Culture, ethnicity, and children's facial expressions: a study of European American, Mainland Chinese, Chinese American, and adopted Chinese girls

This investigation extends previous research documenting differences in Chinese and European American infants' facial expressivity. Chinese girls adopted by European American families, nonadopted Mainland Chinese girls, nonadopted Chinese American girls, and nonadopted European American girls responded to emotionally evocative slides and an odor stimulus. European American girls smiled more than Mainland Chinese and Chinese American girls and scored higher than Mainland Chinese girls for disgust-related expressions and overall expressivity. Adopted Chinese girls produced more disgust-related expressions than Mainland Chinese girls. Self-reported maternal strictness, aggravation, positive expressiveness, and cultural identification correlated with children's facial responses, as did number of siblings and adults in the home. Results suggest that culture and family environment influences facial expressivity, creating differences among children of the same ethnicity.     

Speeded old-new recognition of multidimensional perceptual stimuli: modeling performance at the individual-participant and individual-item levels

Observers made speeded old-new recognition judgments of color stimuli embedded in a multidimensional similarity space. The paradigm used multiple lists but with the underlying similarity structures repeated across lists, to allow for quantitative modeling of the data at the individual-participant and individual-item levels. Correct-rejection response times (RTs) got systematically faster as the similarity of foils to the old study items decreased. There were also intricate patterns of speed-accuracy trade-offs that varied across individual items and participants. An exemplar-based random-walk model provided a good overall quantitative account of the recognition choice probabilities, mean correct RTs, and mean error RTs associated with the individual items on the basis of their positions in multidimensional similarity space. However, the model failed to predict the very long RTs associated with correct rejections of a prototype foil.