A latent profile analysis of Asian American men's and women's adherence to cultural values

The goal of this study was to identify diverse profiles of Asian American women's and men's adherence to values that are salient in Asian cultures (i.e., conformity to norms, family recognition through achievement, emotional self-control, collectivism, and humility). To this end, the authors conducted a latent profile analysis using the 5 subscales of the Asian American Values Scale-Multidimensional in a sample of 214 Asian Americans. The analysis uncovered a four-cluster solution. In general, Clusters 1 and 2 were characterized by relatively low and moderate levels of adherence to the 5 dimensions of cultural values, respectively. Cluster 3 was characterized by the highest level of adherence to the cultural value of family recognition through achievement, whereas Cluster 4 was typified by the highest levels of adherence to collectivism, emotional self-control, and humility. Clusters 3 and 4 were associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms than Cluster 1. Furthermore, Asian American women and Asian American men had lower odds of being in Cluster 4 and Cluster 3, respectively. These findings attest to the importance of identifying specific patterns of adherence to cultural values when examining the relationship between Asian Americans' cultural orientation and mental health status.     

The nonlinear effects of conscientiousness on overall job performance and performance dimensions in the Chinese context

The relationship between conscientiousness and job performance has been found to be nonlinear in the West, which challenges conceptually and empirically the traditional assumption of the single linear relationship. In this research, we examined the nonlinear effects of conscientiousness on both overall job performance and performance dimensions (i.e., task performance, adaptive performance and contextual performance) in the Chinese context. The results of our two studies supported some evidence for the nonlinear effect of conscientiousness on overall job performance. In addition, it was found that conscientiousness has different (linear or nonlinear) effects on performance dimensions. These findings suggest that the nonlinear effects of conscientiousness on job performance deserve further investigation, and a distinction should be made with regard to job performance in personnel evaluation. Results are discussed in terms of the significance of considering the nonlinear relationship between conscientiousness and performance criteria.     

Unpacking Cultural Variations in Peak-Experiences: Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Early Childhood Recollection Between Hong Kong and Brazil

In this cross-cultural study, 115 Hong Kong Chinese and 117 Brazilian college students described a childhood peak-experience (occurring before the age of 14) and provided a self-rating on its enduring impact. Among various categories of peak-experiences, both Hong Kong Chinese and Brazilians reported interpersonal joy most frequently; the second most frequently reported category was external achievement for the Hong Kong sample and developmental landmark for the Brazilian sample. Compared with Brazilians’ narratives, those of Hong Kong Chinese were more social-focused, involving greater number of other people, but less specific. These characteristics of autobiographical memory, i.e., memory focus (self vs. social), memory specificity (specific vs. general), and the number of other people involved, significantly mediated the relation between culture and interpersonal joy. The present findings have extended research on peak-experiences to cross-cultural contexts and incorporated measures of autobiographical memory to unpack cultural variations in these two collectivist societies.     

Overall Hedonic Evaluations and Evaluation of Specific Moments from Past Relationships and High School Days

Two studies were conducted in which student participants gave overall hedonic evaluations of past relationships or their high school days, and, additionally, gave similar evaluations of the best, most memorable, worst, initial, and final moments from them. They also evaluated a typical moment and the percentages of good and bad times in these experiences. Such results from some individuals were given to other participants, who were also asked to make overall evaluations. Overall, the overall evaluations of the original participant related weakly rather than strongly to the evaluations of the specific moments. Generally, the other participants’ overall evaluations converged on those of the original recalling participants, but their overall evaluations of the past relationships were more positive than either their own initial evaluations or those of the original, recalling respondents. In sum, overall evaluations of these long, diverse experiences were not well predicted from valuations of the specific moments we investigated. Hedonic evaluations of past experiences may be influenced by appraisals of their success.     

Customer reactions to encountering consecutive service failures

According to previous studies, many consumers in Taiwan have experienced consecutive service failures. Despite these failures, many consumers still remain loyal to a service provider for a variety of reasons, such as money deposits, contractual agreements, associated costs, time constrains, and health concerns. We attempt to investigate the emotional reactions and expectations of consumers after they have experienced two consecutive service failures. Our findings reveal that for high‐involvement services, although customers display strong negative emotional reactions after each service failure, the reaction to the second service failure is less intensive than that to the first one. Furthermore, our findings show that as long as the products or services remain in use, customers tend to retain high levels of expectation in regard to the service provider. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heartwarming memories: Nostalgia maintains physiological comfort

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, is a predominantly positive and social emotion. Recent evidence suggests that nostalgia maintains psychological comfort. Here, we propose, and document in five methodologically diverse studies, a broader homeostatic function for nostalgia that also encompasses the maintenance of physiological comfort. We show that nostalgia--an emotion with a strong connotation of warmth--is triggered by coldness. Participants reported stronger nostalgia on colder (vs. warmer) days and in a cold (vs. neutral or warm) room. Nostalgia, in turn, modulates the interoceptive feeling of temperature. Higher levels of music-evoked nostalgia predicted increased physical warmth, and participants who recalled a nostalgic (vs. ordinary autobiographical) event perceived ambient temperature as higher. Finally, and consistent with the close central nervous system integration of temperature and pain sensations, participants who recalled a nostalgic (vs. ordinary autobiographical) event evinced greater tolerance to noxious cold.     

Distinct processing for pictures of animals and objects: evidence from eye movements

Many studies have suggested that emotional stimuli orient and engage attention. There is also evidence that animate stimuli, such as those from humans and animals, cause attentional bias. However, categorical and emotional factors are usually mixed, and it is unclear to what extent human context influences attentional allocation. To address this issue, we tracked participants' eye movements while they viewed pictures with animals and inanimate images (i.e., category) as focal objects. These pictures had either negative or neutral emotional valence, and either human body parts or nonhuman parts were near the focal objects (i.e., context). The picture's valence, arousal, position, size, and most of the low-level visual features were matched across categories. The results showed that nonhuman animals were more likely to be attended to and to be attended to for longer times than inanimate objects. The same pattern held for the human contexts (vs. nonhuman contexts). The effects of emotional valence, category, and context interacted. Specifically, in images with a negative valence, focal animals and objects with human context had comparable numbers of gaze fixations and gaze duration. These results highlighted the attentional bias to animate parts of a picture and clarified that the effects of category, valence, and picture context interacted to influence attentional allocation.     

Religious Problem Solving and the Complexity of Religious Rationality Within an Iranian Muslim Ideological Surround

Comparative rationality analysis formally examines the incommensurable social rationalities that theoretically exist within religions and the social sciences according to the ideological surround model (ISM) of the psychology of religion. This study extended these procedures to a new cultural context: 220 Iranian university students responded to the Religious Problem‐Solving Scales developed by Pargament et al. (1988). As hypothesized, the Collaborative Problem‐Solving Style was consistent, and the Self‐Directing Style inconsistent, with Iranian Muslim religious and psychological adjustment. The Deferring Style had ambiguous implications. Comparative rationality analysis demonstrated that sample interpretations of these styles explained greater variance in adjustment than did the original scales. These procedures also yielded the unexpected discovery that the Deferring Style included a secular as well as a religious form of Iranian rationality. These data most importantly support the ISM claim that “future objectivity” requires empirical analyses of the incommensurable rationalities operating within the psychology of religion.     

Modeling general and specific variance in multifaceted constructs: a comparison of the bifactor model to other approaches

This article recommends an alternative method for testing multifaceted constructs. Researchers often have to choose between two problematic approaches for analyzing multifaceted constructs: the total score approach and the individual score approach. Both approaches can result in conceptual ambiguity. The proposed bifactor model assesses simultaneously the general construct shared by the facets and the specific facets, over and above the general construct. We illustrate the bifactor model by examining the construct of Extraversion as measured by the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO‐PI‐R; Costa & McCrae, 1992), with two college samples (N = 383 and 378). The analysis reveals that the facets of the NEO‐PI‐R Extraversion correlate with criteria in opposite directions after partialling out the general construct. The direction of gender differences also varies by facets. Bifactor models combine the advantages but avoid the drawbacks of the 2 existing methods and can lead to greater conceptual clarity.     

Natural ambiguities: Racial categorization of multiracial individuals

Understanding the perception of multiracial persons is increasingly important in today's diverse society. The present research investigated the process of categorizing multiracial persons as “Multiracial.” We hypothesized that perceivers would make fewer Multiracial categorizations of multiracials and that these categorizations would take longer than monoracial categorizations. We found support for these hypotheses across six experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that perceivers did not categorize morphed Black–White faces as Multiracial with the same frequency with which they categorized Black and White faces as Black and White (respectively), and that categorizations of multiracials as Multiracial took longer than monoracial categorizations. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these effects to real Black–White faces. Experiment 3 showed that these findings generalized to Asian–White faces. We used pixel variance analysis to show that these effects were not due to increased variance among Multiracial faces. The image analysis showed that the Black–White morphs and real biracials were actually less varied than either the Black or White sets of faces. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that cognitive load and time constraints detrimentally affected multiracial, but not monoracial, categorizations. Experiment 6 showed that imbuing monoracial categories with importance decreases the use of the Multiracial category. Implications of these findings for understanding perceptions of multiracial persons are discussed.