A performance-based assessment of the structure and complexity of emotional awareness was developed, the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale for Children (LEAS-C). A pilot study (N=6, ages 9-12, M(age) =10.2 years) was conducted to construct, trial, and select scenarios suitable for the scale. A larger validity study (N=51, ages 10-11, M(age) =10.3 years) examined the relationship between the L...

The authors argue against a purely behavioral definition of praise as verbal reinforcement in favor of the view that praise may serve to undermine, enhance, or have no effect on children's intrinsic motivation, depending on a set of conceptual variables. Provided that praise is perceived as sincere, it is particularly beneficial to motivation when it encourages performance attributions to contr...

The behavioral processes through which people react appropriately to verbal descriptions remain poorly understood. I argue here that these processes are Pavlovian. Common objections to a Pavlovian account of symbolic behavior evidence a lack of familiarity with the relevant data or misunderstandings of operant theory. Although much remains to be done to explore the relation between verbal under...

Two experiments examine the manner in which participants vary in how they solve an orientation task. Verbal reports from a pilot study revealed that some participants used a strategy based on mental imagery, while others used verbal descriptions to do the task. The two experiments presented here involved training participants to perform the orientation task using one of these strategies. Partic...

Route directions are instructions, primarily verbal, that explain how to get from one place to another. The current study examines several methods for assessing the quality of verbal route directions by characterizing them in terms of the number of elements (such as landmarks, segments or turns) and by subjective ratings of their goodness. Route directions for routes which were both familiar an...

Sociocognitive approaches suggest that the ability to understand emotions should be well maintained in adult aging. However, neuropsychological evidence suggests potential impairments in processing emotions in older adults. In the current study, 30 young adults (aged 20-40 years) and 30 older adults (aged 60-80 years) were tested on a range of emotional ability measures. There were no age effec...

—M. TED BOREN AND JUDITH RAMEY, ASSOCIATE MEMBER, IEEE Abstract—Thinking-aloud protocols may be the most widely used method in usability testing, but the descriptions of this practice in the usability literature and the work habits of practitioners do not conform to the theoretical basis most often cited for it: Ericsson and Simon’s seminal work PROTOCOL ANALYSIS: VERBAL REPORTS AS DATA [1]. Af...

Experts have remarkable capability of locating, identifying and categorizing objects in their domain-specific images. Eliciting experts’ visual strategies will benefit image understanding by transferring human domain knowledge into image-based computational procedures. In this paper, an experiment conducted to collect both eye movement and verbal description data from three groups of subjects w...

Two experiments examine how participants vary in their approach to solving an orientation task. Verbal reports from untrained participants in a pilot study revealed that some participants used a strategy based on mental imagery, while others used verbal descriptions to do the task. The two experiments presented here involved training participants to perform the orientation task using one of the...