Mysticism in Chinese Christians and Non-Christians: Measurement Invariance of the Mysticism Scale and Implications for the Mean Differences

In this study, the authors validated the 3-factor, 8-facet model of Hood's Mysticism Scale and explored mean differences in mysticism with 330 indigenous Chinese Christian and 323 non-Christian participants. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated good fit for the overall Chinese sample and established measurement invariance of the instrument across the 2 groups. Both groups scored above the midpoint on the total Mysticism Scale, whereas Christians scored significantly higher in the mystical interpretation factor than did non-Christians. Controlling for demographic variables, multiple regression procedures revealed that a high intrinsic religious orientation mediated the association of Christian religious affiliation with mysticism. These results yielded patterns consistent with those found in the West and suggested that the Mysticism Scale was a valid quantitative measure for exploring spirituality issues in Chinese society.     

Theoretical perspectives on eye movements in reading: Past controversies,current issues,and an agenda for future research

The study of eye movements has become a well established and widely used methodology in experimental reading research. This Introduction provides a survey of some key methodological issues, followed by a discussion of major trends in the development of theories and models of eye movement control in fluent reading. Among the issues to be considered in future research are problems of methodology, a stronger grounding in basic research, integration with the neighbouring area of research on single word recognition, more systematic approaches to model evaluation and comparison, and more work on individual variation and effects of task demands in reading.     

Lexical and semantic influences on item and order memory in immediate serial recognition: evidence from a novel task

Previous studies have reported that, in contrast to the effect on immediate serial recall, lexical/semantic factors have little effect on immediate serial recognition. This has been taken as evidence that linguistic knowledge contributes to verbal short-term memory in a redintegrative process at recall. Contrary to this view, we found that lexicality, frequency, and imageability all influenced matching span. The standard matching span task, requiring changes in item order to be detected, was less susceptible to lexical/semantic factors than was a novel task involving the detection of phoneme order and hence item identity changes. Therefore, in both immediate recognition and immediate serial recall, lexical/semantic knowledge makes a greater contribution to item identity than to item order memory. Task sensitivity, and not the absence of overt recall, may have underpinned previous failures to show effects of these variables in immediate recognition. We also compared matching span for pure and unpredictable mixed lists of words and nonwords. Lexicality had a larger impact on immediate recognition for pure than for mixed lists, in line with findings for immediate serial recall. List composition affected the detection of phoneme but not item order changes in matching span; similarly, in recall, mixed lists produce more frequent word phoneme migrations but not migrations of entire items. These results point to strong similarities between immediate serial recall and recognition. Lexical/semantic knowledge may contribute to phonological stability in both tasks.