The purpose of this study was to explore the cognitive adaptation processes of African immigrant women who are professionals. Theories of transformational learning and social cognitive theory were employed to examine cognitive restructuring motivated by learning among women immigrants. The research investigated underlying agentic perspectives and…

Evidence for successful socio-cognitive training in typical adults is rare. This study attempted to improve Theory of Mind (ToM) and visual perspective taking in healthy adults by training participants to either imitate or to inhibit imitation. Twenty-four hours after training, all participants completed tests of ToM and visual perspective taking.…

Gift-giving involves both the objective value of a gift and the symbolic meaning of the exchange. The objective value is sometimes considered of secondary importance as when people claim, "It's the thought that counts." We evaluated when and how mental state inferences count in gift exchanges. Because considering another's thoughts requires…

Incongruity between a positive statement and a negative context is a cue to verbal irony. Two studies examined whether school-age children and adults recognized that listeners require knowledge of context to detect irony. Specifically, the studies investigated whether participants could inhibit their own context knowledge to appropriately gauge…

In a series of three visual perspective-taking experiments, we asked adult participants to judge their own or someone else's visual perspective in situations where both perspectives were either the same or different. We found that participants could not easily ignore what someone else saw when making self-perspective judgments. This was observed…

Discouraged youth need caring adults who employ both traditional and creative strategies to help them develop character and positive life goals. Caring adults can help youth realize that they are worthy of love and possess great potential. There is great promise and hope for troubled youth if they connect with adults who are convinced that every…