“Too Asian?” or the Invisible Citizen on the Other Side of the Nation?

In November 2010, Maclean’s magazine published a provocative article “Too Asian?” which aroused hot debate and critique from various social groups. However, its racist nature and the role of media in reinforcing racial stereotypes, manufacturing consent, and naturalizing unequal power relations has not been examined in a systematic way. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper aims to reveal its ideological and hegemonic function in constructing unequal social identities and social relations which consequently prevents racialized minorities from accessing post-secondary educational opportunities. Four themes are identified and discussed here. First, the “Too Asian?” article reinforces an Us/Them division and a “forever foreigner” identity of racialized minorities. Second, it essentializes ethnic culture and identifies culture rather than structural constraints as an explanation for individual social behaviors. Third, it represents “Asian” students as self-segregationists who should be blamed for their own exclusion. Last, but most important, it aims to justify white privilege in the field of post-secondary education by questioning the idea of meritocracy as university admission criteria and suggests maintaining “WASP Credentials.”     

Assessment of dispositional embarrassability

Abstract

Embarrassability, the propensity for an individual to experience embarrassment, has been frequently acknowledged as an important personality characteristic. The present research sought to explore the dispositional features of embarrassability by the psychometric development of 25-item measure, the Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale (SES). The SES was designed to describe the personality characteristics of easily embarrassed persons rather than reactions to potentially embarrassing situations. The results indicated that the SES was an internally consistent and temporally stable measure. Its items were uncontaminated by social desirability. Assessments of construct validity suggested that the scale was a valid measure of embarrassability, and specifically a better measure of dispositional components of embarrassability than the only alternative measure of the construct. The location of the SES within the Big Five structure of normal adult personality is presented as well as its relationship with measures of deviant personality.     

Cognitive reappraisal and secondary control coping: associations with working memory,positive and negative affect,and symptoms of anxiety/depression

Abstract

The current study examined the relations of measures of cognitive reappraisal and secondary control coping with working memory abilities, positive and negative affect, and symptoms of anxiety and depression in young adults (N=124). Results indicate significant relations between working memory abilities and reports of secondary control coping and between reports of secondary control coping and cognitive reappraisal. Associations were also found between measures of secondary control coping and cognitive reappraisal and positive and negative affect and symptoms of depression and anxiety. Further, the findings suggest that reports of cognitive reappraisal may be more strongly predictive of positive affect whereas secondary control coping may be more strongly predictive of negative affect and symptoms of depression and anxiety. Overall, the results suggest that current measures of secondary control coping and cognitive reappraisal capture related but distinct constructs and suggest that the assessment of working memory may be more strongly related to secondary control coping in predicting individual differences in distress.     

Interpersonal constructs and communicative ability in a police environment: A preliminary investigation

Abstract

This study investigates the relation between indexes of the development of interpersonal construct systems and the qualities of messages generated in response to persuasive tasks within the context of an urban police force. Hypotheses assuming that length of service as a line officer would predict less developed construct systems, and that more developed construct systems would predict message strategies that acknowledge the unique qualities of receivers found general support. In addition, the possibility of further relations between length of service and message variables was explored, but no substantial evidence was found for such effects. These results show the importance of environmental influences on construct development, and suggest that interpersonal perception and message behavior functionally adapt to the needs of organizational participation.     

Visual mental representations supporting object drawing: How naming a novel object with a novel count noun impacts on young children's object drawing

Object drawing can be supported by a number of cognitive resources, each making available visual information about the object being drawn. These resources include perceptual input, short-term visual memory, and long-term visual memory. Each of these resources has the potential to make available distinct forms of visual representation, including viewpoint-specific and viewpoint-independent representations, object-specific and category representations, and separate representations of object colour. We review neuropsychological and developmental evidence supporting these claims, including evidence that the same drawing can reflect the influence of multiple forms of visual representation. Seven experiments are then reported, investigating object drawing by 4- to 6-year-old children, to confirm the support for drawing provided by different forms of visual representation. Young children are selected for investigation because their drawing is relatively unconstrained by culturally determined norms which, in our culture, dictate that objects should be drawn just as they appear from the vantage point of the drawer. To distinguish the support provided by object and category representations, the experiments exploit the privileged links between count nouns as object labels, and representations of object categories. In addition, pre-established representations, visual or otherwise, are precluded from influencing drawing by asking the children to draw novel objects, and by creating novel count nouns with which to label the objects. The results reveal how viewpoint-specific perceptual representations, object-specific representations of shape and of colour, and category representations of shape can each impact on object drawing, and in some circumstances on the same drawing. It appears that simple drawing tasks have the potential to reveal some of the distinct types of representation able to support visual cognition.     

Production and Identification Repetition Priming in AmnesticMild Cognitive Impairment

ABSTRACT

The experiment reported here examined implicit memory function, as measured through repetition priming, in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to examine whether impairments exist in this aspect of memory function. Young adults, healthy older controls, Alzheimer's disease patients, and MCI participants were asked to perform two types of implicit memory tests (word stem completion and threshold identification repetition priming tasks), as well as a recognition test for studied items. As expected, young adults performed better than the other participants on the recognition test and the word stem completion task; there was equivalent priming across groups on the word identification task. While both the older control and MCI participants showed lower levels of priming on the word stem completion task relative to the young adults, the magnitude of priming was equivalent for these two groups, and reliably greater than that of the dementia participants. These results suggest that not all aspects of memory function are impaired in MCI relative to healthy aging.     

The relative influences of movement kinematics and extrinsic object characteristics on the perception of lifted weight

Humans are able to perceive unique types of biological motion presented as point-light displays (PLDs). Thirty years ago, Runeson and Frykholm (Human Perception and Performance, 7(4), 733, 1981, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 112(4), 585, 1983) studied observers’ perceptions of weights lifted by actors and identified that the kinematic information in a PLD is sufficient for an observer to form an accurate perception of the object weight. However, research has also shown that extrinsic object size characteristics also influence the perception of object weight (Gordon, Forssberg, Johansson, & Westling in Experimental Brain Research, 83(3), 477–482, 1991). This study addresses the relative contributions of these two types of visual information to observers’ perceptions of lifted weight, through an experiment in which participants viewed an actor lifting boxes of various sizes (small, medium, or large) and weights (25, 50, or 75 lb) under four PLD conditions—box-at-rest, moving-box, actor-only, and actor-and-box—and one full-vision video condition, and then provided a weight estimate for each box lifted. The results indicated that lift kinematics and box size contributed independently to weight perception. Interestingly, the most robust weight differentiations were elicited in the conditions in which both types of information were presented concurrently, despite their converse natures. Furthermore, full-vision video presentation, which contained visual information beyond kinematics and object information, elicited the best estimates.     

Past Disclosure and Conversational Experience: Effects on Cardiovascular Functioning While Women Talk

A sense of self arises through social interaction and discourse, and this process of self-construction might have physiological correlates. We argue that cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) during communication is related to the salience of subjectivity and self-construction processes. We expected that the context in which a conversation occurs, the extent of disclosure during talk, and speakers' conversational histories (past conversational experience and past tendency to disclose) would be related to CVR. Women ( N = 44) engaged in talk to either a friend or a stranger about a personally relevant topic. Among low disclosers, extent of disclosure was positively related to CVR, while this effect was reversed for high disclosers. Low disclosers who tend not to disclose much but who usually feel comfortable conversing exhibited the largest cardiovascular responses. The findings highlight the importance of past social behavior and language use for physiological processes.     

Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique Promotes Learning and Corrects Inaccurate first Responses

The Psychological Record - Multiple-choice testing procedures that do not provide corrective feedback facilitate neither learning nor retention. In Studies 1 and 2, the performance of participants...