Mary Lamon

Inducing emotion by unilateral contraction of facial muscles: A new look at hemispheric specialization and the experience of emotion

Subjects who maintained voluntary contractions of the left facial muscles experienced sadness. Right facial contractions resulted in a more positive but difficult to characterize experience. These contractions had similar effects on the affective tone of stories told about an ambiguous picture. These findings indicate that emotions can be aroused by unilateral muscle contractions without intervening cognitions. They provide a new methodology for studying the roles of the cerebral hemispheres in emotional experience. Finally, they support the conclusion that the right hemisphere is involved with negative emotional experiences and indicate that the left hemisphere is involved with experiences that are more positive but not readily characterized.

Conceptual transfer insimple insight problems

Three experiments explored the conditions under which information presented in the first part of an experiment facilitates the subsequent solving of simple insight problems. We argue that previous unsuccessful attempts to obtain such facilitation are attributable to the experimenters’ failure to present this information in a form that induces the conceptual operations needed to solve the problem. Substantial facilitation is obtained if the information is presented in a form that induces a few seconds of puzzlement and then a clue is presented that leads to an appropriate reconception; if identical information is presented without such a period of puzzlement and reconception, no facilitation is observed. The results demonstrate that conceptual processing operations, not merely informational content, must be relevant if conceptual transfer is to occur. One possible mechanism involved in such transfer is the indexing of concepts such that they contain pointers to conceptually anomalous episodes

Inducing Emotion by Unilateral Contraction of Hand Muscles

Following 4 unilateral contractions of hand muscles, subjects told stories about pictures from the T.A.T. A propositional analysis of the stories showed that the emotional tone of stories told following left hand contractions were more negative than those told after right hand contractions. These results are comparable to those reported following unilateral facial contractions and are consistent with the arousal of the emotional properties of the hemisphere contralateral to the contractions. When the stories were compared to ones told in a control, no contraction condition, it was found that the differences between the left and right contractions were attributable to the effects of either one or the other depending on the control condition responses to the pictures. The results therefore provide evidence for both left and right hemisphere involvement in emotion.

Emerging E‐Trends and Models in Teacher Education and Professional Development

With the advent of the knowledge era, teacher education needs to prepare teachers to face the changing technological contexts and to model pedagogies and tools for better forms of learning. Despite much enthusiasm about the roles of technology in education, its role in transforming teacher learning, in ways aligned with advances in the learning sciences and contemporary socio‐cultural perspectives, few changes have occurred. While many teacher educators are turning away from technology after early attempts met with mitigated success, some are pushing the boundaries of teacher education and professional activity systems. This paper identifies and analyzes emerging trends and models in e‐learning for teacher education and professional development from the developing research base; both international trends and current developments in the Asia‐Pacific region are described. We focus on progressively more sophisticated approaches including: (1) renewal of delivery of information with online repositories and courses; (2) rise of web‐supported classrooms; (3) participation in learning networks and communities; and (4) knowledge creation in knowledge‐building communities. We propose that technological innovations accompany social and pedagogical changes, and for the betterment of education, teachers need to play key roles as owners and designers of their learning. The potentials and challenges regarding these emerging trends in e‐learning and their implications for teacher learning are examined.

The replacement effect: repeating some items while replacing others.

We performed three experiments on recognition learning that tested for the existence of a replacement effect (i.e., the benefit accruing to nonrecognized items, or targets, when recognized items are replaced in the next study trial). A reverse Rock substitution procedure was used, and the replacement effect occurred in all three experiments. The results were interpreted in terms of a distributed memory model, the matched-filter model of Anderson (1973), but several modifications were necessary. The original version cannot learn, and a closed-loop modification did not show the repetition effect that was clearly evident in the data. The most satisfactory version was one based on probabilistic encoding of features in the item vectors, and it seemed capable of explaining most aspects of the data.

Unilateral Facial Contractions Produce Mood Effects on Social Cognitive Judgements

This study demonstrates that left and right unilateral facial contractions have similar effects on the expression of ethnic stereotypes as do negative and positive moods induced by more conventional means. Subjects who con tracted the left side of their face (negative mood inducer) were more likely to express negative stereotypes of ethnic groups than were subjects who contracted the right side of their face (positive mood inducer). This parallels previous findings obtained using two standard mood inductions: the Veltens mood induction procedure; and a musical mood induction procedure. Given that unilateral facial contractions manipulate mood without cognitive involvement, this mood induction may have advantages over previously used procedures, the effects of which are subject to cognitive mediation explanations. In addition, these results suggest that, at least for the expression of ethnic stereotypes, moods influence on cognition does not depend on a cognitive component of mood induction.

Partnerships for Knowledge Building: An Emerging Model

Knowledge Building is approached in this study from an organizational perspective, with a focus on the nature of school-university-government partnerships to support research-based educational innovation. The paper starts with an overview of what is known about effective partnerships and elaborates a conceptual framework for Knowledge Building partnerships based on a review of literature and two case studies of school-university-government partnerships. In one case, a Ministry of Education wanted to bring more vitality into schools of small remote villages, and in the other case another Ministry of Education wanted to renew its school-based international cooperation profile. Emerging from this work is a three-component model for going to scale with Knowledge Building partnerships: Knowledge Building as a shared vision; symmetric knowledge advancement; and multi-level, research-based innovation. Characteristics of, and conditions for, effective partnerships for Knowledge Building are elaborated, and an emerging model is developed to help communities establish effective partnerships and contribute to this evolving model.

Knowledge Building/Knowledge Forum ® : The Transformation of Classroom Discourse

The goal of our chapter is to contribute to a better understanding of the new kind of learning: the place of computers, knowledge building, and progressive inquiry. We begin with a discussion of typical classroom discourse: IRE/F. Next, we examined how students and teachers used knowledge-building principles (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003) supported by Knowledge Forum (Scardamalia, 2002) in understanding the problems of climate change. At a micro level of analysis, our research focused on the kinds of questions students asked and their subsequent discourse/explanation. We used grids developed by Hmelo–Silver and Barrows (2008) and a classification system developed by Hakkarainen (2003). Results showed a level of explanation in student discourse that contrasted sharply with the IRE classroom discourse structure (teacher initiated question—student response—teacher evaluation; see Cazden, 1988) and with the IRF structure (initiation—response—feedback; see Sinclair, Mc, & Coulthard, 1975; Wells, 1993). The emerging discourse pattern identified in this chapter is called IRFI (initiation—response—feedback/further inquiry).