Cross-situational learning is a mechanism for learning the meaning of words across multiple exposures, despite exposure-by-exposure uncertainty as to the word’s true meaning. We present experimental evidence showing that humans learn words effectively using cross-situational learning, even at high levels of referential uncertainty. Both overall success rates and the time taken to learn words ar...

The present study examined how support providers' empathic dispositions (dispositional perspective taking, empathic concern, and personal distress) as well as their situational empathic reactions (interaction-based perspective taking, empathic concern, and personal distress) relate to the provision of spousal support during observed support interactions. Forty-five committed couples provided qu...

This study found a significant positive relationship between emotional intelligence (MSCEIT) and deep acting (making an effort to feel emotions that are required in interpersonal interactions) in a sample of service workers. Surface acting (faking displayed emotions and hiding personal feelings) was positively associated with emotional awareness. Emotional intelligence did not add to the predic...

BACKGROUND Failure to convey time-critical information to team members during surgery diminishes members' perception of the dynamic information relevant to their task, and compromises shared situational awareness. This research reports the dialog around clinical decisions made by team members in the time-pressured and high-risk context of surgery, and the impact of these communications on share...

Objectives: To examine the influence of perceptions of the motivational climate, self-efficacy, and perceived importance on athletes’ claimed situational self-handicaps in a competitive sport setting. Perceptions of a task involving climate and self-efficacy were expected to be negatively related and perceptions of an ego-involving climate to be positively related to situational self-handicappi...

A new method for assessing situations is employed to examine the association between situational similarity, personality, and behavioral consistency across ecologically representative contexts. On 4 occasions across 4 weeks, 202 undergraduate participants (105 women, 97 men) wrote descriptions of a situation they had experienced the previous day. In addition, they rated its psychological featur...

This article proposes and tests a social-cognitive framework for examining the joint influence of situational factors and the centrality of moral identity on moral intentions and behaviors. The authors hypothesized that if a situational factor increases the current accessibility of moral identity within the working self-concept, then it strengthens the motivation to act morally. In contrast, if...

Researchers have suggested that organizational cynicism is increasing among employees. Although cynicism has been examined from a situational perspective, little work has examined the dispositional roots of this attitude. In this paper we explore the dispositional variables that predict organizational cynicism and suggest that future research explore the development of cynical attitudes from bo...

This paper investigates penalty calls in the National Hockey League (NHL). Our study shows that there are various situational effects that are associated with the next penalty call. These situational effects are related to the accumulated penalty calls, the goal differential, the stage of the match and the relative strengths of the two teams. We also investigate individual referee effects acros...

When looking for the referents of novel nouns, adults and young children are sensitive to cross-situational statistics (Yu and Smith, 2007; Smith and Yu, 2008). In addition, the linguistic context that a word appears in has been shown to act as a powerful attention mechanism for guiding sentence processing and word learning (Landau and Gleitman, 1985; Altmann and Kamide, 1999; Kako and Trueswel...