READING INTERESTS OF CHINESE ADOLESCENTS: EFFECTS OF PERSONAL AND SOCIAL FACTORS*

The relation of the reading interests of Chinese adolescents to their personality (introversion), values (intellectualism and academic achievement), and the reading interests of their family members and peers was studied. A total of 2,114 secondary school students participated in the study. The hypothesized relationship was found to be positive. Specifically, the more introverted students were attracted to more literary materials, whereas the less introverted were fond of more action type of materials. Students high on the value of intellectualism were found to read in general more than those low on the value in almost any kind of materials. Compared to the low ones, students high on the value of academic achievement tended to read more but the differences were not extensive; their interest seemed to focus more on the literary and curriculum-related materials. With respect to family and peer influences, students with parents, siblings, classmates, and friends who read tended to read more and have wider reading interests.     

RELIGIOUS SCHEMA AND VALUES*

Past research has consistently shown marked differences between religious believers and non-believers. Such differences were suggested in this study to be due to the presence of religious schema in believers. It was hypothesized that non-believers would be less schematic, or aschematic with respect to religion. This hypothesis was examined by comparing the value system of college student believers (Protestants and Catholics) and non-believers (those indicating no religious faith). Extensive differences were found. Consistent with the hypothesis, the differences were found mainly on the schema-relevant values. In essence, believers showed greater preference for and possession of the moral and relational values, and lesser on the personal-extrinsic, competency, and egoistic values. As predicted, no difference was found on the social and intellectual types of values which are basically schema-irrelevant. The notion of schema availability was also supported. When subjects' religiosity (as indicated by their preference for the salvation value and their self-rated possession of the religiousness value) was controlled for, all the above differences were removed. When high and low religiosity believers were compared, great differences were found. The differences between the high and low religiosity non-believers were however much less extensive.     

Health as a value: methodological and theoretical considerations

The concept of value placed on health is very important in several different theoretical approaches to the study of health behavior. In practice, however, health value is generally assumed to be universally high rather than being directly measured. If this assumption is incorrect, then theories that include health value have rarely been adequately tested. This paper presents a short 4-item Likert scale designed to measure the value placed on health. Norms from the utilization of this scale in five different samples are presented. Health value is found to increase with age among girls, but the increase apparently stops by late adolescence, before full adult levels of health value are achieved. Middle-aged women place a higher value on health than do middle-aged men, although no comparable sex difference appears in a sample of undergraduates. Consistent with theoretical predictions, both health locus of control beliefs and beliefs in the efficacy of certain preventive health behaviors correlate more highly with the performance of those same behaviors 5 to 9 months later among respondents who place a high value of health relative to those who do not value health so highly. However, this interaction is found only when it can be safely assumed that health is the primary value underlying the behavior. The importance of considering a variety of values in addition to health as possible motivators of preventive health behavior is stressed.     

Memory for the pitch of a tone

Observers attempted to detect the presence of a pitch difference between two successive tones. The percentage of correct judgments was equivalent for tones separated by .95, 4.5, and 8.9 sec. There was a general increase in reports of a pitch difference with increased intertone interval, which is interpreted as arising from hypothesized shifts in the neural locus of the first stimulus during the intertone interval.     

Contrastive marking in French dialogue: Why and how

This experiment studies French-speaking adults' preferences for prosodic marking (focal accent) or morphosyntactic marking (clefting) to express information contrasts in dialogue. Our goal is to determine what syntactic and conceptual factors might contribute to these preferences, by examining for the former, the grammatical function of the item bearing the contrastive mark (subject vs complement) and, for the latter, the size of the class to which the contrasted item belongs (two members vs more than two members). The subjects' responses on a forced-choice judgment task showed that when only one device was used for contrast, subjects clearly preferred clefting for grammatical subjects and focal accent for complements. When both devices were used (prosodic and morphosyntactic), contrasted subjects were preferred over contrasted complements. Response times were longer when the contrasted item belonged to a two-member class. These results demonstrate that subjects' judgments of the suitability of linguistic devices for expressing information contrasts in French are more highly affected by syntactic factors than conceptual ones.     

The assessment of gender role stress for Chinese

The present study aimed to extend the generality of the construct of gender role stress (GRS) to Chinese samples. Specific objectives included (1) devising Chinese versions of the Masculine Gender Role Stress Scale (MGRS) and Feminine Gender Role Stress Scale (FGRS) developed by Eisler and his colleagues (2) examining the relationship between GRS and gender role orientation, and (3) evaluating the concurrent validity of GRS by correlating it with a measure of health adjustment. Fifty-one male and 58 female Chinese college students in Hong Kong participated in Study 1, which aimed to develop Chinese versions of the two GRS scales. Similar to Americans, Chinese male students scored higher on the MGRS scale, but lower on the FGRS scale than Chinese female students. Students' scores on the two GRS scales were independent from their global ratings of stereotypic masculinity and femininity. A second sample, consisting of 46 male and 73 female Chinese nurses, was recruited for Study 2, which evaluated the association between GRS and health adjustment. As hypothesized, a high level of MGRS or FGRS was positively related to a high level of health and mental health disturbances for both male and female nurses.This study was funded in part by the Asia Scholarship for Research on Women 1992/93 of the United Board for Christian Higher Education. The authors would like to thank Professor Richard M. Eisler for his permission to translate the MGRS and FGRS scales into Chinese, and the Association of Hong Kong Nurses for their assistance in data collection.     

The syllable-length effect in number processing is task-dependent

Two experiments were run in order to investigate the relationship between syllable length of number names and eye-fixation durations during silent reading of one- and two-digit numbers. In Experiment 1, subjects had to read a series of three numbers and recall them orally; in Experiment 2, subjects had to indicate manually whether the value of the middle number was between the values of the outer numbers. The effect of syllable length was controlled for possible confounding effects of number frequency and number magnitude. Findings indicated that fixation duration depended on syllable length of number names in the first task, but not in the second task. The results call into question the claim that phonological encoding is imperative in visual processing; phonological encoding was used only when the numbers had to be recalled, and not when they were coded for computational purposes.