Catherine Caldwell-Harris

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associate Professor at Boston University

Technological inventions create environments altered from the environments of human evolution. I examine humans' ability to adapt to evolutionary mismatches by scrutinizing historical and current cases of technological disruptions. Using a historical case method, how technology altered parent-child relationships is analyzed in the very different ca...

Bilingualism has been a longstanding interest in Psycholinguistics. The foreign language effect (Miozzo et al., 2020) refers to the finding that bilinguals experience different emotional intensities when using a native or foreign language. Our team was interested in examining the differences in emotional responses when bilingual people tell emotion...

Emergentism provides a framework for understanding how language learning processes vary across developmental age and linguistic levels, as shaped by core mechanisms and constraints from cognition, entrenchment, input, transfer, social support, motivation, and neurology. As our commentators all agree, this landscape is marked by intense variability...

Autistic atypicality sociality has been historically attributed to mentalizing deficits. Examination of specific domains of social functioning could broaden the explanatory possibilities. We illustrate this for the domain of navigating social hierarchies. We review writings by autistic people, including advice books, memoirs, book reviews, online d...

Background User-led autism discussion forums provide a wealth of information about autistic lived experiences, albeit oriented toward those who regularly use computers. We contend that healthcare professionals should read autism discussion forums to gain insight, be informed, and in some cases, to correct assumptions about autistic persons’ lives a...

Over the last decades, theoretical perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences have proliferated rather than converged due to differing assumptions about what human affective phenomena are and how they work. These metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions, shaped by academic context and values, have dictated affective const...

Like many of us, I've long noticed that autistics avoid (and sometimes find illogical) status-seeking and social power moves. So.... I finally got around to writing a conceptual anaktsus on this, and am posting the paper to get discussion going.

In 2005, Science magazine designated the problem of accounting for difficulties in L2 (second language) learning as one of the 125 outstanding challenges facing scientific research. A maturationally-based sensitive period has long been the favorite explanation for why ultimate foreign language attainment declines with age-of-acquisition. However, n...

Language is rule-governed. Language is flexible, creative and bursts with odd patterns which then demonstrate a hidden regularity when examined further—or not. Which is it? I argue: Both, and everything in between. I review examples from multiple domains of language, such as orthography, morphology, semantics and syntax, where aspects of language s...

Little is known about how persons with autism spectrum conditions acquire foreign languages. To augment the literature with the experiences of autistic persons, trained raters coded discussion forum posts for categories such as method of learning, number of languages mentioned, and outcomes of learnings. Compared to forum posts on non-autism websit...

User-led autism discussion forums provide a wealth of information about autistic lived experience, albeit oriented towards those who regularly use computers. We contend that health-care professionals should read autism discussion forums to gain insight, be informed, and in some cases, to correct assumptions about autistic persons' lives and possibi...

How Deaf children should be taught to read has long been debated. Severely or profoundly Deaf children, who face challenges in acquiring language from its spoken forms, must learn to read a language they do not speak. We refer to this as learning a language via print. How children can learn language via print is not a topic regularly studied by edu...

We present here a unifying framework for affective phenomena: the Human Affectome. By synthesizing a large body of literature, we have converged on definitions that disambiguate the commonly used terms—affect, feeling, emotion, and mood. Based on this definitional foundation, and under the premise that affective states reflect allostatic concerns,...

Titone and Tiv (2021) describe recent research and new questions to illustrate the power of the systems framework of bilingualism. But this framework does more than suggest new questions. My purpose here is to present 3 examples of how multicausal frameworks can illuminate longstanding topics in bilingualism. • A systems framework disrupts the ill...

Little is known about how persons with autism spectrum conditions experience the process of learning foreign languages. To augment the research literature (reviewed here) with the experiences of autistic persons, online autism forums were scrutinised. Discussions pertinent to language learning were identified in English, Spanish, French and German,...

For decades word frequency has been one of the most important variables in psycholinguistics. Frequent words are more easily recognized and processed more efficiently than rare words. In the fields of word recognition and psycholinguistics, all researchers are reminded to statistically control for word frequency. But is that advice still correct? A...

The current study contributes empirical data to our understanding of how knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) syntax aids reading print English for deaf children who are bilingual and bimodal in ASL and English print. The first analysis, a conceptual replication of Hoffmeister ( 2000), showed that performance on the American Sign Language Asse...

This article is invited peer commentary for the article: Digital Language Learning (DLL): Insights from Behavior, Cognition, and the Brain by Ping Li and Yu-Ju Lan This commentary has an unusual format. The format is part of the message. Humans are motivated to attend and read when material is interesting; people generally are more motivated to...

The Multidimensional Religious Ideology (MRI) scale is a new 43-item measure that quantifies conservative versus liberal aspects of religious ideology. The MRI focuses on recurring features of ideology rooted in innate moral instincts while capturing salient differences in the ideological profiles of distinct groups and individuals. The MRI highlig...

Turkish university students who had learned English via classroom instruction read six ethical dilemmas (three in English, three in Turkish) while skin conductance was recorded. Ratings of agreement with selfish actions were higher in the foreign language; agreement with ethical actions were higher in the native language. The skin conductance respo...

Recent studies claim that having an analytical cognitive style is correlated with reduced religiosity in western populations. However, in cultural contexts where social norms constrain behavior, such cognitive characteristics may have reduced influence on behaviors and beliefs. We labeled this the ‘constraining environments hypothesis.’ In a sample...

As a part of a larger Affectome Project (http://neuroqualia.org/background.php) with an overarching goal of mapping and redefining biological substrates of feelings and emotions, we explored the neural underpinnings for the functions of motivation and emotion. Historically emotion and motivation have been placed into distinct neural circuits and ex...

It is common to have good declarative but poor procedural knowledge of a foreign language, especially for classroom learners. To study this gap in a constrained manner, we asked Chinese learners of English to repeat, correct and produce indirect speech. The indirect speech construction was selected in the present study because it is known to be a p...

No agent-based model exists of language learning following immigration to a new country. Language learning has features which make it a good fit to Agent Based Models (ABMs), such as diffusion/adoption effects: people learn language via social interaction and are influenced by other social actors about how and when to invest in learning. Language l...

Repeated and orthographically similar words are vulnerable in RSVP, as observed using the repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. Prior researchers have claimed that RB is increased for emotion words, but the mechanism for this was unclear. We argued that RB should be reduced for words with properties that capture attention, such as emotion words. Empl...

Purpose This article examines whether syntactic and vocabulary abilities in American Sign Language (ASL) facilitate 6 categories of language-based analogical reasoning. Method Data for this study were collected from 267 deaf participants, aged 7;6 (years;months) to 18;5. The data were collected from an ongoing study initially funded by the U.S. In...

Analytical thinking predicts irreligiosity across paradigms and contexts. Explanations for this association have included the likelihood that analytical cognition interrupts the expression of innate cognition biases, such as teleology and anthropomorphism, that lead to religious beliefs; or that analytical thinkers are better at discriminating betw...

Appreciating the humor in jokes involves incongruity-detection and resolution, which requires good language skills. Foreign language comprehension is challenging, including interpreting words within their sentence context. An implication is that jokes in a foreign language will be more difficult to understand and therefore probably less humorous, c...

Synchrony has been found to increase trust, prosociality and interpersonal cohesion, possibly via neurocognitive self-other blurring. Researchers have thus highlighted synchrony as an engine of collective identity and cooperation, particularly in religious ritual. However, many aspects of group life require coordination, not merely prosocial cooper...

Factors influencing native and nonnative signers’ syntactic judgment ability in American Sign Language (ASL) were explored for 421 deaf students aged 7;6–18;5. Predictors for syntactic knowledge were chronological age, age of entering a school for the deaf, gender, and additional learning disabilities. Mixed-effects linear modeling analysis reveale...

Failing to acquire language in early childhood because of language deprivation is a rare and exceptional event, except in one population. Deaf children who grow up without access to indirect language through listening, speech-reading, or sign language experience language deprivation. Studies of Deaf adults have revealed that late acquisition of sig...

Indian English only (IndE- only ), e.g. “I’ll meet you here only”, is rejected as poor English by many IndE speakers. In the present study, we used a mixed method to investigate familiarity, comprehension and use of IndE- only in 20 L1 IndE speakers in the US. Participants completed a psycholinguistic task comprising syntactic, semantic, and pragma...

Understanding the factors that influence the emotional resonances of messages shown to bilingual speakers is an important consideration when marketing in communities where several languages are used. Bilingual speakers have long reported that emotional phrases feel stronger in their native language than in their foreign language. Examples include s...

Öz The impact of individualism and collectivism on depression in Asian heritage students was investigated. Results replicated the existing finding of greater report of high parental control and depressive symptoms among AsianAmerican students compared to EuropeanAmerican. Depressive symptoms were linked to failures of personal achievement in both...

Understanding the factors that influence the emotional resonances of messages shown to bilingual speakers is an important consideration when marketing in communities where several languages are used. Bilingual speakers have long reported that emotional phrases feel stronger in their native language than in their foreign language. Examples include s...

Does a native language suffer when students take all of their classes in a foreign language, even in their home country? Turkish students studying psychology, economics, or English literature with English as the language of instruction (N = 91) were studied across a three-year period. Test scores, word fluency measures, and self-ratings were broadl...

A growing literature examines how affective processing may be weaker in a foreign language than in a native language. This article reviews mechanisms that could underlie this effect and then delves into practical implications. The most common category of explanations is that emotional resonances in the discourse context accrue to utterances because...

This study examined whether musical training, ethnicity, and experience with a natural tone language influenced sensitivity to tone while listening to an artificial tone language. The language was designed with three tones, modeled after level-tone African languages. Participants listened to a 15-min random concatenation of six 3-syllable words. Se...

It is unknown if the developmental path of antonym knowledge in deaf children increases continuously with age and correlates with reading comprehension, as it does in hearing children. In the current study we tested 564 students aged 4–18 on a receptive multiple-choice American Sign Language (ASL) antonym test. A subgroup of 138 students aged 7–18...

The topic editors, Cornelia Herbert and colleagues, have noted that language has historically been assumed to be independent from emotions. The historical backdrop to this is the long reign of faculty psychology, which viewed the human mind as composed of discrete abilities (see discussion in Barrett, 2013). The mental modularity popularized by Cho...

In another language, your own thoughts might be foreign to you

Full text available from my bu.academia site: https://www.academia.edu/8238494/Rehearsal_and_aptitude_in_foreign_vocabulary_learning Foreign language learners rehearse the language they are learning, both vocally and subvocally, as part of inner speech development (Guerrero, 2005). To add to the research on which method of rehearsal is more effec...

Idiocentrism refers to a set of personality traits indicating an individualistic orientation. Idiocentric people define themselves as relatively autonomous and self-reliant. In social relations, they pursue their own goals and are generally motivated by their own preferences, rather than group goals and social norms. In interactions with others, th...

Allocentrism refers to a set of personality traits that indicate a collectivist orientation. Allocentrics define themselves as interdependent with others. In social relations, they stay close to members of their ingroup, are sensitive to social norms, and may choose to subordinate their own personal goals to those of their family or ingroup. They t...

Learners often anecdotally report preferring live instructors to videotaped lectures, but few controlled comparisons exist, and none have been conducted for foreign language learning. College students experienced a single foreign language lesson in an unknown foreign language, Samoan, either from a live instructor or from a videotape of the same le...

Recent experimental findings suggest stable individual differences in the perception of auditory stimuli lacking energy at the fundamental frequency (F0), here called missing fundamental (MF) tones. Specifically, some individuals readily identify the pitch of such tones with the missing F0 ("F0 listeners"), and some base their judgment on the frequ...

Reticence to express emotions verbally has long been observed in Chinese culture, but quantitative comparisons with Western cultures are few. Explanations for emotional reticence have typically focused on the need in collectivist culture to promote group harmony, but this explanation is most applicable to negative emotions such as anger, not positi...

Abstract Special interests are frequently developed by individuals with autism spectrum disorder, expressed as an intense focus on specific topics. Neurotypical individuals also develop special interests, often in the form of hobbies. Although past research has focused on special interests held by children with autism spectrum disorder, little is k...

This study compared self-reported impulsivity and neurocognitively assessed response inhibition in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorder (ED), and healthy control participants. Participants completed the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11), stop-signal reaction time task, and measures of OCD and ED symptomatology (Yale-Brown Obsessi...

Full text available from: https://www.academia.edu/2911489/Caldwell-Harris_C.L._2012_._Atheism_by-product_of_cognitive_styles_of_independent_learning_and_systemizing._Religion_Brain_and_Behavior_2_70-73

A compelling body of scholarship exists which proposes that religious and spiritual beliefs exist in every human society because they reflect fundamental aspects of evolved human nature. This raises the question: why do atheists exist and are atheism and non-belief unnatural? A diverse and growing literature on irreligion reveals that distinct pers...

Atheists are America’s least trusted group, and stereotypes about them abound: Atheists are non-conformist, sceptical, cynical, and joyless, rarely experiencing awe. Atheists (N = 42) were recruited from the American atheist website and compared to Christians (N = 22) and Buddhists (N = 18). Groups were highly similar in their reported well-being,...

Chinese—English bilinguals residing in the US were interviewed about their experience of using emotional expressions. They judged L1-Mandarin expressions as feeling stronger than L2-English expressions. Respondents nonetheless preferred to express their emotions in English, citing more relaxed social constraints in English-speaking environments. El...

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which particular stimuli, such as letters or sound, generate a secondary sensory experience in particular individuals. Reports of enhanced memory in synesthetes raise the question of its cognitive and neurological substrates. Enhanced memory in synesthetes could arise from the explicit or implicit use of a synesthetic...

Whether immigrants to the U.S. from collectivist cultures will adopt American individualist values is an important question at the intersection of theories on acculturation and individualism/collectivism. According to the assimilation hypothesis, Turkish immigrants to the U.S. should become more individualistic with increasing length of stay. Alter...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This study will investigate whether Chinese orthography differs from English orthography in terms of the relative activation of semantic versus phonological information. Do Chinese characters evoke greater activation of semantic information compared to phonological information? Do they trigger greater...

Emotion-memory effects occur when emotion words are more frequently recalled than neutral words. Bilingual speakers report that taboo terms and emotional phrases generate a stronger emotional response when heard or spoken in their first language. This suggests that the basic emotion-memory will be stronger for words presented in a first language. T...

Obsessive-compulsive personality traits (OCPTs) may be associated with cognitive disorganization (i.e., executive control deficits). That is, individuals presenting with pronounced OCPTs may rigidly adhere to rules and procedure in an attempt to compensate for cognitive disorganization. We predicted that individuals presenting with OCPTs would demo...

When word pairs having a familiar order are sequentially flashed on a computer in their non-familiar order, (code zip), observers have a strong phenomenology of seeing them in familiar order (zip code). Reversal errors remained frequent even when participants obtained perceptual experience of reverse-display items by beginning with a block of longe...

Repeating an item in a brief or rapid display usually produces faster or more accurate identification of the item (repetition priming), but sometimes produces the opposite effect (repetition blindness). We present a theory of short-term repetition effects, the competition hypothesis, which explains these paradoxical outcomes. The central tenet of t...

Bilingual speakers frequently report experiencing greater emotional resonance in their first language compared to their second. In Experiment 1, Turkish university students who had learned English as a foreign language had reduced skin conductance responses (SCRs) when listening to emotional phrases in English compared to Turkish, an effect which w...

Background and objectives: Early investigators claimed that temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) was associated with a personality traits and psychiatric symptoms collectively known as the interictal behavioral syndrome or Geschwind's syndrome. Interictal behavioral alterations associated with TLE included affective dysregulation; irritability and impulsiv...

Pavlenko urges the community of language researchers to modify their conceptions of the mental lexicon, based on findings from bilingualism and emotions. She makes a compelling case. While reading her article, one can temporarily forget that in contemporary practice, emotion is not regarded as relevant to the theoretical question of the structure o...

People remember emotional and taboo words better than neutral words. It is well known that words that are processed at a deep (i.e., semantic) level are recalled better than words processed at a shallow (i.e., purely visual) level. To determine how depth of processing influences recall of emotional and taboo words, a levels of processing paradigm w...

Semantic interference in picture naming is readily obtained when categorically related distractor words are displayed with picture targets; however, this is not typically the case when both primes and targets are words. Researchers have argued that to obtain semantic interference for word primes and targets, the prime must be shown for a sufficient...

Because humans need both autonomy and interdependence, persons with either an extreme collectivist orientation (allocentrics) or extreme individualist values (idiocentrics) may be at risk for possession of some features of psychopathology. Is an extreme personality style a risk factor primarily when it conflicts with the values of the surrounding s...

Recall of emotion words is superior to neutral words. Prior work reported in this journal (Anooshian & Hertel, 1994) found that this effect was absent in a second language. Words in a second language may thus lack the emotional associations of words acquired in childhood. To determine whether memory probes may be generally useful for assessing emot...

When two orthographically similar words are displayed using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), the repeated letters in the second critical word (W2) are not detected, leading to a deficit in reporting this word, a phenomenon known as repetition blindness (RB). The unrepeated letters in W2 do appear to be detected and available to feed activat...

Six experiments used an illusory words paradigm to demonstrate that repetition blindness (RB) in orthographically similar words affects only the words' shared letters. Rapid serial visual presentation streams of words and word fragments allowed the unique letters of the 2nd critical word to combine with a subsequent fragment to create a word, as in...

We tested the hypothesis that more frequent exposure to multi-word phrases results in deeper entrenchment of their representations, by examining the performance of subjects of different religiosity in the recognition of briefly presented liturgical and secular phrases drawn from several frequency classes. Three of the sources were prayer texts that...

The cognitive science of religion is a new field which explains religious belief as emerging from normal cognitive processes such as inferring others' mental states, agency detection and imposing patterns on noise. This paper investigates the proposal that individual differences in belief will reflect cognitive processing styles, with high function...