The Name-Pronunciation Effect: Further Evidence from Chinese

This study examined the Chinese name-pronunciation effect. The easy-to-pronounce and difficult-to-pronounce Chinese names were created using the same characters in order to control for visual perceptual and conceptual fluency. In Experiment 1, participants rated each name in terms of liking, electability as a state leader, income level, and baby name preference. An additional rating of prevalence was used to estimate familiarity. In Experiment 2, participants did not read the name aloud before rating and performed intentional recall and recognition tests. In both experiments, the easy-to-pronounce names were rated higher than difficult-to-pronounce names on liking. This effect generalized to judgments of electability and baby name preference but not to prevalence and income level. There were no differences in memory performances between the two types of names. Results are discussed in terms of the boundary condition of the name-pronunciation effect and the advantage of using Chinese names to study this effect.     

Tests of the Relationship Between Children's Temperament and Asthma and of the Reliability and Validity of the Brief Scale of Temperament

Two studies are reported. One examined the reliability and validity of a brief scale to measure children's temperament; the other tested the relationship of early temperament and the development of asthma. In Study 1, principal caretakers of 46 4- to 7-year-olds, usually the mothers, filled out questionnaires containing the Brief Scale of Temperament (BST) and the Behavioral Style Questionnaire. The caretakers did this twice, about 1 week apart. The first time the children's recent temperament was assessed, and the second time past (> 1 year) temperament was assessed. Internal consistency and correlational analyses revealed substantial reliability and validity for BST assessments of recent and past temperament. Study 2 incorporated the BST in a large-scale survey of 325 families, with parents providing data on their children's asthma and temperament. BST assessments of early (past) temperament were made retrospectively regarding the child's first few years. Comparisons of early temperament revealed no differences between children who developed asthma and those who did not in their overall scores on the BST or for any of the temperament characteristics it measures. In addition, correlational analyses of data for asthmatics showed that early temperament was not related to ratings of the severity of the asthma condition the children developed or the impacts of any of 12 specific asthma triggers, including any involving emotional states, such as stress or worry.     

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.     

Self-Perceived Peer Acceptance in Preschoolers of Differing Economic and Cultural Backgrounds

Self-evaluation begins in early childhood and becomes more nuanced as children get older. However, little is known about the specific factors that predict self-perception and in particular peer acceptance, early in life. This is especially true for low-income children and children of different ethnicities. This study examined 4-year-old children's feelings of social acceptance relative to teachers' perceptions. It also explored whether temperament, language skills, traditional parenting, and teachers' perceptions of peer acceptance were related to children's self-perceptions. Using 94 preschoolers from different cultural and economic backgrounds as participants, results of a mixed model analysis of variance indicated that the relation between children's self-perceptions and teachers' ratings were not uniform across economic and cultural groups. In addition, results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses demonstrated that traditional parenting was one of the strongest predictors of children's social self-perceptions. Beyond parenting, children with relatively good verbal skills, who were not temperamentally shy, tended to perceive themselves as socially competent.     

The Effect of Differential Post-Weaning Environment on the Rigidity of an Animal's Behavior

Seventy-two first, second and third grade boys and girls were administered seriation problems involving different combinations of shape and color variation. Success rates and latency scores were influenced by shape variation, but not by color variation or grade level. The failure to obtain predicted interactions between the effects of grade level and stimulus variation was attributed to the clarity of the relevant stimulus dimension.     

The Semantics of Secrecy: Young Children's Classification of Secret Content

The authors explored whether young children can distinguish potential secrets from nonsecrets by their content, as can older children, adolescents, and adults. Ninety children, 4, 5, and 6 years old, rated the secrecy of items from an adult-validated list of personal information about an age- and gender-appropriate puppet. Two factors of the children's data corresponded to the adult categories of nonsecrets and secrets, and a third factor corresponded to surprises. All ages rated surprises as significantly more secret than nonsecret items; however, the surprise items contained linguistic cues to secrecy. A tendency to rate nonsecrets as secret decreased with age, but only the 6-year-olds rated secrets other than surprises as significantly more secret than nonsecrets. Thus, children acquire the implicit rules defining secret content from a somewhat later age than that reported for the cognitive or behavioral capacities for secrecy.     

The relationship between emotional-state language and emotion understanding: A study with school-age children

We carried out an investigation with primary-school children on the relationship between both use and comprehension of emotional-state language and emotion understanding. Participants were 100 students between 7 and 10 years old (mean age=8 years and 10 months; SD=15.3 months), equally divided by gender. They completed four tests evaluating their language ability, use of emotional-state language, comprehension of emotional-state language and emotion understanding (EU) respectively. Significant correlations were found between both use and comprehension of emotional-state talk and children's EU. In addition, regression analyses showed that comprehension of emotional-state language, rather than its use, plays a significant role in explaining children's emotion understanding.     

On Philosophy

In this article the author holds that progress in philosophy is a vague concept. Its criteria are not universally acknowledged. All that is clear is that philosophy does not develop in a linear way. Philosophy is polydiscoursive. As for the past fifty years, the author believes three important things happened in philosophy. (1) It has been shown that consciousness exists not within one individual but spreads within a community of people; (2) philosophy has discovered autism, a result that helps us to understand a human being as neither a biological nor a social individual but a third thing—a dreaming being who is not only asocial but also tongueless, where speech and consciousness are separated; and (3) contemporary philosophy has learned to distinguish between sign and symbol. And it has been realized that the human mind is neither an instinct nor a computer but an objectified suffering, a transformed emotion.     

THE SECOND SPHERE AND THE STORY OF NO STORY

The author discusses Roy Schafer's ideas of the second self and second reality, as well as his consistent theme of storyteller and story. The latter theme is also explored in the context of more recent psychoanalytic influences, such as Bionian thought, trauma theory, the French approach, and the interpersonal perspective. To illustrate the idea of the nonstory in today's clinical encounters, the author presents two clinical vignettes.     

ACTION,AGENCY, AND EMPATHY: SCHAFER ON THE ANALYST'S DILEMMA

Throughout his career, a central feature of Roy Schafer's theorizing has been to highlight the role of activity and personal agency in every facet of human experience. This theme has remained at the forefront of Schafer's work, despite being embedded within different frames of reference. In this paper, the author highlights Schafer's focus on activity, notes some clinical problems to which it can give rise, and suggests the way that Schafer has attempted to deal with these difficulties.