Acta Psychologica最新文献

English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers working in rural areas encounter various emotional impediments, and the failure to effectively regulate these emotions may ultimately result in attrition. In light of the 'complexity turn' in affect research, the present study adopts complex dynamic systems theory to trace the emotional labour trajectories of two senior high school EFL teachers during their initial employment in rural China. An analysis of retrospective interviews, narrative frames and researcher field notes revealed that critical incidents (CIs) acted as perturbations, propelling the participants out of stability and redirecting their emotional labour trajectories along alternative paths. Four categories of CIs were identified: dissatisfaction with the rural environment, challenges in EFL teaching, difficulties in managing interpersonal relationships and limited opportunities for professional advancement. Turnover intention emerged through a cumulative process as the participants negotiated emotional labour, with CIs acting as significant catalysts. The findings underscore the urgent need for enhanced support mechanisms for rural teachers.

Perceptual decision-making is often done in conditions of uncertainty. Through a process of Bayesian inference, people can combine priors, such as knowledge about base-rates, with available sensory evidence to make perceptual decisions. How this ability changes with aging is not well understood. Here we compare perceptual decision-making in younger (n = 78) and older (n = 56) adults, using a two-alternative-forced-choice task in which participants judged the orientation of dots in dynamic Glass pattern stimuli (rightward or leftward) that varied in coherence in one direction. In one condition, participants were explicitly told that for one color, the stimuli would occur more frequently in one orientation than the other while stimuli in the other color were equally likely to occur in both orientations. In the other condition, participants implicitly learned this prior through experience with the task. When explicit knowledge of the prior was given, younger adults performed more accurately than older adults with both groups showing more accuracy for items in the color with an unequal base rate. When the prior was implicitly learned, there was no overall age difference in accuracy and older adults showed a greater benefit of the unequal prior in accuracy than younger adults. In both conditions, participants were more confident in decisions about stimuli that were consistent with the prior. Older adults were generally less confident in their decisions in the implicit condition despite the fact that their performance was not significantly different than that of the younger adults. These results suggest that older and younger adults can incorporate a prior in perceptual decision-making, and that older adults may particularly benefit from implicit learning of the base-rate prior. For both older and younger adults, judgements that were consistent with the prior, even when no diagnostic sensory information was present, were more confident than judgements that were inconsistent with the prior. These results suggest that a base-rate prior can influence confidence even in the absence of evidence. Linear Ballistic Accumulator model parameter estimates largely align with past research that suggests that older adults have a slower information processing rate, greater response caution and require more evidence before making a decision. These results suggest that older adults may be negatively impacted by explicit presentation of multiple sources of information during decision-making.

This study investigated a sample of 339 Chinese undergraduates majoring in Thai to examine how personality traits (shyness and curiosity) and foreign language emotions (enjoyment, peace of mind, anxiety, and boredom) jointly predict foreign language classroom engagement through both direct and indirect pathways. Structural equation modelling revealed that shyness exerted a detrimental influence on foreign language learning, whereas curiosity exerted a facilitative influence, outweighing the impact of shyness. Mediation analyses further indicated that specific emotional variables served as mediating mechanisms between personality traits and engagement. Psychological network analysis positioned engagement at the core of the network structure, while preliminary evidence suggested an inverted-U, non-linear association between curiosity and engagement. The study concludes by outlining pedagogical implications and proposing tailored instructional strategies designed to enhance classroom engagement.

The present research examines the effect of ethical leadership in reducing workplace incivility to foster employee knowledge sharing and employee innovative job performance by underpinning social learning theory. This research employed a quantitative research design and followed the post-positivist philosophy in line with the underlying research questions, and the approach to theory is deductive, as this research intends to examine the causal relationship among study variables. The target population for this research is higher secondary and vocational schools (providing technical and skill-based education), providing tertiary and secondary education under the constituency of the Government of Punjab, Punjab province of Pakistan. We identified 150 unique workgroups with a mean size of 5 employees (n = 750), and every workgroup had a dedicated manager/leader/supervisor (Head/Principal). The intended sample was 150 leaders overseeing 750 employees in 150 schools. The findings of the present research noted that when employees are treated fairly, honestly, and with respect, they tend to model similar values, resulting in an ethical work environment that eventually reduces workplace incivility since employees not only observe but also anticipate the implications of their actions. When individuals observe that civility produces favorable results, they tend to engage in desirable outcomes at the workplace, including knowledge sharing and innovative job performance. Implementing training programs for school principals and teachers has the potential to foster healthy connections and, eventually, polite, desirable workplace behavior.

Drawing on ecological systems theory, we investigate how microsystem components (i.e., individual characteristics and the family, school, and peer environments) collectively relate to English as a foreign language (EFL) achievement. To this end, we administered a cross-sectional questionnaire to 1395 Chinese middle school students and conducted a network analysis to model these relationships. The results indicated that dimensions of study engagement (dedication and vigor), teacher support, and family socioeconomic status (SES) were directly and positively associated with EFL achievement, whereas student cohesiveness, classroom order, classmate support, and friend support exhibited weak negative associations. Dedication operated as a central node whose activation had widespread consequences across the entire network. Parental support emerged as a key bridge node linking dimensions of distinct microsystem components. Furthermore, the directional associations among task orientation, student cohesiveness, and EFL achievement differed significantly between junior and senior high school students. Overall, the findings suggest that microsystem associations with EFL achievement operate through multiple pathways, vary in magnitude across the dimensions of the four microsystem components, and differ by developmental stage, underscoring the need for integrative, system-level approaches to improving adolescents' foreign language learning.

Although research on creativity and dyslexia produced contrasting results, accumulated evidence suggests that the characteristics associated with dyslexia may underlie the creative advantage often reported in the literature. Rather than a general creative advantage in individuals with dyslexia, empirical findings pointed at strengths in specific sub-processes of creative thinking. While previous studies have attempted to identify the cognitive mechanisms that explain the dyslexic creative benefit, the role of age has been scarcely investigated, especially during school transitions. To explore the age-related patterns of creative abilities in typical and atypical conditions, 64 children and preadolescents (age: 8-14) with and without dyslexia completed the Figure Completion test of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT; Torrance, 1990), together with a battery of reading tests. Results revealed a significant interaction effect between group (typical vs. dyslexia) and school level (primary vs. junior high school). Whereas primary school children with dyslexia showed comparable levels of flexibility and originality to their typical peers, junior high school students with dyslexia obtained significantly higher flexibility scores in the creative task. Furthermore, unlike typical peers - whose originality declined with age - children with dyslexia showed a tendency to increased originality. These findings reveal a distinct development of creativity in dyslexia, suggesting that creative skills may rise gradually across school years and counteract the age-related creative decline typically observed in adolescent peers.

Listening to a conversation between two talkers and recalling the information is a common goal in verbal communication. However, cognitive-psychological experiments on short-term memory performance often rely on rather simple stimulus material, such as unrelated word lists or isolated sentences. The present study uniquely incorporated running speech, such as listening to a two-talker conversation, to investigate whether talker-related visual cues enhance short-term memory performance and reduce listening effort in non-noisy listening settings. In two equivalent dual-task experiments, participants listened to interrelated sentences spoken by two alternating talkers from two spatial positions, with talker-related visual cues presented as either static faces (Experiment 1, n = 30) or animated faces with lip sync (Experiment 2, n = 28). After each conversation, participants answered content-related questions as a measure of short-term memory (via the Heard Text Recall task). In parallel to listening, they performed a vibrotactile pattern recognition task to assess listening effort. Visual cue conditions (static or animated faces) were compared within-subject to a baseline condition without faces. To account for inter-individual variability, we measured and included individual working memory capacity, processing speed, and attentional functions as cognitive covariates. After controlling for these covariates, results indicated that neither static nor animated faces improved short-term memory performance for conversational content. However, static faces reduced listening effort, whereas animated faces increased it, as indicated by secondary task RTs. Participants' subjective ratings mirrored these behavioral results. Furthermore, working memory capacity was associated with short-term memory performance, and processing speed was associated with listening effort, the latter reflected in performance on the vibrotactile secondary task. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that visual cues influence listening effort and that individual differences in working memory and processing speed help explain variability in task performance, even in optimal listening conditions.

Previous research, informed by the existential escape hypothesis, highlighted that pornography may be used to escape from perceived meaninglessness indicated by boredom. Specifically, perceived meaninglessness significantly predicted increased frequency of pornography consumption, using pornography for excitement seeking, and for sexual pleasure via boredom and emotional avoidance (i.e., indirect serial relationships). In the current research, we aimed to replicate this model, substituting problematic pornography consumption as the outcome variable. As expected, perceived meaninglessness significantly predicted increased problematic pornography consumption via boredom and using pornography for emotional avoidance. This indirect serial relationship was also significant when each subscale of the problematic pornography consumption measure was used as the outcome variable. Further, we replicated original findings such that the indirect serial relationship was significant when frequency of pornography consumption was the outcome variable. The novelty of this research is that it incorporates problematic pornography consumption as a means of existential escape from boredom, heretofore not empirically tested. Further, our replication consolidates pornography consumption as a means of existential escape from the meaninglessness signalled by boredom by measuring a different aspect of pornography consumption.

Objective: Disruptive classroom behavior in physical education classes is a common challenge in classroom management. Teachers often respond to such behavior with criticism; however, different types of criticism may produce distinct behavioral responses among students. This study investigates how teachers' use of constructive criticism and destructive criticism in response to students' disruptive classroom behavior in physical education classes influences students' intention to improve such behavior through the mediating effects of negative academic emotions and teacher-student relationship.

Methods: Questionnaire data were collected from 583 Chinese junior high school students, and the mediating effects in the model were estimated using the product-of-coefficients approach with bias-corrected Monte Carlo bootstrapping.

Results: (1) The mediating effect of constructive criticism was significant. (2) The mediating effect of destructive criticism was also significant. (3) The predictive effect of the constructive criticism path was significantly stronger than that of the destructive criticism path.

Conclusions: (1) When teachers respond to students' disruptive behavior in physical education classes with constructive criticism, they can enhance students' intention to improve their behavior by alleviating negative academic emotions and strengthening teacher-student relationship. (2) When teachers respond to students' disruptive behavior in physical education classes with destructive criticism, they can reduce students' intention to improve their behavior by increasing negative academic emotions and weakening teacher-student relationship. (3) Constructive and destructive criticism have significantly different effects on students' intention to improve disruptive classroom behavior, with constructive criticism demonstrating greater effectiveness in enhancing their intention to improve.