The present study examined the use of painting for short-term mood and arousal improvement following an angry mood. Participants’ changes in mood and arousal were measured after viewing 2 short film clips and again after participating in 1 of 4 conditions: painting their current mood (venting), painting something that makes them feel happy (positive distraction), painting a still life (neutral distraction), or completing a word search puzzle (nonart-making control). Results revealed a significant improvement in mood in the positive and neutral distraction conditions as compared with the venting and nonart control conditions, which did not differ from 1 another. There was also a reduction in arousal across conditions. As predicted by broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 2001), participants in the positive distraction condition used a greater number of colors and more positive mood-tone colors than those in the venting condition. These results are the first to experimentally investigate strategies for short-term mood improvement using painting following an angry mood.

The current study examined the impact of mobile applications or apps on student learning in an introduction to psychology course. Students were assigned to complete a learner-centered worksheet activity on the brain and central nervous system using either an interactive 3-D Brain app or their online course textbook. We measured student learning based on the change in performance from pretest to posttest separately on labeling and multiple-choice items and then from a composite (labeling + multiple choice) score. There was a significant increase in performance from pretest to posttest for the app group on all measures, however, there was only a significant increase in the labeling measure for the text group. The app group answered more items correctly than the text group on the multiple choice and composite measures, but there was no difference in the labeling measure. Also, there was no difference in self-reported ratings of enjoyableness between the app and the text conditions on the worksheet activity. The results demonstrate one way in which mobile devices, in general, and mobile apps, specifically, can be effectively integrated in an introduction to psychology class to enhance student learning.

People often receive and recount information in different languages. This experiment examined the impact of switching languages on false recall, recognition, and recognition confidence. We presented Spanish–English bilinguals with 10 lists of words associated to a critical non-presented lure, either in English or in Spanish. Each list was followed by free recall either in English or in Spanish. The final stage was a recognition test in either language. Results showed a higher proportion of veridical and false recall in English, the more dominant language, than in Spanish, the native language. Noncritical intrusions were equivalent in both languages. More importantly, false recall, false recognition, and false recognition confidence were higher across languages than within languages. The results are examined in relation to current research and interpretations of bilingual false memory.

The purpose of the present two experiments was to examine priming and assimilation effects of stored mental representations of religious constructs using two different tasks that activate self-concept. In the first experiment, participants were first primed with a religious exemplar (Jesus) or a religious stereotype (Christian). Next, participants responded using a lexical-decision task to word and nonword targets that were positively valenced emotion-laden religious targets, negatively valenced emotion-laden religious targets, sacred religious targets, and neutral (nonreligious) targets preceded by either self-primes or control primes. Participants in the exemplar condition exhibited assimilation effects to self-primes whereas individuals in the stereotype condition exhibited contrast effects to self-primes. These effects were independent of target type. Our second experiment was conducted to demonstrate priming and assimilation effects on participants' subsequent mood state using a location task. We found that individuals who were implicitly primed with negatively valenced targets exhibited higher levels of depression than individuals primed with the other target types. We also found strong correlations in our sample between measures of religious orientation and religiosity; however, these variables did not correlate with either reaction time (Experiment 1) or mood state (Experiment 2). Results are interpreted with respect to Active-Self theory and research in social cognition.

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