Michael Fartoukh

Effects of Emotion on Writing Processes in Children

The aim of this study was to analyze the consequences of emotion during narrative writing in accordance with Hayes’s model. In this model, motivation and affect have an important role during the writing process. Moreover, according to the emotion-cognition literature, emotions are thought to create interferences in working memory, resulting in an increase of cognitive load. Following Cuisinier and colleagues, fourth and fifth graders were instructed to write autobiographical narratives with neutral emotional content, positive emotional content, and negative emotional content. The results did not indicate an effect of emotional instructions on the proportion of spelling errors, but they did reveal an effect on the text length. However, a simple regression analysis showed a correlation between working memory capacity and the number of spelling errors in the neutral condition only. The potential influence of cognitive load created by emotion on the writing process is discussed.

Developmental Abilities to Form Chunks in Immediate Memory and Its Non-Relationship to Span Development

Both adults and children –by the time they are 2–3 years old– have a general ability to recode information to increase memory efficiency. This paper aims to evaluate the ability of untrained children aged 6–10 years old to deploy such a recoding process in immediate memory. A large sample of 374 children were given a task of immediate serial report based on SIMON®, a classic memory game made of four colored buttons (red, green, yellow, blue) requiring players to reproduce a sequence of colors within which repetitions eventually occur. It was hypothesized that a primitive ability across all ages (since theoretically already available in toddlers) to detect redundancies allows the span to increase whenever information can be recoded on the fly. The chunkable condition prompted the formation of chunks based on the perceived structure of color repetition within to-be-recalled sequences of colors. Our result shows a similar linear improvement of memory span with age for both chunkable and non-chunkable conditions. The amount of information retained in immediate memory systematically increased for the groupable sequences across all age groups, independently of the average age-group span that was measured on sequences that contained fewer repetitions. This result shows that chunking gives young children an equal benefit as older children. We discuss the role of recoding in the expansion of capacity in immediate memory and the potential role of data compression in the formation of chunks in long-term memory.

Influence d’une induction émotionnelle sur le ressenti émotionnel et la production orthographique d’enfants de CM1 et de CM2

Resume Cette recherche vise a etudier l’effet de l’induction d’un etat emotionnel sur le ressenti emotionnel et les performances orthographiques d’enfants de CM1 et de CM2. En reference a l’etude de Cuisinier et de ses collaborateurs (2010) qui a montre un impact de l’emotion sur la cognition, en constatant l’augmentation du nombre d’erreurs orthographiques dans une dictee, l’hypothese selon laquelle la valence emotionnelle (neutre, triste ou gaie) d’un texte lu collectivement agirait de maniere indirecte sur les capacites orthographiques des enfants est testee. En creant une charge cognitive supplementaire, les emotions induites devraient avoir un effet negatif sur les ressources attentionnelles dediees au traitement orthographique. Des lors, la realisation d’une dictee issue du texte lu devrait s’accompagner d’une augmentation du nombre d’erreurs orthographiques. La procedure de la recherche de Cuisinier et al. (2010) a ete repliquee, d’une part, en y ajoutant une double lecture des textes inducteurs d’emotion et, d’autre part, en mesurant a trois reprises le ressenti emotionnel. Les resultats revelent un effet des emotions sur le ressenti et les performances orthographiques des enfants. De plus, l’exercice de la dictee provoque un ressenti emotionnel negatif chez les enfants. Les relations entre emotion et cognition et l’effet du contenu emotionnel sur les capacites orthographiques des enfants sont discutes.