Does parental job insecurity matter? Money anxiety, money motives, and work motivation

A structural model focusing on the spillover effect of parental perceived job insecurity on money anxiety was developed and tested. The crossover effect of parents' money anxiety on their children's money anxiety, money motives, and motivation to work was also examined. Data were collected from a sample of undergraduates and their parents. Results of structural equation modeling analyses supported a spillover effect of paternal perceived job insecurity on paternal money anxiety. However, maternal perceived job insecurity was not significantly associated with maternal money anxiety. Results also supported a crossover effect of parental money anxiety on youths' money anxiety. Youths' money anxiety was significantly related to youths' negative money motives. In turn, youths' negative money motives were associated with their intrinsic motivation to work. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Spoken word recognition in context: evidence from Chinese ERP analyses

Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments were conducted to investigate spoken word recognition in Chinese and the effect of contextual constraints on this process. In Experiment 1, three kinds of incongruous words were formed by altering the first, second or both syllables of the congruous disyllabic terminal words in high constraint spoken sentences. Results showed an increase of N400 amplitude in all three incongruous word conditions and a delayed N400 effect in the cohort incongruous condition as compared with the rhyme incongruous and plain incongruous condition. In addition, unlike results in English, we found that the N400 effect in the rhyme incongruous condition disappeared earlier than in the plain incongruous condition. In Experiment 2, three kinds of nonwords derived from sentence congruous words were constructed by altering few or many phonetic features of the onset or the whole of the first syllable, and the resulting nonwords appeared as disyllabic terminal forms in either high or low constraint sentences. All three nonword conditions elicited the N400 component. In addition, in high constraint sentences but not in low, the amplitude and duration of the N400 varied as a function of the degree of phonetic mismatch between the terminal nonword and the expected congruous word.     

The roles of familial alcoholism and adolescent family harmony in young adults' substance dependence disorders: mediated and moderated relations

This study examined the prospective relations among family history density of alcoholism (FHD), adolescent family harmony, and young adults' alcohol and drug dependence. Family harmony was rated by mothers and fathers in adolescence, and young adults' substance dependence diagnoses were obtained through structured interviews. Higher FHD predicted lower adolescent family harmony, which in turn increased young adults' odds of being diagnosed with drug dependence (with and without alcohol dependence) compared to no diagnoses or to alcohol dependence only. Family harmony also interacted with FHD such that the protective effect of family harmony on young adults' drug dependence with or without alcohol dependence decreased as FHD rose, and was nonsignificant at high levels of FHD. The findings suggest the importance of distinguishing among alcohol and drug dependence disorders and examining their differential etiological pathways, and also suggest that the protective effects of harmonious family environments on substance dependence may be limited at high levels of FHD.     

Modeling relations between hassles and internalizing and externalizing symptoms in adolescents: a four-year prospective study

This study examined the relations between hassles and internalizing and externalizing symptoms across 4 years in adolescents who varied with regard to their risk for psychopathology. The sample comprised 240 adolescents assessed in 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grades regarding their level of peer and academic hassles and internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Structural equation modeling was used to construct latent variables of hassles and internalizing and externalizing syndromes. Results varied by informant about the teens' symptoms. For adolescent report, the stress exposure model fit the data best for internalizing syndromes; that is, higher levels of stressors predicted significantly higher levels of self-reported symptoms 1 year later. For mother report of adolescents' symptoms, the stress generation model fit the data best for both internalizing and externalizing syndromes; that is, higher levels of adolescents' internalizing and externalizing symptoms, as reported by their mothers, significantly predicted higher levels of hassles 1 year later.     

Recognition of faces and complex objects in younger and older adults

We examined whether (1) age-associated impairments in face recognition are specific to faces or also apply to within-category recognition of other objects and (2) age-related face recognition deficits are related to impairments in encoding second-order relations and holistic information. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found reliable age differences for recognition of faces, but not of objects. Moreover, older adults (OAs) and younger adults (YAs) displayed similar face inversion effects. In Experiment 3, unlike YAs, OAs did not show the expected decline in performance for recognition of composites (Young, Hellawell, and Hay, 1987). In Experiment 4, both OAs and YAs showed a whole/part advantage (Tanaka and Farah, 1993). Our results suggest that OAs have spared function for processing of second-order relations and holistic information. Possible explanations for the finding that OAs have greater difficulty recognizing faces than recognizing other objects are proposed.     

Effects of syntactic category assignment on lexical ambiguity resolution in reading: an eye movement analysis

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing lexically ambiguous words whose meanings share a single syntactic category (e.g., calf), lexically ambiguous words whose meanings belong to different syntactic categories (e.g., duck), or unambiguous control words. Information provided prior to the target always unambiguously specified the context-appropriate syntactic-category assignment for the target. Fixation times were longer on ambiguous words whose meanings share a single syntactic category than on controls, both when prior context was semantically consistent with the subordinate interpretation of a biased ambiguous word (Experiment 1) and when prior context was semantically neutral as to the intended interpretation of a balanced ambiguous word (Experiment 2). These ambiguity effects, which resulted from differences in difficulty with meaning resolution, were not found when the ambiguity crossed syntactic categories. These data indicate that, in the absence of syntactic ambiguity, syntactic-category information mediates the semantic-resolution process.     

儿童口语词汇获得年龄效应

获得年龄是指儿童第一次学会某个词的年龄。单词获得年龄效应是指早获得的词比晚获得的词加工快。该简要概述了获得年龄数据的收集以及获得年龄在成人词典加工中的作用,重点介绍了获得年龄效应与频率效应的关系的研究,并对获得年龄效应的机制进行了简要的评述。     

What does it mean to trust blockchain technology?

This paper argues that the widespread belief that interactions between blockchains and their users are trust-free is inaccurate and misleading, since this belief not only overlooks the vital role played by trust in the lack of knowledge and control but also conceals the moral and normative relevance of relying on blockchain applications. The paper reaches this argument by providing a close philosophical examination of the concept referred to as trust in blockchain technology, clarifying the trustor group, the structure, and the normatively loaded nature of this trust relation. The paper ends by critically reflecting on two of the most promising values (decentralization and transparency) that can invite users’ trust in blockchain technology, arguing that there is a tension between the pressing values that are intended to be achieved by developers and the predicament situations caused by current blockchain implementations.     

The Language of Thought and The Embodied Nature of Language Use

Philosophical Studies -     

Stability of Q-sort attachment security from age two to five

The current report demonstrates reliability and stability of Q-sort attachment security in a sample of 46 mothers and their children seen by two observers at age two and again at age four to six years. Security scores were correlated between ages (r=.44), and a high proportion of item-by-item correlations between ages were also significant.