Journal of General Psychology最新文献

Evidence exists that Westerners rely on similarities to organize their perceptual experiences (descriptive style) and on dispositions to explain human behavior, whereas Far East Asians rely on functional relationships (relational style) and situational details. The present research challenged this dichotomy by investigating perceptual organization and causal attribution in bicultural women of Middle Eastern descent. In Experiment 1, participants were given three items from which to pick two that would go together (e.g., shampoo, conditioner, hair). In Experiment 2, participants were asked to explain desirable and undesirable outcomes (i.e., grades). In both studies, cultural orientation was assessed. When participants were given three items from which to pick two that would go together, they emulated the Westerners' descriptive approach to perception, selecting choices based on similarities (e.g., shampoo and conditioner) rather than on functional relationships (e.g., shampoo and hair). When participants explained desirable outcomes, they preferred internal causes, whereas when they explained undesirable outcomes, they preferred external causes, thereby expressing the self-serving bias often attributed to people from the West. Yet, they also exhibited a hybrid cultural orientation, which included both collectivistic and individualistic inclinations. Although these findings support a polycultural viewpoint, according to which people can manage coherent lives informed by multiple legacies, they also indicate that cultural mindsets do not evenly influence information processing.

High co-morbidity among mental disorders indicates that common transdiagnostic mechanisms underlie various psychopathology, yet there has been little research effort to empirically explicate transdiagnostic processes. A few existing studies are limited in the number of transdiagnostic mechanisms and mental disorder categories explored. The current study addresses these limitations by examining the relationship between three transdiagnostic processes (experiential avoidance, rumination, and emotion dysregulation) and symptom severity of five mental disorders (generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, specific phobia, and depression) in a college sample (N = 266). Applying Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), three transdiagnostic models were evaluated, with the five latent variables of mental disorder regressed onto each transdiagnostic process. The results showed that all transdiagnostic models-except the emotion dysregulation model-generally fit the data well. Among the tested models, the strongest evidence was found for experiential avoidance as a transdiagnostic mechanism underlying multiple disorders, suggesting the need for further research effort to reduce experiential avoidance in diverse clinical populations.

This research explored the association between the mindfulness of call center agents in the Philippines and the level of emotional exhaustion they experienced. The study also contributes to the literature by investigating the role of call center agents' work (job demands and supervisory position) and personal characteristics (age and marital status) as moderating factors that might influence the effect of mindfulness on emotional exhaustion. Survey data were collected from 412 call center agents from 5 call center companies in the Philippines. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used for data analysis. The results supported a negative association between mindfulness and emotional exhaustion. Moreover, the analysis of the moderating effect found that the negative effect of mindfulness on emotional exhaustion was particularly strong for call center agents who: (1) experienced high job demands; (2) held a supervisory position; (3) were single, and (4) were younger.

Although there is an extensive literature on interpersonal rejection, individual studies that have examined adults' emotional and behavioral responses to rejection have tended to limit their scope to a specific category of rejector (e.g., acquaintances). As a result, prior research has failed to systematically investigate whether individuals' emotional and behavioral responses to perceived rejection differ as a function of the role of the potential rejector. In the present study, a total of 481 participants read two scenarios describing hypothetical situations in which rejection by a specific individual (i.e., significant other, friend, or acquaintance) was ambiguous. After each scenario, participants rated the extent to which they would be likely to anticipate (a) experiencing various negative emotions (e.g., upset) and (b) engaging in various behavioral responses (i.e., act friendly, retaliate, complain, avoid) to the potential rejector. Overall, the potential of being rejected by another person with whom one has a close and valued relationship (i.e., a significant other and, to a lesser degree, a friend) was associated with heightened negative emotion and a heightened likelihood of engaging in an active response, either prosocial (i.e., act friendly) or antisocial (i.e., retaliate or complain). In contrast, potential rejection by an acquaintance was associated with relatively little negative emotion and relatively little desire to engage the other (i.e., avoid). In sum, the participants' relationship with specific individuals was found to influence both the intensity of their anticipated negative emotional response to ambiguous rejection and the pattern of their anticipated behavioral response to the potential rejectors.

Sadness is divided into two subtypes, namely loss and failure sadness, which are encoded by different concepts of one's mind. However, it is unclear how such a conceptual difference is supported by neurophysiological foundations. In the present study, we conducted an electroencephalogram experiment for processing congruency between loss- and failure-sadness contexts and emotional words. Electroencephalogram recordings were performed for 23 participants, using a picture-word priming paradigm without explicit congruency judgment. One of the three types of emotional pictures (loss, failure, or neutral picture as the baseline) preceded emotional target words with high, middle, or low fitting properties for sadness contexts in each trial. No significant word-onset event-related potential effects were observed. Upon word-offset event-related potential effects, middle-phase negative potentials around 400 ms for high-fitting words, increased in the failure prime-target context but not in the loss context, compared to the neutral context. Additionally, the negative potentials increased as the failure-sadness intensity decreased, which indicated contextual conflict between prime pictures and target words. In contrast, the corresponding negative potentials for the loss context increased as the loss-sadness intensity increased, which indicated congruency effects under sadness bias. In later latency, after around 400 ms, the slow negative event-related potential effects appeared similar for both the loss and failure contexts. These results suggest that loss and failure sadness are differently represented in the mind, and are founded on the middle-phase neurophysiological processing.

Although lexical competition has been ubiquitously observed in spoken word recognition, less has been known about whether the lexical competitors interfere with the recognition of the target and how lexical interference is resolved. The present study examined whether lexical competitors overlapping in output with the target would interfere with its recognition, and tested an underestimated hypothesis that the domain-general inhibitory control contributes to the resolution of lexical interference. Specifically, in this study, a Visual World Paradigm was used to access the temporal dynamics of lexical activations when participants were moving the mouse cursor to the written word form of the spoken word they heard. By using Chinese characters, the orthographic similarity between the lexical competitor and target was manipulated independently of their phonological overlap. The results demonstrated that behavioral performance in the similar condition was poorer compared to that in the control condition, and that individuals with better inhibitory control (having smaller Stroop interference effect) exhibited weaker activation of orthographic competitors (mouse trajectories less attracted by the orthographic competitors). The implications of these findings for our understanding of lexical interference and its resolution in spoken word recognition were discussed.

Adolescents are believed to be susceptible to eating disorders (EDs) due to their serious fear of appearance evaluation from society. Related to this, low body-esteem has been found to be common among individuals with EDs. The present study mainly aimed to explore how emotional intelligence (EI), gender, and body size influence the relationship between body-esteem and EDs risk among adolescents. 128 middle school students classified as obese and 128 age-and gender-matched normal weight controls were included. All participants were asked to fill out self-report measures of body-esteem, EI, and EDs risk. The results showed that (1) both gender and body size directly influenced body-esteem and EDs risk; (2) EI acted as a moderator between body-esteem and EDs risk; and (3) both gender and body size interacted with EI and body-esteem to influence EDs risk. These findings contribute to our understanding of boundary conditions by which low body-esteem leads to EDs among adolescents, and help us to correspondingly conduct targeted intervention of adolescents' EDs.

This paper reports on the development of a shortened version of the 3 × 2 achievement goal questionnaire, a psychometrically sound, theoretically driven, self-report measure. The shortened version (AGQ-S) which contains 12 items and six subscales improves on the original version in three ways: It eliminates the redundant frequency scale, simplifies the scoring of the subscales, and reduces overlap across subscales. The reliability and validity of the AGQ-S were examined within 177 undergraduates from mainland China (46.3% females, mean age = 20.53; SD = 1.31); 158 undergraduates from Macau (61.9% females; mean age = 20.64; SD = 1.67), and 348 5th-graders from mainland China (54.0% females; mean age = 11.56; SD = 0.59), respectively. Confirmatory factor analyses showed acceptable fits of the data for the 12-item model in both studies (χ²/df ranged from 1.24 to 1.70; CFI, IFI, and TLI were all above 0.97). Thus, the scores of the Chinese version of the AGQ-S were found to be valid and reliable. The short form was deemed sufficient for psychological research contexts with extremely limited time constraints.

Previous research into predictive inferences making showed that textual constraint influenced hemispheric processing of the inferences. However, the relationship between metacomprehension monitoring competence (MMC) and hemispheric processing of predictive inferences has rarely been investigated. The present study employed a divided visual field (DVF) paradigm to examine the effects of textual constraint and MMC on hemispheric processing of predictive inferences with Chinese native speakers during Chinese text reading. Results showed that neither response time nor facilitation effects indicated any significant interaction for our MMC groups. MMC was unlikely to play a role in hemispheric processing of predictive inferences. The results were consistent with those of the very rare relevant previous research, in which readers' judgments of learning failed to have significant effects on inference making performance while judgments of inferencing had. Future investigation could focus more on the study of an inference-specific dimension of metacomprehension monitoring that might be more closely related to inference making. Results also indicated that the left hemisphere (LH) showed greater facilitation for strongly constrained predictive inferences than for weakly constrained predictive inferences, and that the right hemisphere (RH) showed greater levels of facilitation for weakly constrained predictive inferences. Taken together, MMC did not seem to have a positive impact on hemispheric predictive inference making. There was a RH facilitation advantage for weakly constrained texts and an LH advantage for strongly constrained texts.