Georgia Papantoniou

Older adults' decoding of emotions: age-related differences in interpreting dynamic emotional displays and the well-preserved ability to recognize happiness

Although the ability to recognize emotions through bodily and facial muscular movements is vital to everyday life, numerous studies have found that older adults are less adept at identifying emotions than younger adults. The message gleaned from research has been one of greater decline in abilities to recognize specific negative emotions than positive ones. At the same time, these results raise methodological issues with regard to different modalities in which emotion decoding is measured. The main aim of the present study is to identify the pattern of age differences in the ability to decode basic emotions from naturalistic visual emotional displays.

Affect and Cognitive Interference: An Examination of Their Effect on Self-Regulated Learning

The present study examined the relationships among affect, self-regulated learning (SRL) strategy use, and course attainment in the didactics of mathematics (teaching mathematics) subject matter domain. The sample consisted of 180 undergraduate students attending a didactics of mathematics course (mean age = 21.1 years) at the School of Early Childhood Education. The participants were asked to respond to the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) and the Cognitive Interference Questionnaire (CIQ). They also completed the Learning Strategies Scales of the MSLQ. Examination grades were used as the measure of course attainment. Pearson correlations and path analysis revealed that negative affect was positively related to cognitive interference, and positive affect influenced positively the use of almost all of the SRL strategies. Elaboration was the only SRL strategy found to predict the didactics of mathematics course attainment. Finally, cognitive interference was found to negatively predict course attainment.

Mindfulness and action control in young, middle-aged, and old adults: an examination of their relationship to attentional bias towards emotional information

The aim of the study was to investigate the relationships of the self-regulatory dispositions of mindfulness and action control with attentional bias towards emotional information in young, middle-aged, and old adults. The participants (N = 185) were 69 young adults (M = 24.7 years; SD = 5.0), 67 middle-aged adults (M = 47.3 years; SD = 7.6), and 49 old adults (M = 73.4 years; SD = 5.6) of both genders. They were divided into three educational levels (low, middle, high) according to the years of education. An emotional color-word interference test (EC-WIT) was designed by the authors to investigate attentional bias towards (a) positively toned and (b) negatively toned information, and it was used along with self-report measures of dispositional mindfulness and action-state orientation. The results indicated that age was related to slower reaction times (RTs) for the two conditions of the EC-WIT, while the higher the level of education the faster the RTs. Decision-related action orientation was associated with a decreasing level of negativity bias in early attention orienting only in young adults. Mindfulness was associated with a decreasing level of attentional bias towards emotional information, either positive or negative, only in middle-aged adults.

The combined effect of sleep and time of day on emotion decoding from dynamic visual cues in older adults

It is well known that night sleep is a decisive factor for the effective functioning of the human body and mind. In addition to the role of sleep, older adults report that they are “morning types” and that their cognitive and emotional abilities seem to be at a higher level in the morning hours. In this vein, this study is aimed at examining the effect of sleep combined with the “time of day” condition on a specific ability that is crucial for interpersonal communication, namely, emotion recognition, in older adults. Specifically, the study compared older adults’ performance in decoding emotions from ecologically valid, dynamic visual cues, in two conditions: “early in the morning and after night sleep”, and “in the afternoon and after many hours since night sleep”. An emotion recognition task was administered twice to 37 community-dwelling older adults. The results showed a statistically significant higher performance in the morning in decoding all emotions presented, compared to the afternoon condition. Pleasant surprise, sadness, and anxiety were revealed as the most difficult emotions to be recognized in the afternoon condition.

Dispositional Hope and Action-State Orientation: Their Role in Self-Regulated Learning

This chapter presents a study that examined the relations of the cognitive facets of hope (i.e., pathways thought and agency thinking) with action control and strategy use in self-regulated learning (SRL). Specifically, it was hypothesized that the effects of hope on strategy use (i.e., cognitive, metacognitive, and resource management) and course attainment would be independent from the effects of volitional person characteristics such as action orientation that involves disengagement, initiative, and persistence. A total of 275 undergraduate students participated in the study. The Adult Dispositional Hope Scale (ADHS), the Action Control Scale (ACS-90), and the Learning Strategies Scales of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) were used. Course grades were used as measure of course attainment. The results from path analysis suggest that the two components of dispositional hope predicted the use of almost all of the learning strategies. Disengagement and initiative were found to mainly predict time and study environment management and effort regulation. Persistence and pathways thought, in their turn, made an independent contribution to the variance of course attainment, whereas metacognitive and time and study environment management strategies mediated the effects of disengagement, initiative, and agency thinking. In conclusion, the study showed that trait-like person characteristics, which are central to positive psychology, impact university students’ SRL strategy use and course attainment.

Inefficient understanding of non-factive mental verbs with social aspect in adults: comparison to cognitive factive verb processing

Introduction Mental verbs denote inner mental states and are an important link between language and Theory of Mind ability conceptualized as mental state understanding. Non-factive mental verbs denote an obligation or intention and constitute a discrete class of mental verbs which are characterized by their social aspect. This study aimed to examine adults’ ability to understand non-factive mental verbs with the social aspect as compared to cognitive factive mental verbs which denote a true event. Methods A total of 94 participants, aged 18–95 years, were examined using two tasks measuring non-factive and factive verb processing, respectively, and a working memory test. Results The results indicated that non-factive verbs process is at a significantly lower level than those of cognitive factives. Conclusion The inspection of the way adapted to process the non-factive verbs denoting obligation or intention, as well as the confirmation of a unifactorial structure of the task developed to measure non-factives’ processing, showed that adults have a common pattern of non-factive mental verb understanding, which is based on heuristic ways of thinking and is not affected by working memory capacity and age.

Inhibitory Control, Task/Rule Switching, and Cognitive Planning in Vascular Dementia: Are There Any Differences From Vascular Aging?

Recent studies have shown that patients diagnosed with Vascular Dementia (VaD) exhibit deficits in executive functions. According to “vascular hypothesis of cognitive aging,” community-dwelling older adults having risk factors for vascular disease development (RVD) may suffer from cognitive decline of the same type. The aim of the study was to assess the level of specific executive functions (EF) that have been revealed as most affected by vascular abnormalities, in older adults with incipient VaD and RVD. Subsequently specific ways of EF measuring could be suggested for more accurate diagnosis of early stage VaD. The study compared three adult groups (N = 60): (a) patients diagnosed with incipient VaD, according to DSM-5 criteria (n = 20); (b) community-dwelling older adults presenting cardiovascular risk factors (RVD; n = 20); (c) healthy young adult controls (n = 20). Three types of executive functions were examined: inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility as rule/task switching, and planning. The following D-KEFS subtests were administered for their evaluation: The ‘Color-Word Interference Test,’ the ‘Verbal Fluency Test,’ and the ‘Tower Test.’ Mixed-measures ANOVA, MANOVA, and one-way ANOVA as well as Scheffe post hoc test were applied to the data of the scores in each condition of each test. The results showed that VaD patients had significantly lower performance in test conditions requiring switching and planning, compared to RVD group and young controls. The specific deficits of VaD patients, compared to older adults presenting RVD according to multiple-group path analyses were: more uncorrected errors in inhibition, the use of semantic knowledge primarily instead of switching ability to switch between semantic categories, as well as a lower level of movement precision in planning.

Brain plasticity in older adults: Could it be better enhanced by cognitive training via an adaptation of the virtual reality platform FitForAll or via a commercial video game?

The aim of the study was to examine the effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) and Video Games (VG) as cognitive training tools in community dwelling older adults. A total of 19 older adults aged from 65 to 79 years comprised the sample of the study. According to the intervention program they were submitted to, participants were separated into two groups. The first one was trained using an adaptation of virtual reality platform (FitForAll), developed to train specific cognitive functions (n = 10). Contrary to the above the second group was trained in a go-kart-style video game (Super Mario Kart) on the Wii console (n = 9). There wasn’t significant difference between the two groups in terms of age, gender and educational level. In both groups the intervention consisted of 18 sessions of about 40’ each, over a six-week period (3 times per week). Specific cognitive functions and state affect were measured before and immediately after training, as well as one month after the intervention. The findings revealed participants’ improved performance in executive functions, after being trained in both intervention programs. However, it has been observed that the participants trained using VG had been better at maintaining their improved performance even after the end of the intervention program. VG also seemed to enhance in the long term participants’ positive affect.