Search for: All records

This study utilizes 6 weeks of electronic daily diary self-assessments across more than 1 year of the COVID-19 pandemic to examine associations between adolescents’ phone and video social contact with friends, family, and others over time. The sample includes justice-involved juveniles adjudicated to probation or incarceration and a comparison community sample of never-arrested adolescents. Findings reveal that community youth did not demonstrate positive emotional gains from social contact via phone or video during the pandemic and at times experienced more negative emotion on days with virtual social contact; however, such contact was especially beneficial for justice-involved youth, who had better self-conceptions and stronger feelings of social connection (although more loneliness as well) on days when they engaged in phone or video contact with friends or family. Thus, social contact via phone or video may serve to close the gap in emotional well-being between justice-involved and community adolescents. 

Abstract Many studies have claimed to find that reading fiction leads to improvements in social cognition. But this work has left open the critical question of whether any type of narrative, fictional or nonfictional, might have similar effects. To address this question, as well as to test whether framing a narrative as fiction matters, the current studies presented participants ( N  = 268 in Study 1; N  = 362 in Study 2) with literary fiction texts, narrative nonfiction texts, expository nonfiction texts, or no texts. We tested their theory-of-mind abilities using the picture-based Reading the Mind in the Eyes task and a text-based test of higher-order social cognition. Reading anything was associated with higher scores compared to reading nothing, but the effects of framing and text type were inconsistent. These results suggest that prior claims regarding positive effects of reading fiction on mentalizing should be seen as tenuous; other mechanisms may be driving previously published effects.