The term Alexithymia identifies a multidimensional cognitive and affective condition, characterized by difficulty to recognize and distinguish feelings from bodily sensations of emotional arousal, difficulty to describe emotions, poor fantasies and preoccupation with external events [1]. Alexithymia was originally described as a personality trait in psychosomatic patients with poor response to ...

We report the results of a pilot study that compared the computer self-efficacy construct with metacognition. While self-efficacy is primarily affective and refers to one’s beliefs about one’s ability to perform a task, metacognition is primarily cognitive and refers to one’s thoughts about one’s ability to perform a task. Given their similarity, both have been used as surrogate measures of kno...

IntroductIon The social, relational, and affective dynamics are receiving more and more attention in the study of learning processes, as cognitive, affective, and emotional dimensions of learning seem to be closely related. This kind of co-origination, borne out in the context of neurosciences, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and education, has also been recognized in the field o...

Pretend play has a central role for children's development and psychological well-being. However, there is a paucity of standardized and valid measures specifically devoted to assess the core domains involved in play activities in preschool and primary school children. The Affect in Play Scale-Preschool (4-5 years) and the Affect in Play Scale-Preschool Extended Version (6-10 years) are semi-st...

Abstract Comprehensibility, or ease of understanding, has emerged as an important construct in second language (L2) speech research. Many studies have examined the linguistic features that underlie this construct, but there been limited work on behavioral and affective predictors. The goal study was therefore to examine extent which anxiety collaborativeness predict interlocutors’ perception on...

Cognitive control has been described and referred to over the years by different terminology including “controlled processing”, “central executive” and “attentional bias”. We present behavioral and neuroimaging experimental investigations of this psychological construct reflecting topdown control in overriding inappropriate thoughts, actions, and emotions. The ability to override competing acti...

In one of the Father Brown short-stories, G.K. Chesterton described the (fictitious) French detective Aristide Valentin by writing that ‘‘(h)e was not ‘a thinking machine’; for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it cannot think.’’ Although this aphorism dates from 1911, long before the notion of a thinking machine became popular, i...

This article critically reviews the literature that examines the anxiety phenomenon in the field of second/foreign language learning. A major theme that runs through this review is how anxiety comes into play in second/foreign language learning, and whether it is a central construct or only an add-on element that is negligible. Anxiety is defined and described in how it is measured and relates ...

Several literatures converge on the idea that approach and avoidance/withdrawal behaviors are managed by two partially distinct self-regulatory system. The functions of these systems also appear to be embodied in discrepancyreducing and -enlarging feedback loops, respectively. This article describes how the feedback construct has been used to address these two classes of action and the affectiv...

Survival rates are increasing for children born extremely preterm, yet despite the majority of these children having IQ scores within the average range, 50-70% of these children have later school difficulties. This paper reviews factors associated with academic difficulties in these children, emphasizing the contributions of executive functions (EF) and self-regulation. The roles of EF are exam...