Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Persons' Mentality: A Cross-Cultural Replication and More

Jesse Bering (2002) investigated how American university students in an interview task conceived of dead persons' mentality immediately after death. He found that different categories of mental states or capacities were conceived differently: psychobiological and perceptual states ceased, whereas emotional, desire, and epistemic states continued. Our Study 1 was a replication of Bering's experiment in a different cultural setting, in which the subjects were Chinese undergraduate students. A similar pattern of results was found. In Study 2, instead of being asked about a dead person's various mental states immediately following the death, participants were asked to judge a dead person's mental states after the person had been dead for 2 days. The overall pattern of participants' responses was not affected by this manipulation, but they did show an increase in attributions of certain mental states to dead agnostics. In addition, a more refined breakdown of responses revealed that individuals tended to judge that, upon death, visual and auditory perception continued, whereas olfactory and gustatory sensation ceased.     

The development of social value orientation across different contexts

This study aimed to explore Chinese children's social value orientation across different ages and contexts. Revised decomposed games were used to measure the social value orientation of 9‐, 11‐, and 14‐year‐old children and college students as an adult group. About half of them were assigned to the hypothetical context of “equal payment group,” providing equal compensation for participation in the study, and the others to the “real payment group,” who got payment according to their own choices in the games. Results showed that 9‐ and 11‐year‐old children's choices differed between the two contexts: They made more prosocial choices in the hypothetical context, and more competitive choices in the “real payment” context. The 14‐year‐olds’ and adults’ choices were not significantly different in the two contexts. These results may imply that by 14 years of age, children have stable social value orientation, and their behavior reflects this value.     

Increasing Students' Scientific Creativity: The “Learn to Think” Intervention Program

The “Learn to Think” (LTT) Intervention Program was developed for raising thinking abilities of primary and secondary school students. It has been implemented in more than 300 schools, and more than 200,000 students took part in the experiment over a 10‐year span. Several longitudinal intervention studies showed that LTT could promote the development of students' thinking ability, learning motivation, and learning strategy as well as raise academic performance in primary schools. This article describes a study of the influence and the delayed effects of LTT on the scientific creativity of secondary school students. One hundred and seven students were selected from a secondary school, 54 of them participated in the LTT every 2 weeks and the rest had not. The intervention lasted 2 years, and the delayed effect was explored half a year after terminating the intervention. The Scientific Creativity Test for Secondary School Students was used four times from pre‐test to delayed post‐test. The results indicated that the LTT did promote the development of scientific creativity of secondary school students, and the effects on the scientific creativity were not necessarily immediate, but tended to be long‐lasting.     

How Speech Modifies Visual Attention

Auditory distractions can have serious consequences in critical situations such as driving. Mobile phones, radios, media players, and information devices that interpret and produce speech are increasingly common in vehicles, but the threats to visual attention are not yet fully understood. In three experiments, we found that most speech tasks had relatively small adverse effects on the detection of a briefly presented target among distractors across a 60° subarea of the visual field. Although there was a little impact on detectability, moderately difficult speech tasks slowed responding relative to silence. Our most demanding condition—generating and speaking a word beginning with the last letter of another word—had the greatest effects on accuracy and latency, with responding slowed by about 900 ms. An impairment of this magnitude presents a significant threat to safe driving and calls into question the belief that hands‐free voice‐controlled devices are the answer to the problem of driver distraction. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic Regulation Responding to an External Stimulus: A Differential Equation Model

This study examines the dynamic regulation process responding to an external stimulus. The damped oscillator model has been used to describe this process. However, the model does not allow a nonzero steady state, even though the oscillations may continue and do not necessarily damp toward zero. This study introduces the driven damped oscillator model which has an additional parameter to identify different patterns of the steady state. Three methods, generalized local linear approximation, continuous time structural equation modeling, and analytic solutions of differential equations are provided to estimate model parameters. A simulation study indicates that parameters in the driven damped oscillator model are well recovered. The model is then illustrated using a data set on the daily reports of sales after a sale promotion. Potential applications and possible expansions of this model are also discussed.     

Core Knowledge Employee Creativity and Firm Performance: The Moderating Role of Riskiness Orientation,Firm Size,and Realized Absorptive Capacity

In this study, we examine when creativity is positively or negatively related to firm performance. Building on the creation–implementation tension theorized in the literature and the attention capacity perspective, we argue that the relationship between creativity and firm performance is contingent on riskiness orientation, firm size, and realized absorptive capacity. Data were collected from 761 core knowledge employees, 148 CEOs, and 148 HR executives from 148 high‐technology firms. The results indicated that core knowledge employee creativity was negatively related to firm performance when riskiness orientation was high. The relationship was positive when realized absorptive capacity was high. Finally, the relationship was more positive in small firms than in large firms. We discuss the implications of our findings for creativity research and managerial practices.     

Evaluating Word in Phrase: The Modulation Effect of Emotional Context on Word Comprehension

The present study aims to explore the influence of emotional context on word evaluation. Participants were asked to read an “adjective + noun” phrase, where the adjective could be a positive or negative word, and the noun could be a positive, neutral or negative word, and then to make an emotional evaluation on the emotional tone of the target noun based on a 9-point Likert scale. In a control condition, an isolated noun was presented with no context. Results showed that positive context made the evaluation of target words bias toward positive tone, while negative context shaped the evaluation of target words toward negative tone. The modulatory effect of negative context was greater than that of positive context in shaping evaluation of emotional words with opposite valence. Moreover, the modulatory effect of emotional context was constrained by the inherent meaning of target word. The present study demonstrated the flexibility as well as the relative stability of emotional meaning of word.     

Language aptitude for pronunciation in advanced second language (L2) Learners: Behavioural predictors and neural substrates

Individual differences in second language (L2) aptitude have been assumed to depend upon a variety of cognitive and personality factors. Especially, the cognitive factor phonological working memory has been conceptualised as language learning device. However, strong associations between phonological working memory and L2 aptitude have been previously found in early-stage learners only, not in advanced learners. The current study aimed at investigating the behavioural and neurobiological predictors of advanced L2 learning. Our behavioural results showed that phonetic coding ability and empathy, but not phonological working memory, predict L2 pronunciation aptitude in advanced learners. Second, functional neuroimaging revealed this behavioural trait to be correlated with hemodynamic responses of the cerebral network of speech motor control and auditory-perceptual areas. We suggest that the acquisition of L2 pronunciation aptitude is a dynamic process, requiring a variety of neural resources at different processing stages over time.     

Hydrogen-induced cold cracking in heat-affected zone of low-carbon high-strength steel

The Y-groove cracking test by submerged arc welding was employed to study the susceptibility of a low-carbon high-strength steel to hydrogen-induced cold cracking (HICC). The morphology of hydrogen cracks was observed using an electron probe microscope. The results showed that the heat-affected zone (HAZ) has a higher susceptibility to HICC than the weld metal and that increasing heat input can improve the HICC resistance of the weldment. The intergranular microcracking is the main HICC mode at the lowest heat input condition, accompanied with some transgranular microcracks attached to complex inclusions. In combination with phase transformation behaviour in sub-zones, the effect of the phase transformation sequence is proposed to try to illustrate the fact that the fine-grained HAZ has higher probability of hydrogen cracking than the coarse-grained HAZ owing to the occurrence of hydrogen enrichment in the fine-grained HAZ after the transformation.     

A phase-field model for deformation twinning

We propose a phase-field model for modeling microstructure evolution during deformation twinning. The order parameters are proportional to the shear strains defined in terms of twin plane orientations and twinning directions. Using a face-centered cubic Al as an example, the deformation energy as a function of shear strain is obtained using first-principle calculations. The gradient energy coefficients are fitted to the twin boundary energies along the twinning planes and to the dislocation core energies along the directions that are perpendicular to the twinning planes. The elastic strain energy of a twinned structure is included using the Khachaturyan's elastic theory. We simulated the twinning process and microstructure evolution under a number of fixed deformations and predicted the twinning plane orientations and microstructures.