Dressing up posture: The interactive effects of posture and clothing on competency judgements.

Individuals often receive judgements from others based on their clothing and their posture. While both of these factors have been found to influence judgements of competency independently, their relative importance in impression formation is yet to be investigated. We address this by examining interactive effects of posture and clothing on four competency measures: confidence, professionalism, approachability, and likeliness of a high salary.

A longitudinal investigation of the relationship between maternal mind-mindedness and theory of mind.

Data are presented from a longitudinal investigation examining the relationship between maternal mind-mindedness (MM) in infancy and socio-cognitive development in childhood. We revisited children (n = 18) who had taken part in a longitudinal study as infants. MM had been assessed at 10, 12, 16, and 20 months of age.

The gestural misinformation effect: skewing eyewitness testimony through gesture.

The susceptibility of eyewitnesses to verbal suggestion has been well documented, although little attention has been paid to the role of nonverbal communication in misinformation. Three experiments are reported; in each, participants watched footage of a crime scene before being questioned about what they had observed. In Experiments 1 and 2, an on-screen interviewer accompanied identically worded questions with gestures that either conveyed accurate information about the scene or conveyed false, misleading information.

Revealing children's implicit spelling representations.

Conceptualizing the underlying representations and cognitive mechanisms of children's spelling development is a key challenge for literacy researchers. Using the Representational Redescription model (Karmiloff-Smith), Critten, Pine and Steffler (2007) demonstrated that the acquisition of phonological and morphological knowledge may be underpinned by increasingly explicit levels of spelling representation. However, their proposal that implicit representations may underlie early 'visually based' spelling remains unresolved.

Giving cognition a helping hand: the effect of congruent gestures on object name retrieval.

The gestures that accompany speech are more than just arbitrary hand movements or communicative devices. They are simulated actions that can both prime and facilitate speech and cognition. This study measured participants' reaction times for naming degraded images of objects when simultaneously adopting a gesture that was either congruent with the target object, incongruent with it, and when not making any hand gesture.

To sign or not to sign? The impact of encouraging infants to gesture on infant language and maternal mind-mindedness.

Findings are presented from the first randomized control trial of the effects of encouraging symbolic gesture (or "baby sign") on infant language, following 40 infants from age 8 months to 20 months. Half of the mothers were trained to model a target set of gestures to their infants. Frequent measures were taken of infant language development and dyadic interactions were scrutinized to assess mind-mindedness.

Television alcohol advertising: do children really mean what they say?

Few studies have investigated children's responses to television alcohol advertising. Two separate studies evaluated the appeal of alcohol advertisements on children aged 7-10. An exploratory interview study (N = 17) was carried out to assess children's verbal responses to both alcohol and non-alcohol advertisements and to elicit vocabulary to be used in the second study.

Dynamic assessment of learning ability improves outcome prediction following acquired brain injury.

Primary Purpose: There is a need to improve the prediction of outcome following acquired brain injury. The previous focus has been on specifying the relative contribution of such variables as pre-morbid intellectual ability, socioeconomic status, severity of injury and performance on neuropsychological assessments. To date, findings remain discrepant and often inconclusive.

The relationship between television advertising, children's viewing and their requests to Father Christmas.

Objective: Children's letters to Father Christmas provide an opportunity to use naturalistic methods to investigate the influence of television advertising.

Methods: This study investigates the number of toy requests in the letters of children aged between 6 and 8 (n = 98) in relation to their television viewing and the frequency of product advertisements prior to Christmas. Seventy-six hours of children's television were sampled, containing over 2,500 advertisements for toys.

The effects of prohibiting gestures on children's lexical retrieval ability.

Two alternative accounts have been proposed to explain the role of gestures in thinking and speaking. The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) claims that gestures are important for the conceptual packaging of information before it is coded into a linguistic form for speech. The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (Rauscher, Krauss & Chen, 1996) sees gestures as functioning more at the level of speech production in helping the speaker to find the right words.

How visual images of chocolate affect the craving and guilt of female dieters.

This study asks whether exposure to images of chocolate induces cravings and guilty feelings in females. A further aim was to examine whether these effects are heightened in the case of dieters. The participants, 85 females, saw a series of enticing media images, either of chocolate or of non-food products.

More gestures than answers: children learning about balance.

This research extends the range of domains within which children's gestures are found to play an important role in learning. The study involves children learning about balance, and the authors locate children's gestures within a relevant model of cognitive development--the representational redescription model (A. Karmiloff-Smith, 1992).

Barbie or Betty? Preschool children's preference for branded products and evidence for gender-linked differences.

Children in the United Kingdom watch more television and are exposed to more advertising than children in any other European country. This article investigates the extent to which preschool children (aged 4-5 years) prefer brands advertised on television. Seventy-five children were interviewed and given a choice task in which they had to select the product, from eight pairs each comprising a branded and nonbranded product, that children of their own age and gender preferred.