Harnessing Happiness? Uncontrollable Positive Emotion in Bipolar Disorder, Major Depression, and Healthy Adults Yoona Kang and June Gruber The ability to adaptively exert control over negative emotions is associated with beneficial mental health outcomes. Less is known about the associated emotional sequelae surrounding controllable versus uncontrollable positive emotional experiences. The ability to harness positive emotions […]
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STUDY ALERT: Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Techniques: From Cognitive and Educational Psychology
Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan, and Daniel T. Willingham Summary Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. Improving educational outcomes will require efforts on many fronts, […]
STUDY ALERT: How to Make a Young Child Smarter: Evidence From the Database of Raising Intelligence
How to Make a Young Child Smarter: Evidence From the Database of Raising Intelligence John Protzko, Joshua Aronson, and Clancy Blair Can interventions meaningfully increase intelligence? If so, how? The Database of Raising Intelligence is a continuously updated compendium of randomized controlled trials that were designed to increase intelligence. In this article, the authors […]
STUDY ALERT: Constructing memory, imagination, and empathy: a cognitive neuroscience perspective
Constructing memory, imagination, and empathy: a cognitive neuroscience perspective Brendan Gaesser Studies on memory, imagination, and empathy have largely progressed in isolation. Conse- quently, humans’ empathic tendencies to care about and help other people are considered independent of our ability to remember and imagine events. Despite this theoretical autonomy, work from across psychology, and neuroscience […]
STUDY ALERT: Learning, Memory, and Synesthesia
Learning, Memory, and Synesthesia Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer People with color-grapheme synesthesia experience color when viewing written letters or numerals, usually with a particular color evoked by each grapheme. Here, we report on data from 11 color-grapheme synesthetes who had startlingly similar color-grapheme pairings traceable to childhood toys containing colored letters. These are the […]
STUDY ALERT: Classification learning predicts individual learning curves and enable personalized teaching
High-order feature-based mixture models of classification learning predict individual learning curves and enable personalized teaching Yarden Cohen and Elad Schneidman Pattern classification learning tasks are commonly used to explore learning strategies in human subjects. The universal and individual traits of learning such tasks reflect our cognitive abilities and have been of interest both psychophysically and clinically. […]
STUDY ALERT: A Cognitive Model of Analytical Reasoning Using GRE Problems
A Cognitive Model of Analytical Reasoning Using GRE Problems Scott Barry Kaufman, Helen J. Ross, and Eli M Silk A cognitive task analysis was performed to aid in the development of a cognitive model and associated tutor for the task of correctly solving a subset of the analytic ability questions from the Graduate Record […]
STUDY ALERT: The effects of relationship context and modality on ratings of funniness
The effects of relationship context and modality on ratings of funniness Mary Louise Cowan and Anthony C. Little There is evidence to suggest that humour is an important part of mate choice and that humour may serve as an indicator of genetic quality. The current study investigated how rated funniness from a video clip was […]
STUDY ALERT: What drives sleep-dependent memory consolidation: Greater gain or less loss?
What drives sleep-dependent memory consolidation: Greater gain or less loss? When memory is tested after a delay, performance is typically better if the retention interval includes sleep. However, it is unclear what accounts for this well-established effect. It is possible that sleep enhances the retrieval of information, but it is also possible that sleep protects […]
STUDY ALERT: A dynamic developmental link between verbal comprehension-knowledge (Gc) and reading comprehension
A dynamic developmental link between verbal comprehension-knowledge (Gc) and reading comprehension: Verbal comprehension-knowledge drives positive change in reading comprehension Matthew R. Reynolds, Joshua J. Turek Intelligence and general academic achievement have a well-established relation, but the interrelated development of the two constructs over time is less well-known. In this study, the dynamic developmental relation between […]
STUDY ALERT: Openness to Experience and Engagement Facilitate Maintenance of Verbal Ability in Older Adults
Openness to Experience and Activity Engagement Facilitate the Maintenance of Verbal Ability in Older Adults Michael J. Hogan, Roger T. Staff, Brendan P. Bunting, Ian J. Deary, and Lawrence J. Whalley The current study used data from the Aberdeen Birth Cohort, 1936, to investigate the hypothesis that the positive effects of the personality trait Openness […]
STUDY ALERT: Preschoolers’ selective learning is guided by the principle of relevance
Preschoolers’ selective learning is guided by the principle of relevance Annette M.E. Henderson, Mark A. Sabbagh, Amanda L. Woodward We investigate whether preschoolers’ word learning is selectively attuned to learning word–referent links that they expect will be relevant to their everyday communicative contexts. In two studies, 4-year-olds were taught the name of an unfamiliar […]