Academic expectations as sources of stress in Asian students

Education is highly valued in Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC) countries such as China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea but the expectations of parents, teachers and students themselves to excel academically can also be a source of intense stress for many students. The Academic Expectations Stress Inventory (AESI), developed by Ang and Huan (Educ Psychol Meas 66: 522–539, 2006) to measure parent, teacher and self expectations as sources of academic stress in Asian adolescents, was administered to 176 Singaporean secondary and college students one month before their major examinations. Rasch analyses of the students’ responses to the AESI showed the nine items in the inventory formed a robust unidimensional scale of academic stress, with two separate unidimensional subscales of Expectations of Parents and Teachers and Expectations of Self complementing the factor analysis conducted by Ang and Huan (Educ Psychol Meas 66: 522–539, 2006). The item thresholds showed the AESI measured the student trait range adequately, and affirmed the inventory as a brief yet valid measure of academic stress for Asian students from a CHC background. The AESI is a valuable tool for teachers and researchers, as it provides an understanding of the role of parents, teachers and self expectations as sources of academic stress among students from a CHC background.     

Does emotion processing require attention? The effects of fear conditioning and perceptual load

This study examined the impact of perceptual load on the processing of unattended threat-relevant faces. Participants performed a central letter-classification task while ignoring irrelevant face distractors, which appeared above or below the central task. The face distractors were graded for affective salience by means of aversive fear conditioning, with a conditioned angry face (CS+), an unconditioned angry face (CS-), and a neutral control face. The letter-classification task was presented under conditions of both low and high perceptual load. Results showed that fear conditioned (i.e., CS+) angry face distractors interfered with task performance more than CS- angry or neutral face distractors but that this interference was completely eliminated by high perceptual load. These findings demonstrate that aversively conditioned face distractors capture attention only under conditions of low perceptual load.     

Overconfidence effects in category learning: a comparison of connectionist and exemplar memory models

Exemplar and connectionist models were compared on their ability to predict overconfidence effects in category learning data. In the standard task, participants learned to classify hypothetical patients with particular symptom patterns into disease categories and reported confidence judgments in the form of probabilities. The connectionist model asserts that classifications and confidence are based on the strength of learned associations between symptoms and diseases. The exemplar retrieval model (ERM) proposes that people learn by storing examples and that their judgments are often based on the first example they happen to retrieve. Experiments 1 and 2 established that overconfidence increases when the classification step of the process is bypassed. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that a direct instruction to retrieve many exemplars reduces overconfidence. Only the ERM predicted the major qualitative phenomena exhibited in these experiments.     

Audience response as a heuristic cue in persuasion

Previous research on the persuasive impact of an overheard audience has yielded conflicting results. In this study, we attempted to understand such audience effects within the framework of the heuristic model of persuasion. Subjects listened to an audiotaped persuasive message that conveyed arguments of either high or low quality and that was responded to by either an enthusiastic or an unenthusiastic overheard audience. In addition, subject involvement (high vs. low) was varied. Consistent with predictions, the audience response cue influenced postmessage opinions only under low involvement; under high involvement, only argument quality affected persuasion. Analyses that took into account subjects' need for cognition supported the additional hypothesis that individuals lower in need for cognition would be more responsive to the audience manipulation under low involvement. Thought-listing data and regression analyses provided further support for the heuristic model.     

Seeking and applying diagnostic information in a health care setting

Many studies have shown that people have difficulty judging the diagnostic value of conditional probability information with respect to one or more hypotheses. The present research addressed two aspects of performing the diagnostic task in a health care decision: (a) recognition of the information's importance, and (b) correct usage of that information. In experiment 1, health care providers, who are trained in, and regularly exposed, to conditional probabilities imparting diagnostic information, exhibited at least a rudimentary recognition of the need for this information in assessing diagnosticity. Experiment 2 indicated that health care and layperson subjects had difficulty in actually applying the information, however. This difficulty prompts a need for judgment aids and caution in using diagnostic information.     

Factors influencing assignment of pronoun antecedents

In two experiments a group of adult subjects and a group of 10 – 13 year old subjects completed sentences of the format NP1 V NP2 because Pro… The fragment, John telephoned Bill because he…, elicited completions such as had good news, which locate the impetus for telephoning in NP1 (John). The fragment, John admired Bill because he…, elicited completions such as was a fine athlete, which locate the impetus for admiring in NP2 (Bill). The assignment of the subject pronoun of the second clause as coreferential with NP1 or NP2 shows that this choice depends on a factor, direction of causality, which may be assigned to verb roots. This factor was isolated from interacting semantic and syntactic features of sentences in which the verbs occurred. Manipulation of these features resulted in greater or lesser salience of the direction of causality factor. The potential of this technique for investigation of verb semantics and for interaction of semantic, pragmatic and syntactic features in the psychological study of comprehension is discussed.