Educational and Vocational Aspirations of Minority and Female Students: A Longitudinal Study

This study examined the relative importance of school, family, personal/psychological, race, and sex variables in predicting educational and vocational aspirations. A nationally representative sample of 10th‐grade students was followed through 2 years beyond their high school. Results suggested that sex and race significantly predicted educational and vocational aspirations of students. The educational aspiration model was shown to be more robust than the occupational aspiration model. Overall, students showed increases in educational and occupational aspirations, regardless of sex and race. Compared with other groups, Asian Americans had the greatest increase in educational aspirations. Female students, on the average, had higher educational and vocational aspirations.     

评《以科学的态度对待科学是学者的天职》

印度洋海啸造成的灾难既动摇了一些人的宗教信仰,也唤醒了另一些人潜在的宗教意识。中国几家媒体趁势而上,海外的电子刊物《新语丝》遥相对应,开展了一场关于人类是否应该“敬畏自然”的大论战。一家出版社以《敬畏自然》为名,将文章结集出版。社长宫敬才教授(他也以一篇《生态危机与人道主义的关系》参加了该论战)亲自命笔为之撰写了题为《以科学的态度对待科学是学者的天职》的序言(见《博览群书》2005年第5期,以下简称《序言》)。笔者拜读之后,如骨鲠在喉,不得不吐,于是不揣冒昧,写了如下评论文字,愿求教于方家。《以科学的态度对待科学…     

Examining the cross‐cultural validity of the positive affect and negative affect schedule between an Asian (Singaporean) sample and a Western (American) sample

The positive affect and negative affect schedule (PANAS) is a popular measure of positive (PA) and negative affectivity (NA). Developed and validated in Western contexts, the 20‐item scale has been frequently administered on respondents from Asian countries with the assumption of cross‐cultural measurement invariance. We examine this assumption via a rigorous multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, which allows us to assess between‐group differences in both strength of scale item‐to‐latent factor relationship (metric invariance test) and mean of each scale item (scalar invariance test), on a large sample of 1,065 respondents recruited from Singapore (Asian sample) and the United States (Western sample). We found that two items assessing PA (“excited” and “proud”) and three items assessing NA (“guilty,” “hostile,” and “ashamed”) exhibited metric noninvariance whereas 11 of the remaining metric invariant items exhibited scalar noninvariance, suggesting that the PA and NA constructs differ from what the PANAS is expected to measure for Asian respondents. Our findings serve as a cautionary note to researchers who intend to administer the PANAS in future studies as well as to researchers interpreting the results of past studies involving respondents from Asian countries.     

How to save the wounded self: Power distance belief's moderation of self‐identity threat and status‐related consumption

There is ample evidence in the relevant literature to show that self‐identity threat affects consumers' behavior, psychological needs, purchasing behavior, and product choice. The present research takes self‐identity threat to another level with a focus on the moderating role of power distance belief (PDB) in the relation to self‐identity threat and status consumption. The research involves two studies. Study 1 shows that threatened participants with a high PDB prefer status goods to nonstatus goods. By contrast, the low‐PDB group is indifferent to the status of goods. Study 2 reexamines the results of Study 2 with different participants and goods and tests the moderated mediation of symbolic compensatory need in the status consumption of high‐PDB participants. The results and implications of our findings are presented in the Discussion section.     

Classifying adults' and children's faces by sex: computational investigations of subcategorical feature encoding

The faces of both adults and children can be classified accurately by sex, even in the absence of sex-stereotyped social cues such as hair and clothing (Wild et al., 2000). Although much is known from psychological and computational studies about the information that supports sex classification for adults' faces, children's faces have been much less studied. The purpose of the present study was to quantify and compare the information available in adults' versus children's faces for sex classification and to test alternative theories of how human observers distinguish male and female faces for these different age groups. We implemented four computational/neural network models of this task that differed in terms of the age categories from which the sex classification features were derived. Two of the four strategies replicated the advantage for classifying adults' faces found in previous work. To determine which of these strategies was a better model of human performance, we compared the performance of the two models with that of human subjects at the level of individual faces. The results suggest that humans judge the sex of adults' and children's faces using feature sets derived from the appropriate face age category, rather than applying features derived from another age category or from a combination of age categories.     

学生感知的学校氛围与主客观学业成绩:心理素质及其分维度的中介作用

本研究旨在探究心理素质及其分维度在学生感知的学校氛围与主客观学业成绩之间的中介作用。采用整群抽样的方法选取被试,样本一抽取北京、陕西等七个省市10所中学7~12年级共1274名学生,样本二抽取重庆、湖南等四个省市7所中学7~12年级共2190名学生。结果表明：（1）学生感知的学校氛围与主观学业成绩存在显著正相关,与客观成绩的正相关呈边缘显著,与心理素质存在显著正相关;（2）心理素质在感知的学校氛围与主客观学业成绩之间中介作用显著;（3）心理素质的不同维度在学生感知的学校氛围与学业成绩关系之间中介作用存在差异,其中认知品质在学生感知的学校氛围与学业成绩之间存在稳定的正向中介作用。研究结果启示教育者在实施素质教育的过程中,应注意营造积极的学校氛围,以此提高学生心理素质,尤其是认知品质的发展,从而提高学生的学业成绩。