OBJECTIVE Chronic stress has well-documented negative effects on hippocampal structure and function, and has been suggested to contribute to age-related declines. In contrast, there is evidence that exercise has beneficial effects in older adults. The current investigation examined effects of lifetime stress on hippocampal volume and memory, the moderating role of stress on age effects, and the...

Detecting and modeling the engagement of a child during an interaction offers meaningful insights into socio-emotional and cognitive state assessment. Previous work has shown that the engagement level of a child during an interaction with a psychologist can be captured from their vocal behavior. In particular global statistical measures on vocal features computed over an entire interaction were...

The major goal of the present study was to examine the reciprocal and longitudinal associations between coparenting conflict and father engagement with children during the early childhood years. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey--Birth Cohort (N = 3600), the findings supported the hypothesis that father engagement at 9 months has a significant effect on coparenting conflic...

Child engagement is defined as the interaction of a child with his/her environment in a contextually appropriate manner. Engagement behavior in children is linked to socio-emotional and cognitive state assessment with enhanced engagement identified with improved skills. A vast majority of studies however rely solely, and often implicitly, on subjective perceptual measures of engagement. Access ...

Children’s preparedness for school is an important predictor of their eventual academic attainment, health, and personal success well into adulthood. Although kindergarten knowledge of numbers and vocabulary represent robust indicators of children’s readiness to learn at school entry, theory and research suggest that selfdirected learning skills are also important in meeting the challenges of t...

This study examined the effects of peer groups on changes in academic engagement in 11- to 13-year-old children. From the entire cohort of 366 sixth graders in a town, 87% participated at the beginning and end of the school year. Peer groups were assessed using socio-cognitive mapping; as an indicator of motivation, teachers reported on students' classroom engagement. Peer groups were homogeneo...

PURPOSE To study the effect of depression (high levels of depressive symptoms) on social engagement. DESIGN AND METHODS In 65 nursing homes in the Netherlands, 562 newly admitted residents were assessed at admission. Social engagement was measured with the MDS Index of Social Engagement. A multivariate logistic regression model was used to study the effect of depression, measured according to...

Video games are not just an important cultural artifact of youth culture but have considerable cognitive worth. Centered within an information processing theory and mediating processes’ framework, the empirical qualitative study investigated, via stimulated recall methods, the thinking skills and strategies of five teenagers while playing an action-adventure video game. Sixteen types and 600 in...

As they relate to user-generated content on the internet, civic engagement and psychological empowerment have received significant interest in recent years. While past studies have examined online civic participation and political empowerment, the way in which civic engagement offline and content generation online are related to psychological empowerment has not been thoroughly explored. The pu...

This longitudinal study adopts a multidimensional perspective to examine the relationships between middle school students’ perceptions of the school environment (structure support, provision of choice, teaching for relevance, teacher and peer emotional support), achievement motivation (academic selfconcept and subjective task value), and school engagement (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive e...