An extensive body of research has documented cognitive impairments in children who develop in high-adversity contexts. These findings have led to the predominant view that chronic stress impairs cognition. However, this is not the whole story. Recent theory suggests that these same individuals may also develop enhanced cognitive abilities for solving problems in high-adversity contexts. This specialization hypothesis predicts that people from harsh environments will show improved performance on tasks matching recurrent problems in those environments. This novel hypothesis has not yet been assessed within the context of learning, where it may have important implications for education, employment, and interventions. Here, we examine the ability to learn about danger versus non-danger information in college students. We describe the results of an unpublished, preregistered, well-powered, and confirmatory study (N=126) showing that college students with more involvement in, but not more exposure to, violence learn better about danger but not about location information, than peers with less involvement in violence.This study will be submitted as a Registered Report to a journal. Although the date of release is not yet known, its publication is expected to take around 18 months to be available

This data collection contains information from the first wave of High School and Beyond (HSB), a longitudinal study of American youth conducted by the National Opinion Research Center on behalf of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Data were collected from 58,270 high school students (28,240 seniors and 30,030 sophomores) and 1,015 secondary schools in the spring of 1980. Many items overlap with the NCES's NATIONAL LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE CLASS OF 1972 (ICPSR 8085). The HSB study's data are contained in eight files. Part 1 (School Data) contains data from questionnaires completed by high school principals about various school attributes and programs. Part 2 (Student Data) contains data from surveys administered to students. Included are questionnaire responses on family and religious background, perceptions of self and others, personal values, extracurricular activities, type of high school program, and educational expectations and aspirations. Also supplied are scores on a battery of cognitive tests including vocabulary, reading, mathematics, science, writing, civics, spatial orientation, and visualization. To gather the data in Part 3 (Parent Data), a subsample of the seniors and sophomores surveyed in HSB was drawn, and questionnaires were administered to one parent of each of 3,367 sophomores and of 3,197 seniors. The questionnaires contain a number of items in common with the student questionnaires, and there are a number of items in common between the parent-of-sophomore and the parent-of-senior questionnaires. This is a revised file from the one originally released in Autumn 1981, and it includes 22 new analytically constructed variables imputed by NCES from the original survey data gathered from parents. The new data are concerned primarily with the areas of family income, liabilities, and assets. Other data in the file concentrate on financing of post-secondary education, including numerous parent opinions and projections concerning the educational future of the student, anticipated financial aid, student's plans after high school, expected ages for student's marriage and childbearing, estimated costs of post-secondary education, and government financial aid policies. Also supplied are data on family size, value of property and other assets, home financing, family income and debts, and the age, sex, marital, and employment status of parents, plus current income and expenses for the student. Part 4 (Language Data) provides information on each student who reported some non-English language experience, with data on past and current exposure to and use of languages. In Parts 5-6, there are responses from 14,103 teachers about 18,291 senior and sophomore students from 616 schools. Students were evaluated by an average of four different teachers who had the opportunity to express knowledge or opinions of HSB students whom they had taught during the 1979-1980 school year. Part 5 (Teacher Comment Data: Seniors) contains 67,053 records, and Part 6 (Teacher Comment Data: Sophomores) contains 76,560 records. Questions were asked regarding the teacher's opinions of their student's likelihood of attending college, popularity, and physical or emotional handicaps affecting school work. The sophomore file also contains questions on teacher characteristics, e.g., sex, ethnic origin, subjects taught, and time devoted to maintaining order. The data in Part 7 (Twins and Siblings Data) are from students in the HSB sample identified as twins, triplets, or other siblings. Of the 1,348 families included, 524 had twins or triplets only, 810 contained non-twin siblings only, and the remaining 14 contained both types of siblings. Finally, Part 8 (Friends Data) contained the first-, second-, and third-choice friends listed by each of the students in Part 2, along with identifying information allowing links between friendship pairs.

As modern society experiences rapid changes, the unpredictability of the labor market is increasing. University students preparing to join the workforce may experience increased anxiety and stress due to the heightened uncertainty regarding their career plans. Regulating such negative emotions and adjusting to the changing circumstances may influence their career development. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate the relationship between cognitive emotion regulation (CER) — specifically adaptive CER and maladaptive CER — and career decision-making self-efficacy (CDMSE), with career adaptability (CA) as a mediating factor. The path analysis model consisting of adaptive CER, maladaptive CER, CA, and CDMSE was tested with 357 Korean university students who were facing the school-to-work transition. The results of the study were as follows. First, adaptive CER was positively related to CA and CDMSE, while maladaptive CER was negatively related to CA only. Second, CA and CDMSE were positively related. Third, CA partially mediated the relationship between adaptive CER and CDMSE and fully mediated the relationship between maladaptive CER and CDMSE. Based on these results, theoretical and practical implications are proposed, and the limitations of the study are discussed.

New employees can bring new perspectives and vitality to the organization. Creating a suitable environment for new employees to innovate, maintain their work enthusiasm, and stimulate their innovative behavior is an important research topic. This study focused on recent college graduates and included 893 valid samples collected from Chongqing, China. A structural equation model was constructed from a multidimensional perspective to explore the mediating role of employee engagement between person-environment fit and new employees’ innovative behavior. The results show that person organization fit, needs supplies fit, and demands abilities fit can directly increase new employees’ innovative behavior; Emotional and behavioral engagement mediate the relationship between person organization fit and needs supplies fit on innovative behavior, and behavioral and cognitive engagement mediate the relationship between demands abilities fit on innovative behavior. This provides practical suggestions for enterprise managers on effectively promoting employees’ innovative behavior and leading enterprises to realize sustainable development.

University students are the most employed category of participants in cognitive research. However, researchers cannot fully control what their participants do the night before the experiments (e.g., consumption of alcohol) and, unless the experiment specifically concerns the effects of alcohol consumption, they often do not ask about it. Despite previous studies demonstrating that alcohol consumption leads to decrements in next-day cognitive abilities, the potential confounding effect of hangover on the validity of cognitive research has never been addressed. To address this issue, in the present study, a test-retest design was used, with two groups of university students: at T0, one group was constituted by hungover participants, while the other group was constituted by non-hungover participants; at T1, both groups were re-tested in a non-hangover state. In particular, the tests used were two versions of a parity judgment task and an arithmetic verification task. The results highlight that: (a) the response times of university students experiencing a hangover are significantly slower than those of non-hangover students and (b) the response times of hungover students are slower than those of the same students when re-tested in a non-hangover state. Additionally, it was also observed that the prevalence of hungover students in the university campus varies depending on the day of the week, with a greater chance of enrolling hungover participants on specific days. In light of the latter result, the recruitment of university students as participants in cognitive experiments might lead researchers to erroneously attribute their results to the variables they are manipulating, ignoring the effects of the potential hangover state.

Connections between our findings and the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) model.

Work and intellectually fatiguing environments can significantly influence the health of individuals, which is strictly bound to motor efficiency. In particular, desk workers and university students may have a sedentary lifestyle and a condition of mental fatigue caused by daily routine, which could impair motor efficiency. The assessment is a starting point for enhancing awareness of the individual’s psychophysical condition through the perception of one’s body motor efficiency, motivating to move towards improvement. This way, a submaximal test based on perceived exertion was developed (Cubo Fitness Test, CFT) and validated in previous studies. Hence, two further studies were employed to enhance the consistency and accuracy of this instrument in different conditions. The first study investigated the internal responsiveness of CFT, evaluating if mental fatigue could affect motor efficiency. The second study investigated which perceived intensity (weak, moderate, strong, or absolute maximum) could be more reliable for applying the CFT (as previous research focused the investigation only on moderate intensity). In the first investigation, participants assessed two stimuli (mental fatigue induced with a Stroop color-word task and a neutral condition based on the vision of a documentary) lasting 60 min each. The quality of psychophysical recovery (total quality recovery) and the mood state (Italian Mood State questionnaire) were evaluated before the stimuli. After the fatiguing or the neutral task, the mood state was newly assessed, together with the evaluation of the workload’s characteristics (Nasa TLX) and the CFT motor efficiency. In the second investigation, participants had to perform CFT twice for each at different intensities of Borg’s Scale of perceived exertion. Researchers successfully requested to fill out the NASA TLX questionnaire regarding the perceived workload characteristics of CFT, and the reliability of each intensity was assessed. Results seem to enhance the consistency and the accuracy of the instrument. Indeed, findings evidenced that CFT is not influenced by mental fatigue conditions typical of the intellectual work of desk workers and university students for which this test was specifically conceived. Moreover, moderate and strong perceived intensity are the most adequate conditions to assess motor efficiency in these populations.

Place of residence, gender, age, university, and career of the participants.