From Assessment to Design: What Is Really Needed in Technology Accompaniment to Achieve Subject Constitution?

Based on the argument that technologies mediate human experience and praxis, the idea of technology accompaniment has been suggested as an approach to developing human-tech relations. In light of this idea, this paper argues, firstly, that when technologies inevitably have moral relevance in influencing human perceptions and actions, the constitution of a moral subject has much to do with shaping technological mediation deliberately and creatively. While there is not always a direct connection between what humans know and what humans do, technological mediation can help to strengthen people’s motivation to do the right thing. Subsequently, we examine two approaches that have often been suggested for realizing subject-constitution-with-technology: one is Technology Assessment, and the other is Mediation Design. Although the former can equip people with knowledge about technological mediation, it is relatively weak when it comes to directly producing moral behavior. In contrast, the latter not only exerts a more direct impact on user behavior but may also improve people’s moral knowledge. Nonetheless, both approaches face the general challenge of moral education. As moral knowledge does not guarantee moral behavior, knowing facts and theories about technological mediation may not lead to subject constitution as a result of the development of the human-tech relationship. To overcome this difficulty, an extension of the latter approach is proposed. The design of meta-mediation has great potential to shift users’ attention to the aforementioned mediating effect of technology-in-use and, thereby, users’ subject constitution can be enabled.     

Common Mental Health Challenges in a University Context in Hong Kong: a Study Based on a Review of Medical Records

Applied Research in Quality of Life - While numerous studies have suggested the rising prevalence of common mental disorders amongst university students, studies examining mental health of Chinese...     

Establishing Arbitrarily Applicable Relations of Same and Opposite with the Relational Completion Procedure: Selection-Based Feedback

The Psychological Record - Research suggests that the relational completion procedure (RCP) is effective for studying derived relations of same and opposite. Previously, procedural parameters, such...     

Spatial Conceptions in Chinese and Canadian Children

Four-, five-, and six-year-old Chinese and Canadian boys and girls were presented a series of 11 graphic models and were asked to draw them. Supporting Piaget's theory, the data indicated that drawing performance on the topological dimension was better than the performance on the Euclidean dimension, and that there were neither gender nor cultural differences in performance. The research offers strong support for a main effect of biological or maturational factors as the foundation for the developmental influences in the acquisition of spatial conceptions.     

Self‐confidence,anxiety, and post‐purchase dissonance: a panel study

This study proposes an integrated conceptual model of the antecedents of post‐purchase dissonance. Data were gathered via a two‐stage panel study among consumers who made purchase of technology items. Study results demonstrate that consumer chronic characteristics (i.e., trait anxiety and generalized self‐confidence) not only directly influence post‐purchase dissonance positively and negatively but also are mediated by consumers' temporary feelings (i.e., state anxiety and specific self‐confidence) toward a purchase situation, and then indirectly influence post‐purchase dissonance positively and negatively. Trait anxiety positively influences state anxiety and that generalized self‐confidence and specific self‐confidence negatively influence state anxiety. Furthermore, trait anxiety appears to negatively influence specific self‐confidence, and generalized self‐confidence appears to negatively influence trait anxiety and positively influence specific self‐confidence.     

Opening the Creative Mind of High Need for Cognitive Closure Individuals through Activation of Uncreative Ideas

Drawing on the integrative system theory of creativity combining the person, process, and press perspectives, this research offers the first evidence of how high-need-for-cognitive-closure (NFC) individuals’ creative mind can be opened up, by making them become more cognizant of uncreative ideas as consensually invalid solutions to creative problems. A validation study was conducted to first establish the utility of a newly developed chocolate design task. In the second study, half of the participants were made aware of conventional chocolate designs by drawing these designs before generating a revolutionized design of chocolate; the other half did not have to draw out the conventional designs first. Results confirmed that, given the opportunity to cognize uncreative solutions, high-NFC participants who had a higher creative ideation potential became the most creative. Their low-NFC counterparts, however, did not seem to benefit from the trigger of uncreative solutions. The implication that holding onto a chronic motive to attain cognitive closure or epistemic certainty is not necessarily detrimental to creative performance was discussed.     

Vocal emotions influence verbal memory: Neural correlates and interindividual differences

Past research has identified an event-related potential (ERP) marker for vocal emotional encoding and has highlighted vocal-processing differences between male and female listeners. We further investigated this ERP vocal-encoding effect in order to determine whether it predicts voice-related changes in listeners’ memory for verbal interaction content. Additionally, we explored whether sex differences in vocal processing would affect such changes. To these ends, we presented participants with a series of neutral words spoken with a neutral or a sad voice. The participants subsequently encountered these words, together with new words, in a visual word recognition test. In addition to making old/new decisions, the participants rated the emotional valence of each test word. During the encoding of spoken words, sad voices elicited a greater P200 in the ERP than did neutral voices. While the P200 effect was unrelated to a subsequent recognition advantage for test words previously heard with a neutral as compared to a sad voice, the P200 did significantly predict differences between these words in a concurrent late positive ERP component. Additionally, the P200 effect predicted voice-related changes in word valence. As compared to words studied with a neutral voice, words studied with a sad voice were rated more negatively, and this rating difference was larger, the larger the P200 encoding effect was. While some of these results were comparable in male and female participants, the latter group showed a stronger P200 encoding effect and qualitatively different ERP responses during word retrieval. Estrogen measurements suggested the possibility that these sex differences have a genetic basis.     

Towards a synthetic model of own group biases in face memory

In the current work, we extend the Categorization-Individuation Model (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010)—an existing model of the own race bias—to organize and explain the proliferation of own group biases in face memory. In this model, we propose that own group biases result from the coacting processes of social categorization,motivation to individuate, and individuation experience. This extended Categorization-Individuation Model affords a number of benefits. First, this model allows us to begin to consider various own group biases as manifestations a single class of phenomena, offering sensible predictions across and among biases. Further, this extended Categorization-Individuation Model makes novel predictions for how own group biases can be exacerbated and eliminated by both perceptual and motivational processes, allowing for potentially novel interventions forown group biases. Finally,we discuss a variety of open questions with regard to an extended Categorization-Individuation Model, with an eye towards framing future research questions.     

Taiwanese immigrant mothers' childcare preferences: socialization for bicultural competency

This paper explores how middle-class Taiwanese immigrant mothers in the United States defined the benefits of placing their children in predominantly White American childcare centers instead of using more culturally familiar forms of care. From in-depth interviews with seven Taiwanese immigrant mothers, it was learned that they viewed these settings positively, even though their children were not in cultural environments that mirrored their homes and ethnic communities. Mothers explained that they purposefully chose this type of setting because 1) they desired to develop their children's social competency in U.S. society; 2) they perceived U.S. childcare settings as multicultural and accepting of diverse cultures even if they were in the minority; and 3) they were confident that their children's participation in their own Taiwanese ethnic community would ensure the maintenance of their children's ethnic identity and knowledge of their parents' culture. For these reasons, they did not seek out race matching or cultural congruity between childcare centers and their homes. Instead, mothers viewed the childcare center as part of their overall socialization strategy for developing their children's bicultural competency in both their heritage culture as well as U.S. society.     

The effects of culture and friendship on rewarding honesty and punishing deception

The present research explores whether the type of relationship one holds with deceptive or honest actors influences cross-cultural differences in reward and punishment. Research suggests that Americans reward honest actors more than they punish deceptive perpetrators, whereas East Asians reward and punish equally (Wang & Leung, 2010). Our research suggests that the type of relationship with the actor matters for East Asians, but not for Americans. East Asians exhibit favoritism toward their friends by rewarding more than punishing them, but reward and punish equally when the actors are strangers (Experiment 1 and 2); Americans reward more than they punish regardless of the type of relationship (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the findings were replicated when the proposed mechanism – social mobility – was manipulated within the same culture (Experiment 3). We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding how friends versus strangers are rewarded and punished in an increasingly relationally complex world.