Category induction from distributional cues in an artificial language

The ability to identify the grammatical category of a word (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) is a fundamental aspect of competence in a natural language. Children show evidence of categorization by as early as 18 months, and in some cases younger. However, the mechanisms that underlie this ability are not well understood. The lexical co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences could provide information about word categories--for example, words that follow the in English often belong to the same category. As a step in understanding the role distributional mechanisms might play in language learning, the present study investigated the ability of adults to categorize words on the basis of distributional information. Forty participants listened for approximately 6 min to sentences in an artificial language and were told that they would later be tested on their memory for what they had heard. Participants were next tested on an additional set of sentences and asked to report which sentences they recognized from the first 6 min. The results suggested that learners performed a distributional analysis on the initial set of sentences and recognized sentences on the basis of their memory of sequences of categories of words. Thus, mechanisms that would be useful in natural language learning were shown to be active in adults in an artificial language learning task.     

Transferring voice effects in recognition memory from remembering to knowing

In five experiments, we investigated the effects of voice congruency (same vs. different voices at study and at test) on remembering and knowing in recognition memory. With low- and medium-frequency three- or four-syllable words, a voice congruency effect occurred only in remembering. With nonwords, voice congruency effects occurred both in remembering and in knowing. With nonwords and divided attention at study, the voice congruency effect transferred almost completely from remembering to knowing. By showing a transfer of effects from remembering to knowing as encoding became more impoverished, these findings support a distinctiveness/fluency account of remembering and knowing as well as the theory that remembering and knowing indicate retrieval of events from episodic and semantic memory systems, respectively.     

Social Constructionism as a Sociological Approach

This essay concerns itself with a detailed presentation of the contents of two works on the construction of reality in society. One is Berger and Luckmann’s well-known book (The social construction of reality. Penguin Book, Harmondsworth, 1966); the other is the somewhat less known book on the same subject by Holzner (Reality construction in society. Schenkman Publishing Company, Cambridge, 1972; orig. 1968). These works deal with the social construction of shared symbolic and cognitive universes of meaning, and partake of the same theoretical sources, namely, Symbolic Interactionism and Schutz’s phenomenological sociology. They differ in their theoretical pursuits, however. Berger and Luckmann deal with what is necessary for the construction of a shared symbolic world, as society is endowed with both an objective and a subjective reality. Holzner is more interested in the social distribution and control of reality construction, and in the different types of reality constructs.     

Motivational Antecedents and Consequences of the Mother–Adolescent Communication

Communication between parents and their children represents an important factor of family socialization. Nevertheless, little is known about why parents communicate in different ways and how these qualitative differences in parent–child communication may affect the child. Building on self-determination theory, the present study focuses on motivational antecedents of need-supportive communication as a function of parental child-related beliefs (i.e., long-term goals that parents have set for their children’s future, and parental child-related behavior expectations in terms of parental dissatisfaction or satisfaction with child behavior). Moreover, the effect of perceived need-supportive communication on children’s prosocial behavior and (externalizing and internalizing) behavioral difficulties will be addressed. Three waves of data from 1125 mothers and adolescents aged between 10 and 17 years were analyzed using growth-curve modeling. We found linearly increasing trajectories in extrinsic parental goals for children and dissatisfaction with child behavior, and decreasing trajectories of need-supportive communication. Individual differences do not vary significantly over time. In addition, holding extrinsic parental goals for children positively predicts parents’ dissatisfaction with their child’s behavior and negatively predicts need-supportive communication. Parents’ dissatisfaction with their child’s behavior also contributes to decreasing need-supportive communication. As expected, need-supportive communication predicts prosocial behavior and externalizing behavioral difficulties. When need-supportive communication decreases over time, both externalizing and internalizing behavioral difficulties increase. Furthermore, the effect of mothers beliefs on adolescents socioemotional development was mediated through perceived mother’s communication quality. These results suggest that parental child-related beliefs are important motivational antecedents of parent–child communication that may prevent behavioral difficulties.     

Parenting Behaviors and Child Externalizing: A Short-Term Investigation of Directionality

Children (N = 404) provided data during 3rd and 4th grades concerning their mothers’ use of punitive discipline and yielding to coercion. Teachers provided data regarding their perceptions of children’s externalizing behaviors at school. We tested a cross-lagged model examining parental disciplinary behaviors as predictors of child externalizing behavior, as well as child externalizing behaviors as a predictor of parental disciplinary behaviors. For boys and for girls, there was over-time stability in all three variables of interest. For boys only, more externalizing behaviors in Grade 3 predicted greater use of punitive discipline by parents and more parental yielding to coercion in Grade 4, over and above Grade 3 levels of these parenting variables. The reverse direction of effects was not observed.     

Predicting Self‐Confident Behaviour with Implicit and Explicit Self‐Esteem Measures

The present research compared the validity of popular direct and indirect measures of self‐esteem in predicting self‐confident behaviour in different social situations. In line with behavioural dual‐process models, both implicit and explicit self‐esteem were hypothesized to be related to appearing self‐confident to unacquainted others. A total of 127 participants responded to the Rosenberg Self‐Esteem Scale, the Multidimensional Self‐Esteem Scale, and an adjective scale for measuring explicit self‐esteem (ESE). Participants' implicit self‐esteem (ISE) was assessed with four indirect measures: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the name‐letter task (NLT), and two variants of an affective priming task, the reaction‐time affective priming task (RT‐APT) and the error‐based affective priming task (EB‐APT). Self‐confident behaviour was observed in four different social situations: (i) self‐introduction to a group; (ii) an ostracism experience; (iii) an interview about the ostracism experience; and (iv) an interview about one's personal life. In general, appearing self‐confident to unknown others was independently predicted by ESE and ISE. The indirect measures of self‐esteem were, as expected, not correlated, and only the self‐esteem APTs—but not the self‐esteem IAT or the NLT—predicted self‐confident behaviours. It is important to note that in particular the predictive power of the self‐esteem EB‐APT pertained to all four criteria and was incremental to the ESE measures. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Religion and Health: Anxiety,Religiosity, Meaning of Life and Mental Health

We examined the association among anxiety, religiosity, meaning of life and mental health in a nonclinical sample from a Chinese society. Four hundred fifty-one Taiwanese adults (150 males and 300 females) ranging in age from 17 to 73 years (M = 28.9, SD = 11.53) completed measures of Beck Anxiety Inventory, Medical Outcomes Study Health Survey, Perceived Stress Scale, Social Support Scale, and Personal Religiosity Scale (measuring religiosity and meaning of life). Meaning of life has a significant negative correlation with anxiety and a significant positive correlation with mental health and religiosity; however, religiosity does not correlate significantly anxiety and mental health after controlling for demographic measures, social support and physical health. Anxiety explains unique variance in mental health above meaning of life. Meaning of life was found to partially mediate the relationship between anxiety and mental health. These findings suggest that benefits of meaning of life for mental health can be at least partially accounted for by the effects of underlying anxiety.     

Old Wine in New Bottles? The Case of Self‐compassion and Neuroticism

Research on self‐compassion, which is defined as being understanding and kind to oneself when confronted with negative experiences, has produced an impressive number of articles in recent years. This research shows that individual differences in self‐compassion, as measured by the Self‐Compassion Scale (SCS), are positively related to life satisfaction, health and social functioning. However, a critical and systematic test of self‐compassion from a personality perspective has not yet conducted so far. In the present study (N = 576), we (i) tested the factor structure of the SCS, (ii) examined the distinctiveness of self‐compassion with regard to the five‐factor model of personality, focusing on neuroticism, and (iii) tested the incremental predictive power of self‐compassion beyond the five‐factor model in the context of life satisfaction. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a two‐factor plus six facets solution of self‐compassion (a positive factor and a negative factor). Additional analyses revealed that the negative factor was redundant with facets of neuroticism (rs ≥ .85), whereas the positive factor had some unique variance left. However, neither the negative factor nor the positive factor could explain substantial incremental variance in life satisfaction beyond neuroticism. Recommendations for how to use the SCS are provided, and the future of research on self‐compassion is discussed. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Local influence analysis of nonlinear structural equation models

By regarding the latent random vectors as hypothetical missing data and based on the conditional expectation of the complete-data log-likelihood function in the EM algorithm, we investigate assessment of local influence of various perturbation schemes in a nonlinear structural equation model. The basic building blocks of local influence analysis are computed via observations of the latent variables generated by the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, while the diagnostic measures are obtained via the conformal normal curvature. Seven perturbation schemes, including some perturbation schemes on latent vectors, are investigated. The proposed procedure is illustrated by a simulation study and a real example. Acknowledgment: This research is fully supported by a grant (CUHK 4243/02H) from the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region. The authors are indebted to ICPSR and the relevant funding agency for allowing use of their data, and to the Editor and reviewers for their valuable comments for improving the paper.