Eye movements in response to real and apparent motions of acoustic targets.

Monitoring of eye movements resulting from the tracking of sound displacements in total darkness confirmed the generally accepted idea that smooth pursuit cannot be induced in the absence of a real visible target. Exclusively saccadic movements were obtained with real and apparent displacements of a constant frequency source and with frequency variations associated to spatially calibrated positions through training for 5 Ss. Smooth pursuit eye movements were only observed if S was allowed to point and follow with his hand the perceived position of acoustic targets.     

Cultural orientation and psychological well-being in Chinese Americans

Examined cultural orientation in the domains of language proficiency, cultural activity, and social relationship, and its relationship with psychological well-being in a group of 143 Chinese Americans in San Francisco. Four indicators of psychological well-being were utilized, two assessing the experience of distress (depression level and negative affect) and two assessing positive well-being (positive affect and life satisfaction). Domain-specific cultural orientations were found to hold differential relationships with psychological well-being. For instance, bicultural activity orientation predicted the best psychological well-being (regardless as to how it was assessed), but socially separatist individuals experienced less negative affect than assimilated and bicultural respondents. Findings were discussed in the context of the multicultural setting of San Francisco. It is suggested that future research retain separate assessments of domain-specific cultural orientation, examine the contribution of the community's ethnic/cultural composition to its members' cultural orientations (i.e., address the role of person-environment fit) and study their impact on psychological well-being. The data reported here were collected as part of the author's doctoral dissertation. Ricardo F. Munoz and Guillermo Bernal guided and supported the implementation of this study; Sunwoo Lee assisted with the data analysis; and Edison J. Trickett and the anonymous reviewers offered helpful suggestions.     

Perceptions of Women Condom Proposers Among Chinese Americans,Japanese Americans,and European Americans1

This study was a comparison of the judgments made about a sexually active female condom proposer by men and women of 3 ethnic groups: Chinese Americans, European Americans, and Japanese Americans. Results indicate that Chinese Americans reacted more negatively to the female condom proposer than did European Americans. Japanese Americans could not be distinguished between either of the groups on most measures. However, Japanese Americans did perceive the female condom proposer to be less sexually attractive than did the other 2 groups. These findings underscore the importance of distinguishing among subgroups of Asian Americans, especially when considering issues related to gender and sexuality.     

Phonology and access to Chinese character meaning

One of the central concerns in theories of reading skills is the role of phonology in access to word meaning. The present study focused on this issue in Chinese to examine the extent to which phonology affects Chinese character recognition. Two naming experiments were conducted with a phonologically mediated semantic priming paradigm, and the relative frequencies of semantic associates of the targets and their homophones were manipulated systematically. Analyses showed that a semantic associate produced robust priming on target naming at 57- and 250-msec. stimulus onset asynchronies, but only the low frequency homophones of high frequency semantic associates facilitated target naming at a 250-msec. stimulus onset asynchrony. These results indicate the role of phonology is neither obligatory nor efficient in access to Chinese character meaning, contradicting the key assumptions of the lexical constituency model. A revised parallel access model that emphasizes visual access to semantics is suggested as a more plausible account.     

Perceived homogeneity and familial loyalty between Chinese and Americans

On the basis of both previous and recent research on intercultural perceptions (Lee & Ottati, 1993; Triandis & Vassiliou, 1967), it is hypothesized that perceived group homogeneity would be intimately related to familial loyalty (or commitment) and stability. A cross-cultural questionnaire study was conducted both in the People’s Republic of China (n=182) and in the United States of America (n=182). The results revealed that both Chinese and American subjects perceived a collectivistic society to have more familial commitment and stability while they perceived an individualistic society to have less familial commitment and stability. The implications for this study have been discussed.     

Perceived homogeneity and familial loyalty between Chinese and Americans

On the basis of both previous and recent research on intercultural perceptions (Lee & Ottati, 1993; Triandis & Vassiliou, 1967), it is hypothesized that perceived group homogeneity would be intimately related to familial loyalty (or commitment) and stability. A cross-cultural questionnaire study was conducted both in the People’s Republic of China (n=182) and in the United States of America (n=182). The results revealed that both Chinese and American subjects perceived a collectivistic society to have more familial commitment and stability while they perceived an individualistic society to have less familial commitment and stability. The implications for this study have been discussed.     

Autonomic, subjective, and expressive responses to emotional films in older and younger Chinese Americans and European Americans

Previously, the authors found that during idiosyncratic emotional events (relived emotions, discussions about marital conflict), older European American adults demonstrated smaller changes in cardiovascular responding than their younger counterparts (R. W. Levenson, L. L. Carstensen, W. V. Friesen, & P. Ekman, 1991; R. W. Levenson, L. L. Carstensen, & J. M. Gottman, 1994). This study examined whether such differences held when the emotional events were standardized, and whether they extend to another cultural group. Forty-eight old (70-85 years) and 48 young (20-34 years) European Americans and Chinese Americans viewed sad and amusing film clips in the laboratory while their cardiovascular, subjective (online and retrospective), and behavioral responses were measured. Consistent with previous findings, older participants evidenced smaller changes in cardiovascular responding than did younger participants during the film clips. Consistent with earlier reports, old and young participants did not differ in most subjective and behavioral responses to the films. No cultural differences were found.     

Cultures of moderation and expression: emotional experience, behavior, and physiology in Chinese Americans and Mexican Americans

Ethnographic accounts suggest that emotions are moderated in Chinese cultures and expressed openly in Mexican cultures. The authors tested this notion by comparing subjective, behavioral, and physiological aspects of emotional responses to 3 (warned, unwarned, instructed to inhibit responding) aversive acoustic startle stimuli in 95 Chinese Americans and 64 Mexican Americans. Subjective reports were consistent with ethnographic accounts; Chinese Americans reported experiencing significantly less emotion than Mexican Americans across all 3 startle conditions. Evidence from a nonemotional task suggested that these differences were not artifacts of cultural differences in the use of rating scales. Few cultural differences were found in emotional behavior or physiology, suggesting that these aspects of emotion are less susceptible to cultural influence.     

Somatic and social: Chinese Americans talk about emotion

Empirical findings suggest that Chinese and Americans differ in the ways that they describe emotional experience, with Chinese using more somatic and social words than Americans. No one, however, has investigated whether this variation is related to differences between Chinese and American conceptions of emotion or to linguistic differences between the English and Chinese languages. Therefore, in two studies, the authors compared the word use of individuals who varied in their orientation to Chinese and American cultures (European Americans [EA], more acculturated Chinese Americans [CA], and less acculturated CA) when they were speaking English during emotional events. Across both studies, less acculturated CA used more somatic (e.g., dizzy) and more social (e.g., friend) words than EA. These findings suggest that even when controlling for language spoken, cultural conceptions of emotion may shape how people talk about emotion.     

Age of first onset major depression in Chinese Americans

Using data from the Chinese American Epidemiological Study, risk for experiencing an initial episode of major depression across the life course was examined. Data were collected on 1,747 U.S.-born and foreign-born Chinese Americans (ages 18-65 years). Results suggest that Chinese American women did not evidence higher risk than Chinese American men for experiencing a 1st major depressive episode. Risk for experiencing a 1st depressive episode decreased as length of residence in the United States increased. Although those who immigrated at younger ages evidenced greater overall risk, those who came at later ages were more likely to become depressed at or soon after arrival. Competing theories of acculturation-related risk are discussed and directions for future research are proposed.     

Intergenerational cultural dissonance in parent-adolescent relationships among Chinese and European Americans

Generational cultural gaps (assessed as the mismatch between adolescents' ideals and perceptions of the parent-adolescent relationship) were investigated among Chinese youth with immigrant parents and their European American counterparts who have been in the United States for generations and assumingly do not have intergenerational cultural gaps. The authors of the study examined the associations of such generational gaps with adolescents' behavioral problems and whether youth's appreciation of Chinese parent-adolescent relationships (parental devotion, sacrifice, thoughtfulness, and guan) described by the notion of qin would moderate the relationship between discrepancies and youth's adjustment. A total of 634 high school students (M = 15.97 years; 95 and 154 first- and second-generation Chinese American respectively, and 385 European Americans) completed measures of parental warmth, parent-adolescent open communication, qin, and psychological adjustment. The U.S.-born Chinese American adolescents' ideals exceeded perceptions of parents' warmth and open communication to a greater degree than it did for European American adolescents (ps < 0.05). Such discrepancies in parental warmth were related to greater internalizing symptoms for second-generation Chinese American youth than for their European American peers. In addition, for second-generation Chinese, their perceptions of qin, particularly parents' devotion and sacrifice, had stronger moderating effects, diminishing the associations between generational cultural gaps and youth's behavioral problems compared with those of European American and first-generation Chinese youth. Parental thoughtfulness also played a similar beneficial role, but did so for all youth.     

Relation of Individualism–Collectivism and Ethnic Identity to Spiritual Transcendence Among European Americans,Asian Indian Americans,and Chinese Americans

The hypothesis that spirituality is influenced by individualism–collectivism and ethnic identity is investigated among European Americans (EAs), Asian Indian Americans (AIAs), and Chinese Americans (CAs) who completed measures of individualism–collectivism, ethnic identity, personality, and spiritual transcendence (ST). Data analyses indicated that EAs scored higher than both AIAs and CAs on the ST. Separate regression analyses on ST with demographics and personality as covariates and individualism–collectivism and ethnic identity as independent variables indicated that collectivism significantly predicted ST for EAs and AIAs, and resolution of ethnic identity significantly predicted ST for Chinese Americans.     

Inhibitory stroke neighbour priming in character recognition and reading in Chinese

In alphabetic languages, prior exposure to a target word's orthographic neighbour influences word recognition in masked priming experiments and the process of word identification that occurs during normal reading. We investigated whether similar neighbour priming effects are observed in Chinese in 4 masked priming experiments (employing a forward mask and 33-ms, 50-ms, and 67-ms prime durations) and in an experiment that measured eye movements while reading. In these experiments, the stroke neighbour of a Chinese character was defined as any character that differed by the addition, deletion, or substitution of one or two strokes. Prime characters were either stroke neighbours or stroke non-neighbours of the target character, and each prime character had either a higher or a lower frequency of occurrence in the language than its corresponding target character. Frequency effects were observed in all experiments, demonstrating that the manipulation of character frequency was successful. In addition, a robust inhibitory priming effect was observed in response times for target characters in the masked priming experiments and in eye fixation durations for target characters in the reading experiment. This stroke neighbour priming was not modulated by the relative frequency of the prime and target characters. The present findings therefore provide a novel demonstration that inhibitory neighbour priming shown previously for alphabetic languages is also observed for nonalphabetic languages, and that neighbour priming (based on stroke overlap) occurs at the level of the character in Chinese.     

Exploring orthographic neighborhood size effects in a computational model of Chinese character naming

Orthographic neighborhood (N) size effects have been extensively studied in English consistently producing a facilitatory effect in word naming tasks. In contrast, several recent studies on Chinese character naming have demonstrated an inhibitory effect of neighborhood size. Response latencies tend to be inhibited by inconsistent characters with large neighborhoods relative to small neighborhoods. These differences in neighborhood effects between languages may depend on the characteristics (depth) of the mapping between orthography and phonology. To explore this, we first conducted a behavioral experiment to investigate the relationship between neighborhood size, consistency and reading response. The results showed an inhibitory effect of neighborhood size for inconsistent characters but a facilitatory effect for consistent characters. We then developed two computational models based on parallel distributed processing principles to try and capture the nature of the processing that leads to these results in Chinese character naming. Simulations using models based on the triangle model of reading indicated that consistency and neighborhood size interact with the division of labor between semantics and phonology to produce these effects.     

Help-seeking behavior and attitude of Chinese Americans regarding psychological problems

Investigated the help-seeking behavior and attitude regarding psychological problems as mediated by mental health status, acculturation level, and sociodemographic characteristics in a community sample of Chinese Americans. Of the 128 respondents, 17 (13.3%) had consulted professional help for a nervous or emotional problem. Compared to the others, they reported significantly poorer mental health status (i.e., had more physical symptoms, had once come close to experiencing a "nervous breakdown," and had a relative who had been in treatment), and were more likely to be American-born. For those who had not previously sought help, attitude toward help seeking was examined. A positive attitude was mediated by superior English ability, being younger, married, and from a lower SES background. The findings suggested help-seeking behavior is primarily mediated by presence of need, whereas attitude reflected a general propensity. Acculturation was an important predictor of both behavior and attitude, with the less acculturated most in need of education about the utility of mental health service.     

Levels of processing and phonological priming in Chinese character completion tests

This study investigated the level of processing (LoP) effect in the Chinese character completion task. Stem cues, either graphemically or phonetically related to a target character, were used to generate two different kinds of perceptual tests. By giving participants either direct or indirect instructions, the character completion tests could be either an explicit or an implicit memory test. For the implicit test, LoP effects were not found between Read and Generation conditions, whereas the Physical condition did not produce priming. In addition, no priming was found when participants received graphemic cues during the test. For the explicit test, on the other hand, a standard pattern of LoP effects was found between the Physical, Read, and Generation conditions. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of lexical access for character completion tests and the role of phonology in processing Chinese characters.     

Emotional expression and physiology in European Americans and Hmong Americans

Ethnographic and clinical observations suggest that Asians are less expressive than European Americans. To examine whether this difference emerged in online emotional responding, 50 Hmong Americans (HAs) and 48 European Americans (EAs) were asked to relive past episodes of intense happiness, pride, love, anger, disgust, and sadness. Facial behavior and physiological reactivity were measured. For most emotions, more cultural similarities than differences were found. There were some exceptions: During happiness, fewer HAs than EAs showed non-Duchenne smiles (i.e., "social" smiles), despite similarities in reported emotional experience and physiological reactivity. Within-group differences between "less Hmong" and "more Hmong" HAs were also found. Implications of these findings for our understanding of culture-emotion relations are discussed.     

Target locations in visual field and character recognition by students of Chinese

The potential influence of target location in a visual field on search should be considered in layouts of control panels and advertisements. This investigation was done to verify the assumption that the upper-left portion of a page or its equivalent naturally attracts the attention of the viewer. Exp. 1 used a tachistoscope to test which of eight Chinese characters first attracted the attention of viewers. The eight Chinese characters are arranged in a square and a circular configuration. In the square layout, a large square (18 cm x 18 cm) was first conceptually subdivided into nine equal parts (6 cm x 6 cm). Then, the eight Chinese characters were put in the center of each part, leaving the central part blank. In the circular layout, the same Chinese characters were symmetrically placed on the conceptual circumference (r = 6 cm) of a circle within a large square. Exp. 2 was a paper-and-pencil test. An embedded-fault-character-search was used to examine the location of the first faulty character discovered by the subjects. 60 college students and 36 schoolchildren were selected as subjects for the tachistoscopic experiment and paper-and-pencil test. Finally, five graduate students participated in Exp. 3 in which an eye camera registered subjects' eye movements to measured distribution of durations of looking over eight locations. The measurements indicated a slight predominance of the upper-left portion for college students and graduate students, and a slight predominance of the upper-right portion for schoolchildren.