Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and the promotion of deviance

ABSTRACT

As a social movement demanding universal suffrage, Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement mobilized thousands of young protesters and fomented radical views stridently subversive of mainland China’s political interference. The social movement continues to promote further forms of deviance in the form of calling for independence. As the city and former British colony lacks the sovereignty of statehood and democracy, the movement’s non-conformity to law needs to be contextualized as a form of deviance. In contributing to the deviancy of social movements, we utilize data obtained from interviews with participants of the movement alongside those who opposed the protest to understand the East Asian cultural setting of the Umbrella Movement’s promotion of deviance.     

Word identification: Imageability, semantics, and the content-functor distinction

It has often been suggested that different special-purpose mechanisms underlie the processing of content words and function words. The received view is that processing differences in various tasks arise because of differences between these word classes in terms of their semantic/syntactic function, despite the fact that these tasks often involve word processing in the absence of any sentence context. It is also well known that the ease with which a word arouses a sensory impression is often a good predictor of word-processing performance, yet the literature largely ignores the fact that, typically, imageability and word class are confounded factors. A series of three experiments shows that in the context of a Stroop task, the typical content-function word difference can be obtained, but that this word class difference disappears completely when the items are matched on the dimension of imageability. It is suggested that the processing of decontextualized content and function words does not necessarily engage distinct special purpose processing mechanisms. Implications for understanding previously published work on word class effects in other paradigms are briefly noted.     

Adult age differences in binding actors and actions in memory for events

Three experiments provide evidence for an age-related deficit in the binding of actors with their actions. Young and older adults were tested on their memory for a series of events, each involving an actor performing a simple action. Older adults had greater difficulty than did young adults at discriminating old events from novel conjunctions of familiar actors and actions, even when the two groups were equated on memory for each of those features in isolation by using a longer retention interval for young adults. These results are consistent with an age-related associative deficit linked to declines in hippocampal and prefrontal cortical functioning. They further provide evidence that age differences in source monitoring are not limited to speech acts but, rather, generalize to more complex actions. Finally, they provide evidence for age differences in susceptibility to conjunction memory errors, stemming from decreased reliance on recollection and increased reliance on familiarity with increased age. Example videos may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Emotional distress in nonmetropolitan persons living with HIV disease enrolled in a telephone-delivered, coping improvement group intervention.

The study delineated depressive symptoms and modeled emotional distress in persons living with HIV disease in nonmetropolitan areas of 13 U.S. states. Participants (N=329) were enrolled in a randomized clinical trial of a telephone-delivered, coping improvement group intervention, and 60% reported moderate or severe levels of depressive symptomatology on the Beck Depression Inventory. Structural equation modeling indicated that participants who experienced more severe HIV symptomatology, received less social support, and engaged in more avoidant coping also experienced more emotional distress (a latent construct comprising depressive symptoms and emotional well-being). Greater HIV-related stigma and rejection by family led to more emotional distress, with social support and avoidant coping mediating almost entirely the effects of the former 2 variables. The model accounted for 72% of the variance in emotional distress in nonmetropolitan persons living with HIV disease.     

Motivational and Emotional Consequences of Self-Engagement: Voting in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

The role played by self-engagement in the prediction and consequences of goal-directed behavior was examined. Components of the Triangle Model of Responsibility were measured 4 days prior to the 2000 U.S. presidential election, and reported voting and reactions to the election were measured the day after the election. In support of the model, engagement in voting was highest when the guidelines for voting were perceived as clear, when the individual perceived personal control over voting, when the individual perceived voting as relevant to his or her role as a citizen, and when who won the election was important to the individual. Engagement in voting was strongly related to reports of actually voting in the election, and completely mediated the relationship between the other predictors and reported voting. Engagement was also related to a variety of behavioral activities (e.g., watching the presidential and vice-presidential debates, staying up late to watch the election results) indicative of investment in the election. Finally, being engaged in the act of voting prior to the election was strongly related to being in a heightened state of uncertainty and anxiety as a function of not knowing the outcome of the election. The importance of self-engagement in predicting behavior and emotional consequences to behavior is discussed.