The ability to quickly and efficiently detect ecological stimuli, such as snakes, spiders, and fearful faces, is vital for one’s survival. Here we asked whether such stimuli are processed automatically. In the study, we used negative faces to examine the automatic processing of ecological stimuli with two criteria (i.e., intentionality and load-insensitivity) that are essential aspects of automaticity.
In Experiment 1, we manipulated perceptual load in a visual search task, where participants searched for a target letter (either X or N) from an array of letters (five letters, selected from O, E, F, H, K, Z, V) that together circled around a central fixation. Either a negative face (i.e., ecological stimuli) or a neutral face (i.e., non-ecological stimuli) was presented in the peripheral as a task-irrelevant distractor. To further rule out the possibility that the salience of the negative faces may account for the load-insensitive attention capture, we used the same paradigm in the Experiment 2, except that a color singleton, a salient stimulus without ecological property, was presented as the distractor in the peripheral.
A total of twenty-one college students participated in the study. As expected, in Experiment 1, the search efficiency was higher when the perceptual load was low, and the presence of the negative face captured a larger amount of attention than the neutral face. Critically, the amount of attention captured by the negative face (versus neutral face) was the same across different levels of perceptual load, suggesting that ecological stimuli are processed automatically. To further examine the possibility that the load-insensitive attention capture observed in Experiment 1 was instead due to the salience, not the ecological property, of the negative face, in Experiment 2 we used the same paradigm as that in Experiment 1, except that a salient color singleton, not the negative face, was presented in the peripheral as a task-irrelevant distractor. We found that although the presence of the color singleton captured attention, the amount of attention capture varied as a function of perceptual load, suggesting that it is the ecological property, not the salience, of the negative face that is processed automatically.
Taken together, our study provides direct evidence that ecological stimuli are processed automatically, independent of perceptual load. Further fMRI studies may help elucidate the neural basis of the automatic processing of ecological stimuli, possible via a sub-cortical pathway.

The existing research paradigms of multisensory integration usually involve the random presentation of stimuli of unisensory modalities and bi-sensory modality. Such kind of paradigms, however, exists the modality shift effect which could lead to inaccurate measurement of multisensory integration. Therefore, it is necessary to exam the modality shift effect and separate it from the tests in order to analyze the results of multisensory integration.
Experiment one examined whether modality shift effect affected the audiovisual integration in the previous paradigms of multisensory integration. The visual, auditory, and audiovisual stimuli were randomly presented. Subjects were suggested to respond to those stimuli as quickly as they could. Results showed that the modality types of pre-stimuli affected the response to the post-stimuli. The race modal is invalid only when the pre-stimuli were from the audiovisual or visual modality.
Experiment two manipulated the intensity of pre-and-post stimuli so as to examine whether modality shift effect was caused by the suppression of reaction during the switch of modalities or by the priming on the same modality. The subjects were asked to response when detected visual or auditory stimulus. Through the analysis of the subjects’ reactions, we found that the intensity of pre-stimuli affected the response to the post-stimuli.
Therefore, we concluded that among the paradigms of multisensory integration, two factors had effects on the measurement of multisensory integration: First, dynamic adjusting on distribution of attention affected by the pre-stimuli; second, dynamic adjusting on the alertness of present reaction caused by the intensity of pre-stimuli. To get the pure results in multisensory measuring, these two influence factors should be eliminated in the measurement of multisensory integration.

Text comprehension researchers generally agree that successful understanding of narrative text requires building a coherent situation model, and this process is affected by many factors, including text materials, prior knowledge, and individual processing abilities. Past research indicates that working memory is related to information processing but less so with situation model construction. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that visuospatial and verbal working memory subcomponents of working memory influence situation model updating processes. In addition, individuals’ cognitive styles may be correlated with working memory, especially visuospatial memory and the central executive. For example, visually field-independent participants have higher levels of psychological differentiation, cognitive reorganization, visuospatial memory, and verbal working memory than do field-dependent participants. The question addressed in this study is whether cognitive style is related to situation model construction.
Two experiments were conducted to explore this question using the anaphora resolution paradigm and moving window technique. Participants’ field dependency was assessed using the Embedded Figures Test. Among 134 university students, 80 participants were included who were the top and bottom 30% in terms of field dependency (i.e., highly field-independent, and highly field-dependent). They first memorized a building layout until completing a blank layout without errors, at which time the remaining tasks were begun on the computer with the screen of IMB 14 inches. Experiment 1 examined whether spatial situation model updating ability (measured using the spatial distance effect), visuospatial memory, and verbal working memory depended on field dependency. There was a significant three-way interaction of cognitive style, anaphoric position, and movement direction. Simple effects analysis indicated that the spatial distance effect was significant for those who were field-independent only in the low predictability condition, and for those who were field-dependent only in the high predictability condition. A repeated measures ANOVA confirmed that this spatial distance effect remained significant including visuospatial and verbal working memory as covariates. Correlations indicated that greater field-independency was associated with larger visuospatial and verbal working memory. Experiment 2 was designed to facilitate narrative processing of the anaphora sentence for the field-dependent participants (i.e., with situation model updating ability) by adding an object within the path room without mentioning the path room (cf. Dutke, 2006). As such, field-independent participants were able to update their situation model. As predicted, there were main effects of anaphoric position and movement direction but the three-way interaction was not significant. Further analyses confirmed that field-dependent and field-independent participants showed significant spatial distance effects in the high and low predictability conditions.
In summary, this research suggests that the field-independent participants are better able to update their spatial situation model than are field-dependent participants. The results are discussed in terms of psychological differentiation, cognitive coding strategy, and cognitive reorganization.

An important question in research on bilinguals is whether bilinguals activate information in both languages even when they intend to speak in only one of their two languages. Psycholinguistic and neuroscientific investigations have provided inconsistent data regarding activation of the two languages by using explicit task paradigms. However, most prominent theories of bilingualism assume that mental representation of languages can be divided into a lexical (word form) and a conceptual (word meaning) level. Thus, the notion of activation was ill-defined in previous studies and it is unclear to which degree words from the non-target language are processed by bilinguals. Therefore, innovative paradigms, conceptual decision tasks and lexical decision tasks were designed in this study to further explore the activation and inhibition of non-target language in bilingual speech production.
In the present study, we used the task of cross-language repetition priming. Participants from South China Normal University included sixty students of non-English-majors who did not pass CET Band 4 and forty students of English-majors. All participants were Chinese natives aging 18~25 years, who learned English as a second language from about the age of 11. Participants were randomly divided into different experiments. Each experiment consisted of a study block and a test block. In the study block, bilingual participants named the pictures in the target language, and in the test block they were instructed to make a concept decision (Experiment 1 and 2) or a lexical decision (Experiment 3). Non-target language words were presented in the test block and half of their translation equivalents were used in the study block. Some new words never used in study block as fillers appeared in test block. Then, Study status (studied vs. non-studied) was manipulated in the test block. The response times and accurate rates were recorded.
In experiment 1, there was no cross language repetition priming effect in both highly proficient and less proficient bilinguals. But in experiment 2, we observed cross language repetition priming effect with conceptual decision tasks only in less proficient bilinguals. However, no cross language repetition priming effect was found with lexical decision tasks in experiment 3. The results revealed that for highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals, the non-target language was inhibited on conceptual level during the speech production. But for less proficient Chinese-English bilinguals, the non-target language could be inhibited on conceptual level only when using the more dominant language; while using the less dominant language, the non-target language was just inhibited on lexical level but not on conceptual level.

Unlike alphabetic scripts, such as English, the vast majority of written languages have no space information to delimit words, for example Chinese and Japanese. Chinese text is written without spaces between successive characters or words. There is no obvious visual cue to demarcate words except punctuation marks. Given this, it is intriguing how readers target their saccades and how words are recognized during Chinese reading for Chinese people and Chinese language learners.
Bai et al. (2009) investigated how American international students read Chinese sentences with or without spaces. English, which was the participants’ mother’s language, has interword spaces in the text. Four spacing conditions were included in the experiment: normal unspaced condition; single character spaced condition (text with spaces between every character); word spaced condition (text with spaces between words); and nonword spaced condition (text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords). The results suggested that American readers’ Chinese reading was facilitated under the word segmentation condition compared to the normal condition because they have no unspaced text reading experience, thus the spaces could help with word segmentation during Chinese reading. Therefore, it is considered that the experience of reading text with visual segmentation cues plays an important role during Chinese reading for people who learn Chinese as a second language as Li et al. (2010) suggested.
Typical Japanese text is a mixture of Kanji, Hiragana & Katakana. There is no interword spacing in ordinary Japanese script. However, Japanese readers are, to some extent, used to interword spacing, as children are initially taught to read spaced Hiragana to aid learning. Sainio, Hyöna, Bingushi, & Bertram (2007) investigated the role of interword spacing in pure Hiragana and mixed Kanji-Hiragana text. The results indicated that interword spacing served as an effective segmentation cue during Hiragana text reading; spacing information in mixed Kanji-Hiragana text was redundant, since the visually salient Kanji characters served as effective cues by themselves. Therefore, Japanese readers are considered to be very familiar with those visual cues provided by the text during reading.
Although Japanese text has no interword spaces, the mixed text can provide readers effective visual word segmentation cues. However, there is no such cue in normal unspaced Chinese text. Therefore, we predicted that interword spaced Chinese text would have a similar facilitatory effect for Japanese students as it did for American students, considering interword spaces could help them to demarcate Chinese words. That is to say, their reading performance under the word spaced condition would be better than that under unspaced condition.
Two experiments were conducted including normal text, word, nonword and character segmentation conditions using spaces or highlighting as the visual segmentation cue. Twenty-four Japanese-Chinese bilinguals participated in these two experiments. An EyeLink 2000 eye tracker (SR Research, Canada) was used to record their right eye movements, sampling every two milliseconds.
Same results were observed in the two experiments. No significant difference was found between word segmentation and normal text conditions on total number of fixations and total sentence reading time for global analyses. However, the local analyses of eye movement measures showed that Japanese students required shorter total reading time and fewer total fixations in the word segmentation condition than in the normal text condition. The results suggested that sentences with word segmentation cues were as easy to read as normal sentences for Japanese students. Thus, word segmentation may facilitate Chinese word recognition for Japanese students.

Since 1980’s systematic researches have been made on mental processes, influencing factors and psychological models of problem solving. The researches found that problem context, problem representation types, mental preparation, working memory, cognitive styles, and self-evaluation are the main factors for problem solving (Lu haidong, 2004; You xuqun, 2006; Chen yinghe, 2004; Beckmann et al., 2007). Some researchers pointed out that problem representation and problem solving plans are the basic inner processes (Kintch & Greeno, 1985; Greeno, 1986). Along with deeper studies, direct translation strategy and problem-model strategy (Mayer, 1996) were considered as the main representation types, and working memory as the major factor for problem representation type (Baddeley, 1992; Cornoldi, 1999; Mclean, 1999; Wang enguo, 2007; Wanyan, 2007). However, the past studies paid much attention to how verbal working memory affected problem representation, while there were few studies on how visual-spacial memory span influenced problem representation in mathematics. As a hypothesis, we thought that it was the individual differences in working memory that resulted in different problem representation in mathematics, which led to different performances in mathematical assignments. Those with a high spacial working memory span, based on an overall comprehension of the problem, could construct a good problem representation, and would show superiority in high speed and accuracy in mathematical problem solving. Those with a high verbal working memory span, might display an advantage in comprehension of mathematical problems. However, compared with the high visual-spacial memory span group, they might have different problem representation. This study was especially concerned about whether there were differences in problem representation and problem solving between the two groups with different working memory.
This study included four separate experiments. 104 Grade 6 pupils from primary school (male, 61, female, 43, Mage=11.26±0.56) participated in the study. Four tests were carried out, concerning mathematical problems, problem representation, verbal working memory span and visual-spacial working memory span respectively. All subjects were tested by mathematical works and cognitive behavior.
By using one-way analysis of variance and χ2 test, this study found:
1. Verbal working memory span showed a main effect in high level difficult word problem solving (F (1,102)=5.78, p<0.05), and had no main effect in low and middle level difficult word problem solving (F (1,102)=0.21, p>0.05; F (1,102)=0.58, p>0.05).
2. Visual-spacial working memory span showed a main effect in the three level difficult word problem solving (F (1,102)=8.13, p<0.01; F (1,102)=4.59, p<0.05; F (1,102)=11.01, p<0.01).
3. The mathematical scores were correlated with problem representation. When solving the three level difficult problems, the high score group had a tendency to choose problem-model strategy (82.0%; 81.9%; 55.8%). There were significant differences in problem representation in the three level difficult problems between the high and low score group.
4. There were no relations between verbal working memory span and problem representation types (low difficult problem: χ2(2)=2.31, p>0.05; middle difficult problem: χ2(2)=2.21, p>0.05; high difficult problem: χ2(2)=2.95, p>0.05). When solving the three level difficult problems, both the high and low verbal working memory span groups tended to choose problem-model strategy (high group: 65.7%; 63.9%; 46.6%; low group: 71.3%; 66.3%; 42.9%), and there were no significant differences between the high and low verbal working memory span group in selecting problem representation types.
5. There were correlations between visual-spacial working memory span and problem representation types (low difficult problem: χ2(2)=16.44, p<0.001; middle difficult problem: χ2(2)=18.16, p<0.001; high difficult problem: χ2(2)=8.64, p<0.01). In solving the three level difficult problems, there were significant differences between the high and low visual–spacial working memory span group in selecting problem representation types, and the high visual-spacial working memory span group more likely chose problem-model strategy (75.4%; 72.4%; 49.9%).

The past two decades have seen a considerable research progress on self-enhancement which represents a preeminent self-motive defined as the tendency to hold overly positive self-evaluations. Despite this research, little is known about the potential cultural impact on self-enhancement. More specifically, questions have been raised (Zuo & Zhang, 2006) and yet to be answered on whether cross-cultural differences in self-construal (independent vs. inter-dependent or interpersonal) affect self-enhancement. Related to this cross-cultural question are the developmental characteristics of self-enhancement that also require further investigations. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between interpersonal relations and self-enhancement among Chinese adolescents. We hypothesized that self-enhancement manifest itself differently depending on the Chinese interpersonal contexts. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we examined self-serving attribution as an explicit self-enhancement strategy under interpersonal comparison condition. In Experiment 2, we examined both explicit (self-serving attribution & selective acceptance and refutation) and implicit self-enhancement strategies (e.g., a measure of birthday preference) under interpersonal comparison versus non-interpersonal comparison conditions.
One hundred and 67 students (81 males and 86 females, Mage = 21.51 years) participated in Experiment 1.We used two between-subject designs. One is a 2 (feedback type: success, failure) × 2 (relationship type: friends, strangers) × 2 (research situation: public, private) between-subject design, with attribution of responsibility for the task outcome being the primary dependent variable. The other is a 2 (attribution type: self-serving, self-effacing) × 2 (feedback type: success, failure) × 2 (relationship type: friends, strangers) design, with evaluation of attribution and intention to communicate being the dependent variables. In experiment 2, 150 junior high school students (66 males and 84 females, Mage = 13.5 years), 91 senior high school students (43 males and 48 females, Mage = 16.92 years), and 105 college students (68 males and 37 females, Mage = 19.6 years) were randomly assigned to between-subjects conditions. The independent variables were partner type, feedback type, and age group, whereas the dependent variables were birthday-number preference, attribution for the task outcome, and assessment of the effectiveness of the test respectively.
In Experiment 1, participants exhibited self-effacing attribution under the interpersonal comparison condition, and their evaluations of self-effacing attribution were more positive than those of self-serving attribution in the negative feedback context. The evaluations of friends’ attribution were more positive than those of strangers.’ Moreover, adolescents liked to make friends with self-effacing rather than self-serving partners after receiving negative feedback. Results from Experiment 2 lent support to the existence of implicit self-enhancement. There was a birthday-number preference that was also independent of age. Adolescents under the interpersonal comparison condition did not show self-serving attribution. By contrast, under the non-interpersonal comparison condition, self-serving attribution was present nearly across all age groups, with junior high school students showing more self-serving attribution than senior high school or college students. When assessing the effectiveness of the test they have taken, adolescents showed selective acceptance and refutation, with junior high school students self-enhancing more than senior high school or college students.
These results suggest that Chinese adolescents self-enhance in non-interpersonal comparison situations. However, the demonstration of this motive is somewhat implicit and is dependent on interpersonal contexts. Over the course of the adolescent years, implicit self-enhancement stays unchanged, whereas explicit self-enhancement which peaks in early adolescents decreases with age.

Safety operation behavior is the non-technical skills of modern airline pilots behaved in implementing scheduled flights, which has been regarded as the importance safeguard to ensure flight safety. Previous research indicated that cognitive and personality various may influence unsafe operation and accident involvement in aviation. However, recently several researches have concluded that the majority of aviation safety campaigns aimed at influencing social cognition various such as attitudes and risk perception have failed. One reason may be that the role of personality characteristics often has been ignored when such campaigns are carried out. In aviation, risk tolerance is been usually regarded as a personality trait, which is the amount of risk that an individual is willing to accept in the pursuit of some goal and is an importance factor to influence flight safety. This present study attempts to integrate two of these research traditions, the personality trait approach and the social cognition approach, in order to understand the mechanisms underlying pilot’ safety operation behaviors.
Based on a sample of 257 commercial airline pilots came from China Southern Airlines Ltd. as college graduates with good physical and mental health, and four flight experts with the certificates of LOSA and CRM invited to conduct level evaluation on the actual safety operation behaviors of these airline pilots, the present study examined the associations between risk tolerance, risk perception, hazardous attitudes and safety operation behaviors among airline pilots in China used a self-administered questionnaire survey. Structural equation modeling analyses and hierarchical regression analyses were applied to detect the effects of risk tolerance on safety operation behaviors among airline pilots as well as the mediating role of hazardous attitudes and the moderating role of risk perception in the effects of risk tolerance.
Results indicated that after controlling for the effects of age, educational level, position, and flight times, risk tolerance displayed a direct effect on safety operation behaviors of airline pilots, in which high-risk tolerance pilots were lower safety operation behaviors than their low risk tolerance counterparts. Risk perception served to moderate the association between risk tolerance and safety operation behaviors in that high risk perception weakened the negative association. Risk tolerance displayed an indirect effect on safety operation behaviors of airline pilots, which hazardous attitudes could fully mediate the relationship between risk tolerance and safety operation behaviors. That is, risk tolerance could affect safety operation behaviors among airline pilots through influencing hazardous attitudes. However, the mediating effect of hazardous attitudes was moderated by risk perception. High risk perception could actually protect airline pilots who were provided with high hazardous attitudes from low safety operation behaviors. In fact, hazardous attitudes, as a moderated mediator, had an effect on safety operation behaviors of airline pilots.
In sum, it is demonstrated that risk tolerance has a direct and indirect effect in the mechanisms underlying airline pilot’ safety operation behaviors. Meanwhile, risk perception and hazardous attitudes play important roles in the effect of risk tolerance on pilots’ safety operation behaviors in this study. These results imply that we could emphasize the low risk tolerance and high risk perception of candidates in pilot selection and could assist pilots with low safety operation behaviors by improving their risk tolerance levels, improving their hazardous attitudes, and helping them promote high risk perception levels.

According to sexual selection theory, both intra-sex competition, mainly among the unlimited sex, or males, and mate choice, mostly by the limiting sex, or females, lead to wide ranging sex dimorphic attributes, which are referred to as weapons and ornaments. Human males possess similar weapon- and ornament-like traits and behaviors. Men are bigger, more aggressive, and more violent than women. These are weapon-like traits. Men brag and talk big, have a sense of humor, and take risks. These are ornament-like traits. Both sets of behaviors are driven by mating motives so that unmarried young men manifest these weapon- and ornament-like behaviors more than married or older men. The purpose of the present study was to empirically demonstrate the association between mating motives and risk taking behavior in men and to demonstrate that the same association does not exist among women.
In two experiments, we manipulated mating motives by exposing participants to attractive opposite-sex pictures. We measured perception of risk taking by tracking and measuring participants’ attentional disengagement from risky sport scenes (Study 1) and by having participants evaluate risks involved in different risky sports (Study 2). One-hundred and fifteen college students participated in Study 1. We primed participants with a 3-minute task either to describe an ideal mate or to describe the weather. After the priming, participants completed an attention disengagement task. A picture of sports scene registering high or low risk was displayed for 500 ms in one quadrant of the computer screen. Right after the picture was a geometric figure, appearing in either the same quadrant as the picture (filler trials) or the three other quadrants (attentional shift trials). Participants were instructed to press “A” or “K” on the English computer keyboard as soon as possible to indicate whether the figure is a circle or a triangle. The more absorbed a participant was by the high-risk sport scene, the longer it took the participant to disengage from the scene and the longer it took the participant to complete the attention shift trials. Participants also filled out a socio-sexual orientation questionnaire and an emotional scale to measure their emotional state at the moment.
Results showed that independent of the emotional state, male participants primed by mating information, as compared with those primed by weather information, responded more slowly after seeing high-risk sport scenes. The same effect was also observed on female participants. Moreover, among male participants primed by mating information, those having a higher or more liberal socio-sexual orientation were not more absorbed by risky sport pictures than those having more conservative socio-sexual orientation. These results suggest that male and female participants primed by mating information are drawn to risk stimulation.
Eighty four college students (mean age = 21.53, SD = 2.17; 37 male) participated in Study 2. Upon entering the experimental room, each participant was seated in front of a computer screen where the participant completed all the visual perception tasks. The prime consisted of attractive female pictures which, as the focus of the present study, were contrasted with three types of controls – attractive male pictures, pregnant women, and sport trophies. The task was to speak to the microphone whether the sport shown in the picture presented high risk or low risk to the person doing the sport. The participants were previously given instructions on how to define high vs. low risk sports. Response time it took the participant to speak out the risk level served as the dependent variable to measure the influence of different primes on the speed by which participants process risky stimuli. Results showed that male participants responded faster to high-risk than low-risk stimuli after primed by attractive female pictures; they responded similarly to high and low risk stimuli after the control primes. Mating prime did not influence female participants’ response. The mixed results suggest that mating has an effect on risk processing and evaluation in both men and women but the mating effect is stronger on men than women as expected by sexual selection.

Multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) is a well known theory which combines the advantages of the factor analysis theory and the item response theory. The current study developed a parameter estimation method of MIRT model with MCMC algorithm, and discussed its application on psychology tests. Monte Carlo method was used to explore the feasibility of MCMC algorithm and to examine the estimation precision as well as the properties of three parameter logistic MIRT models. Besides, this study employed MIRT model to analyze Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices test (RAPMT).
Three findings were presented: (1) The estimation precision of the self-developed program of three parameter logistic MIRT model was comparable with those reported by western studies, which demonstrated the validity of the self-developed program; (2) Along with the sample size and the number of item sample increased, the estimation precision and the robustness of MIRT parameter increased; but along with the number of the test dimension increased (e.g. from 3 to 5), the estimation precision and the robustness of MIRT parameter decreased; (3) When applied the MIRT into the analysis of the RAPMT: (a) Most of the discrimination of the test items were very high. (b) The ability scores of the five dimensions of in the RAPMT were ranked ascendingly as CR, PP, FA, D3 and D2. Compare to the unidimensional item response theory (UIRT), the ability scores of each dimensions reported by MIRT provided more abundant and valuable information for cognitive diagnosis. (c) The correlations between the five dimensions in the RAPMT were on the low to moderate levels.

Chen Li’s career as an industrial psychologist began in July 1933, shortly after he got his doctoral degree from University College London, and lasted till his death in 2004. His achievements in the seemingly long career came within a few years of his life: from 1935 when he authored the first Chinese book on the topic, to mid-1937 when Japan invaded China; and from 1977 to mid-1990s, the gap of 40 years serves as a reminder of the tragedies that China went through. During the latter years of his life, he established the first industrial psychology program (and the first ever management-related academic program) in China’s history. He single-handedly re-kindled the torch of China’s management science cut short by multi years of military and political turmoil. His legacy also includes a large number of students who now shoulder important executive duties in various teaching and management positions. Yet, he considered his life a failure, because he did not see his discipline achieving the goal to “lead human beings towards their best potentials, and through the process, towards ultimate self-actualization”.