Organ donation and culture: a comparison of Asian American and European American beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors

The well-known gap between organ-donor supply and demand in the United States is particularly acute for Asian Americans. Lower participation in organ donation programs by Asian Americans has been hypothesized as one explanation for this observation. This study finds that, relative to European Americans, Asian Americans hold more negative attitudes toward and participate less frequently in a large, urban organ-donor program. The study also hypothesizes and tests possible reasons for subcultural differences in attitudes toward donation. Two cultural belief constructs hypothesized to more strongly predict Asian American attitudes and behaviors appear to impact both groups equally. Reasons for these results along with public policy implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Cyberostracism: effects of being ignored over the Internet

Ostracism is such a widely used and powerful tactic that the authors tested whether people would be affected by it even under remote and artificial circumstances. In Study 1, 1,486 participants from 62 countries accessed the authors' on-line experiment on the Internet. They were asked to use mental visualization while playing a virtual tossing game with two others (who were actually computer generated and controlled). Despite the minimal nature of their experience, the more participants were ostracized, the more they reported feeling bad, having less control, and losing a sense of belonging. In Study 2, ostracized participants were more likely to conform on a subsequent task. The results are discussed in terms of supporting K. D. Williams's (1997) need threat theory of ostracism.     

Visual Similarity of Words Alone Can Modulate Hemispheric Lateralization in Visual Word Recognition: Evidence From Modeling Chinese Character Recognition

In Chinese orthography, the most common character structure consists of a semantic radical on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); the minority, opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). Recent studies showed that SP character processing is more left hemisphere (LH) lateralized than PS character processing. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether this is due to phonetic radical position or character type frequency. Through computational modeling with artificial lexicons, in which we implement a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception but do not assume phonological processing being LH lateralized, we show that the difference in character type frequency alone is sufficient to exhibit the effect that the dominant type has a stronger LH lateralization than the minority type. This effect is due to higher visual similarity among characters in the dominant type than the minority type, demonstrating the modulation of visual similarity of words on hemispheric lateralization.     

Psychometric Evaluation of the Spiritual Transcendence Scale in a Chinese Sample: Is There Factorial Invariance Across Gender,Occupation, and Religion?

This study investigated the reliability and validity of the widely used 23-item Spiritual Transcendence Scale and tested whether there was factorial invariance of the scale by demographic variables such as gender, occupation, and religion in a large Chinese sample (n = 1,894). Exploratory factor analysis with a random subsample supported the original 3-factor structure (prayer fulfillment, universality, and connectedness) in a revised 16-item scale. Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that a 15-item model provided a good fit to the data of the remaining subsample. The scale had alpha reliabilities ranging from .64 to .92 in the exploratory factor analysis and .60 to .92 in the confirmatory factor analysis. Subsequent factorial invariance tests indicated that the scale was invariant across gender and occupation but not religion. Evidence of construct validity was equivocal. Additional empirical studies should be conducted to evaluate the psychometric properties of the scale in other culturally and religiously diverse settings.     

A Unified Framework for the Comparison of Treatments with Ordinal Responses

Different latent variable models have been used to analyze ordinal categorical data which can be conceptualized as manifestations of an unobserved continuous variable. In this paper, we propose a unified framework based on a general latent variable model for the comparison of treatments with ordinal responses. The latent variable model is built upon the location-scale family and is rich enough to include many important existing models for analyzing ordinal categorical variables, including the proportional odds model, the ordered probit-type model, and the proportional hazards model. A flexible estimation procedure is proposed for the identification and estimation of the general latent variable model, which allows for the location and scale parameters to be freely estimated. The framework advances the existing methods by enabling many other popular models for analyzing continuous variables to be used to analyze ordinal categorical data, thus allowing for important statistical inferences such as location and/or dispersion comparisons among treatments to be conveniently drawn. Analysis on real data sets is used to illustrate the proposed methods.     

Intimacy and Complicated Grief among Chinese Elders Having Lost their Spouses: Mediating Role of Meaning Making

This study aims to investigate the mediating role of meaning making in the relationship between intimacy and complicated grief among bereaved elders. A sample of 352 bereaved elders in rural China participated in the study. Both the linear and quadratic effects of meaning making illustrated a model that mediated the effect of intimacy on complicated grief. Essentially, findings revealed that only high levels of meaning making predicted low levels of complicated grief. This study thereby supplements existing research about meaning-making theory.     

Early Childhood Teachers’ Perception of Creative Personality as a Predictor of Their Support of pedagogy important for fostering Creativity: A Chinese Perspective

Previous studies have suggested that teacher’s personality traits and pedagogy are the important areas of investigation in creativity research; however, little is known about the relationship between teachers’ personality traits and creativity-fostering pedagogy. This study proposed a model describing 3 types of perceived personality traits that contribute to teachers’ support of important creativity-fostering pedagogy. The model was tested on a sample of 875 Chinese early childhood teachers. This study first established factorial validity of the measurement scales, the Creative Personality Questionnaire (CPQ) and the Early Childhood Creative Pedagogy Questionnaire (ECCPQ). Confirmatory factor analysis supported the 4-factor structure of the ECCPQ, but failed to replicate the 5-factor structure of the CPQ. An alternative 3-factor model was obtained as a personality measure. The results of multiple regression and structural equation modeling analysis showed that the proposed model was partially supported by the data. Although cognitive abilities factor of creative personality, as expected, was the strongest predictor of self-reported important creative pedagogy, surprisingly openness did not explain unique variance in any of the creative pedagogy factors. One distinct path tapped a relation between the discipline personality traits and teacher-oriented pedagogy was identified, which was seldom addressed in Western creativity research. It may reflect a cultural-specific indigenous variations.