CONCEPTS OF INTELLIGENCE: A COMPARISON OF CHINESE GRADUATES FROM CHINESE AND ENGLISH SCHOOLS IN HONG KONG*

The present study investigated the concepts of intelligence of two groups of Hong Kong Chinese university students. They differed in the secondary schools from which they graduated, one followed the Chinese system and the other the English system. These two groups were otherwise similar in age, academic achievement, and racial background. Subjects were asked to rate items selected from four popular intelligence tests in terms of their relevance to measuring intelligence and perceived difficulty. The relevance ratings were taken as reflections of the group's concept of intelligence. Factor analysis revealed two major factors and several minor factors underlying the relevance ratings of the two groups. The major ones were Non-verbal and Verbal reasoning skills, and the minor ones were Social, Numerical, and Retrieval skills. The Non-verbal reasoning skill was rated equally relevant by the two groups of subjects and was considered as the most relevant skill to measuring intelligence. The Verbal reasoning and Social skills were next, followed by the Numerical skill with the Retrieval skill being the least relevant. The Chinese-school group tended to rate the Verbal reasoning skill to be less relevant than did the English-school group. These findings were attributed to the mental effort involved in solving each type of task and to the differences in school instruction.     

A comparative analysis of two community stressors' long-term mental health effects

The investigation directly compared the long-term mental health consequences of two community-wide stressors, the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear accident and widespread unemployment due to layoff, in demographically comparable samples of women. Results showed a marked degree of similarity in the stressors' effects: Levels of subclinical symptomatology were elevated to similar degrees in each sample during the year following stressor onset, and symptom levels remained elevated in each sample 2 to 3 1/2 years later. Moreover, variables identified as predictors of enduring psychological distress were virtually identical for the two samples. Additional analyses revealed that the mental health status of unemployed husbands mediated the negative psychological effects of layoff on their wives. Implications of these results for understanding the long-term consequences of exposure to community-wide stress are discussed.     

Altering retrieval demands reverses the picture superiority effect

In Experiment 1 subjects studied a mixed list of pictures and words and then received either a free recall test or a word fragment completion test (e.g.,_yr_mi_forpyramid) on which some fragments corresponded to previously studied items. Free recall of pictures was better than that of words. However, words produced greater priming than did pictures on the fragment completion test, although a small amount of picture priming did occur. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the picture priming was not due to implicit naming of the pictures during study. In Experiment 4 subjects studied words and pictures and received either the word fragment completion test or a picture fragment identification test in which they had to name degraded pictures. Greater priming was obtained with words in word fragment completion, but greater priming was obtained with pictures on the picture identification test. We conclude that (1) the type of retrieval query determines whether pictures or words will exhibit superior retention, and (2)our results conform to the principle of transfer appropriate processing by which performance on transfer or retention tests benefits to the extent that the tests recapitulate operations used during learning.     

Is menopause depressing? An investigation of three perspectives

This study examines three perspectives in the literature about menopausal depression. According to one, the physiological changes of menopause result in increased psychological distress. Another approach proposes that menopause is most depressing for women who occupy traditional female gender roles. The third asserts that menopause is not especially depressing for most women. This study empirically examines three perspectives using data from two community surveys. These analyses suggest menopausal status may not be associated with depressive symptomatology, either directly or indirectly through traditional gender roles.This research was supported in part by PHS grant numbers 5T32MH13043, 5T32MH16373, and 5T32MH15774. I appreciate the helpful comments I received from Janet Berkeley, Bruce Link, and an anonymous reviewer on earlier versions of this paper. I also am grateful to Lenore Radloff and NIMH for providing the CMHA data and to Harold Dupuy and NCHS for the HANES data.     

Caffeine,impulsivity, and memory scanning: A comparison of two explanations for the Yerkes-Dodson Effect

Two explanations for the Yerkes-Dodson Effect (1908) were tested. Easterbrook (1959) proposed that arousal reduces the range of cue utilization. Thus, arousal should interfere with the capacity for simultaneous (dual) memory scans. In contrast, Humphreys and Revelle (1984) proposed that arousal facilitates sustained information transfer but interferes with short-term memory. Arousal should thus reduce the time needed to prepare to respond but increase the time needed to scan memory. Either caffeine or placebo was given to 78 subjects who differed in impulsivity. They completed three versions of a memory-scanning task: two single-task versions (physical and category matches) and one dual-task version (either type of match). As predicted by Humphreys and Revelle, relative to placebo, caffeine lowered the intercept (p<.01), suggesting facilitation of sustained information transfer, but increased the slope (p<.05), suggesting impairment of access to short-term memory, of the regression of reaction time on log-transformed memory-set size. That caffeine had a main effect on slopes and on intercepts but did not interact with type of task suggests that arousal does not necessarily disrupt dual-task performance.     

Overall nutrient intake of preschool hyperactive and normal boys

Studies examining the relationship between sugar intake of hyperactive children and behavior problems have reported inconsistent results. We hypothesized that if the problem behaviors of attention deficit-disordered children with hyperactivity (ADDH) are exacerbated by food, then this might be due to differences in their background nutrition relative to non-ADDH children. Parents and day care workers of 24 ADDH and 27 non-ADDH preschoolaged boys were trained to keep food diaries for 21 days. Analysis of the last 14 days for each child revealed no differences in overall nutrient intake between the two groups. On the other hand, for 5 ADDH and 3 non-ADDH children the within-subject correlations between daily behavior and sugar intake were significant. We concluded that nutrition-behavior interactions are more likely a function of idiosyncratic sensitivities, rather than a general tendency for ADDH children to eat differently from non-ADDH children.This research was funded by the Alberta Mental Health Research Advisory Council, and by the National Health Research and Development Program of Health and Welfare Canada. We think Jeannine Fraser for help with data analyses.     

Verb processing during sentence comprehension: Contextual impenetrability

This paper examines verb processing during sentence comprehension. We describe two experiments that assess the interaction between verb complexity and the structural information contained in a sentence. Verb complexity is defined in terms of a verb's possible argument structure arrangements—linguistic information arrayed against a verb's entry in the mental lexicon. Normal subjects had to perform a secondary task presented in the immediate vicinity of the verb while listening to a sentence for meaning. Reaction times to this secondary task show that all of a verb's possible argument structures are momentarily and exhaustively activated in the vicinity of the verb, even in sentences that are structurally biased toward one particular argument structure. We thus argue that verb processing in sentences involves a contextually impenetrable subcomponent of the language comprehension system.Program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, Brandeis University.     

The properties of retrieval cues constrain the picture superiority effect

In three experiments, we examined why pictures are remembered better than words on explicit memory tests like recall and recognition, whereas words produce more priming than pictures on some implicit tests, such as word-fragment and word-stem completion (e.g., completing -l-ph-nt or ele----- as elephant). One possibility is that pictures are always more accessible than words if subjects are given explicit retrieval instructions. An alternative possibility is that the properties of the retrieval cues themselves constrain the retrieval processes engaged; word fragments might induce data-driven (perceptually based) retrieval, which favors words regardless of the retrieval instructions. Experiment 1 demonstrated that words were remembered better than pictures on both the word-fragment and word-stem completion tasks under both implicit and explicit retrieval conditions. In Experiment 2, pictures were recalled better than words with semantically related extralist cues. In Experiment 3, when semantic cues were combined with word fragments, pictures and words were recalled equally well under explicit retrieval conditions, but words were superior to pictures under implicit instructions. Thus, the inherently data-limited properties of fragmented words limit their use in accessing conceptual codes. Overall, the results indicate that retrieval operations are largely determined by properties of the retrieval cues under both implicit and explicit retrieval conditions.