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Researchers have suggested that as children’s language skill develops in early childhood, it comes to help children regulate their emotions (Cole, Armstrong, & Pemberton, 2010; Kopp, 1989), but the pathways by which this occurs have not been studied empirically. In a longitudinal study of 120 children from 18 to 48 months of age, associations among child language skill, observed anger expression, and regulatory strategies during a delay task were examined. Toddlers with better language skill, and whose language skill increased more over time, appeared less angry at 48 months and their anger declined more over time. Two regulatory strategies, support-seeking and distraction, explained a portion of the variance in the association between language skill and anger expression by 36 months.

Six experiments examined orientation-specific effects of stimulus context on the visual perception of horizontal and vertical lengths: Using a paired-comparison method, Experiments 1-5 showed that the probability of judging a given vertical line to be longer than a given horizontal line was relatively great when the stimulus set comprised relatively long horizontals and short verticals, and relatively small when the stimulus set comprised short horizontals with long verticals. To the extent that stimulus context exerts orientation-specific effects on perceived length, it thereby modulates the degree to which verticals appear longer than physically equivalent horizontals: the horizontal-vertical illusion (HVI). Under various contextual conditions, the HVI was as small as 3% (horizontals had to be 3%greater than verticals to be perceived as equally long) and as great as 15%, equaling about 12%in a "neutral" context. In Experiment 6, subjects judged the absolute physical length of each stimulus, and the results indicated that stimulus context acted largely by decreasing perceived lengths. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that differential effects of context reflect a process of stimulus-specific perceptual attenuation.Stimulus context is well known to affect psychophysical judgments, which can be highly sensitive to such factors as the range of the stimuli, how often they are presented, and the sequence of presentation (for review, see Poulton, 1989). Especially striking are various stimulus-specific or differential effects of context-that is, situations in which context exerts unequal effects on different subsets of stimuli.

The perception of linear extent in haptic touch appears to be anisotropic, in that haptically perceived extents can depend on the spatial orientation and location of the object and, thus, on the direction of exploratory motion. Experiments 1and 2 quantified how the haptic perception of linear extent depended on the type of motion (radial or tangential to the body) when subjects explored different stimulus objects (raised lines or solid blocks) varying in length and in relative spatial location. Relatively narrow, shallow, raised lines were judged to be longer, by magnitude estimation, than solid blocks. Consistent with earlier reports, stimuli explored with radial arm motions were judged to be longer than identical stimuli explored with tangential motions; this difference did not depend consistently on the lateral position ofthe stimulus object, the direction of movement (toward or away from the body), or the distance of the hand from the body but did depend slightly on the angular position of the shoulder. Experiment 3 showed that the radial-tangential effect could be explained by temporal differences in exploratory movements, implyingthat the apparent anisotropy is not intrinsic to the structure of haptic space.How do people perceive and judge linear extentslengths or distances that vary along a single spatial dimension-when these are apprehended through selfinitiated actions in manipulatory space? Lederman, Klatzky, Collins, and Wardell (1987) define manipulatory space as the small-scale space that is explored haptically with the arm. Although quantitative studies of the perception oflinear extent in manipulatory space go back more than a century (e.g., Jastrow, 1886), some basic issues still are not fully resolved.One ofthese concerns the isotropy ofperceptual space: How uniform is perceptual space over its several possible axes? Anisotropy seems to be the rule rather than the exception in perceptual systems-and, presumably, arises from potent perceptual mechanisms, given the failure of experience to "correct" the discrepancies. Both vision and passive touch, for instance, have long been known to exhibit systematic deviations from uniformity. E. H. Weber (1834) was apparently the first to note that passive, tactile two-point spatial sensitivity depends systematically on the axis defined by the punctate stimuli. On the arm, for instance, the threshold for detecting spatial separation is smaller when the points are displaced transversely than when they are displaced longitudinally.