Nathalie Mella

Errors are central to learning, yet little is known about how students’ sensitivity to errors relates to their motivation and perceived academic competence over time. The present study examined the directionality of links among error sensitivity, self-perceived academic ability, and achievement goals in a nationwide cohort of 10,163 French vocational education students (59% female) assessed over three waves spanning two academic years. Traditional cross-lagged panel models (CLPMs) and random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs) were estimated separately for each of the 4 goals (mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance). CLPMs suggested reciprocal relations between error sensitivity and achievement goals. However, RI-CLPMs showed that error sensitivity, self-perceived academic ability, and all four achievement goals were strongly and positively associated only at the between-person level. At the within-person level, higher prior error sensitivity and self-perceived ability predicted modest subsequent increases in mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, and performance-approach goals, whereas these goals did not predict subsequent changes in error sensitivity or perceived ability. Performance-avoidance was predicted by neither error sensitivity nor perceived ability but predicted a small subsequent decrease in error sensitivity. Overall, error sensitivity emerged less as an outcome of achievement goals than as a potential precursor of subsequent goal striving. The distinct performance-avoidance pattern suggests that lower error sensitivity may not always indicate adaptive adjustment, but may reflect disengagement from threatening error-related information. Error sensitivity and perceived ability may serve as early indicators of students’ emerging goal orientations, with special attention paid to reduced error sensitivity, which may reflect both healthy coping or disengagement.

Teachers’ socio-emotional competencies (SEC) are known to contribute to their well-being and classroom climate. Yet, little is known about how these competencies interact with their conception of teaching and their implicit theories about emotions. We addressed this gap using a network analysis from 263 preservice teachers to explore the interrelations between preservice teachers’ intra and interpersonal SEC, their conceptions of teaching, and their beliefs about utility, source and malleability of emotions in the classroom. Results show that a constructivist approach to teaching is positively associated with perceiving oneself as a key source of students’ emotional experiences, with this association occurring alongside higher valuation of positive emotions in learning contexts. Intrapersonal SEC is associated with beliefs in the malleability of students’ emotions and co-occurs with teachers’ perceived capacity to support students’ emotional regulation. The central position of malleability beliefs and intrapersonal competencies suggests that these dimensions are highly connected within this system and may represent priorities for future longitudinal or intervention research. Overall, the findings provide a basis for examining how emotional competencies and pedagogical conceptions become translated into classroom practices during teacher development.

There is growing evidence in the literature of positive relationships between socio-emotional competencies and school performance. Several hypotheses have been used to explain how these variables may be related to school performance. In this paper, we explored the role of various school adjustment variables in the relationship between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades, using a weighted network approach. This network approach allowed us to analyze the structure of interrelations between each variable, pointing to both central and mediatory school and socio-emotional variables within the network. Self-reported data from around 3,400 French vocational high school students were examined. This data included a set of interpersonal socio-emotional competencies (cognitive and affective empathy, socio-emotional behaviors and collective orientation), school adjustment measures (adaptation to the institution, school anxiety, self-regulation at school, and self-perceived competence at school) as well as grades in mathematics and French language. The results showed that self-regulation at school weighted the most strongly on the whole network, and was the most important mediatory pathway. More specifically, self-regulation mediated the relationships between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades.

Most studies exploring how remote memory is represented in the brain are based on strong episodic self-related components. Because of methodological reasons, much less is known about how the information concerning the semantic part of autobiographical memory is retrieved, and whether the brain correlates differ according to the autobiographical moment of the memory formation. In the present study, we explored the neural concomitants of the retrieval of texts learnt at different periods of life, in a comedian with exceptional verbal memory skills. This 49-year-old comedian was instructed to recite aloud a total of 30 texts he learnt during three different epochs: before the age of 15 years (E1), between the age of 15 and 25 years (E2), and after the age of 25 years (E3). The most salient activation was observed for memory from the farthest period, with a preponderance of the medial rostral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and of the precuneus. There was no hippocampal activation during text retrieval by comparison to a control condition, whatever the learning period. This study supports the assumption that the recall of remote semantic memories can occur without hippocampal activation. We discussed the activation of the rostral PFC during retrieval of the oldest (and best consolidated) memories as the possible involvement of control meta-memory processes rather than memory processes per se.

Objective: The adverse effects of anxiety on cognition are widely recognized. According to Attentional Control Theory, worry (i.e. facet of cognitive anxiety) is the component that is responsible for these effects, and working memory capacity (WMC) plays an important role in regulating them. Despite the increasing importance of this problem with aging, little is known about how these mechanisms interact in old age. In this study, we explored the distinct contributions of the somatic and cognitive components of anxiety to neuropsychological performance, and the potential moderating role of WMC. Method: We administered cognitive tasks testing processing speed, cognitive flexibility and working memory to 605 older adults, who also underwent depression and test anxiety assessments (data from VLV study). Results: Multiple regression analyses showed that cognitive (but not somatic) aspects of anxiety affected cognitive flexibility. The effect of cognitive anxiety on processing speed was moderated by WMC: the anxiety-performance association was lower for participants with greater WMC. Conclusion: Results confirmed the specific role of worry in the anxiety–performance relationship in old age and supported the hypothesis that working memory resources regulates its deleterious effect on cognition. The absence of a moderation effect in the more costly switching task may reflect a limitation of resources with aging.

The literature points to a large distributed brain network involved in the estimation of time. Among these regions, the role of the insular cortex is still poorly understood. At the confluence of emotional, interoceptive, and environmental signals, this brain structure has been proposed to underlie awareness of the passage of time and emotion related time dilation. Yet, this assumption has not been tested so far. This study aimed at exploring how a lesion of the insula affects subjective duration, either in an emotional context or in a non‐emotional context. Twenty‐one patients with a stroke affecting the insula, either left or right, were studied for their perception of sub and supra second durations. A verbal estimation task and a temporal bisection task were used with either pure tones or neutral and emotional sounds lasting between 300 and 1500 ms and presented monaurally. Results revealed that patients with a right insular lesion, showed less temporal sensitivity than both control participants and patients with a left insular lesion. Unexpectedly, emotional effects were similar in patients and control participants. Altogether, these results suggest a specific role of the right insula in the discrimination of durations, but not in emotion related temporal distortion. In addition, an ear × emotion interaction in control participants suggests that temporal processing of positive and negative sounds may be lateralized in the brain.

Within-task variability across trials (intra-individual variability (IIV)) has been mainly studied using latency measures but rarely with accuracy measures. The aim of the Geneva Variability Study was to examine IIV in both latency and accuracy measures of cognitive performance across the lifespan, administering the same tasks to children, younger adults, and older adults. Six processing speed tasks (Response Time (RT) tasks, 8 conditions) and two working memory tasks scored in terms of the number of correct responses (Working Memory (WM)—verbal and visuo-spatial, 6 conditions), as well as control tasks, were administered to over 500 individuals distributed across the three age periods. The main questions were whether age differences in IIV would vary throughout the lifespan according (i) to the type of measure used (RTs vs. accuracy); and (ii) to task complexity. The objective of this paper was to present the general experimental design and to provide an essentially descriptive picture of the results. For all experimental tasks, IIV was estimated using intra-individual standard deviation (iSDr), controlling for the individual level (mean) of performance and for potential practice effects. As concerns RTs, and in conformity with a majority of the literature, younger adults were less variable than both children and older adults, and the young children were often the most variable. In contrast, IIV in the WM accuracy scores pointed to different age trends—age effects were either not observed or, when found, they indicated that younger adults were the more variable group. Overall, the findings suggest that IIV provides complementary information to that based on a mean performance, and that the relation of IIV to cognitive development depends on the type of measure used.