When we feel good and bad about ourselves: Self-esteem memories across cultures

Young adults in the United States, Croatia, and China described personal episodes of times when they felt especially good or bad about themselves. These self-esteem memories were either recent (episodes that occurred during the previous 4 weeks) or remote (episodes that occurred between the ages of 10 and 15). Systematic content differences between memories of positive and negative self-worth were apparent primarily for remote rather than for recent memories. Across cultures, long-lasting positive memories frequently represented achievement themes, whereas negative memories frequently represented social themes. Links between achievement success and positive self-regard, and between social distress and negative self-regard, are explained using theories of self-esteem and autobiographical memory.     

齐鲁文化的影响与青刻本《聊斋志异》的出版

历史上齐鲁文化曾孕育了无数杰出的人物和作品,蒲松龄的《聊斋志异》就带有鲜明的齐鲁文化特色。青柯亭本《聊斋志异》是《聊斋志异》的原始木刻本,在《聊斋志异》的传播史上有着重要的地位,它是由同为齐鲁人的赵起果主持刻印出版的,其面世过程及背后的成因反映了齐鲁文化所蕴含的丰富内涵和深刻影响。     

Measuring Quality of Life in HIV and AIDS: A Review of the Recent Literature

This review addresses some of the recent issues surrounding the measurement of quality of life of people living with HIV and AIDS and discusses the properties of suitable instruments. More than 300 articles on quality of life in HIV and AIDS published since 1995 have been appraised. The structure and properties of two broad types of measure are considered: economic indicators or scales and subjective measures. While several good scales have been created for the assessment of people living with HIV infection, few were found to be conceptually comprehensive in terms of the dimensions offered for evaluation. Almost all these instruments were developed in the USA. Simple translation methods provide language versions that lack cross-cultural equivalence. A new cross-cultural methodology has recently been achieved in the development of the WHOQOL-HIV instrument as a measure for international research and its development is described.     

The Contribution of Professor Ninian Smart to Religious Education

Religious Experience Reconsidered was premised on the idea that experience is a site of contested meaning and value for subjects (and scholars). Although the concept of specialness has drawn considerable attention, my goal in writing the book was to update efforts to use attribution theory to bridge between religious studies and the psychology of religion. I intended the focus on micro-social processes to complement analysis at the macro-social level. The need for a broader, more generic second order term, such as specialness, emerged in the context of working out an attributional approach and can and should be extended more broadly. While anything can be set apart as special and an analysis of the politics of deeming is essential, we can still ask if there is empirical evidence to suggest that humans are more likely to set some things apart than others within or across cultures. When we take experience as a site for study, we do not have to limit ourselves to describing the range of views held by our subjects, but can also legitimately seek to explain experience in terms that make sense to us as researchers. The breaking of taboos against explaining experience in naturalistic terms will only have apocalyptic consequences if we assume a special/ordinary binary; viewed on a continuum, we can still find special meaning and value in experiences that are not protected by taboos.     

Religion is natural,atheism is not: On why everybody is both right and wrong

After discussing evidence of irreligion and the rise of the so called “New Atheism”, the authors refute the claim that this poses a problem for the cognitive science of religion and its hypothesis that religion is natural. The “naturalness hypothesis” is not deterministic but probabilistic and thus leaves room for atheism. This, the authors maintain, is true of both the by‐product and adaptationist stances within the cognitive science of religion. In this context the authors also discuss the memetic or “unnaturalness” hypothesis, i.e. that religion is a “virus of the mind”. The authors criticize accounts of atheism offered by cognitive scientists of religion as being based on unfounded assumptions about the psychology of atheists, and object to the notion that the natural aspects of religion by corollary make atheism unnatural. By considering human cognition in a semiotic framework and emphasizing its natural ability to take part in semiotic systems of signs, atheism emerges as a natural, cognitive strategy. The authors argue that to reach a fuller account of religion, the cognitive (naturalness) and memetic (unnaturalness) hypotheses of religion must be merged. Finally, a preliminary analysis of the “New Atheism” is offered in terms of semiotic and cognitive dynamics     

Cross-cultural differences in mental representations of time: evidence from an implicit nonlinguistic task

Across cultures people construct spatial representations of time. However, the particular spatial layouts created to represent time may differ across cultures. This paper examines whether people automatically access and use culturally specific spatial representations when reasoning about time. In Experiment 1, we asked Hebrew and English speakers to arrange pictures depicting temporal sequences of natural events, and to point to the hypothesized location of events relative to a reference point. In both tasks, English speakers (who read left to right) arranged temporal sequences to progress from left to right, whereas Hebrew speakers (who read right to left) arranged them from right to left, replicating previous work. In Experiments 2 and 3, we asked the participants to make rapid temporal order judgments about pairs of pictures presented one after the other (i.e., to decide whether the second picture showed a conceptually earlier or later time-point of an event than the first picture). Participants made responses using two adjacent keyboard keys. English speakers were faster to make "earlier" judgments when the "earlier" response needed to be made with the left response key than with the right response key. Hebrew speakers showed exactly the reverse pattern. Asking participants to use a space-time mapping inconsistent with the one suggested by writing direction in their language created interference, suggesting that participants were automatically creating writing-direction consistent spatial representations in the course of their normal temporal reasoning. It appears that people automatically access culturally specific spatial representations when making temporal judgments even in nonlinguistic tasks.     

Cultural differences in the primacy effect for person perception

Previous work has shown there are robust differences in how North Americans and East Asians form impressions of people. The present research examines whether the tendency to weigh initial information more heavily—the primacy effect—may be another component of these cultural differences. Specifically, we tested whether Americans would be more likely to use first impressions to guide person perception, compared to Japanese participants. In this experiment, participants read a vignette that described a target person's behaviour, then rated the target's personality. Before reading the vignette, some trait information was given to create an expectation about the target's personality. The data revealed that Americans used this initial information to guide their judgments of the target, whereas the Japanese sample based their judgments on all the information more evenly. Thus, Americans showed a stronger primacy effect in their impression formation than Japanese participants, who engaged in more data‐driven processing.     

Culture or anonymity? Differences in proposer behaviour in Korea and Germany

This study explores the proposer behaviour in an ultimatum game (UG) frame under anonymous and non‐anonymous conditions among a Korean and German subject pool (n = 590) in comparison. Whereas the anonymous condition is represented by the standard UG, the non‐anonymous condition integrates an aggregate of the Korean cultural context variables university affiliation, regional origin and seniority. The latter, a classic Confucian context variable, is measured by age differentials. The former two are impactful components of so‐called Yongo networks, a unique Korean informal institution identical to Chinese Guanxi ties. Yongo networks, yet underrepresented in research, are said to be a central context variable to explain Korean social ties and decision‐making behaviour. We observe significant differences between the offer behaviours of Korean and German subjects when exposing selected cultural variables. We argue that the behavioural differences observed are in fact due to culture not anonymity.     

The decline of cooperation,the rise of competition: developmental effects of long‐term social change in Mexico

Using Greenfield's theory of sociocultural change and human development as a point of departure, we carried out two experimental studies exploring the implications of decades of globalised social change in Mexico for children's development of cooperation and competition. In rural San Vicente, Baja California, the baseline was 1970 and the historical comparison took place 40 years later. In Veracruz, the baseline was 1985 and the historical comparison took place 20 years later. In Veracruz, children were tested in both rural and urban settings. We hypothesized that cooperative behavior would decrease in all three settings as a result of the sociocultural transformations of the past decades in Mexico. The Madsen Marble Pull Game was used to assess cooperative and competitive behavior. As predicted by Greenfield's theory of social change and human development, the Marble Pull procedure revealed a striking decrease over time in levels of cooperative behavior, with a corresponding rise in competitive behavior, in all three settings.