Of Tooth and Claw: Predator Self-Identifications Mediate Gender Differences in Interpersonal Arrogance

Men often score higher than women do on traits or tendencies marked by hostile dominance. The purpose of the present research was to contribute to an understanding of these gender differences. Four studies (total N?=?494 U.S. undergraduates) administered a modified animal preference test in which participants could choose to be predator or prey animals, but not labeled as such. Men were consistently more interested in being predator animals than women were, displaying a sort of hostile dominance in their projective preferences. Predator self-identifications, in turn, mediated gender differences in outcomes related to hostile dominance. Studies 1 and 2 provided initial evidence for this model in the context of variations in interpersonal arrogance, and Studies 3 and 4 extended the model to nonverbal displays and daily life prosociality, respectively. The findings indicate that gender differences in hostile dominance are paralleled by gender differences in preferring to think about the self in predator-like terms. Accordingly, the findings provide new insights into aggressive forms of masculine behavior.     

Diagnostic utility of the PTSD Checklist in detecting ptsd in Chinese earthquake victims

By using the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) module of the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) as the gold standard to identify PTSD, the current study investigated the diagnostic efficiency of the PTSD Checklist (PCL) as a screening questionnaire in a sample of 152 Chinese victims of the Wenchuan earthquake. The results showed that the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was .96 (SE = .02), and the optimally efficient cutoff score was 44. The findings provide preliminary support of the PCL as a screening questionnaire among Chinese earthquake victims. The present study may contribute to further PTSD-related research and practices in Chinese disaster settings.     

盲视与洞见——《荀子·非十二子》今读

《荀子·非十二子》顺应了当时天下学术总归一统的思想潮流,同时也以不容异己之势遮蔽了自身学术思想的好多问题。从历史的、辩证的角度看,荀子批判十二子的诸多论点盲视与洞见并存,与其自身的学术占位、理论体系和现实政治关怀密不可分。他的立论呈现出那个时代知识思想和政治权力难分彼此、相伴相生的原生态,并对后世知识分子言说与王朝政治产生了深远的影响。     

Contact and identity: The experience of ‘China goods’ in a Ghanaian marketplace

The rise in Chinese traders and increased availability of low‐cost imported goods benefits consumers, challenges local African retailers and is a point of tension in local communities. China's presence in Africa has been largely discussed and analysed through a political economy perspective. The social impact in local communities has been documented anecdotally but has yet to be empirically studied. This study took place in Makola Market, Accra, Ghana, to investigate the emerging intergroup encounters between established Ghanaian traders and nascent Chinese traders. Photo‐elicited semi‐structured interviews were conducted to explore how their interrelated experiences shape their interpretative framework and inform the dialectic of contact and social identity. I draw on these interpretative frameworks to propose a new model of contact, the Tri‐relational Contact Model, to capture and highlight how people's experiences include contact relationships with not just each other, but also with their places of business and the goods of trade. The findings from this study empirically highlight the micro‐level impact of China's presence in Ghana and help re‐conceptualize the contact hypothesis through a new model of contact with greater analytical utility to explicate the relational nature of contact and social identity formation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

美国宗教的渊源及诸教和谐共处的原因探析

美国是一个移民组成的国家,许多人将其比作民族"大熔炉"。移民们不仅将基督教三大分支——新教、天主教、东正教带进了美国,也将犹太教、伊斯兰教、佛教、印度教等带到了美国。此外,美国还存在着土生土长的宗教如摩门教和难以计数的小型宗教派别。在这个宗教多元的国度里,如此多的教派何以能够和谐共处?本文从政教分离、司法独立、崇尚教育、法律完备、移民的美国化、慈善机构的作用以及美国社会等方面作了一些探索和分析。     

Beyond risk and ambiguity: Deciding under ignorance

In this study, we examined the neural basis of decision making under different types of uncertainty that involve missing information: ambiguity (vague probabilities) and sample space ignorance (SSI; unknown outcomes). fMRI revealed that these two different types of uncertainty recruit distinct neural substrates: Ambiguity recruits the left insula, whereas SSI recruits the anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral inferior parietal cortex, and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. The finding of unique activations for different types of uncertainty may not necessarily be predicted within the reductive approach of modern theories of decision making under uncertainty, because these theories purport that humans reduce more complicated uncertain environments to subjectively formed less complicated ones (i.e., SSI to ambiguity). The predictions of the reductive view held only for ambiguityaverse individuals and not for ambiguity-tolerant individuals. Consequently, theories of decision making under uncertainty should include individual tolerance for missing information and how these individual differences modulate the neural systems engaged during decision making. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://cabn.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Position of phonetic components may influence how written words are processed in the brain: Evidence from Chinese phonetic compound pronunciation

Previous studies have shown a right-visual-field (RVF)/left-hemisphere (LH) advantage in Chinese phonetic compound pronunciation. Here, we contrast the processing of two phonetic compound types: a dominant structure in which a semantic component appears on the left and a phonetic component on the right (SP characters), and a minority structure with the opposite arrangement (PS characters). We show that this RVF/LH advantage was observed only in SP character pronunciation, but not in PS character pronunciation. This result suggests that SP character processing is more LH lateralized than is PS character processing and is consistent with corresponding ERP N170 data. This effect may be due to the dominance of SP characters in the lexicon, which makes readers opt to obtain phonological information from the right of the characters. This study thus shows that the overall information distribution of word components in the lexicon may influence how written words are processed in the brain. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://cabn .psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

罪犯精神病态的初步探索

以中国罪犯为被试,对Hare精神病态量表进行修订,并在此基础上进一步探讨罪犯精神病态的影响因素。研究结果表明:(1)修订的Hare精神病态量表具有良好的信度和效度;(2)年龄、文化程度、婚姻状况和犯罪次数是影响罪犯精神病态得分的重要因素。20-29岁年龄组罪犯精神病态的得分显著高于30-38岁年龄组;文化程度高的罪犯精神病态的得分显著低于文化程度低的罪犯,大专以上文化程度的罪犯精神病态得分最低;未婚罪犯精神病态的得分显著高于已婚和离异的罪犯;累犯精神病态的得分显著高于初犯。