The Connection Between Happiness and Service Businesses: A Preliminary Study

Happiness may be one of the most important goals that many people pursue in the world. This study adopts a qualitative approach to investigate the determinants of happiness for Taiwanese/Chinese people. Further, we investigate related service opportunities for happiness via a field survey of 808 respondents. This study identifies four happiness segments for people in Taiwan/China: Influential & Outgoing, Adequately Settled, Pleasure Seeking, and Young & Restless. These four happiness segments differ markedly in terms of characteristics and potential service opportunities. The findings of this study have implications for researchers who are seeking to understand happiness in an Asian country.     

Maintaining faith in agency under immutable constraints: cognitive consequences of believing in negotiable fate

Negotiable fate refers to the idea that one can negotiate with fate for control, and that people can exercise personal agency within the limits that fate has determined. Research on negotiable fate has found greater prevalence of related beliefs in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe and English-speaking countries. The present research extends previous findings by exploring the cognitive consequences of the belief in negotiable fate. It was hypothesized that this belief enables individuals to maintain faith in the potency of their personal actions and to remain optimistic in their goal pursuits despite the immutable constraints. The belief in negotiable fate was predicted to (a) facilitate sense-making of surprising outcomes; (b) increase persistence in goal pursuits despite early unfavorable outcomes; and (c) increase risky choices when individuals have confidence in their luck. Using multiple methods (e.g., crosscultural comparisons, culture priming, experimental induction of fate beliefs), we found supporting evidence for our hypotheses in three studies. Furthermore, as expected, the cognitive effects of negotiable fate are observed only in cultural contexts where the fate belief is relatively prevalent. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the intersubjective approach to understanding the influence of culture on cognitive processes (e.g., Chiu, Gelfand, Yamagishi, Shteynberg, & Wan, 2010), the sociocultural foundations that foster the development of a belief in negotiable fate, and an alternative perspective for understanding the nature of agency in contexts where constraints are severe. Future research avenues are also discussed.     

Children's moral evaluations of reporting the transgressions of peers: age differences in evaluations of tattling

The way children evaluate the reporting of peers' transgressions to authority figures was investigated. Participants, ages 6-11 years (N = 60), were presented with a series of vignettes, each of which depicted a child who committed either a minor transgression (such as not finishing the vegetables at lunch) or a more serious transgression (such as stealing from a classmate). Participants were asked to evaluate the decision of a child observer who either did or did not report the transgression to a teacher. Younger children considered reporting to be appropriate for both types of transgressions, but older children considered reporting to be appropriate for major transgressions only. Results are interpreted with reference to (a) a changing peer culture in which the social cost of reporting transgressions increases and (b) a developmental change in children's cognitive capabilities.     

Sex-Dimorphic Color Preference in Children with Gender Identity Disorder: A Comparison to Clinical and Community Controls

The present study was designed to assess sex-dimorphic color preferences in children with gender identity disorder (47 boys, 18 girls), clinical controls (65 boys, 35 girls), and community controls (65 boys, 35 girls). The mean age of the children was 7.63 years (range?=?3–12 years). Children were shown a hexagon-shaped display of 144 colors extracted from PowerPoint?. Each child was asked to choose his or her three favorite colors (Trials 1–3) by pointing to them, naming them, and then to provide a justification for each choice. From the entire array, children labeled a total of 11 different colors: black, blue, brown, gray, green, orange, pink, purple, red, white, and yellow. For three of the colors (blue, pink/purple, and red), there was evidence for normative sex differences in color preference, and, for the colors blue and pink/purple, the gender-referred children showed inverted patterns of color preference. For the color blue, luminance values showed that the gender-referred boys and control girls preferred lighter shades, whereas the gender-referred girls and control boys preferred darker shades. Qualitative analysis indicated that gender-specific justifications were uncommon, even for the sex-dimorphic colors. Gender-referred children showed inverted gender-stereotyped color preferences, which are likely related to their more general pattern of cross-gender identification. Principles of gender-differentiated development derived from gender-schema theory are used to explain the group differences in color preferences.     

Group-serving attributions across intergroup contexts: Cultural differences in the explanation of sex-typed behaviours

This research attempted to integrate Tajfel's (1978) social identity theory with self-presentational concerns by exploring attributions about perceived group differences in behaviour. As such, it dealt with group-level rather than individual-level attributions, exploring whether bias in making such verbal attributions varied as a function of the interviewer's group identity and the presence of an ingroup audience. Undergraduate men and women at The Chinese University of Hong Kong rated the appropriateness of ingroup-favouring and outgroup-favouring explanations for male-typed and female-typed behaviors in a face-to-face interview. A group-serving bias was found for female-typed behaviours, but only when the same-sex audience was absent. A conceptual replication of the experiment was run in the United States to examine the possible cultural basis for the Chinese moderation of favouritism in the audience condition. The group-serving bias was more robust for the American undergraduates, extending across male- and female-typed behaviours and also across audience conditions, It was argued that these cultural differences in attributional bias appear to reflect the strength of the movement for women's liberation and norms surrounding the avoidance of conflict in the United States and Hong Kong.     

Three wishes of gifted and nongifted adolescents

Three wishes of 69 gifted and 66 nongifted adolescents within the United States were solicited in a group situation. The findings indicated that personal wishes were of the most concern for both gifted and nongifted adolescents, and that male adolescents in both groups tended to value material possessions more often than did female adolescents. A significant between-groups difference revealed that gifted adolescents expressed more altruistic and fewer goal wishes than their nongifted peers. These kinds of data are one more means of describing, for teachers and counselors, a general picture of students' psychological and social orientations.     

When modesty fails: The social impact of group-effacing attributions following success or failure

This study explored how group members perceived a fellow group member who made either group-serving or group-effacing attributions following success or failure. Forty male undergraduates from the Chinese University co-operated in pairs with a confederate on a demanding group task. After learning that their group's performance had exceeded or failed to meet a standard, the subjects heard their confederate-partner make group-effacing or group-serving attributions. As predicted, subjects evaluated the group-serving partners more highly (p < 0.05). Preference for group-enhancing members was discussed as a pancultural response arising from the interdependence of group members. Given the process of social categorization, group members rise or fall together and are therefore socialized to support their group.     

The Role of Affective Dispositions in Job Satisfaction and Work Strain: Comparing Collectivist and Individualist Societies

The individualism-collectivism dimension cuts across the East and the West. It explains the differing values and cultural breeding that are necessary in acculturating people's affective and cognitive behaviours in accordance with the culture to which they belong. Many empirical studies have investigated the effects of personality traits on job satisfaction and work strain. The personality of individuals affects how they perceive the impact of job satisfaction and work stress. Furthermore, personality traits are influenced by cultural background. This study surveyed 626 nurses from collectivist and individualist societies to find out the possible difference in the role of affective dispositions in self-reported job satisfaction and work strain between these two cultural orientations.     

A test of the sensorimotor account of vision and visual perception

Two theories define the relationship between sensory experience and perception of location. The doctrine of specific nerve energies relies on hard-wired, genetically specified relationships between stimulation and perception, modifiable only within limits by adaptation. In a newer sensorimotor account, experience tunes the relationship between stimulation and perception. The perception of pressure phosphenes can differentiate the two theories, because the phosphene appears at a location predicted by physiological optics and in a modality predicted by specific nerve energies. Moving a finger vertically along the outer orbit of the eye while pressing gently on it through the lid during nasally directed gaze results in apparent motion of the phosphene out of phase with the finger, therefore in contradiction to information from motor efference to the finger, tactile sense at the fingertip, eyelid and bulb, joint receptors, and proprioception from muscles driving the finger. A test of the sensorimotor theory giving it every advantage had six observers in darkness moving their fingers along the eye and observing phosphenes for 1 h and 2400 motion cycles; the phosphene always obeyed the doctrine of specific nerve energies, never adapting or changing modality as the sensorimotor theory predicts.