Eye movements of second language learners when reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text

The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text. Also, participants' native languages were different in terms of their basic characteristics: English and Korean are spaced, whereas the other two are unspaced; Japanese is character based whereas the other three are alphabetic. Thus, we assessed whether any spacing effects were modulated by native language characteristics. Eye movement measures showed least disruption to reading for word-spaced text and longer reading times for unspaced than character-spaced text, with nonword-spaced text yielding the most disruption. These effects were uninfluenced by native language (though reading times differed between groups as a result of Chinese reading experience). Demarcation of word boundaries through spacing reduces non-native readers' uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby speeding lexical identification, and in turn, reading. More generally, the results indicate that words have psychological reality for those who are learning to read Chinese as a second language, and that segmentation of text into words is more beneficial to successful comprehension than is separating individual Chinese characters with spaces.     

Mapping novel labels to actions: how the rhythm of words guides infants' learning

We investigated the effect of lexical stress on 16-month-olds' ability to form associations between labels and paths of motion. Disyllabic English nouns tend to have a strong-weak (trochaic) stress pattern, and verbs tend to have a weak-strong (iambic) pattern. We explored whether infants would use word stress information to guide word-action associations during learning. Infants heard two novel words with either verb-like iambic stress or noun-like trochaic stress. Each word was paired with a single novel object performing one of two path actions and was tested using path-switch trials. Only infants in the iambic stress condition learned the association between the novel words and the path actions. To further investigate infants' difficulty in mapping the trochaic labels to the actions, we conducted an additional study in which infants were given an object switch task using the trochaic labels. In this case, infants were able to associate the trochaic labels with the objects, providing further support that infants use lexical stress to guide label-referent associations. This study demonstrates that by 16months, English-learning infants have developed a bias to expect disyllabic action labels to have iambic stress patterns, consistent with native language stress patterns.     

Measuring anxious responses to predictable and unpredictable threat in children and adolescents

Research has highlighted the need for new methods to assess emotions in children on multiple levels to gain better insight into the complex processes of emotional development. The startle reflex is a unique translational tool that has been used to study physiological processes during fear and anxiety in rodents and in human participants. However, it has been challenging to implement developmentally appropriate startle experiments in children. This article describes a procedure that uses predictable and unpredictable aversive events to distinguish between phasic fear and sustained anxiety in children and adolescents. We investigated anxious responses, as measured with the startle reflex, in youths (N = 36, mean age = 12.63 years, range = 7-17) across three conditions: no aversive events (N), predictable aversive events (P), and unpredictable aversive events (U). Short-duration cues were presented several times in each condition. Aversive events were signaled by the cues in the P condition but were presented randomly in the U condition. Participants showed fear-potentiated startle to the threat cue in the P condition. Startle responses were also elevated between cues in the U condition compared with the N condition, suggesting that unpredictable aversive events can evoke a sustained state of anxiety in youths. This latter effect was influenced by sex, being greater in girls than in boys. These findings indicate the feasibility of this experimental induction of the startle reflex in response to predictable and unpredictable events in children and adolescents, enabling future research on interindividual differences in fear and anxiety and their development in youths.     

A Review of Carolyn Chen’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience</Emphasis>

Becoming religious among immigrants to the U.S. is undoubtedly a complex transformation. It takes place with both external sociocultural conditions and internal spiritual and psychological volitions. While marveling at Carolyn Chen’s fine scholarship on Taiwanese immigrants’ conversion experience, this review offers a critical reading of Chen’s equation: becoming American = becoming religious or vice versa with the reviewer’s own experience as both an Asian immigrant and a cultural anthropologist. It also discusses Chen’s assessment of the gendered identity of both Asian-American men and women, be it religious, cultural, or political.     

Higher-order factors of the Big Five predict exploration and threat in life stories

Research has not previously examined whether higher-order traits of the Big Five are related to characteristics of life story narratives. The current study explored possible links between the broad dispositions of Stability (comprising the shared aspects of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability) and Plasticity (comprising the shared aspects of Extraversion and Openness) with narrative accounts of threat and exploration in the life-stories of 128 adults. Stability was inversely related to construals of threat in narratives, and Plasticity was positively related to exploration in narratives after controlling for the suppressor effects of demographic variables. These findings add to the research linking higher-order factors of the Big-Five to important domains as well as research linking dispositional traits to narrative identity.     

Objects and Levels: Reflections on the Relation Between Time-Consciousness and Self-Consciousness

The text surveys the development of the debate between Zahavi and Brough/Sokolowski regarding Husserl’s account of inner time-consciousness. The main arguments on both sides are reconsidered, and a compromise is proposed.     

The influence of emotion on lexical processing: Insights from RT distributional analysis

In two lexical decision experiments, the present study was designed to examine emotional valence effects on visual lexical decision (standard and go/no-go) performance, using traditional analyses of means and distributional analyses of response times. Consistent with an earlier study by Kousta, Vinson, and Vigliocco (Cognition 112:473–481, 2009), we found that emotional words (both negative and positive) were responded to faster than neutral words. Finer-grained distributional analyses further revealed that the facilitation afforded by valence was reflected by a combination of distributional shifting and an increase in the slow tail of the distribution. This suggests that emotional valence effects in lexical decision are unlikely to be entirely mediated by early, preconscious processes, which are associated with pure distributional shifting. Instead, our results suggest a dissociation between early preconscious processes and a later, more task-specific effect that is driven by feedback from semantically rich representations.     

Aversion to Happiness Across Cultures: A Review of Where and Why People are Averse to Happiness

A common view in contemporary Western culture is that personal happiness is one of the most important values in life. For example, in American culture it is believed that failing to appear happy is cause for concern. These cultural notions are also echoed in contemporary Western psychology (including positive psychology and much of the research on subjective well-being). However, some important (often culturally-based) facts about happiness have tended to be overlooked in the psychological research on the topic. One of these cultural phenomena is that, for some individuals, happiness is not a supreme value. In fact, some individuals across cultures are averse to various kinds of happiness for several different reasons. This article presents the first review of the concept of aversion to happiness. Implications of the outcomes are discussed, as are directions for further research.