Assessment of Major Life Events for Hong Kong Adolescents: The Chinese Adolescent Life Event Scale

Previous Chinese research on adolescent life stress adopted life event scales that were directly translated from Western measures. To address the methodological and cultural issues overlooked by the import approach, the present research aimed at constructing a life event scale for Hong Kong adolescents. Study 1 was conducted to congregate items for the Chinese Adolescent Life Event Scale (CALES). The CALES contains 44 items derived from 618 Hong Kong adolescents. Study 2 revealed adequate test–retest reliability and criterion-related validity for the CALES. Moreover, the CALES yielded stronger relationships with depression than did the translated life event measures. Results suggest that the CALES is appropriate for assessing life events for Hong Kong adolescents. Both unique features of the CALES and life events found only in the translated measures are examined. Implications for Chinese research on life stress are discussed.     

Perceived Parental Rearing Style, Self-Esteem and Self-Criticism as Predictors of Happiness

This study set out to determine to what extent three recalled parental (care, discouragement of behavioural freedom, denial of psychological autonomy), self-esteem, and self-criticism predicted self-rated happiness in a normal, non-clinical, population of young people in their late teens and early 20s. Three hundred and sixty-five participants completed four questionnaires: Parental Bonding Instrument (Parker, Tupling and Brown: 1979, British Journal of Medical Psychology 55, pp. 1–10), Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg: 1965, Society and the Adolescent Self-Image (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ)), Self-Criticism Questionnaire (Brewin, Firth-Cozens, Furnham and McManus: 1992, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 101, pp. 561–566), and the Oxford Happiness Inventory (Argyle, Martin and Crossland: 1989, Recent Advances in Social Psychology: An International Perspective (Elsevier, North Holland)). Regressions showed self-esteem (the positive five items) to be the most dominant and powerful correlate of happiness. Maternal care was a significant correlate of both self-esteem and self-criticism. Maternal care was the only direct correlate of happiness when paternal and maternal rearing styles were examined together suggesting that the warmth showed by mothers towards their children was particularly beneficial in increasing the offsprings' scores on self-reported happiness. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

客体与空间工作记忆的分离：来自皮层慢电位的证据

利用128导事件相关电位技术,采用延迟匹配任务的实验范式,测查了16名正常被试在完成客体任务和空间任务时的皮层慢电位（slow cortical potentials,简称sp成分）,实验发现：在后部脑区,客体工作记忆与空间工作记忆在慢波活动的时间上存在分离,空间任务更早的诱发出负sp成分,并且空间任务激活更多的后部脑区;左下前额叶在客体工作记忆任务与空间工作记忆任务中都有激活,并且激活强度不存在显著差异;背侧前额叶主要负责客体信息的保持与复述,但左右背侧前额叶的激活强度存在不对称性。     

Setting the Record Straight: Confucius’ Notion of Ren

Comparative studies involving early Confucian ethics often appear to assume that it is a unified approach to morality. This essay challenges that assumption by arguing that Confucius had a significantly different conception of ren, commonly viewed as central to Confucian ethics, from that of Mencius. It is generally accepted that ren has two senses: in a narrow sense, it is the virtue of benevolence (or compassion); in a broad sense, it is the all-encompassing ethical ideal. Both senses fail to capture Confucius’ conception of ren, for the narrow sense fits only Mencius’ understanding of ren, while the broad sense lacks emphasis and precision. I propose a third sense of ren, that is, ren as an integral, higher-order virtue with respect as its most salient component. This sense of ren is more in keeping with the textual evidence in the Analects. It played a key role in Confucius’ political-moral thinking and made his doctrine diverge considerably from that of Mencius, who understood ren primarily as compassion.     

双任务干扰的注意资源限制机制:来自汉字笔画数效应的证据

该研究的两个实验采用心理不应期范式,探讨了重叠任务情境下双任务的相互干扰机制。实验中被试相继完成高低音的辨别任务(T1)和汉字外在特征(颜色或笔画数)的任务判断(T2),T1和T2间采用变化的SOA。结果发现:(1)T1的反应选择导致T2的加工成绩大幅下降,PRP效应非常显著。(2)当T1占据中枢瓶颈时,T2和T1在中枢瓶颈中并行得到加工并导致T1的加工效率显著下降。(3)由于注意资源的有限性,具有自动激活特征的汉字同样受瓶颈机制的限制。只要存在对注意资源的二次分配就会存在瓶颈的调节机制。     

Distinguishing genuine from spurious causes: a coherence hypothesis

Two opposing views have been proposed to explain how people distinguish genuine causes from spurious ones: the power view and the covariational view. This paper notes two phenomena that challenge both views. First, even when 1) there is no innate specific causal knowledge about a regularity (so that the power view does not apply) and 2) covariation cannot be computed while controlling for alternative causes (so that the covariation view should not apply), people are still able to systematically judge whether a regularity is causal. Second, when an alternative cause explains the effect, a spurious cause is judged to be spurious with greater confidence than otherwise (in both cases, no causal mechanism underlies the spurious cause). To fill the gap left by the traditional views, this paper proposes a new integration of these views. According to the coherence hypothesis, although a genuine cause and a spurious one may both covary with an effect in a way that does not imply causality at some level of abstraction, the categories to which these candidate causes belong covary with the effect differently at a more abstract level: one covariation implies causality; the other does not. Given this superordinate knowledge, the causal judgments of a reasoner who seeks to explain as much as possible with as few causal rules as possible will exhibit the properties that challenge the traditional views. Two experiments tested and supported the coherence hypothesis. Both experiments involved candidate causes that covary with an effect without implying causality at some level, manipulating whether covariation that implies causality has been acquired at a more abstract level. The experiments differed on whether an alternative cause explains the effect.     

Selection demands versus association strength in the verb generation task

Neuroimaging and neuropsychological data from Thompson-Schill and colleagues (Thompson-Schill, D’Esposito, Aguirre, & Farah, 1997; Thompson-Schill et al., 1998) showed that in the verb generation task, the left inferior frontal gyrus (left IFG) was more involved in a high-selection condition, in which the noun had two verb responses of equal association strength, than in a low-selection condition, in which the noun had only one strongly associated verb. They proposed that the left IFG was involved in selecting semantic information from competing alternatives. The present study compared verb generation in two high-selection conditions that varied in the association strength of the most frequently produced verbs. The results from neurally intact participants and a patient with a lesion that included the left IFG indicated that association strength between nouns and the most frequently produced verb, rather than competition during verb selection, affected verb generation. The degree of involvement of the left IFG may depend on the difficulty of verb retrieval as reflected in association strength.     

Cognitive processes underlying coping flexibility: differentiation and integration

This study investigates how individuals formulate flexible coping strategies across situations by proposing differentiation and integration as two stress-appraisal processes. Results showed that participants who coped more flexibly adopted the dimensions of controllability and impact in differentiating among different stressful situations. They also deployed an integrated strategy: the deployment of more monitoring in situations perceived as controllable but less of this strategy in situations perceived as uncontrollable. Participants who coped less flexibly did not adopt any given dimensions and tended to use more monitoring regardless of situational characteristics. These results suggest that individuals with different extents of coping flexibility differ in the cognitive processes. Individuals who cope more flexibly display a greater extent of differentiation and integration than do those who cope less flexibly. These findings are translated into strategies for stress management workshops.     

Trace fear conditioning is reduced in the aging rat

Auditory trace fear conditioning is a hippocampus-dependent learning task that requires animals to associate an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) and a fear-producing shock-unconditioned stimulus (US) that are separated by an empty 20-s trace interval. Previous studies have shown that aging impairs learning performance on hippocampus-dependent tasks. This study measured heart rate (HR) and freezing fear responses to determine if aging impairs hippocampus-dependent auditory trace fear conditioning in freely moving rats. Aging and Young rats received one long-trace fear conditioning session (10 trials). Each trial consisted of a tone-CS (5 s) and a shock-US separated by an empty 20-s trace interval. The next day rats received CS-alone retention trials. Young rats showed significantly larger HR and freezing responses on the initial CS-alone retention trials compared to the Aging rats. A control group of aging rats received fear conditioning trials with a short 1-s trace interval separating the CS and US. The Aging Short-Trace Group showed HR and freezing responses on the initial CS alone retention trials that were similar to the Young Long-Trace Group, but greater than the Aging Long-Trace Group. A second aging control group received unpaired CSs and USs, and showed no HR or freezing responses on CS-alone retention trials. These data show that HR and freezing are effective measures for detecting aging-related deficits in trace fear conditioning.     

Improving measurement precision of test batteries using multidimensional item response models

A conventional way to analyze item responses in multiple tests is to apply unidimensional item response models separately, one test at a time. This unidimensional approach, which ignores the correlations between latent traits, yields imprecise measures when tests are short. To resolve this problem, one can use multidimensional item response models that use correlations between latent traits to improve measurement precision of individual latent traits. The improvements are demonstrated using 2 empirical examples. It appears that the multidimensional approach improves measurement precision substantially, especially when tests are short and the number of tests is large. To achieve the same measurement precision, the multidimensional approach needs less than half of the comparable items required for the unidimensional approach.