The Influence of Social Context on Educational and Psychological/Cognitive Processes

A special issue of Behavioral Sciences (ISSN 2076-328X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2025 | Viewed by 6885

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Department of Psychology, University of Montana, 32 Campus Dr., Missoula, MT 59812, USA
Interests: learning; memory; metacognition
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Behavioral Sciences announces a Special Issue entitled “The Influence of Social Context on Educational and Psychological/Cognitive Processes”. This Special Issue aims to cover investigations in education and learning in and out of the laboratory, within the context of wider social interaction. This could include both offline settings, such as the typical classroom, or online networks, such as social media platforms. Given the increased diversity in how we gather information, we hope to be an outlet through which researchers can disseminate information about how we learn and behave in various social environments, what works and does not work, and what potential solutions might be proposed. We believe that this research area is important because education sciences can no longer be examined without understanding their relation to the broader social world.

Suggested themes can include, but are not limited to, learning, memory, metacognition, language, decision making and judgments in all social contexts, and any psychological processes that have been or could be influenced by social media networks. We welcome contributions that highlight not only behavioral but also physiological/biological methodologies to better understand social context effects. In addition, we seek contributions from authors who are interested in any age group, from children to older adults, or performances measured in one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many relationships. As academics who have considered and examined educational or psychological/cognitive processes under various social contexts or between different age groups, we hope that you will consider submitting your work to this Special Issue.

The aims and scope of the journal Behavioral Sciences can be found at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/behavsci.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Education Sciences.

Sincerely,

Prof. Dr. Lisa K. Son
Dr. Yoonhee Jang
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • education
  • learning
  • memory
  • metacognition
  • language
  • decision making and judgments
  • online learning
  • social media
  • social network
  • teaching of psychology
  • collaboration

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 1678 KiB  
Article
High Impostors Are More Hesitant to Ask for Help
by Si Chen and Lisa K. Son
Behav. Sci. 2024, 14(9), 810; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14090810 - 12 Sep 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1055
Abstract
Help-seeking behavior requires both components of metacognition—monitoring (being aware of the need for help) and control (initiating the help-seeking action). Difficulties in initiating help-seeking, therefore, can be indicative of a metacognitive breakdown, for instance, when a student believes that a gap in knowledge [...] Read more.
Help-seeking behavior requires both components of metacognition—monitoring (being aware of the need for help) and control (initiating the help-seeking action). Difficulties in initiating help-seeking, therefore, can be indicative of a metacognitive breakdown, for instance, when a student believes that a gap in knowledge is something to hide. To explore the relationship between knowing that one needs help and actually seeking it, we examined the potential influences of impostorism, which refers to the feeling of being a “fraud”, despite one’s objective accomplishments. Participants were asked to solve math reasoning and verbal reasoning insight problems, while also being given a “help” button that could be pressed at any time in order to get the solution. Results showed that, overall, students were more likely to ask for help with math than verbal reasoning problems—help also correlated with boosted performance. There was also a slight indication that individuals who scored relatively high on impostorism were numerically less likely to seek help and waited longer to do so for the math problems. Our findings suggest that a fear of being exposed as an impostor may hinder one’s help-seeking behaviors, especially in more challenging subjects, such as math. Full article
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19 pages, 1706 KiB  
Article
Young Children’s Directed Question Asking in Preschool Classrooms
by Michelle Wong, Koeun Choi, Libby Barak, Elizabeth Lapidow, Jennifer Austin, Patrick Shafto and Elizabeth Bonawitz
Behav. Sci. 2024, 14(9), 754; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14090754 - 27 Aug 2024
Viewed by 1001
Abstract
Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children’s speech, providing a means by which young learners can rapidly gain information about the world. Previous research has demonstrated that children exhibit sensitivity to the knowledge state of potential informants in laboratory settings. However, it [...] Read more.
Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children’s speech, providing a means by which young learners can rapidly gain information about the world. Previous research has demonstrated that children exhibit sensitivity to the knowledge state of potential informants in laboratory settings. However, it remains unclear whether and how young children are inclined to direct questions that support learning deeper content to more knowledgeable informants in naturalistic classroom contexts. In this study, we examined children’s question-asking targets (adults, other preschoolers, self-talk) during an open-play period in a US preschool classroom and assessed how the cognitive and linguistic characteristics of questions varied as a function of the intended recipient. Further, we examined how these patterns changed with age. We recorded the spontaneous speech of individual children between the ages of 3 and 6 years (N = 30, totaling 2875 utterances) in 40-min open-period sessions in their preschool day, noting whether the speech was directed toward an adult, another child, or was stated to self. We publish this fully transcribed database with contextual and linguistic details coded as open access to all future researchers. We found that questions accounted for a greater proportion of preschoolers’ adult-directed speech than of their child-directed and self-directed speech, with a particular increase in questions that supported broader learning goals when directed to an adult. Younger children directed a higher proportion of learning questions to adults than themselves, whereas older children asked similar proportions of questions to both, suggesting a difference in younger and older children’s question-asking strategies. Although children used greater lexical diversity in questions than in other utterances, their question formulation in terms of length and diversity remained consistent across age and recipient types, reflecting their general linguistic abilities. Our findings reveal that children discriminately choose “what” and “whom” to ask in daily spontaneous conversations. Even in less-structured school contexts, preschoolers direct questions to the informant most likely to be able to provide an adequate answer. Full article
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13 pages, 1061 KiB  
Article
Integrating Guilt and Shame into the Self-Concept: The Influence of Future Opportunities
by Hyeman Choi
Behav. Sci. 2024, 14(6), 472; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14060472 - 3 Jun 2024
Viewed by 1019
Abstract
This study explored the integration of guilt and shame experiences into the self-concept, focusing on how perceived future opportunities affect this process. The participants in Study 1 (N = 201) and Study 2 (N = 221) recalled experiences that elicited either [...] Read more.
This study explored the integration of guilt and shame experiences into the self-concept, focusing on how perceived future opportunities affect this process. The participants in Study 1 (N = 201) and Study 2 (N = 221) recalled experiences that elicited either guilt or shame and that they believed could occur again in the future (i.e., repeatable) or could not (i.e., non-repeatable). The results showed that when the participants viewed an event as repeatable, suggesting that future opportunities for change were possible, they were more likely to accept and integrate the experiences associated with guilt than with shame. This difference disappeared when the target event was non-repeatable, thereby providing no future opportunities for change. Study 2 further demonstrated the moderating role of future coping confidence in the relationship between the interaction effect of emotion type and event repeatability on self-integration. These findings underscore the different roles of guilt and shame in identity development and intrapersonal learning. Full article
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16 pages, 1589 KiB  
Article
Evaluating the Relative Perceptual Salience of Linguistic and Emotional Prosody in Quiet and Noisy Contexts
by Minyue Zhang, Hui Zhang, Enze Tang, Hongwei Ding and Yang Zhang
Behav. Sci. 2023, 13(10), 800; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs13100800 - 26 Sep 2023
Viewed by 2548
Abstract
How people recognize linguistic and emotional prosody in different listening conditions is essential for understanding the complex interplay between social context, cognition, and communication. The perception of both lexical tones and emotional prosody depends on prosodic features including pitch, intensity, duration, and voice [...] Read more.
How people recognize linguistic and emotional prosody in different listening conditions is essential for understanding the complex interplay between social context, cognition, and communication. The perception of both lexical tones and emotional prosody depends on prosodic features including pitch, intensity, duration, and voice quality. However, it is unclear which aspect of prosody is perceptually more salient and resistant to noise. This study aimed to investigate the relative perceptual salience of emotional prosody and lexical tone recognition in quiet and in the presence of multi-talker babble noise. Forty young adults randomly sampled from a pool of native Mandarin Chinese with normal hearing listened to monosyllables either with or without background babble noise and completed two identification tasks, one for emotion recognition and the other for lexical tone recognition. Accuracy and speed were recorded and analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects models. Compared with emotional prosody, lexical tones were more perceptually salient in multi-talker babble noise. Native Mandarin Chinese participants identified lexical tones more accurately and quickly than vocal emotions at the same signal-to-noise ratio. Acoustic and cognitive dissimilarities between linguistic prosody and emotional prosody may have led to the phenomenon, which calls for further explorations into the underlying psychobiological and neurophysiological mechanisms. Full article
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