Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children's emotion vocabulary

Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input among English-speaking toddlers (16–30 months) using two datasets: Wordbank (N = 5520; 36% female, 38% male, and 26% unknown gender; 1% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic, 40% White, 2% others, and 50% unknown ethnicity; collected in North America; dates of data collection unknown) and Child Language Data Exchange System (N = 587; 46% female, 44% male, 9% unknown gender, all unknown ethnicity; collected in North America and the UK; data collection dates, were available between 1962 and 2009). First, we show that toddlers develop the vocabulary to express increasingly wide ranges of emotional information during the first 2 years of life. Computational measures of word valence showed that emotion labels are embedded in a rich network of words with related valence. Second, we show that caregivers leverage these semantic connections in ways that may scaffold children's learning of emotion and mental state labels. This research suggests that young children use the dynamics of language input to construct emotion word meanings, and provides new techniques for defining the quality of infant-directed speech.     

Teaching Prospect Theory with the Deal or No Deal Game Show

Recent evidence indicates that decision makers are more sensitive to potential losses than gains. Loss aversion psychology has led behavioural economists to look beyond expected utility by developing prospect theory. We demonstrate this theory using the Deal or No Deal game show.     

Students’ writing ‘in transition’ from A-levels to university: how assessment drives students’ understandings,practices and discourses

The lament that ‘students can’t write’ remains loud and defiant, even after years of research pointing to the myriad factors that make students’ writing challenging, particularly when they move into university. This paper reports on a longitudinal, ethnographic study which explored students’ writing ‘in transition’, from A-levels to university in the UK, through the critical lens offered by the academic literacies conceptual framing. This paper offers critical analysis of the ways that students, teachers and institutions position writing at A-level and university, exploring the assumptions and beliefs that underpin their understandings and practices using Ivani?’s framework of discourses of writing. The analysis proposes that the centrality of assessment in the treatment of language at both levels creates an ‘assessment discourse of writing’, which originates in school, and becomes a defining and restrictive frame for students’ writing as they move into higher education. The analysis further suggests that assessment is the principal cause for the students’ challenges with adapting to the writing requirements of university. Moreover, assessment is used as a metalanguage for discussing writing at A-levels, and can become an unhelpful ‘anchor of continuance’ for students as they move into university.     

Women in interdisciplinary science: Exploring preferences and consequences

For at least a decade, U.S. funding agencies and university campuses have promoted the expansion of interdisciplinary research. At the same time, federal and local programs have sought to increase the participation of women and minorities in science, mathematics, and engineering. Research has focused on each of these trends independently, but very few studies have considered their interaction by asking how intellectual preferences for and professional consequences of interdisciplinary science might be influenced by gender, race, and/or ethnicity. Focused specifically on gender, this paper considers the expectation that women will be more drawn to interdisciplinary research, and explores the learning styles, work preferences, and career behaviors that might anticipate and/or explicate gender differences in interdisciplinary science. Principal mechanisms by which researchers engage in interdisciplinarity - cross-fertilization, team-collaboration, field-creation, and problem-orientation - are tested for evidence of gendering using preliminary empirical data from three studies. The results of this exploratory analysis offer clues about possible tendencies and raise questions about the potential costs and benefits for those who adopt them.     

Emotion discourse, social cognition, and social skills in children with and without developmental delays

This study examined parent-child emotion discourse, children's independent social information processing, and social skills outcomes in 146 families of 8-year-olds with and without developmental delays. Children's emergent social-cognitive understanding (internal state understanding, perspective taking, and causal reasoning and problem solving) was coded in the context of parent-child conversations about emotion, and children were interviewed separately to assess social problem solving. Mothers, fathers, and teachers reported on children's social skills. The proposed strengths-based model partially accounted for social skills differences between typically developing children and children with delays. A multigroup analysis of the model linking emotion discourse to social skills through children's prosocial problem solving suggested that processes operated similarly for the two groups. Implications for ecologically focused prevention and intervention are discussed.     

Creating a knowledge-based economy in the United Arab Emirates: realising the unfulfilled potential of women in the science,technology and engineering fields

As the United Arab Emirates (UAE) moves towards a knowledge-based economy, maximising the participation of the national workforce, especially women, in the transformation process is crucial. Using survey methods and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines the factors that influence women's decisions regarding their degree programme and their attitudes towards science, technology and engineering (STE). The findings point to the importance of adapting mainstream policies to the local context and the need to better understand the effect of culture and society on the individual and the economy. There is a need to increase interest in STE by raising awareness of what the fields entail, potential careers and their suitability with existing cultural beliefs. Also suggested is the need to overcome negative stereotypes of engineering, implement initiatives for further family involvement at the higher education level, as well as the need to ensure a greater availability of STE university programmes across the UAE.