This study focused on the relationship between personal perceptual memory and story comprehension. In two experiments, participants read story texts. Half the participants were asked to retrieve highly vivid perceptual memories (Exp. 1) or autobiographical memories as highly perceptual and personal memories (Exp. 2) before reading a story, and the other half were asked to retrieve less vivid perceptual memories, as a control task, before reading. Results showed that participants read more slowly under the highly perceptual memory retrieval condition only when their experiences were relatively similar to the experiences depicted in the story. Additionally, similarity between story content and participants’ experiences was positively correlated with enjoyment of the story in both experiments. We interpreted the results as indicating that individuals are involved in emotional processes when they are able to integrate their own perceptual memories into the story content. Personal perceptual memory also appeared to contribute to story comprehension.

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This study examined motivational beliefs and self-regulated learning strategies and their association with academic achievement. In addition, the changes in students’ perceptions of motivation and self-regulation over time were taken into account by considering students’ perceptions at weeks 2 and 10 of the 14-week academic semester. The findings of the research found strong associations between the self-regulated learning strategies and motivational beliefs at both the pre- and post stages of measurement. Second, strong associations were found between the post measures of self-efficacy and intrinsic value and grade average formulated at the end of the academic semester. Moreover, students’ self-efficacy and intrinsic value scores had strong associations with grade average when measured prior to the final examination period in week 10. Consequently, there is an intriguing interaction between engagement in self-regulated learning strategies at the beginning and end of the semester in terms of driving the corresponding measures of motivational beliefs and their direct affect on academic achievement. Moreover, learning and educational strategies were considered to ameliorate the problems related to sustaining engagement in self-regulated learning strategies over the semester period which affect motivational beliefs and academic achievement.

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Previous research has shown that being religious is beneficial in various ways. Though religion’s benefits are well-studied, few investigations have provided quantitative and explorative perspectives on its effects. Most studies concern religion’s influence on specific psychological aspects of the human mind. This study investigated whether people’s language use reflects the effects of religious training. We analyzed writing samples from 12 new believers in the Catholic Church via a language analysis program and conducted relevant psychological tests. The results showed language patterns changed significantly with religious training, even though these changes did not show any correlations with the psychological scales. These results indicate that religiosity can be reflected in certain language behaviors. Moreover, the results suggest language usage can be a reliable and sensitive index for measuring religiosity.

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The current study investigated the differential attentive, emotional and behavioral responses to facial expressions in toddlers with autism (N = 37) and healthy controls (N = 40) using a task capturing visual attention, emotional response and joint attention behavior to facial expression. The findings showed that autistic children’s performances were significantly worse than healthy children. These preliminary findings suggest that children with autism not only show less visual attention to facial expression than healthy children but also have impairments in social attention. A fine-grained analysis showed that children with autism, but not healthy children, showed abnormal emotional responses to the negative facial expressions. The results are discussed in terms of cognitive deficits in facial expression in young children of autism.

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The present study examined the influence of differential experience with own- and other-age faces on adults’ facial age judgment abilities. In Experiment 1, Chinese participants were asked to make age estimates (i.e., in years) for faces within three Asian stimulus age groups: children, young adults, and middle-age adults. Participants showed the greatest differentiation in their age estimates for own-age young adult stimulus faces relative to the child and middle-age adult stimulus facial age groups. Thus, participants’ age estimates for own-age young adult faces appear to be more refined relative to their age estimates for other-age faces. In Experiment 2, the same pattern of results was replicated with a group of Japanese participants. The role of differential experience with own- and other-age individuals in shaping facial age perception is discussed.

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