Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a topic of intense policy interest. A main motivation is the health of school children, and, in particular, the rising childhood obesity rate. Medical and nutrition literature has long argued that a healthy diet can have a second important impact: improved cognitive function. In this paper, we test whether offering healthier lunches af...

We investigated the role of the amygdala in mental state inference in a sample of adults and in a sample of children aged 4 and 6 years. This period in early childhood represents a time when mentalizing abilities undergo dramatic changes. Both children and adults inferred mental states from pictures of others' eyes, and children also inferred the mental states of others from stories (e.g., a fa...

Theories about reading have moved away from viewing the reader as a passive recipient of textual input, as a tabula rasa upon which the author sketches his or her message. Under this view, reading comprehension is easily explained by the success of the textual input entering and staying intact within the mind of the reader. Adopting this view, some character educators can assert that reading mo...

In two online studies, we test whether spontaneous self-affirmation (measured by the Spontaneous Self-Affirmation Measure, SSAM) predicts better mental health and coping role that self-esteem dispositional optimism play in these relationships. Study 1 (N = 110) was cross-sectional. study 2 192) collected measures one month post-baseline. Consistent with pre-registered hypotheses, SSAM predicted...