Forming Life Satisfaction among Different Social Groups during the Modernization of China

Quality of life has become a notable concern in the modernization of China. However, there are no adequate data to chart the formation of quality of life, in terms of life satisfaction, and in relation to the societal conditions of modernization. Moreover, it is still a question concerning how life satisfaction forms among people of different social groups, differentiated by class, education, age, and gender. To answer the questions, the present study involved a random sample survey of 732 inhabitants in Beijing. Results indicate the contributions of income, age, perceived modern economic conditions in society, and satisfaction with societal economic conditions. In contrast, education and the ownership class appear to predict lower life satisfaction. Furthermore, there are significant variations in the effects of the factors in predicting the life satisfaction of people in different social groups. Notably, perceived economic conditions appear to be less important to people of higher class positions. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Are DSM-IV-TR Borderline Personality Disorder, ICD-10 Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, and CCMD-III Impulsive Personality Disorder Analogous Diagnostic Categories Across Psychiatric Nomenclatures?

This study examined the validity of the borderline construct which encompasses diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV-TR Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), ICD-10 Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD), and CCMD-III Impulsive Personality Disorder (IPD) in a sample of 1,419 Chinese psychiatric patients. Participants completed the Chinese Personality Disorder Inventory and the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory-2 assessing various disordered personality features. Adequate internal consistency was found for the borderline construct (α = .83). Exploratory factor analysis revealed two components: (1) affective and cognitive disturbances, and (2) impulse dysregulation, which were replicated by confirmatory factor analysis. Item analysis indicated that the various borderline criteria displayed similar levels of diagnostic efficiency, which does not support the elimination of fear of abandonment and transient psychotic features from the EUPD and IPD criteria set. Findings of this study suggest that BPD, EUPD, and IPD may represent analogous diagnostic categories across classification systems.     

Parental, peer, and teacher influences on the social behavior of Hong Kong Chinese adolescents

Intensive interviews and self-report questionnaires were used to investigate parental, peer, and teacher influences on the prosocial and antisocial behaviors of Hong Kong Chinese adolescents. Students came from 5 academically different high schools. Results indicated that perceived parental influence was positively associated with frequency of prosocial behavior and negatively associated with frequency of delinquent behavior. Students with good relationships with their parents and peers showed lower frequencies of antisocial behaviors than did students with bad relationships. Adolescents in different identity statuses (achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, diffusion; E. H. Erikson, 1968) showed different patterns of prosocial and antisocial behaviors. For example, adolescents in the identity achievement group exhibited high frequencies of prosocial behaviors and low frequencies of antisocial behaviors, but those in the identity moratorium group exhibited quite high frequencies of both prosocial and antisocial behaviors.     

The differential effects of thalamus and basal ganglia on facial emotion recognition

This study examined if subcortical stroke was associated with impaired facial emotion recognition. Furthermore, the lateralization of the impairment and the differential profiles of facial emotion recognition deficits with localized thalamic or basal ganglia damage were also studied. Thirty-eight patients with subcortical strokes and 19 matched normal controls volunteered to participate. The participants were individually presented with morphed photographs of facial emotion expressions over multiple trials. They were requested to classify each of these morphed photographs according to Ekman's six basic emotion categories. The findings indicated that the clinical participants had impaired facial emotion recognition, though no clear lateralization pattern of impairment was observed. The patients with localized thalamic damage performed significantly worse in recognizing sadness than the controls. Longitudinal studies on patients with subcortical brain damage should be conducted to examine how cognitive reorganization post-stroke would affect emotion recognition.     

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.     

Meta-analytic structural equation modeling: a two-stage approach

To synthesize studies that use structural equation modeling (SEM), researchers usually use Pearson correlations (univariate r), Fisher z scores (univariate z), or generalized least squares (GLS) to combine the correlation matrices. The pooled correlation matrix is then analyzed by the use of SEM. Questionable inferences may occur for these ad hoc procedures. A 2-stage structural equation modeling (TSSEM) method is proposed to incorporate meta-analytic techniques and SEM into a unified framework. Simulation results reveal that the univariate-r, univariate-z, and TSSEM methods perform well in testing the homogeneity of correlation matrices and estimating the pooled correlation matrix. When fitting SEM, only TSSEM works well. The GLS method performed poorly in small to medium samples.     

The Effects of Early English Learning on Auditory Perception of English Minimal Pairs by Taiwan University Students

Auditory perception of English minimal pairs was tested with or without noise background. Each subject was interviewed after the test to collect information regarding their early experience on learning English as a foreign language. This study was designed to examine the differential effects of learning English at three age-starting points and two learning durations. This study hopes to determine how childhood experience of English learning (which is not mandatory in public elementary schools) has affected the auditory competence of university students in distinguishing English minimal pairs. Results showed that age effects were salient only under condition of noise background. Without the interference of background noise, most subjects performed well enough to obliterate any potential differences.     

The Utility of the Revised Life Orientation Test to Measure Optimism among Hong Kong Chinese

To examine the utility of the revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R) to measure optimism among Hong Kong Chinese, the psychometric properties of the revised and the original versions of the Life Orientation Test were compared. A total of 248 Hong Kong Chinese undergraduates were studied in the fall and 165 of these participants were tested again 5 months later. Results indicated that the LOT-R is a reliable and valid measure of dispositional optimism among Hong Kong Chinese. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the LOT-R represents a one-factor model of optimism better than does the original version. Despite its brevity, the LOT-R is psychometrically sounder than the original sclae. These findings point to the feasibility of replacing the original with the revised scale in future research among Hong Kong Chinese. However, the utility of the revised test in cross-cultural comparisons may still be limited by the absence of emic components. Further research on optimism in the Chinese people with the LOT-R should pay more attention to the identification of emic dimensions.     

Lexical and conceptual processing in Chinese-English bilinguals: Further evidence for asymmetry

According to the asymmetry model of bilingual representation (Kroll & Stewart, 1994), the first language (L1) lexicon is closely tied to an underlying conceptual memory, whereas second language (L2) items are mostly associated with their L1 equivalents. An outcome of this architecture is that L1-to-L2, or forward, translation must be mediated by the conceptual memory, whereas L2-to-L1 (backward) translation takes a direct lexical path. Some predictions derived from this hypothetical structure were tested in the present study, which took into account, through analysis of covariance, variations in response production time, concept retrieval time, and some other characteristics associated with the individual test items. Proficient Chinese-English bilinguals were tested on delayed production (Balota & Chumbley, 1985), picture naming, word translation, and category matching. The expected asymmetrical pattern of translation latencies (i.e., forward > backward) was demonstrated, although it could be statistically explained by the item characteristic of familiarity; matching an L1 item to a category name was faster than matching an L2 item, suggesting relatively strong L1 conceptual links. The present results are best accommodated by a form of asymmetry that allows for nondominant L2-concept linkage, the use of which is conditional upon the familiarity of the test item to the bilingual.     

Explanatory Effort and Structure as Contributors to the Good Life Among University Students

Ample theory and case evidence suggest the salutary role of making sense or explaining social reality for people's well-being. However, empirical evidence in support of the proposition is slim. To examine this proposition in a testable way, the present study employed a longitudinal panel design to assess associations between earlier reasoning on later well-being among a sample of 151 university students in Hong Kong. At the first wave, it measured reasoning in terms of explanatory consolidation and explanatory effort. Explanatory consolidation referred to a student's consistent agreement or disagreement with propositions of sociological theories that explain social problems, protest, and crime. Explanatory effort concerned the student's tendency to explain social problems. At the second wave, the study measured five good-life indicators to represent well-being. Results showed that explanatory consolidation and effort have significant relations with good life characteristics that are consistent with Chinese culture. These findings support social constructionist claims about the contribution of reasoning in the educational setting.