What is in the news today? How media-related affect shapes adolescents' stance towards the EU.

Introduction: Adolescence is regarded as a formative period for political development. One important developmental context is media. Negatively perceived political media content can foster populistic attitudes, which in turn decreases support of political institutions, such as the European Union (EU).

Assessing affect in adolescents with e-diaries: multilevel confirmatory factor analyses of different factor models.

In the last two decades, e-diary studies have gained increasing interest, with a dominant focus on mood and affect. Although requested in current guidelines, psychometric properties are rarely reported, and methodological investigations of factor structure, model fit, and the reliability of mood and affect assessment are limited. We used a seven-day e-diary dataset of 189 adolescent participants (12-17  years).

Daily automated feedback enhances self-regulated learning: a longitudinal randomized field experiment.

The goal of the present study was to investigate the effects of automatically generated, adaptive feedback on daily self-regulated learning (SRL) in an experimental field study. University students reported their application of SRL strategies in the morning and in the evening over the course of 36 days using electronic learning diaries. Students were randomly assigned to the experimental group with feedback (LDF,  = 98) or the control group without feedback (LD,  = 96).

Monocular eye patching modulates reorienting of covert attention in patients with unilateral middle cerebral artery stroke.

Unilateral brain lesions can lead to impaired contralesional attention and reduced ipsilesional and enhanced contralesional superior colliculus (SC) activity. We aimed to investigate whether modulation of SC activation via monocular eye patching can improve contralesional attention. Twenty left-hemispheric (LH) and 20 right-hemispheric (RH) patients with an acute or subacute middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke completed an endogenous version of the Posner cueing task twice, while the left or right eye was covered with an eye patch.

Affectionate touch and diurnal oxytocin levels: An ecological momentary assessment study.

Background: Affectionate touch, which is vital for mental and physical health, was restricted during the Covid-19 pandemic. This study investigated the association between momentary affectionate touch and subjective well-being, as well as salivary oxytocin and cortisol in everyday life during the pandemic.

Methods: In the first step, we measured anxiety and depression symptoms, loneliness and attitudes toward social touch in a large cross-sectional online survey (N = 1050).

Associations of SLC6A4 methylation with salivary cortisol, salivary alpha-amylase, and subjective stress in everyday life.

Dysregulations of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and sympatho-adrenal medullary (SAM) axis are associated with mental and somatic illness. However, there is lack of knowledge regarding the molecular mechanisms underlying these effects. Epigenetic states in the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) were shown to be associated with stress in various forms.

Changes in the Speed-Ability Relation Through Different Treatments of Rapid Guessing.

As researchers in the social sciences, we are often interested in studying not directly observable constructs through assessments and questionnaires. But even in a well-designed and well-implemented study, rapid-guessing behavior may occur. Under rapid-guessing behavior, a task is skimmed shortly but not read and engaged with in-depth.

Fluid Intelligence Is (Much) More than Working Memory Capacity: An Experimental Analysis.

Empirical evidence suggests a great positive association between measures of fluid intelligence and working memory capacity, which implied to some researchers that fluid intelligence is little more than working memory. Because this conclusion is mostly based on correlation analysis, a causal relationship between fluid intelligence and working memory has not yet been established. The aim of the present study was therefore to provide an experimental analysis of this relationship.

Digital studying in times of COVID-19: teacher- and student-related aspects of learning success in german higher education.

Unlabelled: In the wake of COVID-19, study conditions in Europe have changed dramatically. To limit contact between students and teachers, since March 2020 teaching has largely taken place digitally (remotely via digital means) and in private. Because the success of digital learning likely relies on many factors beyond good digital infrastructure conditions, this article focuses on which aspects, at both the teacher and the student levels, promote digital learning success.

Examining the role of attentional allocation in working memory precision with pupillometry in children and adults.

Working memory (WM) precision, or the fidelity with which items can be remembered, is an important aspect of WM capacity that increases over childhood. Why individuals are more or less precise from moment to moment and why WM becomes more stable with age are not yet fully understood. Here, we examined the role of attentional allocation in visual WM precision in children aged 8 to 13 years and young adults aged 18 to 27 years, as measured by fluctuations in pupil dilation during stimulus encoding and maintenance.

Seeing the Error in My "": A Quantified Degree of Belief Change Correlates with Children's Pupillary Surprise Responses Following Explicit Predictions.

Bayesian models allow us to investigate children's belief revision alongside physiological states, such as "surprise". Recent work finds that pupil dilation (or the "pupillary surprise response") following expectancy violations is predictive of belief revision. How can probabilistic models inform the interpretations of "surprise"? Shannon Information considers the likelihood of an observed event, given prior beliefs, and suggests stronger surprise occurs following unlikely events.

Lifespan effects of current age and of age at the time of remembered events on the affective tone of life narrative memories: Early adolescence and older age are more negative.

The affective tone of autobiographical memories may be influenced by age in two ways-by the current age of the remembering individual and by the age of the remembered self at the time of the remembered event. While aging has been associated with more positive autobiographical memories, young adulthood is remembered more positively than other parts of life. We tested whether these effects also show in life story memories and how they act jointly on affective tone; also, we wanted to explore their effects on remembered lifetimes other than early adulthood.

Formation of academic self-concept and intrinsic value within and across three domains: Extending the reciprocal internal/external frame of reference model.

Background: The reciprocal internal/external frame of reference (RI/E) combines two models of academic self-concept formation, namely the reciprocal effects model (REM) and the internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model. The REM assumes reciprocal relations between achievement and academic self-concept. The I/E model assumes contrast effects between achievement and self-concept across math and verbal domains.

Association between School Contexts and the Development of Subjective Well-Being during Adolescence: A Context-Sensitive Longitudinal Study of Life Satisfaction and School Satisfaction.

The transition to secondary school may negatively impact adolescents' psychosocial and subjective well-being development. However, how subjective well-being develops during secondary school and how school contextual factors, including aspects of ability grouping and achievement composition, are associated with the development of subjective well-being still require clarification. This study examined two measures of subjective well-being, life satisfaction and school satisfaction, to investigate the development of subjective well-being during secondary school.

Reliability of repeated exposure to the human elevated plus-maze in virtual reality: Behavioral, emotional, and autonomic responses.

Approach-avoidance conflicts are a hallmark of anxiety-related behaviors. A gold standard for assessing anxiety-related behaviors in rodents is the elevated plus-maze (EPM), which was recently translated to humans using immersive virtual reality. Repeated behavioral testing is particularly interesting for clinical and pharmacological research in humans but could be limited by habituation effects.

Individual differences in revising the life story-Personality and event characteristics influence change in the autobiographical meaning of life events.

Objective: Repeated autobiographical narratives have recently received increased attention as measures of the stability of narrative identity. We propose that one way to map change in life narratives is to rate the degree to which the autobiographical meaning of renarrated events changes. We aimed to test the influence of age, traits (openness, extraversion), and event characteristics on how much autobiographical meaning changes.

Disengaged response behavior when the response button is blocked: Evaluation of a micro-intervention.

In large-scale assessments, disengaged participants might rapidly guess on items or skip items, which can affect the score interpretation's validity. This study analyzes data from a linear computer-based assessment to evaluate a micro-intervention that blocked the possibility to respond for 2 s. The blocked response was implemented to prevent participants from accidental navigation and as a naive attempt to prevent rapid guesses and rapid omissions.

From Sensor Data to Educational Insights.

Technology is gradually becoming an integral part of learning at all levels of educational [...

Untangling connections between challenges in the adoption of learning analytics in higher education.

Potential benefits of learning analytics (LA) for improving students' performance, predicting students' success, and enhancing teaching and learning practice have increasingly been recognized in higher education. However, the adoption of LA in higher education institutions (HEIs) to date remains sporadic and predominantly small in scale due to several socio-technical challenges. To better understand why HEIs struggle to scale LA adoption, it is needed to untangle adoption challenges and their related factors.

Maternal self-efficacy development from pregnancy to 3 months after birth.

The present study uses a prospective longitudinal study design to investigate the development of maternal self-efficacy in the transition phase to parenthood, drawing on a large sample of socially and/or culturally disadvantaged families (N = 292). Parity, maternal education, migration, informal and formal social support are considered as potential predictors. Results indicate that previous birth experience, being born abroad, and higher levels of formal and informal social support during pregnancy jointly predict higher levels of maternal self-efficacy three months after birth.

Test Anxiety Does Not Predict Exam Performance When Knowledge Is Controlled For: Strong Evidence Against the Interference Hypothesis of Test Anxiety.

Do test-anxious students perform worse in exam situations than their knowledge would otherwise allow? We analyzed data from 309 medical students who prepared for a high-stakes exam using a digital learning platform. Using log files from the learning platform, we assessed students' level of knowledge throughout the exam-preparation phase and their average performance in mock exams that were completed shortly before the final exam. The results showed that test anxiety did not predict exam performance over and above students' knowledge level as assessed in the mock exams or during the exam-preparation phase.

Universal ingredients to parenting teens: parental warmth and autonomy support promote adolescent well-being in most families.

Even though each adolescent is unique, some ingredients for development may still be universal. According to Self-Determination Theory, every adolescent's well-being should benefit when parents provide warmth and autonomy. To rigorously test this idea that each family has similar mechanisms, we followed 159 Dutch parent-adolescent dyads (parent: M = 45.