|
Current Directions in Psychological Science is a publication of the Association for Psychological Science.
|
Editor
Randall W. Engle Georgia Institute of Technology
Advisory Board
Marie T. Banich
University of Colorado Boulder
Martha Ann Bell
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Valérie Camos
Université de Fribourg
Sheldon Cohen
Carnegie Mellon University
Frank Durso
Georgia Institute of Technology
Joseph P. Forgas
University of New South Wales, Australia
Chris Fraley
University of Illinois
Isabel Gauthier
Vanderbilt University
David Myers
Hope College
James Nairne
Purdue University
Thomas Oltmanns
Washington University in St. Louis
Howard Weiss
Georgia Institute of Technology
Steve West
Arizona State University
|
|
|
Current Directions in Psychological Science |
The links below take you to the journal via the APS website. If not already logged in, you will be redirected to log-in using your last name (Garcia) and Member ID (81665).
|
|
|
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Dilara Deniz Can, Melanie Soderstrom, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek
Although researchers know that infant-directed speech (IDS) promotes language learning in children, researchers have only recently begun to examine exactly how it does so. Golinkoff and colleagues review research demonstrating that IDS increases children's attention to language, heightens distinctions between different sounds in speech, and promotes high-quality interactive exchanges between caregiver and child -- three things that are important for fostering language development.
|
|
Angela Scarpa
Arousal and its regulation are key components of emotional control and adaptation. According to the biosocial vulnerability model, genetic and epigenetic variations can change the functioning of the autonomic and central nervous systems -- key players in the regulation of arousal -- leading to psychological disruption and maladjustment. Scarpa illustrates this model by describing how specific types of arousal dysregulation can lead to the maladjustment seen in children with autism spectrum disorder and childhood aggression.
|
|
Michael J. Beran
Cognitive control involves a number of different processes and abilities, including self-control and meta-cognition. Though cognitive control was originally thought to be a purely human trait, Beran presents research with chimpanzees indicating that they are able to strategically distract themselves in order to boost self-control during delay-of-gratification tasks and display metacognitive monitoring during information-seeking tasks. These findings suggest some continuity in traits between humans and chimpanzees and raise questions about animal consciousness.
|
|
Christopher J. Soto and Jennifer L. Tackett
Soto and Tackett review current research examining personality in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. They find that although childhood personality is similar to adult personality in many ways -- such as in the hierarchical organization of personality traits -- it cannot be simply seen as a "child-sized" version of adult personality. Youth personality has been found to concurrently and prospectively predict biological, social, and health outcomes, demonstrating the need for future research in this area.
|
|
Nicolas Chevalier
Children are often thought to know what they should do (e.g., raise their hand before talking in a classroom) but be unable to do it. Researchers, therefore, have often failed to study goal identification in children, focusing instead on studying goal maintenance and the processes responsible for carrying out goals. Chevalier proposes that children often fail to identify goals and discusses how attention for goal-signaling cues changes and increases across development.
|
|
David Matsumoto, Mark G. Frank, and Hyisung C. Hwang
What spurs intergroup and political violence? Matsumoto, Frank, and Hwang present the ANCODI hypothesis, which posits that together, the emotions of anger, contempt, and disgust can motivate hostility and predict intergroup and political violence. They detail studies examining the emotions expressed in the speeches leading up to violent (the assassination of Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions, in 2009) and nonviolent (pro-Tibet protests at the Olympics in China in 2008) events that provide support for their hypothesis.
|
|
Sebastiaan Mathôt and Stefan Van der Stigchel
The pupil's response to light was once thought to simply be reflexive -- something that occurred without any cognitive input -- however, Mathôt and Van der Stigchel discuss research showing that it depends on many cognitive factors. Pupillary response depends on a person's awareness and interpretation of and attention to a stimulus and also reflects changes in arousal. Pupillary response, according to the authors, is not simply a reflexive action but an exquisitely detailed reflection of one's mental state.
|
|
Robin M. Hogarth, Tomás Lejarraga, and Emre Soyer
People take information from past experiences and use it to infer what will happen in the future, but inferences about future outcomes are not always accurate. Hogarth, Lejarraga, and Soyer discuss wicked (involving a mismatch between learning and prediction settings) and kind (involving a close match between learning and prediction settings) learning environments and describe how this framework can be used to pinpoint the sources of inference errors and create environments in which these errors are minimized.
|
|
Catalina Kopetz and Edward Orehek
People often make decisions that are harmful -- for example, smoking, overeating, or engaging in risky sexual behaviors. These types of behaviors are often thought to represent self-regulatory failures, but Kopetz and Orehek describe how they could be viewed instead as successes. Although a behavior such as smoking may not promote the objective of overall heath, it may help achieve the goal of fitting in with a peer group who smokes and can be seen as a successful regulation in that context.
|
|
Valerie F. Reyna, Rebecca B. Weldon, and Michael McCormick
Although risky decisions can be good in some situations -- like asking a prospective partner out on a date -- in many others, they can lead to negative outcomes such as physical injury, incarceration, or drug and alcohol abuse. Reyna, Weldon, and McCormick describe how fuzzy-trace theory can be used to reduce risky decision making, using interventions in which people are trained to view risk in a more gist-based, abstract manner -- a type of construal shown to improve decisions.
|
|
Nick Haslam and Erlend P. Kvaale
It was initially hoped that the rise in biological and genetic (i.e., biogenetic) explanations for mental disorders might lead to greater public understanding and acceptance of mental illness, but studies have shown that this has not occurred. Haslam and Kvaale introduce a mixed-blessings model explaining how biogenetic explanations for mental illness impact public and self-stigma of affected people in both positive and negative ways.
|
|
Michael L. DeKay
Predecisional information distortion occurs when a decision maker biases his or her interpretations of subsequent information in a way that favors an early-emerging belief or preference. Information distortion can occur through positive distortion of initial information or negative distortion of trailing information, and it is difficult to curtail. DeKay describes the types of models used to examine this phenomenon and the effects of predecisional information distortion on choice.
|
|
|
Current Directions in Psychological Science is a publication of the Association for Psychological Science. Please contact APS by email or by telephone at +1 202.293.9300 with questions or comments.
|
|
|
