Internship: a recruitment and selection perspective

In this study, we examined internship as a recruitment and selection process. On the basis of impression management theory, we hypothesized that both organizations and interns make efforts to impress the other party during the internship if they intend to hire or be hired. Using longitudinal data collected at 3 points from 122 intern–supervisor dyads in the United States, we found that 60% of internships turned into job offers from the host organizations. Interns wishing to be hired were more likely to use self-promotion and ingratiation, which increased the likelihood of job offers. Organizations wishing to hire appeared to be more open to interns' creativity, which increased interns' application intentions. For interns who indicated prior to their internship that they were not interested in working in their host organizations after graduation, supervisory mentoring did not influence their subsequent intentions to apply for full-time employment.     

The effect of social marketing communication on safe driving

Processing of cognition, affect, and intention was investigated in viewers of advertisements to prevent speeding while driving. Results indicated that anchoring-point messages had greater effects on viewers' cognition, attitude, and behavioral intention than did messages without anchoring points. Further, the changes in message anchoring points altered participants' perceptions of acceptable and unacceptable judgments: a higher anchoring point in the form of speeding mortality was more persuasive in promoting the idea of reducing driving speed. Implications for creation of effective safe driving communications are discussed.     

The Modern Construction of Childhood: What Does It Do to the Paradox of Modernity?

The examination of the modern construction of subject is not over yet. Although many thinkers have exhausted its conceptual ambiguities and practical consequences, its impact is far from fully understood without an analysis of the construction of childhood for the future subject. In this essay, I problematize five constructions of childhood that emerged in the modern time and scrutinize the impasses of logic or conceptual ambiguities within, along with the practical consequences thereof. I explore how the modern construction of childhood is problematic in and of itself, as well as the light it sheds on the deeply embedded ambiguities and aporia (Wagner in A sociology of modernity: liberty and discipline. Routledge, New York 1994; Zhao in Educ Theory 57(1):75–88 2007) in the construction of the modern subject. This paper will untangle the problems associated with each of these constructs and their respective implications for the making of the modern subject.     

The role of the ventral and dorsal pathways in reading Chinese characters and English words

Previous literature in alphabetic languages suggests that the occipital-temporal region (the ventral pathway) is specialized for automatic parallel word recognition, whereas the parietal region (the dorsal pathway) is specialized for serial letter-by-letter reading ( [Cohen et al., 2008] and [Ho et al., 2002] ). However, few studies have directly examined the role of the ventral and dorsal pathways in Chinese reading compared to English reading. To investigate this issue, we adopted the degraded word processing paradigm used by Cohen et al. (2008) and compared brain regions involved in the processing of degraded Chinese characters and English words during lexical decision, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The degraded characters/words were created by inserting blank spaces between radicals of Chinese characters or syllables of English polysyllabic words. Generally, the current study replicated the effects of Cohen et al. (2008), showing that in Chinese – like in alphabetic languages – character spacing modulates both ventral (bilateral cuneus, left middle occipital gyrus) and dorsal (left superior parietal lobule and middle frontal gyrus) pathways. In addition, the current study showed greater activation in bilateral cuneus and right lingual gyrus for Chinese versus English when comparing spaced to normal stimuli, suggesting that Chinese character recognition relies more on ventral visual-spatial processing than English word recognition. Interestingly, bilateral cuneus showed monotonic patterns in response to increasing spacing, while the rest of the regions of interest showed non-monotonic patterns, indicating different profiles for these regions in visual-spatial processing.     

Kinematics, kinetics, and electromyogram of ankle during drop landing: a comparison between dominant and non-dominant limb

The biomechanical difference between the dominant and non-dominant limb has seldom been studied during double-leg landing. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of limb laterality on the ankle kinematics, kinetics and electromyogram (EMG) during drop landing. Sixteen healthy adults were recruited and dropped individually from platforms with three different heights (0.32 m, 0.52 m, and 0.72 m). The ground reaction force, ankle joint kinematics, and surface EMG of tibialis anterior (TA) and lateral gastrocnemius (LG) were measured in both lower extremities. Two-way analysis of variance was used to analyze the effects of laterality and dropping height. The peak angular velocities in dorsiflexion and abduction were significantly higher in the dominant ankle, whereas the pre- and post-landing EMG amplitudes of the TA were significantly higher in the non-dominant limb. Compared with the dominant side, the non-dominant ankle has a more effective protective mechanism in that excessive joint motion is restrained by greater ankle flexor activity. Compared with the non-dominant side, the dominant ankle joint is in greater injury risk during drop landing, and data measured in the dominant limb may produce more conservative conclusions for injury protection or prediction.     

Effects of level of processing on emotional memory: gist and details

The object of this study was to investigate whether level of processing (LOP) modulates enhanced memory performance for emotional stimuli, and, if so, whether the LOP effects relate to their gist and details. During the study phase, participants were presented with colourful pictures with negative, neutral and positive valences and encoded the emotional pictures under either a semantic (living/non-living judgement) or a perceptual (left/right position judgement) condition. During the test phase, they judged whether the presented picture was old or new in Experiments 1 and 2, and also judged whether a specific concept, labelled using words, had been studied in Experiment 2. The results showed that under both encoding conditions, the details of both negative and positive pictures were recognised better than those of neutral pictures. Also, the gist of negative pictures was recognised better than that of neutral pictures but only under the semantic condition. These data provide evidence that the LOP differentially modulates enhanced emotional memory for gist and details of pictures.     

Mutual interference between statistical summary perception and statistical learning

The visual system is an efficient statistician, extracting statistical summaries over sets of objects (statistical summary perception) and statistical regularities among individual objects (statistical learning). Although these two kinds of statistical processing have been studied extensively in isolation, their relationship is not yet understood. We first examined how statistical summary perception influences statistical learning by manipulating the task that participants performed over sets of objects containing statistical regularities (Experiment 1). Participants who performed a summary task showed no statistical learning of the regularities, whereas those who performed control tasks showed robust learning. We then examined how statistical learning influences statistical summary perception by manipulating whether the sets being summarized contained regularities (Experiment 2) and whether such regularities had already been learned (Experiment 3). The accuracy of summary judgments improved when regularities were removed and when learning had occurred in advance. In sum, calculating summary statistics impeded statistical learning, and extracting statistical regularities impeded statistical summary perception. This mutual interference suggests that statistical summary perception and statistical learning are fundamentally related.     

The effect of emotion-focused orientation at retrieval on emotional memory in young and older adults

This study examines how emotion-focused orientation at retrieval affects memory for emotional versus neutral images in young and older adults. A total of 44 older adults (ages 61-84 years, M=70.00, SD=5.54) and 43 young adults (ages 17-33 years, M=20.58, SD=3.72) were tested on their free recall and forced-choice recognition of images. At retrieval the emotion-focused orientation was manipulated by instructing participants to focus on emotion-related information (i.e., emotional content of images and the emotional reactions evoked by the images). In the control conditions participants were either instructed to focus on visual information or not provided any specific orientation instruction. In free recall but not forced-choice recognition, the emotion-focused orientation increased young adults' positivity bias and thus wiped out their superior negativity bias. However, the emotion-focused orientation did not affect older adults' emotional memory. The data suggest that young adults activate and prioritise emotional goals in response to external demand during intentional information processing whereas older adults seem to spontaneously tune themselves to emotional goals.     

土家、苗、侗、藏族高中生学业自我的发展特点及对策

采用问卷法对452名民族地区的土家、苗、侗、藏族高中生的学业自我发展特点进行研究,结果表明：（1）土家、苗、侗、藏族高中生的学业自我均处于中等发展水平,民族差异不显著;（2）土家、苗、侗、藏族高中生学业自我总体上性别差异均不显著;（3）除藏族外,其他三民族高中生学业自我的年级差异均不显著,但在学业自我发展的高峰与低谷期上有所差异;（4）除苗、藏族高中生外,土家族和侗族高中生的学业自我均存在显著的城乡差异,农村高中生的学业自我水平均优于城市高中生的。     

Estimating Religious Populations with the Network Scale‐Up Method: A Practical Alternative to Self‐Report

Getting accurate information on religious demographics from survey‐based self‐reports presents a difficult task, suffering from the biases of social desirability, personal safety concerns, and the ambiguous definitions of religious identity. The network scale‐up method (NSUM) is an estimation strategy based on the enumeration of social network ties. NSUM has recently been employed to estimate the sizes of hidden populations in criminology and public health, but it has not been utilized in the study of religion. In this study, we argue for the advantages of NSUM in overcoming the biases associated with self‐reports and lay out a practical guide for the scholars of religion to the design and calculation of NSUM. We use a recent survey of Chinese international students to illustrate the use of NSUM and estimate the percentage of Buddhists (4.3 percent) and Christians (8.6 percent) in this population. We recommend interested scholars to adopt NSUM for its reliability, easy implementation, and the affinity between the sociological perspective on religion and the socially‐oriented assumption of NSUM.