Explaining the behaviour of random ecological networks: the stability of the microbiome as a case of integrative pluralism

Synthese - Explaining the behaviour of ecosystems is one of the key challenges for the biological sciences. Since 2000, new-mechanism has been the main model to account for the nature of scientific...     

Says Who?: Decision-Making and Conflicts among Chinese-Canadian and Mainland Chinese Parents of Young Children

The present study explores the decision-making process and conflicts on infant care issues among Chinese mothers and fathers in Canada and China. The study utilized a mother–father informant approach and analyzed inter-parental agreement on parents’ responses. The participants included 127 families of 1-year old infants (68 Chinese–Canadians, 59 mainland Chinese). The findings revealed that parents used various strategies in making decisions about child issues such as mothers taking the lead, joint (mother–father) decisions, taking the child’s interest into consideration, and seeking advice from extended families and professionals. Differences were found by gender of the parent and by country. The inter-parental agreements for how decisions were made and the types of conflicts that occurred were relatively low.     

Different attitudes toward humor between Chinese and American students: evidence from the Implicit Association Test

Although cross-cultural research indicates that Chinese people demonstrate less humor than do Americans, little research addresses the reasons. This cross-cultural difference may be largely due to different implicit attitudes toward humor held by Chinese and Americans, deeply rooted in the two cultural traditions. Both self-report evaluation and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) were used to compare Chinese and American attitudes toward humor. Although 60 Chinese undergraduate students showed no significant difference from 33 American exchange students in explicit attitudes toward humor, the former associated humor more frequently with unpleasant adjectives and seriousness with pleasant adjectives on the IAT; the opposite pattern was found for the American group. This indicated a negative implicit attitude toward humor among the Chinese students.     

Observing neighborhood effects without neighbors

With a new metric called phonological Levenshtein distance (PLD20), the present study explores the effects of phonological similarity and word frequency on spoken word recognition, using polysyllabic words that have neither phonological nor orthographic neighbors, as defined by neighborhood density (the N-metric). Inhibitory effects of PLD20 were observed for these lexical hermits: Close-PLD20 words were recognized more slowly than distant PLD20 words, indicating lexical competition. Importantly, these inhibitory effects were found only for low- (not high-) frequency words, in line with previous findings that phonetically related primes inhibit recognition of low-frequency words. These results indicate that the properties of PLD20--a continuous measure of word-form similarity--make it a promising new metric for quantifying phonological distinctiveness in spoken word recognition research.     

自我调节学习量表的修订:发展性研究

现有的自我调节学习研究的工具适用范围受到一定限制。依据心理测量学原理随机抽取了1115名青少年进行自我调节学习量表的施测和修订。结果表明:(1)修订后的量表由三个维度构成:动机,策略,意志;(2)各量表的信度和效度均达心理测量学标准,有较好的适用性;(3)修订后的自我调节学习量表适用的年龄范围较以往研究工具更为广泛。