How does social evaluation influence hot and cool inhibitory control in adolescence?

The aim of the present study is to examine whether in hot, i.e., affectively charged contexts, or cool, i.e., affectively neutral contexts, inhibitory control capacity increases or decreases under social evaluation in adolescents and adults. In two experiments, adolescents and young adults completed two Stroop-like tasks under either a social evaluation condition or a control condition. The social evaluation condition comprised the presence of a peer (Experiment 1) or an adult (Experiment 2) playing the role of an evaluator, while under the control condition, the task was performed alone. In the Cool Stroop task, participants had to refrain from reading color names to identify the ink color in which the words were printed. In the Hot Stroop task, participants had to determine the emotional expression conveyed by faces from the NimStim database while ignoring the emotion word displayed beneath. The results were similar in both experiments. In adolescents, social evaluation by a peer (Experiment 1) or by an adult (Experience 2) facilitated hot but not cool inhibitory control in adolescents. In adults, social evaluation had no effect on hot or cool inhibitory control. The present findings expand our understanding of the favorable influence of socioemotional context on hot inhibitory control during adolescence in healthy individuals.

Cognate identification methods: Impacts on the cognate advantage in adult and child Spanish-English bilinguals

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine whether four different cognate identification methods resulted in notably different classifications of cognate status for Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Third Edition (PPVT-III) test items and to investigate whether differences across criteria would impact findings of cognate effects in adult and preschool-aged Spanish-English bilingual speakers. Methodology: We compared four cognate identification methods: an objective criterion based on phonological overlap; two subjective criteria based on a translation elicitation task; and a hybrid criterion integrating objective and subjective standards. We then used each criterion to investigate cognate effects on the PPVT-III in 26 adult and 73 child Spanish-English bilinguals. Data and analysis: The test items identified as cognates by each criterion were compared (Experiment 1). Then, cognate advantage magnitudes, cognate accuracy rates, non-cognate accuracy rates, and number of individuals demonstrating the cognate advantage were investigated in both adult (Experiment 2) and child bilinguals (Experiment 3). Conclusions: Objective and subjective cognate identification methods were found to select notably different subsets of test items as cognates. Further, the methods led to differences in cognate effects, as well as in cognate and non-cognate accuracy rates, for both child and adult bilinguals. Originality: Although the cognate advantage has been widely studied in adult bilinguals, research on the cognate advantage in child bilinguals is limited and methods of identifying cognates are inconsistent across studies. The present study provides information about cognate effects in a young population and is the first comparison of objective and subjective approaches to cognate identification. Implications: This study extends previous work on cognate word processing in both child and adult bilinguals. Further, results offer an evaluation of methodologies that are critical for investigating the cognate advantage. This both facilitates interpretation of previous findings and can be used to guide methodological decisions in future research.