilities to coordinate physiological stress across response systems moderate the effects of interparental conflict on developmental outcomes. Past cross-sectional research…

Purpose: The current study investigated the effect of attention on heaviness perception and its physiological and kinematic contributions. Method: Participants lifted objects that varied in mass and volume while their muscle activity and movement were recorded. Participants were instructed to pay attention to their arm (internal) or the object…

The purpose of this study was to identify the feasibility of using the pupil dilation and heart rate variability (HRV), to diagnose learners' changing cognitive load in a video learning setting. The pupil dilation and HRV of 23 participants were recorded during their learning progress, and the learning materials, including differences in task…

A burgeoning literature supports the role of autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning as an index of physiologic sensitivity to the environment, but extant research is limited in its focus on single branches of the ANS, childhood samples, and solely negative environmental factors. This study seeks to address these limitations by exploring…

This research investigates whether a short mindfulness exercise can reduce children's psychophysiological stress reactions in the face of a performance task. To answer the question, a randomized controlled trial with 106 elementary school children, aged between 5 and 11 years, was conducted. An intervention group completed a two-minute breathing…

Introduction: Anxiety is an emotion which is characterized by a set of cognitive, psychophysical and behavioral symptoms, showed by a subject before some situations which are perceived as threatening or dangerous. The aim of the present work was to know the relationship between anxiety, emotional intelligence and personality, as well as the…

Physiological activities (heart rate and respiratory rate) during a word retrieval task were measured in normal participants. Word frequency demonstrated a significant effect on naming accuracy and latencies but not on physiological activities. These data will serve as a basis for comparison for individuals with a compromised language system.

Low-cost devices have widened the use of multimodal data in experiments providing a more complete picture of behavioural effects. However, the accurate collection and combination of multimodal and behavioural data in a manner that enables reproducibility is challenging and often requires researchers to refine their approaches. This paper presents…

The aim of this study was to validate the Teacher Stress Inventory (TSI) for use in a South African context. The process of scale validation also sheds significant light on this culturally diverse group of participants' levels of psychological wellbeing and physical health, and its association with the level of stress that teachers reported. Using…

Effectively regulating negative emotions is important for successful self-regulated learning. However, research has hardly examined which emotion regulation strategies benefit self-regulated learning. In an experimental study, it was examined whether positive reappraisal facilitates self-regulated learning by counterbalancing the depletion of…

Regulating affective responses to acute stress has the potential to improve health, performance, and well-being outcomes. Using the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat as an organizing framework, we review how appraisals inform affective responses and highlight research that demonstrates how appraisals can be used as regulatory…

Regulating affective responses to acute stress has the potential to improve health, performance, and well-being outcomes. Using the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat as an organizing framework, we review how appraisals inform affective responses and highlight research that demonstrates how appraisals can be used as regulatory…

While there is a general consensus in the literature that individuals with autism spectrum disorder have difficulty with cognitive empathy, much less is known about emotional empathy processing in these individuals. Most research has employed subjective self-report measures, which can often be misinterpreted or under-reported/over-reported. More…

This paper presents a comprehensive review and a specific example implementation of a minimally invasive technique that can be used to make quantitative measurements of a subject's Electro-Dermal Activity (EDA) in educational technology studies. The Q sensor is a low-cost wireless sensor that can be worn on the wrist to measure a subject's…