Perceived control is an important psychosocial resource for health and well-being across the lifespan. Global control (i.e., overall perceived control) decreases over time in studies following people every few years to upwards of 10 years. Changes across wider intervals of the lifespan, however, have yet to be examined. Further, how perceived…

Despite a long history of local control of schools, educational issues have become increasingly contested at higher levels of government as battles are fought in state and federal venues and along partisan lines. In light of this change as well as recent battles over school responses to COVID-19 and schools' roles in combating systemic racism, we…

Over the past several decades, the psychological concepts of self-control and grit have gained prominence in the research literature. While these constructs have been studied extensively in isolation, there has been growing interest in understanding the relationship between the two constructs and the factors that mediate this relationship. The…

This study examined the factor structure of executive control throughout elementary school, as well as associations between executive control abilities in preschool and elementary school. Data were drawn from a longitudinal study of executive control development in a community sample of children (N = 294; 53% female, 47% male) oversampled for low…

Repeating a single-prime stimulus as a target to respond to usually facilitates responses. However, sometimes, prime repetition slows the responses and produces the single-prime negative priming effect. In this study, the distractor set hypothesis was proposed as a mechanism of attentional control that can contribute toward single-prime negative…

Attention is biased toward features aligning with task goals and stimuli previously allocated attentional priority (selection history). The relationship between selection history and the strategic control of attention has scarcely been explored. In the present study, we utilized a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS) task…

Previous research has linked working memory capacity (WMC) with enhanced proactive control. However, it remains unclear the extent to which this relationship reflects the influence of WMC on the tendency to engage proactive control, or rather, the ability to implement it. The current study sought to clarify this ambiguity by leveraging the Dual…

Staggered adoption of policies by different units at different times creates promising opportunities for observational causal inference. Estimation remains challenging, however, and common regression methods can give misleading results. A promising alternative is the synthetic control method (SCM), which finds a weighted average of control units…

More and more adolescents are using information and communication technologies (i.e., ITCs) in a massive and addictive way (e.g., by sending aggressive messages on social networks), driving cyberbullying trends (Fanti et al., in European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 168-181, 2012). Little is known about the relationship between young…

The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4-10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants…

Control-value theory suggests that students' control and value appraisals mediate the relation between contextual supports and student emotions in formal learning settings; however, this theory has not been tested in informal learning contexts. Understanding mechanisms for instructional support in informal learning contexts can inform the design…

School discipline has been a site of contention and reform. In this study, we draw from 17 interviews with traditional and charter school principals in one mid-sized urban school district to examine how principals use discipline as a tool to both maintain control and demonstrate care. Our study calls attention to different strategies principals…

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit in panel data settings. The "synthetic control" is a weighted average of control units that balances the treated unit's pre-treatment outcomes and other covariates as closely as possible. A critical feature of the original…

The Work Volition Scale (WVS) is a brief measure of the perceived capacity to make career decisions despite constraints; however, systematic validation of item responses to the scale is still in its infancy. The present article reports on research conducted to investigate the latent structure of WVS, its invariance across gender, and mean…

When teaching infection prevention and control (IPC), nursing education tends to focus on skills and fostering good practice rather than challenging students' thinking. Therefore, students' misconceptions about IPC receive less attention than they deserve. The purpose of the study was to make an inventory of student nurses' misconceptions about…