A Mediated Moderation Model of Conformative Peer Bullying

We investigated the relationship between conformative peer bullying and issues of peer conformity among adolescents. This relationship is examined through the establishment of a mediated moderation model for conformative peer bullying using structural equation modeling in a sample of 391 second-year middle school students in Seoul, South Korea. We found that peer pressure and resistance to peer influence interact with one another to affect antisocial conformity, which then affects conformative peer bullying, thereby establishing its mediated moderation effect. The results suggest that conformative peer bullying that encourages and assists active bullies is affected by antisocial conformity; moreover, an individual’s capacity to resist peer influence plays a protective role against peer conformity, and this must be acknowledged as a significant influence in conformative peer bullying among adolescents.     

Referential coding contributes to the horizontal SMARC effect

The present study tested whether coding of tone pitch relative to a referent contributes to the correspondence effect between the pitch height of an auditory stimulus and the location of a lateralized response. When left-right responses are mapped to high or low pitch tones, performance is better with the high-right/low-left mapping than with the opposite mapping, a phenomenon called the horizontal SMARC effect. However, when pitch height is task irrelevant, the horizontal SMARC effect occurs only for musicians. In Experiment 1, nonmusicians performed a pitch discrimination task, and the SMARC effect was evident regardless of whether a referent tone was presented. However, in Experiment 2, for a timbre-judgment task, nonmusicians showed a SMARC effect only when a referent tone was presented, whereas musicians showed a SMARC effect that did not interact with presence/absence of the referent. Dependence of the SMARC effect for nonmusicians on a reference tone was replicated in Experiment 3, in which judgments of the color of a visual stimulus were made in the presence of a concurrent high- or low-pitched pure tone. These results suggest that referential coding of pitch height is a key determinant for the horizontal SMARC effect when pitch height is irrelevant to the task.     

Age-related changes of arm movements in dual task condition when walking on different surfaces

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the dual task paradigm would influence arm movements during walking. Furthermore, we examined the effects of different walking surfaces on arm movements while performing dual tasks. The effects of age and gender were also investigated. Fifteen young adults and 15 older adults were included in this study. Subjects were asked to perform the walking task alone (single-task trial) and walking in combination with a cognitive task (dual-task trial). Four walking conditions (1 single task and 3 dual task trials)×two walking surfaces were encountered. Both age groups had greater elbow and trunk movement in the sagittal plane under the dual task trials as compared to the single task trial (p<.05). Subjects had greater upper extremity and upper body movement on the soft floor than on the hard floor (p<.05). Subjects had greater movement amplitude when confronting a challenging environment, especially in the contralateral side. Among gender, there was a group-gender interaction: the older females had smaller upper extremity movement than the older males (p<.05) but the opposite was true for the young adults. The results suggest that different age groups of males and females use different balance control strategy to deal with the challenging conditions.     

Aligning inside and outside perspectives of the self: A cross‐cultural difference in self‐perception

Past research shows that European Americans tend to take a first‐person perspective to understand the self and are unlikely to align the inside look with the outside gaze, whereas Asians tend to take a third‐person perspective and are likely to shift their inside look in the direction of the outsize gaze. In three experiments, we compared Asians and European Americans' self‐perceptions when the presence of their parents in the background of self‐perception was primed or otherwise. Without the priming, both European Americans and Asians viewed themselves more positively from their own perspective than from their parents' perspective. With the priming, only Asians lowered the positivity of their self‐perceptions to match the perceived positivity of the self in the parents' perspective. These results suggest that Asians do not have a static, passive tendency to assimilate their self‐views into the perceived external assessments of the self. Rather, their self‐views are fluid and flexible.     

Life Satisfaction of the Aged in the Retirement Process: A Comparative Study of South Korea with Germany and Switzerland

This study aims to examine relationships among various types of transitional retirement processes and life satisfaction. It conducted a cross-national comparison among Korea, Germany, and Switzerland using the Cross-National Equivalent File and the ordered logistic analysis method was used as the analysis model. We classify the retirement process by three types; the complete retirement type, the hopping type of post-retirement and the continuity type of post-retirement, and evaluate the life satisfaction in each type of retirement process. Our empirical analysis finds that workers of the complete retirement type have higher level of life satisfaction than workers working continually after retirement in South Korea, while workers continually working even after retirement periods have higher level of life satisfaction than workers of the complete retirement type in Germany and Switzerland. Based upon these empirical results, we also discuss the policy direction to improve the life satisfaction of the aged in South Korea.     

Multiple attentional control settings at distinct locations without the confounding of repetition priming

An attentional control setting (ACS), which is based on the task goal, induces involuntary attentional capture by a stimulus possessing a target-defining feature. It is unclear whether ACSs are maintained for multiple targets defined as conjunctions of a color and location. In the present study we examined the possibility of local ACSs for dual targets defined as combinations of color and location, using different paradigms: visual search in Experiment 1, and spatial cueing in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, a distractor captured attention only when its features matched the ACSs. Likewise, in Experiment 2, a significant attentional capture effect was found only with a matching cue, whose color and location were in line with the conjunction of the target definition. Importantly, the identical pattern of attentional capture was also obtained for a neutral-color target, which was unlikely to be primed by any color of the cue. Thus, these findings imply that the attentional bias depending on the match between the cue and target did not result from cue–target repetition priming. The present study highlights that top-down attentional control can be set flexibly to accomplish a complex task goal efficiently.     

Engineering Values Into Genetic Engineering: A Proposed Analytic Framework for Scientific Social Responsibility

Recent experiments have been used to “edit” genomes of various plant, animal and other species, including humans, with unprecedented precision. Furthermore, editing the Cas9 endonuclease gene with a gene encoding the desired guide RNA into an organism, adjacent to an altered gene, could create a “gene drive” that could spread a trait through an entire population of organisms. These experiments represent advances along a spectrum of technological abilities that genetic engineers have been working on since the advent of recombinant DNA techniques. The scientific and bioethics communities have built substantial literatures about the ethical and policy implications of genetic engineering, especially in the age of bioterrorism. However, recent CRISPr/Cas experiments have triggered a rehashing of previous policy discussions, suggesting that the scientific community requires guidance on how to think about social responsibility. We propose a framework to enable analysis of social responsibility, using two examples of genetic engineering experiments.