Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Persons' Mentality: A Cross-Cultural Replication and More

Jesse Bering (2002) investigated how American university students in an interview task conceived of dead persons' mentality immediately after death. He found that different categories of mental states or capacities were conceived differently: psychobiological and perceptual states ceased, whereas emotional, desire, and epistemic states continued. Our Study 1 was a replication of Bering's experiment in a different cultural setting, in which the subjects were Chinese undergraduate students. A similar pattern of results was found. In Study 2, instead of being asked about a dead person's various mental states immediately following the death, participants were asked to judge a dead person's mental states after the person had been dead for 2 days. The overall pattern of participants' responses was not affected by this manipulation, but they did show an increase in attributions of certain mental states to dead agnostics. In addition, a more refined breakdown of responses revealed that individuals tended to judge that, upon death, visual and auditory perception continued, whereas olfactory and gustatory sensation ceased.     

Chinese philosophy: A characterization

This article offers a synthetic characterization of Chinese philosophy based on an analytical reconstruction of its main traditions and thinking. Three main traditions in Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese Buddhism, are depicted and discussed, together with some comments on Chinese Marxism in the contemporary scene. Four characteristics of Chinese philosophy are presented: intrinsic humanism, concrete rationalism, organic naturalism, and a pragmatism of self‐cultivation. It is clear from the discussion that these four characteristics are interrelated and mutually supporting and thus should be better understood in the context of one another. Many open problems of philosophy, such as transcendence, evil, logic, and theoretical knowledge, are raised by an inquiry into Chinese philosophy. If Chinese philosophy serves to make us critically aware of these problems and to provide alternative ways of thinking, we are more than justified in presenting Chinese philosophy as a philosophy of universal concern and universal significance.     

The Effect of Companion's Gender on Impulsive Purchasing: The Moderating Factor of Cohesiveness and Susceptibility to Interpersonal Influence

Most impulse purchasing research investigates individual‐level factors. This paper, however, examines the influence of shopping companion gender on impulse purchasing. The results of the three studies show that shoppers were more likely to exhibit impulse purchase behavior when shopping with an opposite gender companion. In addition, shoppers who were in the low‐cohesive condition and who shopped with an opposite gender companion were more likely to exhibit impulse purchase behavior than those who shopped with the same gender companion, and those who were susceptible to interpersonal influence were also more likely to exhibit impulse purchase behavior when shopping with an opposite gender companion. For shoppers who were not as susceptible to interpersonal influence, the influence of their companion's gender appeared to diminish on impulsive purchasing.     

The phenomenon of hate crimes in the United States

This review examines the phenomenon of hate crimes in the United States. Findings derived from the FBI data for the period 1996–2008 revealed that the incidence of anti‐racial hate crimes varied among different racial groups, that antireligious hate crimes were committed toward Jews and Muslims more than toward others, and that antisexual orientation hate crimes focused on male homosexuals more than others. Antireligious hate crimes were more likely to be directed against property, whereas anti‐racial and antisexual orientation hate crimes were more likely to be directed against people. We discuss these findings in the light of some relevant theoretical perspectives from social psychology. Potential solutions to hate crimes could be developed by focusing on the most relevant predictive factors.     

A longitudinal examination of the relationship between teacher burnout and depression

This study investigates the longitudinal relationships between burnout and depression among teachers. Middle and high school teachers participated in a 3‐wave survey. The results of the latent growth modeling analysis revealed that there was a significant relationship between the initial status of burnout and the initial status of depression. Results also indicated a significant relationship between the change rate of burnout and the change rate of depression. Moreover, the autoregressive cross‐lagged modeling revealed a causal relationship such that teacher's burnout leads to subsequent depression symptoms, not vice versa.     

Development of a Screening Instrument for Early Language Delay in Hong Kong Chinese: A Preliminary Study

Having language delay—one of the common neurodevelopmental difficulties during childhood—does not only imply an impairment in communication in the 1st few years of life. Previous studies have suggested that language problems have long-term implications for social, emotional, and intellectual development. Researchers have found that early identification and intervention of speech and language delay yields better treatment effects. However, unlike most of the motor developmental assessment tools, language assessment tools are not readily transferred across cultures because of the different linguistic features and the developmental stages of such features in a particular language or dialect. The present study presents an empirical example of the initial development of a culturally sensitive screening protocol, using vocabulary size as the indicator to minimize the effect of linguistic differences.     

Studies on the Basic Factors in Animal Fighting: VI. Inter-Species Coexistence in Birds

An attempt was made to investigate the hypothesis that type of abstract reasoning impairment was related to age. Forty brain damaged patients were divided into four age groups (30–39, 40–49, 50–59, and 60+) and evaluated by a concept identification task which yields data as to whether impairment is qualitative or quantitative. The results indicated that the greatest amount of qualitative type impairment occurred among the older brain damaged patients when compared with the other subjects.     

R and Relevance Principle Revisited

This paper first shows that some versions of the logic R of Relevance do not satisfy the relevance principle introduced by Anderson and Belnap, the principle of which is generally accepted as the principle for relevance. After considering several possible (but defective) improvements of the relevance principle, this paper presents a new relevance principle for (three versions of) R, and explains why this principle is better than the original and others.     

Too Many Blacks,Too Many Whites: Is There Racial Balance?

Racial conflict between African Americans and Whites has been observed to occur most frequently at two critical points: when African Americans make up approximately 30% of a given group or when African Americans make up approximately 50% of a given group. These two critical ratios are referred to as the J and (inverted) U patterns of racial conflict, respectively. To date, most of the data supporting either the J or U models have been derived from large demographic studies that do not directly assess individual perceptions. Thus, little is known about the individual reactions of members from either racial group to varying percentages of group racial composition. This small-group experiment examined the responses of African-American and White subjects to their inclusion in four-person groups of varying racial compositions. Three racial configurations were created and included the following percentages of African Americans: 25%, 50%, and 75%. The results support the U model of racial conflict. Moreover, the U model fit the data equally well for African Americans and Whites.     

Conflict-driven adaptive control is enhanced by integral negative emotion on a short time scale*

ABSTRACT

Negative emotion influences cognitive control, and more specifically conflict adaptation. However, discrepant results have often been reported in the literature. In this study, we broke down negative emotion into integral and incidental components using a modern motivation-based framework, and assessed whether the former could change conflict adaptation. In the first experiment, we manipulated the duration of the inter-trial-interval (ITI) to assess the actual time-scale of this effect. Integral negative emotion was induced by using loss-related feedback contingent on task performance, and measured at the subjective and physiological levels. Results showed that conflict-driven adaptive control was enhanced when integral negative emotion was elicited, compared to a control condition without changes in defensive motivation. Importantly, this effect was only found when a short, as opposed to long ITI was used, suggesting that it had a short time scale. In the second experiment, we controlled for effects of feature repetition and contingency learning, and replicated an enhanced conflict adaptation effect when integral negative emotion was elicited and a short ITI was used. We interpret these new results against a standard cognitive control framework assuming that integral negative emotion amplifies specific control signals transiently, and in turn enhances conflict adaptation.