Interactive processing of phonological information in reading Japanese Kanji character words and their phonemic radicals

Kanji are categorized into four types based on the combinations of "subword validity" (when the right phonemic radical represents the same On-reading as the whole Kanji character) and "radical-neighbor consistency" (when the whole Kanji character represents the same On-reading as all of its neighbor characters). The study demonstrated that both subword validity and radical-neighbor consistency affect naming latencies and error rates regardless of character frequency. The study also demonstrated that the subword validity affects ease of extraction of a subword's phonology. These results suggest that the phonology of the whole Kanji competes with the subword's phonology. Moreover, the competition is stronger when the radical-neighbors aid in extracting the phonology of the whole Kanji.     

Placing the face in context: cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion

Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people's emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or a different one. The surrounding people's emotions influenced Japanese but not Westerners' perceptions of the central person. These differences reflect differences in attention, as indicated by eye-tracking data (Study 2): Japanese looked at the surrounding people more than did Westerners. Previous findings on East-West differences in contextual sensitivity generalize to social contexts, suggesting that Westerners see emotions as individual feelings, whereas Japanese see them as inseparable from the feelings of the group.     

Examining Self-Concealment within the Framework of Psychological Inflexibility and Mindfulness: A Preliminary Cross-Sectional Investigation

Although self-concealment has been a central topic in the field of personality and applied psychologies, it remains somewhat unclear how it should be conceptualized. The present study investigated self-concealment within the framework of psychological inflexibility and mindfulness, two major emotion/behavior regulation processes integrated into contemporary cognitive behavioral models of behavioral health. One-thousand sixty college undergraduates (77 % female; n = 816) completed a web-based survey that included the measures of interest. Results revealed that psychological inflexibility was positively and uniquely associated with self-concealment. The association between mindfulness and self-concealment was moderated by gender; higher levels of self-concealment predicted lower levels of mindfulness for women only and were associated with sexual-minority men, but self-concealment did not vary for women as a function of sexual orientation status. Additional results and future directions are also discussed.     

Culture and attention: Recent empirical findings and new directions in cultural psychology

Over the past 3 decades, cultural psychologists have empirically investigated the influence of cultural meaning systems on human psychology. Under the rubric of holistic versus analytic thought, researchers have demonstrated that there are substantial cultural variations in social cognition, and that such variations are observable even in so‐called fundamental psychological processes, such as attention. The aim of this paper is to review 3 major themes in culture and attention: (1) culture and attention to nonsocial scenes, (2) culture and attention to social scenes, and (3) culture and aesthetics. The paper also discusses 4 major strands of research that could be considered important candidates to further advance the understanding of culture and attention: (1) research on “culture ? human psychological processes,” where we investigate how culture influences modes of attention; (2) research on “human psychology ? cultural processes,” where we investigate how those who hold a specific mode of attention create cultural products and tangible representations of culturally shared meanings; (3) research on cultural neuroscience, where we investigate underlying mechanisms and processes of specific modes of attention; and (4) research on cultural transmission processes, where we investigate how specific modes of attention is taught by adults and internalized by children.     

Antipredator behavior of Swiss-Webster mice in a visible burrow system

Swiss-Webster mice living in a visible burrow system (VBS) reacted to presentation of a live cat in the surface area of the VBS by retreat to the burrows and reductions in nondefensive behaviors such as eating and drinking. Live eat-exposed subjects remained in the burrows 14 hr or more, while subjects exposed to a toy (plush) cat prior to live cat exposure reemerged almost immediately and made many contacts with the toy cat. However, subjects exposed first to the cat and later to a toy cat showed intermediate surface reemergence times and cat contacts during toy cat tests, indicating strong sensitization effects of prior live cat exposure. Previous studies indicated that rats in this situation show retreat to the burrows, surface avoidance, and reduction in nondefensive behaviors. The mouse pattern was similar, with the notable exception that in the first 5min block after cat presentation, mice rapidly alternated retreat to the burrow chambers with reappearance in the tunnel segment near the surface, to scan the surface visually and sniff. Movement during this time block involved a stretch attend posture characteristic also of risk assessment activities in rats. Such visual and olfactory inspection of the cat is not seen in rats in the VBS. This difference may be related to the finding that rats, but not mice, emit ultrasonic “alarm cries” during and after cat exposure. © 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Examining the constructs of work-to-family enrichment and positive spillover

This paper reports three studies examining construct validity evidence for two recently developed measures of the positive side of the work–family interface: work-to-family positive spillover (WFPS; Hanson, Hammer, & Colton, 2006) and work-to-family enrichment (WFE; Carlson, Kacmar, Wayne, & Grzywacz, 2006). Using confirmatory factor analysis, the results from the first two studies indicate that the best fitting model distinguishes between WFPS and WFE, each with three sub-dimensions. However, these studies also showed that several items measuring WFE cross-loaded onto factors measuring WFPS. Results from the discriminant analyses showed that the sub-dimensions of WFPS and WFE uniquely predicted job satisfaction and life satisfaction. Yet, when WFPS and WFE were examined as one dimension, the measure of WFE predicted life satisfaction, but the measure of WFPS did not add to the prediction above WFE. Across both studies, WFE mediated the relationship between WFPS with both job and life satisfaction. Lastly, Study 3 provides some evidence of the content adequacy of these items; however, several items overlapped in content. These results suggest that enrichment and positive spillover are distinct but related constructs, each with three sub-dimensions. Further, more work is needed to refine the measurement of WFE and WFPS; however, this research helps advance our understanding of the positive side of the work–family interface.     

A study of intermediate propositional logics on the third slice

The intermediate logics have been classified into slices (cf. Hosoi [1]), but the detailed structure of slices has been studied only for the first two slices (cf. Hosoi and Ono [2]). In order to study the structure of slices, we give a method of a finer classification of slices & _n (n 3). Here we treat only the third slice as an example, but the method can be extended to other slices in an obvious way. It is proved that each subslice contains continuum of logics. A characterization of logics in each subslice is given in terms of the form of models.     

When Is Perception Top‐Down and When Is It Not? Culture,Narrative, and Attention

Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, 2003 ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross‐cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited.     

How and When Do Core Self-Evaluations Predict Career Satisfaction? The Roles of Positive Goal Emotions and Occupational Embeddedness

We draw on theories of self-verification and situational strength to examine how and when core self-evaluations (CSE) predict career satisfaction. We tested our hypotheses using a time-lagged study with 139 alumni of two business schools across three measurement waves. Results showed that compared to individuals with lower CSE those with higher CSE were more satisfied with their careers because they associated more positive emotions with pursuing their career goals. However, a high degree of occupational embeddedness attenuated the indirect effect of the CSE–career satisfaction relationship through positive goal emotions and compensated for low levels of positive goal emotions. We discuss theoretical and practical implications.