Why go the extra mile? A longitudinal study on sojourn goals and their impact on sojourners' adaptation

Although international student mobility has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in many parts of the world, the goals that student sojourners pursue when moving abroad have received little systematic attention in psychological research. Likewise, their effects on psychological outcomes such as sojourners' psychological and sociocultural adaptation abroad have not yet been examined. Hence, the purpose of the present research was twofold: First, we established the parsimonious Sojourn Goals Scale and confirmed its psychometric quality and construct validity. Second, we used a longitudinal sample of student sojourners to investigate the role of sojourn goals for sojourners' sociocultural (i.e., sojourners' social relationships) and psychological (i.e., sojourn satisfaction) adaptation abroad at 3 months into the sojourn. Regression analyses revealed substantial effects of sojourn goals on measures of sociocultural adaptation. Response surface analyses served to examine the interplay of sojourn goals and respective sojourn experiences on sojourn satisfaction. We discuss implications for both psychological and applied research and identify future research needs.     

美术专业与普通专业学生对中西方绘画作品的审美认知差异

审美认知是人类最高级最复杂的心理活动之一,在美育中具有重要的作用。本研究采用不同艺术类别及情绪效价的作品图片,考察美术专业与普通专业大学生对中西方绘画作品的审美认知差异。结果发现：美术专业学生与普通学生对西方画的审美认知差异极其显著,且美术专业学生对西方画产生的美感显著强于普通学生;而两类学生对中国画的审美认知差异并不显著;对于不同风格的绘画作品,两类学生都存在着审美偏好,且审美偏好一致,都对中国画产生的美感更为强烈;两类学生的审美认知反应时间差异极其显著,专业学生总体上要比普通学生进行更多更复杂的审美认知加工活动。研究表明,审美认知具有较强的可塑性,对于美育心理学的发展具有重要的价值。     

On self-referencing differences in judgment and choice

Compared to judgment, choice is argued to elicit more self-referent processing and thereby produce greater subsequent recall of evaluated information. This response mode effect is shown to be dependent upon sufficient visualization to overcome the use of heuristic processing during choice. When visualizing prior to the task, choice leads to increased thinking about personal consumption occasions relative to judgment, leading to enhanced recall of vivid (vs. non-vivid) attributes. This proposed interaction of task and visualization was found in two experiments that assessed incidental recall following a choice or judgment task. In experiment 1, participants recalled more vivid product attribute information after choosing between options than after rating each option separately, but only when instructed to visualize during evaluation. To eliminate a comparison-based explanation of this effect, a second experiment was conducted that presented only one option in each category. Participants who evaluated their intention to purchase the option (a judgment equivalent of choice) demonstrated greater recall of vivid product attribute information than did participants who rated their liking for the option, and this recall difference was again moderated by instructions to visualize.     

Effects of ownership expressed by the first-person possessive pronoun

The present study examined the behavioral effects of the first-person possessive pronoun. In each trial, a noun (e.g. cup or bread) was presented to participants after visual presentation of a possessive pronoun “wo de” (Chinese for “my”) or “ta de” (Chinese for “his”), which formed ownership. Half participants were assigned to contextual encoding (CE) condition in which they were required to judge whether they liked the item expressed by a noun from the first or third-person perspective. The rest were assigned to perceptual encoding (PE) condition in which they were asked to judge what color the noun was. A subsequent recall test was performed. The results showed that there were significant memory and response advantages for nouns in “my” ownership under both conditions. The results were discussed with reference to self-specificity and other effects in the current study.     

Nice Guys Finish Fast and Bad Guys Finish Last: Facilitatory vs. Inhibitory Interaction in Parallel Systems

Systems Factorial Technology is a powerful framework for investigating the fundamental properties of human information processing such as architecture (i.e., serial or parallel processing) and capacity (how processing efficiency is affected by increased workload). The Survivor Interaction Contrast (SIC) and the Capacity Coefficient are effective measures in determining these underlying properties, based on response-time data. Each of the different architectures, under the assumption of independent processing, predicts a specific form of the SIC along with some range of capacity. In this study, we explored SIC predictions of discrete-state (Markov process) and continuous-state (Linear Dynamic) models that allow for certain types of cross-channel interaction. The interaction can be facilitatory or inhibitory: one channel can either facilitate, or slow down processing in its counterpart. Despite the relative generality of these models, the combination of the architecture oriented plus the capacity oriented analyses provide for precise identification of the underlying system.     

Overclaiming as a measure of faking

Researchers have recently asserted that popular measures of response distortion (i.e., socially desirable responding scales) lack construct validity (i.e., measure traits rather than test faking) and that applicant faking on personality tests remains a serious concern ( [Griffith and Peterson, 2008] and [Holden, 2008]). Thus, although researchers and human resource (HR) selection specialists have been attempting to find measures which readily capture individual differences in faking that increase personality test validity, to date such attempts have rarely, if ever succeeded. The current study, however, finds that the overclaiming technique captures individual differences in faking and subsequently increases personality test score validity via suppressing unwanted error variance in personality test scores. Implications of this research on the overclaiming technique for improving HR selection decisions are illustrated and discussed.     

Human operant learning under concurrent reinforcement of response variability

This study asked whether the concurrent reinforcement of behavioral variability facilitates learning to emit a difficult target response. Sixty students repeatedly pressed sequences of keys, with an originally infrequently occurring target sequence consistently being followed by positive feedback. Three conditions differed in the feedback given to non-target sequences: concurrent positive feedback presented contingent on response variability, positive feedback presented non-contingently, or no reinforcement for any non-target responses (control condition). Contrary to the result of analogous rat studies, if anything, the participants in the control condition more readily learned to emit the target sequence than did the subjects in each of the other two conditions. It is argued that these contradictory findings are primarily caused by procedural differences, such as differences in the density of the reinforcement schedule applied to non-target behavior, rather than reflecting a true species difference.     

Spontaneous Response Generalization During Whole Word Instruction: Reading to Spell and Spelling to Read

The bulk of the existing literature emphasizes the use of phonemic/phonetic based instruction to enhance generalization between reading and written language. However, phonetically irregular words are common in English and may require the use of whole word approaches. This study examined generalization between from reading to spelling and from spelling to reading following whole word based instruction using a delayed prompt procedure. The total instructional time was equated across conditions. Students exhibited substantial but incomplete generalization with the degree of generalization varying somewhat across responses and students. The most striking finding was that oral spelling instruction in which the printed word was neither presented nor produced resulted in substantial generalization to reading. These data illustrate a model for examining response generalization in instructional contexts.