Mad or mad-mad: conveying subtle emotion with face emoji.

Introduction: To compensate for the lack of pragmatic information available when communicating via text message, texters make frequent use of texting-specific cues, or textisms, to convey meaning that would otherwise be apparent in spoken conversation. Here, we explore how one such cue, face emoji, can impact the interpretation of text messages. METHODS: In Experiment 1, we paired neutral text messages with valenced face emoji to determine whether the emoji can alter the meaning of the text. In Experiment 2, we paired valenced text messages with valenced face emoji to determine whether the emoji can modulate the valence of the text. RESULTS: In Experiment 1, we found that texts paired with positive emoji were rated more positively than texts paired with negative emoji. Furthermore, texts paired with stronger-valenced emoji were rated as less neutral compared to texts paired with milder-valenced emoji. In Experiment 2, we found that slightly positive texts paired with strong positive emoji were rated somewhat similarly to the same texts paired with mild positive emoji; however, slightly negative texts paired with strong negative emoji were rated much more negatively than the same texts paired with mild negative emoji. DISCUSSION: These results indicate that the presence of face emoji, particularly negative face emoji, can alter the interpretation of text messages, allowing texters to communicate nuanced meaning and subtle emotion.

Readers accurately monitor their incidental word learning success during silent reading.

College-age adults who are skilled at reading use sentence context and morphemic information to learn definitions for new words they encounter in print (e.g., Tong et al., 2014). Often, the definitions that adult readers are learning are for word forms that already exist in their mental lexicon (Hulme et al., 2019). Readers demonstrate discrepancies between confidence in what they are retaining during reading and what they actually recall after reading (e.g., Sperling et al., 2004). Thus, metacognitive awareness is undoubtedly important for vocabulary learning. Few studies have investigated the role of metacognition in adults' word learning during reading. In the current study, we examined readers' metacognitive awareness and learning for novel compound pseudowords. Participants read sentences containing semantically opaque or transparent novel compound words in informative sentence contexts. Reading times were recorded, and readers judged how well they derived and would remember the novel words' correct definitions. After reading, participants took a surprise vocabulary test. Sentences containing opaque novel compounds were difficult, indicated by longer reading times. Participants were also less confident in their abilities deriving definitions for opaque than transparent words, and were less accurate on the vocabulary test for opaque words. Participants judged making an inference to define opaque compounds as more difficult than for transparent compounds, suggesting awareness of word learning difficulty. Overall, metacognitive judgments were mostly accurate. However, individual readers' accuracy varied greatly. These results provide a start to understanding how incidental vocabulary learning, and monitoring for this, proceeds in skilled (college-level) adults.

Exploring the Impact of Instruction on College Students' Health Insurance Literacy.

Student health insurance literacy is an area of limited prior knowledge, and investigations into this topic have the potential to impact students' self-care strategies, self-efficacy, decision-making, and quality of life. The purpose of this study was to examine factors associated with health insurance literacy and knowledge among undergraduate students. In this study, undergraduate students at one mid-Atlantic public university in the United States who did and did not receive instruction on health insurance were surveyed. Students were recruited from a course that offers formal instruction about health insurance and students in a comparison group at the same university were recruited from a general education participant pool. Participants (n = 364) completed an online anonymous survey that included demographics, experience with health insurance, health insurance knowledge, and health insurance literacy self-efficacy. Hierarchical multiple regression results indicated participants in the course who received health insurance instruction scored higher on a measure of health insurance knowledge. Higher levels of health insurance self-efficacy was also associated with receiving instruction related to health insurance. Female gender and higher parental education were associated with a lower self-efficacy. Improving health insurance knowledge and self-efficacy among undergraduates is an important aspect of preparing students for post-graduate life where decisions about health insurance coverage and healthcare utilization will increase. Furthermore, increasing health insurance literacy may contribute to raising standards of health literacy, health care, and health care seeking across communities.

Parallel effects of retrieval ease on attributions about the past and the future.

The present study explored the role of task difficulty in judgments about the past and the future. Participants recalled events from childhood and imagined future events. The difficulty of the task was manipulated by asking participants to generate either four or twelve events. Participants then rated how well they could generally remember events from their childhood or how well planned their futures were. Consistent with past research (e.g., Winkielman, Schwarz, & Belli, 1998), participants in the difficult recall group rated their childhood memories as less complete than participants in the easy recall group. A parallel effect was found in participants' judgments of their futures. Participants who were asked to imagine twelve future events rated their future plans as less complete than those who imagined four events. Moreover, there was a negative correlation between the rated difficulty of the task and the degree to which participants found their memories and plans to be complete. We also examined the valence of the generated events. These results showed a strong positivity bias for both types of judgments, and the bias was particularly strong when thinking of future events. The results suggest that similar attributional processes mediate beliefs about the past and the future.