The Emergence of Cultural Self-Constructs: Autobiographical Memory and Self-Description in European American and Chinese Children.

This study examined the emergence of cultural self-constructs as reflected in children's remembered and conceptual aspects of the self. European American and Chinese children in preschool through 2nd grade participated (N=180). Children each recounted 4 autobiographical events and described themselves in response to open-ended questions. American children often provided elaborate and detailed memories focusing on their own roles, preferences, and feelings; they also frequently described themselves in terms of personal attributes, abstract dispositions, and inner traits in a positive light. Chinese children provided relatively skeletal accounts of past experiences that centered on social interactions and daily routines, and they often described themselves in terms of social roles, context-specific characteristics, and oven behaviors in a neutral or modest tone. Findings are discussed in light of the self as a constructed meaning system of culture that emerges early in life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are positive emotions just as “positive” across cultures?

Whereas positive emotions and feeling unequivocally good may be at the heart of well-being among Westerners, positive emotions often carry negative associations within many Asian cultures. Based on a review of East-West cultural differences in dialectical emotions, or co-occurring positive and negative feelings, we predicted culture to influence the association between positive emotions and depression, but not the association between negative emotions and depression. As predicted, in a survey of over 600 European-, immigrant Asian-, and Asian American college students, positive emotions were associated with depression symptoms among European Americans and Asian Americans, but not immigrant Asians. Negative emotions were associated with depression symptoms among all three groups. We also found initial evidence that acculturation (i.e., nativity) may influence the role of positive emotions in depression: Asian Americans fell “in between” the two other groups. These findings suggest the importance of studying the role of culture in positive emotions and in positive psychology. The use of interventions based on promoting positive emotions in clinical psychology among Asian clients is briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive Reactions to Working in Groups in a Study of Group and Individual Goal Decision Making.

The authors explored group members' positive reactions to working in groups that performed a card-sorting task for which they set goals. They also tested predictions regarding observed differences between the goal decisions of groups and individuals for their own and others' performance. Consistent with predictions, group members had more goal commitment, more positive attitudes toward goal attainment, and greater satisfaction with their performance than individuals. Moreover, groups chose goals that were less difficult than the goals of individuals both for their own and for others' performance. The ways in which group decision processes and other factors may account for differences in group and individual goal decisions are considered. In addition, the social-emotional and task-related benefits members perceive of working in their groups are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beyond cognition: Broadening the emotional base of motivational interviewing.

Motivational interviewing (MI) techniques have been described in cognitive and behavioral terms, as means to positively resolve tension created by unresolved ambivalence about change. This view of motivation is consistent with a negative reinforcement model, in which behaviors are performed to escape from negative states. In contrast, the concept of positive reinforcement involves seeking positive states through behaviors that lead toward more satisfying conditions. From this perspective, motivation involves a desire to experience positive emotions. This paper focuses on the potential role that emotions may play in MI, particularly positive emotions. The authors posit that MI elicits positive emotions of interest, hope, contentment and inspiration by inviting clients to envision a better future, to remember past successes, and to gain confidence in their abilities to improve their lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attachment theory and rections to others' needs: Evidence that activiation of the sense of attachment security promotes empathic responses.

Five studies examined the effects of chronic and contextual activation of attachment security on reactions to others' needs. The sense of attachment security was contextually primed by asking participants to recollect personal memories, read a story, or look at a picture of supportive others or by subliminally exposing them to proximity-related words. This condition was compared against the priming of neutral themes, positive affect, or attachment-insecurity schemas. Then reports of empathy and personal distress or the accessibility of empathy and personal-distress memories were assessed. Attachment-security priming strengthened empathic reactions and inhibited personal distress. Self-reports of attachment anxiety and avoidance were inversely related to empathy, and attachment anxiety was positively related to personal distress. The discussion emphasizes the relevance of attachment theory for explaining reactions to others' needs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cross-cultural aging in cognitive and affective components of subjective well-being.

The present study examined age and cultural differences in cognitive and affective components of subjective well-being. A sample of 188 American and Chinese young and older adults completed surveys measuring self-life satisfaction, perceived family's life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect. Across cultures, older adults reported lower negative affect than did young adults. Americans reported higher self-life satisfaction, perceived family's life satisfaction, and positive affect than did Chinese. In addition, perceived family's life satisfaction was more related to self-life satisfaction for Chinese than for Americans. Findings are discussed in light of socioemotional selectivity theory and theories on culture and self-construal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural affordances and emotional experience: Socially engaging and disengaging emotions in Japan and the United States.

The authors hypothesized that whereas Japanese culture encourages socially engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt), North American culture fosters socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride and anger). In two cross-cultural studies, the authors measured engaging and disengaging emotions repeatedly over different social situations and found support for this hypothesis. As predicted, Japanese showed a pervasive tendency to reportedly experience engaging emotions more strongly than they experienced disengaging emotions, but Americans showed a reversed tendency. Moreover, as also predicted, Japanese subjective well-being (i.e., the experience of general positive feelings) was more closely associated with the experience of engaging positive emotions than with that of disengaging emotions. Americans tended to show the reversed pattern. The established cultural differences in the patterns of emotion suggest the consistent and systematic cultural shaping of emotion over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Event memory: Temporal-order judgments of personal life experiences.

Three experiments with undergraduate subjects investigated the mental representations that people form when they recall and chronologically order their personal experiences. Subjects in each study first recalled five events that occurred to them in two general periods of their life (e.g., high school and college). Later, they saw pairs of these events and judged the order in which they occurred. It typically took less time to compare events that occurred in different time periods than events that occurred in the same period. However, response times depended on the serial positions of the compared events in each time period, and the distance between them, in ways that varied over the three experiments. These effects were interpreted in terms of a model of event memory and judgment proposed by Wyer, Shoben, Fuhrman, and Bodenhausen (1985). Specifically, subjects appear to organize the events they are asked to recall into categories defined by the periods of life in which they occurred and assign temporal codes to these categories. However, they do not perform a more detailed temporal coding of the events they recall unless a coherent temporal representation of these events is difficult to construct. A direct comparison between judgments of personal experiences and judgments of others' experiences suggested that people may make more detailed temporal coding of others' experiences than they do of their own. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When and why do central employees speak up? An examination of mediating and moderating variables.

We examined the proposition that employees' work-flow centrality (i.e., the extent to which they are critical to the task-related interaction networks of their work groups) enhances their personal influence within their work groups and, therefore, motivates them to engage in voice behaviors. In support of this proposition, in a study of 184 bank employees nested within 42 work groups, we found that employees' work-flow centrality was positively related to voice behaviors, with their personal influence mediating this relationship. Further, work-flow centrality was more strongly related to personal influence when employees had higher task performance, and personal influence was more strongly related to voice behaviors when employees had higher levels of work-group identification. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotions in memories of success and failure: A cultural perspective.

Americans and Chinese tend to behave differently in response to success and failure: Americans tend to persist on a task after success, whereas Chinese tend to persist after failure. This study examined whether cultural differences in emotional reactions to success and failure account for these differences. American and Chinese students recalled personal success and failure events, evaluated the primary emotion evoked by the event, and responded to measures of concerns, appraisals, and willingness to try the same task again. Americans were more likely than Chinese to report that their success enhanced their self-esteem. Chinese were more likely than Americans to estimate that their success would make others jealous and enhance others' respect for their family. Chinese, compared to Americans, viewed failures as more tolerable, as less problematic for their goals, and as less damaging to their self-esteem. Culture moderated the relations between these components of emotion and willingness to try the task again. In short, culturally framed emotional reactions to success and failure result in different patterns of anticipated self-regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Validity of young children's self-reports of their emotion in response to structured laboratory tasks.

Can young children report coherently on their emotions, and how do their reports contribute to our understanding of emotional development? Two-hundred six children ages 3 to 6 years participated in structured laboratory tasks designed to elicit a range of positive and negative emotions and indicated their emotional state following each task. Children's reports of their emotions meaningfully varied along with the nature of the different tasks during which they were collected (i.e., reports of negative and positive emotions differed across tasks designed to elicit those states). There were no sex differences on reports of any emotion and only small age differences. Multilevel modeling analyses demonstrated that children's self-reports of each emotion converged significantly with objective coding of expressions of those emotions across laboratory tasks; higher convergence for some emotions was associated with older age, higher verbal intelligence, and greater emotion-recognition abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What Do You Do When Things Go Right? The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events.

Four studies examined the intrapersonal and interpersonal consequences of seeking out others when good things happen (i.e., capitalization). Two studies showed that communicating personal positive events with others was associated with increased daily positive affect and well-being, above and beyond the impact of the positive event itself and other daily events. Moreover, when others were perceived to respond actively and constructively (and not passively or destructively) to capitalization attempts, the benefits were further enhanced. Two studies found that close relationships in which one's partner typically responds to capitalization attempts enthusiastically were associated with higher relationship well-being (e.g., intimacy, daily marital satisfaction). The results are discussed in terms of the theoretical and empirical importance of understanding how people "cope" with positive events, cultivate positive emotions, and enhance social bonds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's moral reasoning about their own spontaneous prosocial behavior.

21 48–63 mo old preschoolers were observed and questioned by a familiar experimenter about their spontaneous helping, sharing, or comforting behaviors over a 12-wk period. The Ss justified their prosocial behaviors primarily with references to others' needs and pragmatic considerations and used little punishment and authority-oriented, stereotyped, approval-oriented, or hedonistic reasoning. There were no sex or age differences. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lay theory of race affects and moderates Asian Americans' responses toward American culture.

People may hold different understandings of race that might affect how they respond to the culture of groups deemed to be racially distinct. The present research tests how this process is moderated by the minority individual's lay theory of race. An essentialist lay theory of race (i.e., that race reflects deep-seated, inalterable essence and is indicative of traits and ability) would orient racial minorities to rigidly adhere to their ethnic culture, whereas a social constructionist lay theory of race (i.e., that race is socially constructed, malleable, and arbitrary) would orient racial minorities to identify and cognitively assimilate toward the majority culture. To test these predictions, the authors conducted 4 studies with Asian American participants. The first 2 studies examine the effect of one's lay theory of race on perceived racial differences and identification with American culture. The last 2 studies tested the moderating effect of lay theory of race on identification and assimilation toward the majority American culture after this culture had been primed. The results generally supported the prediction that the social constructionist theory was associated with more perceived similarity between Asians and Americans and more consistent identification and assimilation toward American culture, compared with the essentialist theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Power and the Creation of Patronizing Environments: The Stereotype-Based Behaviors of the Powerful and Their Effects on Female Performance in Masculine Domains.

This work tested the following hypothesis: When powerful men stereotype their female subordinates in masculine domains, they behave in patronizing ways that affect the performance of their subordinates. Experiment 1 examined the stereotyping tendencies and patronizing behaviors of the powerful. Findings revealed that powerful men who stereotyped their female subordinates (i.e., those who were weakness focused) gave female subordinates few valued resources but much praise. In Experiment 2, low-power participants received resources (valued or devalued positions) and praise (high or low) from a powerful man. Subordinates who were assigned to a devalued position but received high praise (i.e., the patronizing behavior mirrored from Experiment 1) were angry. However, men performed better in the anger-inspiring situation, whereas women performed worse. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

一类生态-流行病模型正平衡解的存在性

考虑一类捕食者带有传染病并具有Holling-Ⅱ功能性反应函数的生态-流行病模型.讨论其带有扩散项的在齐次Neumann边界条件下问题.主要考虑其对应的平衡态问题的正解的存在性.首先应用最大值原理和Harnack不等式给出其反应扩散问题的正平衡解的先验估计(正的上下界估计),然后应用能量方法给出了该问题非常数正平衡解的不存在性,最后应用拓扑度理论研究了该问题非常数正平衡解的存在性.     

How self-evaluations relate to being liked by others: Integrating sociometer and attachment perspectives.

What is the relation between self-evaluation and being liked by others? Does being liked by others lead to more positive self-evaluations (as in sociometer theory), or do positive self-evaluations lead to being liked more (self-broadcasting)? Furthermore, what might affect the extent to which self-evaluations are influenced by likability (and vice versa)? The purpose of the present study was twofold. First, it used a naturalistic design to test the direction of the effect between social self-evaluations and others' judgments of likability in real relationships. Second, it examined how individual differences in attachment avoidance and anxiety relate to self-evaluations and likability and whether attachment differences moderate the relation between the two. Social self-evaluations, actual interpersonal liking, and attachment were assessed in participants taking part in a longitudinal group study. The findings supported the sociometer theory: Being liked by others led to more positive self-evaluations. Both anxious and avoidant attachment predicted lower self-evaluations, and anxious attachment predicted stronger reactions to others' liking (i.e., potentiated the sociometer). These findings have several implications for research on selfevaluation, adult attachment theory, and the importance of integrating interpersonal processes and individual differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Culture and mixed emotions: Co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions in Japan and the United States.

Previous cross-cultural comparisons of correlations between positive and negative emotions found that East Asians are more likely than Americans to feel dialectical emotions. However, not much is known about the co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions in a given situation. When asked to describe situations in which they felt mixed emotions, Japanese and American respondents listed mostly similar situations. By presenting these situations to another group of respondents, we found that Japanese reported more mixed emotions than Americans in the predominantly pleasant situations, whereas there were no cultural differences in mixed emotions in the predominantly unpleasant situations or the mixed situations. The appraisal of self-agency mediated cultural differences in mixed emotions in the predominantly pleasant situations. Study 2 replicated the findings by asking participants to recall how they felt in their past pleasant, unpleasant, and mixed situations. The findings suggest that both Americans and Japanese feel mixed emotions, but the kinds of situation in which they typically do so depends on culture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources.

B. L. Fredrickson's (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions asserts that people's daily experiences of positive emotions compound over time to build a variety of consequential personal resources. The authors tested this build hypothesis in a field experiment with working adults (n = 139), half of whom were randomly-assigned to begin a practice of loving-kindness meditation. Results showed that this meditation practice produced increases over time in daily experiences of positive emotions, which, in turn, produced increases in a wide range of personal resources (e.g., increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, decreased illness symptoms). In turn, these increments in personal resources predicted increased life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms. Discussion centers on how positive emotions are the mechanism of change for the type of mind-training practice studied here and how loving-kindness meditation is an intervention strategy that produces positive emotions in a way that outpaces the hedonic treadmill effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)