Altruistic Orientation in Children: Construction and Validation of the Child Altruism Inventory

The Child Altruism Inventory (CAI) consisted of 24 yes-or-no items which measured the altruistic orientation of children. The sample included 1095 Grades 2 to 6 Chinese children in Hong Kong, The test-retest and internal consistency reliabilities of the CAI were in the 0.70s. The correlations of the CAI score with the intelligence and self-esteem scores were significantly positive, while the correlations of the CAI score with the psychoticism and neuroticism scores were significantly negative. Children in classes of positive and negative social environment rated high and low on the CAI respectively. The relations of the CAI score with self-report prosocial and delinquent behavioural indices were also positive and negative respectively. The psychometric properties of the CAI are regarded as quite good.     

Role adjustment as the unit of analysis for researching child development during the transition to school

While child development is well-recognized as a complex process which could hardly be decomposed into separate lines or domains in contemporary psychological theories, the decomposition approach is widely used in empirical studies. Based on the cultural-historical theory, this study argues for adopting the unit of analysis as a way to bridge this gap, and finds “role adjustment” as a suitable unit to analyse child development during the transition to school. The case of a 5-year-old second-generation Chinese Australian child's transition to school (with a total of 34 h of observation and 5 h of interview) is presented to verify its feasibility and to illustrate how it could be achieved in a research practice. The case study demonstrates that a child's role adjustment is in essence a process of transforming his/her role system, during which his/her major roles, the relation of the major roles, as well as his/her role-taking patterns change as a whole, and by tracing a child's role adjustment trajectory, how the child is learning and developing, what difficulties he/she encounter, and why these difficulties appear become clear.     

THE ADAPTATION OF THE FAMILY ENVIRONMENT SCALE TO CHINESE CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS IN HONG KONG

Moos and Moos' (1986) Family Environment Scale (FES) was adapted to the Chinese children and adolescents in Hong Kong. The major sample included 1,174 subjects from three elementary schools and seven high schools. Two subscales, Expressiveness and Independence and a few items were deleted based on the psychometric analysis. The FES scale intercorrelations were consistent, and the factor pattern of the remaining eight scales was explicable in terms of the characteristics of the Chinese culture. Results also showed that middle class families in general had a more positive family social environment than the working class families.     

《周易》断辞所蕴含的思想

断辞的差异性存在外露着作《易》者的价值取向。本文主要拈出断辞“悔”,透视其“悔亡”、“无悔”、“有悔(悔)”三种不同形态:以中、正、比、应等为切入点,玩观卦象,通过数理统计对各自的生成进行定量分析,于对比中彰显出《周易》之内蕴:一、正不如中、应(比)之善;二、执中有应为事物发展最根本的条件:三、得位是事物发展不可低估的要素;四、中正之为美。     

春秋战国齐金文字体研究

春秋战国是汉字字体由篆到隶的重要时期,齐金文素以其精严整饬的美化藻饰体著称,但这只是其字体演变中的一个环节。齐金文字体演变在书写便捷的原动力下,通过体势趋扁趋方打破篆体长圆体势,通过短直的笔画分解篆体圆转的笔画,与其他地域的金文字体一起推动了汉字字体的演变,并以其鲜明的地域个性丰富了汉字字体面貌。     

A Comparison of the Legitimacy of Power Between Confucianist and Legalist Philosophies

The concept of legitimacy is at the heart of the theory of power. It is essential to understand how a political power is built and how obedience is obtained among the population. We examine here the legitimacy of power for two of the most important political philosophies of classical China: Confucianism and Legalism. We show how a specific group of the population, the scholar-officials, play a specialised role in the two systems, acting as a legitimisation group. We further compare rites and laws as a way to obtain social order, and morality vs punishments as a way to obtain obedience. We conclude that the Confucianist system is less fragile than the Legalist, but also more oppressive, since it allows fewer personal choices to individuals.     

Treatment Expectations and Treatment Experience of Chinese Families Towards Family Therapy: appraisal of a common belief

This paper reports results of a qualitative study on family therapy conducted in Hong Kong, which aims to identify Chinese families' treatment expectations, delineate their subjective experience and the outcome in treatment. By comparing the expectations, the experience and the outcome, this study examines and challenges the belief that the practice of family therapy should necessarily be fundamentally adapted to be 'culture-specific', an assumption that has hitherto been untested and possibly based on overgeneralized cultural stereotyping. This study provides empirical evidence for family therapists who have interests in working with local and overseas Chinese families to improve their practice.     

美德的伦理化及其后果

美德在本义上既可属人,也可属于非人事物,既包含伦理美德,也包含非伦理美德。但在赫西俄德传统中,本义上的美德逐渐被伦理化了。这种伦理化有多种表现形式,比如苏格拉底转向,柏拉图论美德是否可教,亚里士多德对美德进行分类,美德的缩容、扩容和嬗变以及合作性美德替代竞争性美德,公正变成美德之一种,美德成为中道或适度等,都显著地体现了美德的伦理化。从后果上来说,美德的伦理化导致了美德的理智化、"最"性的消失、遗忘自然美德、遗忘美德的本义和遗忘荷马。     

Young Mandarin learners use function words to distinguish between nouns and verbs

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin‐speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3‐ and 5‐year‐old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either nouns or verbs in the absence of the requirement for determiners and inflections in the ambient language. In Experiment 1, 3‐, and 5‐year‐old Mandarin‐speaking children were exposed to eight novel words embedded in sentence frames differing only in the form class markers used. The 5‐year‐olds interpreted the novel words as either nouns or verbs depending on the form class markers they heard, while the 3‐year‐olds learned only the nouns. Experiment 2 confirmed that the 5‐year‐olds understood the function of the verb‐marker. Thus, Mandarin‐speaking children can use function words to distinguish nouns versus verbs, and this ability appears between three and five years of age.     

Adolescents' willingness to help with peer victimisation in Taiwan: The role of individual and situation-specific characteristics

The purpose of this study is to evaluate adolescent bystanders' willingness to help and specific help responses as predicted by both individual characteristics (e.g., gender, empathy, victimisation experiences) and situation-specific characteristics (i.e., bystander's relationship with the victim and the presence of another bystander). The study used an experimental vignette method with a sample of Taiwanese adolescents. Participants included 730 seventh graders (49% girls, mean age 12.8 years) attending one middle school in a southern city in Taiwan. Results show that both individual characteristics (e.g., gender, empathy) and a situation-specific characteristic (i.e., the relationship a participant had with the victim) predicted adolescents' willingness to help. However, only individual characteristics predicted adolescents' specific help responses including telling the teacher, telling the bully to stop, and comforting the victims. Directions for future research and implications for interventions and prevention programs are discussed.