MODERNIZATION OF THE CHINESE FAMILY BUSINESS

In order to study the modernization of the Chinese family business, the contrast between formal rationality and substantive rationality was used to characterize significant features of Western culture and Chinese culture respectively. A theoretical model of Chinese social behaviors as influenced by the substantive ethics of Confucianism was adopted to describe the organizational behaviors which were frequently observed in Chinese family business. Several empirical studies comparing organizational climates as perceived by employees working in foreign-invested business, private business with formal regulations, and family business were cited to support the argument that such Confucian virtues as loyalty to the organization, working hard, maintaining interpersonal harmony, etc., are most likely to be manifested in organizations where formal regulations of Western-style management were enforced.     

Differences in Multidimensional Poverty According to Householders’ Gender and Age in South Korea

This study examines multidimensional poverty according to householders’ gender and age in South Korea. Using the counting approach, multidimensional poverty was measured on six dimensions: money, health, housing, employment, social protection, and social relations. The results indicate that the monetary dimension does not cover other deprived dimensions. In terms of poverty rate, female-headed households are more deprived on all six dimensions. The headcount ratio and adjusted headcount ratio gradually decrease as the cutoff value of multidimensional poverty increases. The decreasing tendency is more moderate for female-headed households than for male-headed households, indicating that female-headed households face more weighted poverty dimensions. Our study found that the poverty dimension demonstrates different patterns according to householders’ age. For the older group, health is the second most contributing factor, and for the younger group housing and social protection contributed more to multidimensional poverty than for the older group.

     

Role of the working alliance in the treatment of delinquent boys in community-based programs

Examined the role of the working alliance in the treatment of delinquent boys in community-based residential programs, clarifying the relation between therapeutic process and behavioral change. Horvath and Greenberg's (1989) Working Alliance Inventory was used to assess the therapeutic alliance between youth and staff after 3 weeks in treatment and again after 3 months. Achenbach's (1991) Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Youth Self-Report [YSR] and Teacher Report Form [TRF]) and recidivism scores were used to assess treatment progress and outcome. Results indicated that a positive working alliance assessed after 3 months in treatment related to positive psychological changes and predicted lower rates of recidivism. Unexpectedly, a positive working alliance assessed early in treatment was associated with negative outcomes (increased internalizing and externalizing symptoms and higher rates of recidivism). This finding suggests that for some delinquent youth initially optimistic assessments may be prognostic of slow progress or treatment failure.     

Body-esteem in Swedish 10-year-old children

This study examined body-esteem in 10-yr.-old children. The study group comprised 960 schoolchildren, 515 girls and 445 boys (M age= 10.4, SD=0.5). Analysis showed that girls who were overweight had more negative body-esteem on all dimensions (weight, appearance, and attribution). The overweight boys had more negative perceptions on only two dimensions (weight and appearance). Twice as many girls perceived themselves as too fat (20%) as too skinny (10%). Of the girls who perceived themselves as fat, only 31% were overweight; similarly only 33% of the boys who perceived themselves as fat were overweight. The children's perception of their weight seemed as important as their actual weight and was associated with their body-esteem in the same way. Although few children had dieted (7% of the girls and 5% of the boys), the ones who had dieted had more negative body-esteem than children who had not dieted.     

Influence of Social Perception and Social Monitoring on Structural Priming

Although structural priming has been considered to be an independent cognitive process, recent evidence suggests that structural priming is modulated by sociocognitive factors such as social perception; speakers are more likely to mimic the sentence structure of a socially desirable interlocutor than the structure of a less desirable interlocutor. This study aims to further address the role of sociocognitive factors in language use by investigating how individual differences in social perception and tendency to align with others (i.e., social monitoring) modulate same‐verb structural priming. In particular, we investigate how likely students are to repeat a sentence structure of a teacher depending on their perception of the teacher and their social monitoring tendency. Our results demonstrate that students’ tendency to imitate a sentence structure of the teacher is positively influenced by their perception of the teacher but negatively by social monitoring. We suggest that the effects may be accounted for in terms of their influence on attention and memory encoding.     

Functional Extended Redundancy Analysis

We propose a functional version of extended redundancy analysis that examines directional relationships among several sets of multivariate variables. As in extended redundancy analysis, the proposed method posits that a weighed composite of each set of exogenous variables influences a set of endogenous variables. It further considers endogenous and/or exogenous variables functional, varying over time, space, or other continua. Computationally, the method reduces to minimizing a penalized least-squares criterion through the adoption of a basis function expansion approach to approximating functions. We develop an alternating regularized least-squares algorithm to minimize this criterion. We apply the proposed method to real datasets to illustrate the empirical feasibility of the proposed method.     

Mindful and Mutual Care for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities: A Systematic Literature Review

Parental and professional caregivers of individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) often experience stress and hardship associated with their role, placing them in real danger of burnout and affecting their quality of care. Mindfulness practice is currently being applied to address these issues. We conducted a systematic literature review to explore the effects of mindfulness practice and analyse the intervention and methodological features used for eliciting these effects. An initial search produced 386 publications. Of these, seven met the selection criteria of intervention studies that applied mindfulness to parental and professional caregivers of individuals with DD. We found, from analysis of seven studies, direct effects of mindfulness practice for practitioners (i.e., parental and professional caregivers) and crossover effects for individuals with whom these practitioners interacted (i.e., their children and care recipients). The studies under review collectively suggest that the practice of mindfulness in everyday life over significant periods of time can both improve the experience of care providers and support them in providing a better standard of care for care recipients. Limitations of current mindfulness intervention studies and some implications for future studies are discussed to strengthen the application of mindfulness for individuals influenced by DD.     

Parental Health and Children’s Functioning in Immigrant Families: Family Roles and Perceived Treatment at School

Although parents’ health condition is generally thought to be related to their involvement in their children’s functioning, the possible dynamics behind the scenes in school contexts with immigrant children has received little attention. This study examined the association between parents’ health condition and their children’s academic and behavioral functioning, as well as the mediation effects of parents’ school engagement and children’s perceived treatment at school among 607 immigrant families with 10- to 12-year-old children. Using structural equation modeling, the results indicated that parents’ poor health condition was associated with children’s increased behavioral problems. Parents’ school engagement fully mediated the association between parental health condition and children’s academic achievement and partially mediated the association between parental health condition and children’s behavior problems. Notably, higher levels of parents’ school engagement were associated with increased behavior problems, demonstrating a unique feature in these immigrant children’s developmental functioning. Higher levels of perceived harsh treatment by peers at school due to children’s immigrant identity were associated with these children’s greater risks of behavior problems. The results suggested what may lie behind the scenes in these children’s behavioral problems is that many of these children who act out and are brought to the school office for disciplinary issues may suffer from perceived discrimination and bad treatment by their peers. The findings provide important implications for researchers, healthcare practitioners, and educators seeking to understand this subpopulation and to design and implement family support and prevention programs for young adolescents from immigrant backgrounds.     

The effect of cognitive reappraisal on long‐term emotional experience and emotional memory

One's ability to properly regulate emotion is critical to psychological and physical well‐being. Among various strategies to regulate emotion, cognitive reappraisal has been shown to modulate both emotional experience and emotional memory. However, most studies of reappraisal have focused on reappraisal of negative situations, with reappraisal of positive emotion receiving considerably less attention. In addition, the effects of reappraisal on emotional reactions to stimuli are typically only assessed either immediately or after a short delay, and it remains unclear whether reappraisal effects persist over longer time periods. We investigated the effect of cognitive reappraisal on emotional reactions and long‐term episodic memory for positive and negative stimuli. Men and women viewed emotionally negative, positive, and neutral pictures while they were instructed to either increase, decrease, or maintain the initial emotional reactions elicited by the pictures. Subjective ratings of emotional valence and arousal were assessed during the regulation task and again after 1 week. Memory for the pictures was assessed with free recall. Results indicated that pictures accompanied by instructions to increase emotion were better recalled than pictures reappraised to decrease emotion. Modulation of emotional arousal elicited by stimuli persisted over a week, but this effect was observed only for men. These findings suggest that cognitive reappraisal can have long‐lasting effects on emotional reactions to stimuli. However, the sex differences observed for the effects of reappraisal on emotional reactions highlight the importance of considering individual differences in the effects of regulation.