User:Apaicanada/sandbox

Addition/improvement to an existing article
I added two sentences to the article titled Habit. I found an empirical study and added the following two lines to improve the page:

"A recent study by Adriaanse et al. (2014) found that habits mediate the relationship between self-control and unhealthy snack consumption. The results of the study empirically demonstrate that high-self control may influence the formation of habits and in turn affect behavior."

These changes were published.

Article Evaluation - Plan
For my course assignment, I will be editing the following Wikipedia page: Effortfulness.

I am choosing this article because it was cited as a "stub" by Wikipedia contributors as well as because on the title it is listed as needing additional references. I believe this article fits well with the theme of Personality Psychology as effortfullness could potentially be considered a sub-trait of a broader trait such as Costa and McCrae's traits of conscientiousness or even extroversion. I will begin by elaborating on the existing text and properly cite sources. I will then focus on the topic of effortful control in children and adults as they age, as there are many scholarly articles concerning this and seems quite relevant and important.

My sources for this article will be likely be derived from the following peer-reviewed articles:

Tun, P. A., McCoy, S., & Wingfield, A. (2009). Aging, hearing acuity, and the attentional costs of effortful listening. Psychology and Aging, 24(3), 761-766. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0014802

Kochanska, G., Murray, K. T., & Harlan, E. T. (2000). Effortful control in early childhood: Continuity and change, antecedents, and implications for social development. Developmental Psychology, 36(2), 220-232. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.36.2.220

Eisenberg, N., Valiente, C., Spinrad, T. L., Cumberland, A., Liew, J., Reiser, M.,. . . Losoya, S. H. (2009). Longitudinal relations of children’s effortful control, impulsivity, and negative emotionality to their externalizing, internalizing, and co-occurring behavior problems. Developmental Psychology, 45(4), 988-1008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0016213

Valiente, C., Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., Shepard, S. A., Cumberland, A., & Losoya, S. H. (2004). Prediction of Children's Empathy-Related Responding From Their Effortful Control and Parents' Expressivity. Developmental Psychology, 40(6), 911-926. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.40.6.911

Kochanska, G., & Knaack, A. (2003). Effortful Control as a Personality Characteristic of Young Children: Antecedents, Correlates, and Consequences. Journal of Personality, 71(6), 1087–1112. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6494.7106008

Karreman, A., van Tuijl, C., van Aken, M. A. G., & Deković, M. (2008). Parenting, coparenting, and effortful control in preschoolers. Journal of Family Psychology, 22(1), 30-40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.22.1.30

Article Evaluation - Draft
= Effortfulness = From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In psychology, effortfulness is the subjective experience of exertion when performing an activity, and involves mental concentration, motivation, and energy. In many applications, effortfulness, or lack thereof, is simply measured through self-report by a patient or client to a therapist or psychologist. Effortfulness can also be measured through experimental studies on both children and adults. Much of the work in the past century on effortfulness has been aimed towards establishing an association between effortfulness and objective measures, such as brain imaging. There are also several practical applications of effortfulness, including using the it as an indicator in psychological experimentation, particularly in the field of memory.

The effects of age on effortfulness
Late twentieth and early twenty first century studies on effortfulness have been focused on understanding how it manifests in childhood and develops as humans age. A study on effortful control in children aged 22, 33, and 45 months using multitask behavioral batteries showed that effortfulness was highly longitudinally stable characteristic and that it was coherent across tasks. In other words, this study provided evidence that effortfulness is a transferable characteristic and not limited to certain tasks. These findings also supported the notion that effortfulness is a trait-like characteristic of children's personality and that it manifests at a young age and remains relatively consistent across time.

Effortfulness in children has also been correlated to memory recall. In 1991, a group of researchers at the University of Calgary conducted a study on young children to determine this correlation. Children in kindergarten and the first grade were subjected to a selective recall task. In the study, children were tasked to remember certain objects out of a larger pool of objects during the study period. Children who told were told which objects to remember by the experimenters (thereby reducing effortful identification) were found to recall more tasks than children who had themselves had to put in effort to identify and remember objects. It was speculated that children who were informed by the experimenters had a reduced need for effortfulness, which the experimenters suggest positively influenced their recall ability.

Many studies have also shown the relation of effortfulness to other prominent traits in personality psychology. One notable example is a study which correlated effortfulness to the traits of impulsivity and emotionality. A study of American children between 8-12 years of age demonstrated the relations between effortful control, impulsivity, negative emotionality, and externalizing/internalizing tendencies The study took place over four years and involved a series of questionnaires and battery tasks across this time. The results indicated that children who had externalizing problems displayed low levels of effortful control, high impulsivity, and negative emotionality while children who had internalizing problems displayed high levels of effortful control and low impulsivity. This supported the notion that effortfulness is a characterizable trait and correlates with other parameters of personality. Another link between effortfulness and personality psychology traits came from a study in teenagers between the ages of 14-18. This study showed that decreased effortfulness is correlated to increased social media use as well as a lowered need for cognition.

In the study of aging in 1965, Patrick Rabbitt proposed a hypothesis regarding effortfulness. He hypothesized that as human hearing becomes less acute with age, people require additional effort to comprehend spoken language. This in turn forces elderly individuals to increase effortfulness to understand language relative to those more youthful. Another study, which showed that attentional costs change as a function of age, inferred effortfulness as a causal factor. In this study, it was found that participants with lower hearing ability, who tended to be relatively older, took longer and put in additional effort to complete the same tasks in comparison to younger participants, who had higher hearing ability. This supported the notion that as humans age, an increase in effortfulness is necessary to perform at a similar capacity to those at a younger age.