York University

About: York University is a education organization based out in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 18899 authors who have published 43357 publications receiving 1568560 citations.

Negative facial expression captures attention and disrupts performance.

Abstract: In two experiments, participants counted features of schematic faces with positive, negative, or neutral emotional expressions. In Experiment 1 it was found that counting features took longer when they were embedded in negative as opposed to positive faces. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 and also demonstrated that more time was required to count features of negative relative to neutral faces. However, in both experiments, when the faces were inverted to reduce holistic face perception, no differences between neutral, positive, and negative faces were observed, even though the feature information in the inverted faces was the same as in the upright faces. We suggest that, relative to neutral and positive faces, negative faces are particularly effective at capturing attention to the global face level and thereby make it difficult to count the local features of faces.

Coping with job stress and burnout in the human services

Abstract: A mail survey of 141 human service workers investigated the effects of coping on psychological strain and "burnout" produced by job stress. The survey assessed job stressors and coping strategies with open-ended questions and measured strain using closed-ended alienation, satisfaction, and symptom scales. Because previous research suggested that individual coping responses do not alleviate strain produced by job stress, the survey elicited information on group coping (social support) and on coping strategies initiated by agencies. Job stress was associated with high levels of strain, and group coping with low levels, but individual responses had little effect. Although workers identified many strategies that agencies could use to reduce stress and strain, actual use of such strategies was slight. Because men and women worked in the same jobs, no sex differences in individual coping were predicted and none were found; women, however, reported more social support than men. There was no evidence for moderating (interaction) effects of stress and coping on strain.

Bilingualism and the Development of Executive Function: The Role of Attention

Abstract: In this article, I review research examining the effect of bilingualism on children's cognitive development and in particular, executive function. I describe studies reporting bilingual advantages in various tasks to identify the process or component of executive function that might be responsible for this bilingual advantage, discussing sev- eral possibilities, including inhibitory control. Finally, I propose attention is a fundamental process that initiates developmental differences in bilingual children from as early as infancy. KEYWORDS—bilingualism; cognitive development; executive function; attention; infancy

A Meta-Analysis of Positive and Negative Age Stereotype Priming Effects on Behavior Among Older Adults

Abstract: Objective. Evidence has shown that age stereotypes influence several behavioral outcomes in later life via stereotype valence–outcome assimilation; however, a direct comparison of positive versus negative age stereotyping effects has not yet been made. Methods. PsycINFO and Pubmed were used to generate a list of articles (n = 137), of which seven were applicable. From these articles, means, standard errors (SEs), and other relevant data were extracted for 52 dependent measures: 27 involved negative age primes and 25 involved positive age primes. Independent samples analysis of variance tests were used to explore the influence of prime valence and awareness on behavior compared with a neutral referent. Results. A significant main effect for prime valence was found such that negative age priming elicited a greater effect on behavior than did positive age priming (F(1,48) = 4.32, p = .04). In fact, the effects from negative age priming were almost three times larger than those of positive priming when compared with a neutral baseline. This effect was not influ enced by prime awareness, discipline of study, study design, or research group. Discussion. Findings show that negative age stereotyping has a much stronger influence on important behavioral outcomes among older adults than does positive age stereotyping.