This study examined proactive inhibitory control and its links to self-reported traits in adolescents with and without nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) under negative emotion. Forty-one adolescents (20 NSSI, 21 controls) completed impulsivity and alexithymia measures, watched a negative film clip, and performed a stop-signal task. Results showed that the NSSI group had higher trait impulsivity and alexithymia, and blunted emotional reactivity after mood induction. In the task, they did not proactively prolong go-trial reaction times to prepare for stop signals, yet their commission error rate on stop trials was similar to controls. No correlations emerged between self-reports and task performance. These findings suggest that trait alexithymia and impulsivity may be more closely associated with NSSI, and that under negative emotional conditions, adolescents with NSSI may have difficulty proactively adjusting their behavior in anticipation of potential signals.
The production effect is the finding that words read aloud are usually remembered better than words read silently, a benefit commonly attributed to the encoding of additional distinctive features. Recent work extended this phenomenon to visuospatial memory but found that clicking on dots impaired order reconstruction unless rehearsal was also reduced in the control condition, suggesting a trade-off between distinctiveness and rehearsal disruption. The present study asked whether more natural, body-anchored actions would shift this balance. Participants encoded sequences of eight spatial locations on a touchscreen and later reconstructed their order. In Experiment 1A, touching each dot impaired memory relative to remaining still. In Experiment 1B, however, touching the dots improved performance relative to a control condition in which participants touched irrelevant corner locations during encoding, thereby reducing rehearsal. In Experiment 2, a stronger embodied response, touching each dot and tracing the path between successive locations, again impaired memory. Thus, increasing bodily engagement did not restore the verbal production effect pattern. The findings are interpreted within the Revised Feature Model: spatial production can add distinctive features, but its benefits are outweighed when the required action disrupts serial spatial rehearsal.
We can regulate our own and other people's emotions, but it is not clear whether we use the same strategies to regulate others' emotions as we do to regulate our own. In three preregistered studies, we compared participants' preferences for eight different emotion regulation strategies as a function of target identity. Study 1 (N = 119) compared regulating oneself versus a friend and found that direct action, distraction, suppression, and downward comparison were all used significantly more on oneself compared to a friend, while humor, valuing, and receptive listening were all used more on a friend compared to oneself. Study 2 (N = 120) then examined the role of closeness in emotion regulation strategy choice by comparing strategy preference for regulating oneself versus a close friend versus an acquaintance. Humor, valuing, receptive listening, and direct action were used significantly more on friends compared to acquaintances, while there was no significant difference for reappraisal, downward comparison, distraction, or supression. These results suggest that people show a consistent difference in preference for emotion regulation strategies as a function of who the target of the regulation is and that extrinsic and intrinsic emotion regulation may differ markedly in the strategies people choose to use. A third preregistered study (N = 120) reframed the same comparison in terms of perceived feasibility and found that the strategies participants rated as more feasible to use on themselves, a close friend, or an acquaintance closely mirrored those they reported using, suggesting that perceived feasibility may help explain target-related differences in emotion regulation choice.
Observing others' demonstrations is an important route through which children acquire causal knowledge and develop scientific thinking. Using the trap-tube paradigm, the present study investigated the effects of correct and incorrect demonstrations and their order on causal learning in 2-4-year-olds. Experiment 1 (N = 352) showed that 2-year-olds showed no evidence of causal learning across all demonstration types, and their performance did not differ significantly between conditions. Among 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds, performance was better overall in the mixed-demonstration conditions than in the single-demonstration conditions. Within mixed demonstrations, order affected only 3-year-olds, with better performance in the correct-then-incorrect condition than in the incorrect-then-correct condition. Experiment 2 (N = 365) showed that 2-year-olds did not differ significantly across demonstration types, and their performance was largely near chance, whereas 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds performed better in the mixed-demonstration conditions than in the consistent-demonstration conditions. All children were more likely to change the side of insertion in the mixed-demonstration conditions than in the consistent-demonstration conditions. Overall, the findings suggest that mixed demonstrations support causal learning from age 3 onward, whereas evidence in 2-year-olds was weak and inconsistent.
In many experimental-psychological studies, either the speed or the accuracy of responses could be the primary dependent variable of interest. Often, there is no straightforward choice and this decision is particularly difficult if there are signs of variation in speed-accuracy tradeoff across conditions and/or participants. An apparently well-validated solution to this conundrum is the inverse efficiency score (IES). The general application of IES has never actually been endorsed in the cited sources and recent validation studies show that it does not serve well any of the major purposes to which it has been applied. Its popularity may even have hampered progress on the important methodological issue of how to best combine speed and accuracy measures. The present article traces the history of IES via a literature review and with the aid of contemporary witnesses. This exercise reveals a flaw in the academic culture that could be improved by increasing the value of either checking the original sources or instead being honest about the reliance on second-hand information. The story of IES also exemplifies how ignoring fundamental methodological problems makes practitioners resort to the most accessible solutions, often relying on a simplified appeal to authority and little else.
