Sara Rodriguez-Cuadrado

• BSc Psychology; MSc Cognitive Science and Language; PhD Biomedicine (Neuroscience); PGDip Learning Disabilities; PGCTHE
• Profesor Permanente Laboral at University of Granada

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic neurodevelopmental disorder caused by microdeletion of a critical region on chromosome 7q11.23. At the cognitive level, it is usually characterized by moderate intellectual disability and deficits in visuospatial skills, while showing relative strengths in verbal skills and nonverbal reasoning. Despite their...

Research on multilingualism and emotion has mostly evidenced a larger effect of emotional content of words in the first language (L1) respective to other languages known by the speaker (LX). In this entry, we review studies on the acquisition of emotional words in LX, addressing four issues that have sparked interest in researchers: the effect of e...

Professor Albert Costa (1972-2018) was one of the most influential scholars in the fields of psycholinguistics and bilingualism. This book provides a faithful look at the most relevant lines of research in which he worked during his academic career. Written by some of his close collaborators and friends, the book presents a coherent summary of the...

Replacing traditional journals with a more modern solution is not a new idea. Here, we propose ways to overcome the social dilemma underlying the decades of inaction. Any solution needs to not only resolve the current problems but also be capable of preventing takeover by corporations: it needs to replace traditional journals with a decentralized,...

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder, characterised at the cognitive level by a phenotypic pattern of relative weaknesses (e.g., visuospatial skills) and strengths (e.g., some linguistic and nonverbal reasoning skills). In this study, we performed a systematic search and meta-analysis on lexical-semantic processing in WS, an area of kn...

We explore whether emoji were associatively linked to emotion concepts represented in emotion-laden words, in line with the Associative-Propositional Evaluation model. Specifically, we tested these principles by exploring whether emotionally-congruent emoji could enhance word processing (Study 1 & 2) and recall (Study 3). In Study 1, participants c...

Psycholinguistic studies have shown that there are many variables implicated in language comprehension and production. At the lexical level, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), the estimate of the age at which a word is acquired, is key for stimuli selection in psycholinguistic studies. AoA databases in English are often used when testing a variet...

Social factors impact sentence comprehension in a first language (L1), suggesting that semantic processing cannot be dissociated from social and moral emotions in relation to pro/antisocial individuals. Given that integrating multiple types of information and processing emotion-laden pragmatic information is costlier in a second language (L2), we i...

The moral foreign-language effect (M-FLE) translates into more utilitarian choices, even when given the option of self-sacrifice. We explore the M-FLE in 85 children, who were presented with seven moral dilemmas varying in utilitarianism, aversiveness, and whether they allowed the option of self-sacrifice; 42 answered to the dilemmas in their nativ...

Several studies have explored the use of iconic gestures to improve the learning of foreign vocabulary. In this quest, words for abstract concepts have been largely neglected, under the assumption that abstract concepts have poor or non-existent sensory-motor representations. Yet, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory suggests that they are grounded on co...

Creativity is fast becoming recognised as a key skill for employability and for business success. Scientific research and practice-led initiatives for developing creativity require reliable and valid methods of its measurement, particularly in designs for which a large participant sample needs to be tested quickly. The Widening, Connecting, and Reo...

Despite emoji often being assumed to be a form of emotional communication, the emotional affordances of these are not yet fully established. The current study employed the Emoji Spatial Stroop Task to explore whether spatial iconicity affects semantic-relatedness judgments relating to emoji stimuli. Namely, emoji stimuli were displayed in various v...

A major factor underlying several of scholarship's most pressing problems is its antiquated journal system with its trifecta of reproducibility, affordability and functionality crises. Any solution needs to not only solve the current problems but also be capable of preventing a takeover by corporations. Technically, there is broad agreement on the...

La muerte es un suceso natural al que todas las personas se enfrentan alguna vez en la vida. Por ello, resulta fundamental trabajar el duelo y la muerte desde las etapas más tempranas. La propuesta de intervención escolar presentada parte de una exhaustiva revisión del currículo oficial español de Educación Infantil y Educación Primaria, el cual no...

A sample of 641 participants were presented with four decision-making tasks during the first stages of the COVID–19 lockdown in Spain: The dictator game, framing problems, utilitarian/deontological and altruistic/egoistic moral dilemmas. Participants also completed questionnaires on mental health status and experiences related to the COVID–19 pande...

Emoji are vastly becoming an integral part of everyday communication, yet little is understood about the extent to which these are processed emotionally. Previous research shows that there is a processing advantage for emotionally-valenced words over neutral ones, therefore if emoji are indeed emotional, one could expect an equivalent processing ad...

Foreign languages blunt emotional reactions to moral dilemmas. In this study, we aimed at clarifying whether this reduced emotional response applies to the emotions related to the self, empathy, or both. Participants were presented with moral dilemmas, written in their native or foreign language, in which they could sacrifice one man or themselves...

Emoji are vastly becoming an integral part of everyday communication, yet little is understood about the extent to which these are processed emotionally. Previous research shows that there is a processing advantage for emotionally-valenced words over neutral ones, therefore if emoji are indeed emotional, one could expect an equivalent processing ad...

Despite the fact that emoji are a key part of everyday communication, little is known about the way they may relate to emotional processing of written language. The current study aimed to explore this issue, examining whether including an emotionally-congruent emoji onto emotionally-valenced words could enhance emotional processing. Participants co...

Mentoring and tutoring have been recognised as central in the development of higher education students, at academic, social and personal levels in the Anglo-Saxon countries for decades (Lobato, Arbizu, & del Castillo, Papeles salmantinos de educación, 4, 65–79, 2005). In Spanish universities, however, the trajectory is rather short and has been det...

The COVID-19 pandemic entails challenging psychological conditions for the population, requiring them to make many decisions under stress. In this study, 641 participants were presented with different moral decision-making tasks, and completed a survey on mental health status and experiences, concerns, behaviors and beliefs related to the COVID-19....

It is becoming clear that in the 21st century, a focus on skill development in education is necessary to complement the curriculum, particularly with regards to creative problem solving. The emerging Pedagogy of Play seems to provide a framework to facilitate this but is not easily applicable in the mainstream UK due to difficulties in empowering t...

Word reduction refers to how predictable words are shortened in features such as duration, intensity, or pitch. However, its origin is still unclear: Are words reduced because it is the second time that conceptual representations are activated, or because words are articulated twice? If word reduction is conceptually driven, it would be irrelevant...

Although the perceptual association between verticality and pitch has been widely studied, the link between loudness and verticality is not fully understood yet. While loud and quiet sounds are assumed to be equally associated crossmodally with spatial elevation, there are perceptual differences between the two types of sounds that may suggest the...

Is it possible to enhance creative thinking skills through a play-based pedagogical planning methodology?

Actualmente, son numerosas las dificultades y trastornos del aprendizaje en el ámbito escolar, con un incremento en el área de las matemáticas. Tales dificultades suelen aparecer asociadas a otros trastornos como la dislexia o el Trastorno por Déficit de Atención e Hiperactividad (TDAH). Este artículo tiene como objetivo profundizar en la definició...

The benefits of peer mentoring in school settings are well-documented, however, the focus has been on the perceptions of teachers, as opposed to teaching assistants, who report distinct beliefs about their professional development. A mixed methodology was used in which 304 primary school teaching assistants completed questionnaires regarding their...

Chemotherapy treatments often induce flavour disorders (e.g., dysgeusia) and loss of appetite. This study explored the effects of multisensory modifications through meal presentations and gamification during the food intake of child and adolescent cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Meal trays with a fast food appearance, including separately...

In the current poster, we show how lexical alignment can be negatevely predicted by personality traits as neuroticism.

The process of emotional stimuli has important implications in the regulation of our behaviour. According to the negativity bias theory (Taylor, 1991), negative valence stimuli are processed slower than neutral and positive ones. However Larsen, Mercer, and Balota (2006) claim that once lexical characteristics are held constant, the negativity bias...

Musical melodies have "peaks" and "valleys". Although the vertical component of pitch and music is well-known, the mechanisms underlying its mental representation still remain elusive. We show evidence regarding the importance of previous experience with melodies for crossmodal interactions to emerge. The impact of these crossmodal interactions on...

We explore the properties of foreigner talk through word reduction. Word reduction signals that the speaker is referring to the same entity as previously and should be preserved for foreigner talk. However, it leads to intelligibility loss, which works against foreigner talk. Pairs of speakers engaged in a task where native speakers talked either t...

Over the past decades, numerous experimental studies have demonstrated the existence of crossmodal correspondences between certain acoustic features (e.g. pitch) and visuospatial elevation (e.g. up or down). This phenomenon is particularly observed in the tendency to associate high and low frequency sounds with higher and lower positions in the spa...

Numerous studies suggest that the processing of pitch variations (e.g., melodic ”ups and downs”) can generate vertical spatial representations. However, the conditions that facilitate the emergence of these ‘crossmodal’ representations and their possible consequences still remain elusive. We collected EEG and behavioural data from healthy participa...

Little is known about the possible crossmodal association between loudness and verticality. This lack of research contrasts with the extensive use of a direct translation of loudness (e.g., high vs. low sounds) into the vertical plane (low vs. high spatial positions, respectively) in disciplines such as ergonomics, design and sound engineering. We...

Effects of emotion on word processing are well established in monolingual speakers. However, studies that have assessed whether affective features of words undergo the same processing in a native and nonnative language have provided mixed results: Studies that have found differences between native language (L1) and second language (L2) processing a...

Effects of emotion on word processing are well established in monolingual speakers. However, studies that have assessed whether affective features of words undergo the same processing in a native and non-native language have provided mixed results: studies that have found differences between L1 and L2 processing, attributed it to the fact that a se...

Previous literature has revealed the presence of several crossmodal correspondences between pitch and other dimensions such as spatial elevation, size or colour. For instance, high-pitched tones are associated with high locations in space, small sizes and bright colours. Even though previous studies have suggested that high-pitched sounds generate...

We investigated the possible relationship between loudness and spatial elevation. Participants were presented with two auditory stimuli that differed only in terms of intensity (82dB vs. 56dB). In an initial learning phase, participants associated each of these two stimuli with two different visual stimuli. In the experimental phase, one of the two...

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing body of work that explores whether sensory and motor information is a necessary part of semantic representation and processing. This is the embodiment hypothesis. This paper presents a theoretical review of this work that is intended to be useful for researchers in the neurosciences and neuropsycho...