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CN 11-1911/B

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    25 April 2017, Volume 49 Issue 4 Previous Issue    Next Issue

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    The intermediate common representation of space-time association: Evidence from the reversed STEARC effect
    LIU Xinyuan, ZHANG Zhijie
    2017, 49 (4):  427-438.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00427
    Abstract ( 1220 )   PDF (763KB) ( 86 )  

    Previous studies have suggested that the mental representation of time might be tightly linked with physical space. The time-space interaction has been reported as the preference to associate the past with the left space and the future with the right space, which is called the spatial-temporal association of respond codes (STEARC) effect. The present study investigated three possible cognitive mechanisms underlying the STEARC effect. a) Whether the space-time association is a direct representation that associated temporal/spatial information with the left/right spatial responses. b) Whether the representation of space-time association is intermediated by a common spatial code, the intermediate common code leads corresponding spatial responses. c) Whether the representation of space-time association is intermediated by a distinct code which in turn conducts the spatial responses. All of the three possible space-time representation mechanisms have their own evidence from previous studies. The purpose of the present study is to explore the cognitive mechanisms of spatial-temporal representation. Three experiments were designed according to the dual-task paradigm (spatial task: press the left or right key to judge the meaning of temporal words or the spatial location of squares, font task: judge whether the words were italicized). Participants were asked to complete their judgment by manual (Exp.1 & 2) or saccadic (Exp.3) responses. In both experiment 1 and experiment 2, participants were assigned randomly into two groups——congruent group and incongruent group. In the congruent group, time-space association and response hand was congruent in spatial task and font task (left hand-past/left; right hand- future/right). While the time-space association and response hand was incongruent in the incongruent group (left hand-future/right; right hand- past/left). Experiment 1 investigated the influence of incongruent mappings in the font task on a concurrent STEARC task in which temporal information was completely irrelevant. Experiment 2 employed spatially incompatible mappings in a spatial compatibility task and investigated whether the location-to-response mappings also affected the spatial-temporal response associations. Experiment 3 investigated the specific associations that are responsible for the reversal of STEARC effect by means of dissociating the response modalities (saccadic and manual response) in the spatial and font task. Experiment 1 and experiment 2 found a reversal of STEARC effect in the incongruent group, which could only be interpreted in terms of the intermediate common representations of time and space association. And in experiment 3, participants under incongruent condition showed the STEARC effect, so that there was a specific association between the common representations of time and space. All of the results showed that the representation of the space-time association is intermediated by a common code, and there is a specific association between the common representation codes of time and space.

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    The connecting competition effect on the orthographic-phonological connection coding for children with spelling difficulties
    NING Ning; YANG Shuang; SHEN Chenyan; CAI Yanyan
    2017, 49 (4):  439-449.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00439
    Abstract ( 959 )  

    Spelling difficulty is a common phenomenon; it is one of the major types of learning disorder. An extensive amount of research has yielded considerable evidence that children with spelling difficulties have impairments in orthographic-phonological connections. However, there still remains equivocal about the mechanism of grapheme-sound connection deficits. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the competition interference effect of global phonology and radical phonology on grapheme-sound connection coding for children with spelling difficulties. The first experiment involved artificial single characters as orthographic material, requiring all participants to remember the correspondence between the grapheme and the sound. The grapheme-sound connecting level of children with spelling difficulties was compared across two conditions: competitive phonological condition and control condition. In the competitive phonological condition, pseudo-words with high phonological accessibility were used as experimental material. In the control condition, the phonological accessibility of pseudo-words was low. In the second experiment, artificial compound characters of left-right structure were used as experimental material. All participants were asked to remember the association between the grapheme and the sound. As the same as the first experiment, there were two different conditions: competitive phonological condition and control condition. In the competitive phonological condition, the radical phonology was different from the global phonology, which caused competition interference with global grapheme-sound connecting. In the control condition, no competition interference would be induced since the phonetic components were not into the word. Results of the first experiment found that the children with spelling difficulty showed a lower rate of accuracy of the grapheme-sound connection than the control group, but no significant differences were found between two groups on the response time. In addition, the control group obtained significant lower accuracy in the competitive condition than in the control condition, whereas children with spelling difficulties showed no significant differences between the competitive and control conditions (neither accuracy nor response time). Results of the second experiment indicated that the children with spelling difficulties showed a lower rate of accuracy and a longer response time than the control group. Furthermore, the response time in the competitive condition was longer than that in the control condition for the two groups, which suggested that the two groups were both effected by the competition interference, but according to the results, the effect was more significant for the children with spelling difficulties. Generally, concerning the grapheme-sound connection coding, it was found, as in previous studies, that children with spelling difficulties performed worse than normal children. But the competition of global phonology had no effect on the grapheme-sound connecting for the children with spelling difficulties. One reason for this finding, we suspect, is that children with spelling difficulties mainly depend on visual processing, and lack sensitivity to phonological information. As a result, the phonological information of characters with similar form is hard to be automatically activated by global orthography. As for another finding that the competition interference effect of radical phonology on the grapheme-sound connection is more significant for the children with spelling difficulties, there may be two explanations: (1) children with spelling difficulties have impairments in grapheme-sound connecting, and they are easily interrupted by activated radical phonology; (2) the grapheme-sound connection representations stored in the working memory of the children with spelling difficulties are more likely to be influenced by the proactive interference of activated radical phonology.

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    The modulation of reading level on the development of children’s eye movement characteristics: Evidence from 9- to 11-year-old children
    LIANG Feifei, WANG Yongsheng, YANG Wen, BAI Xuejun
    2017, 49 (4):  450-459.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00450
    Abstract ( 1745 )   PDF (613KB) ( 79 )  

    Previous studies have shown that the basic characteristics of children’ s eye movements during reading undergo substantial changes in early years, becoming adult-like around the age of 11: as chronological age increases, sentence reading times and fixation durations decrease, saccade amplitudes increase, fewer fixations and regressions are made, refixation probability decreases and word skipping probability increases. Then, a basic question is what accounts for the aforementioned changes with respect to the development of children’s eye movements characteristics. There are at least two possible answers: the first is “linguistic proficiency hypothesis” – that the development of reading skill in turn causes the observed changes in eye-movement behavior; the second is “oculomotor tuning hypothesis”- that readers are able to “tune” their oculomotor control system through learning so that the eye movements themselves become more optimal during reading. The present study wished to examine which hypothesis is more convincing; specifically we examined whether there were any developmental treads in terms of the influence of reading level on children’s basic eye movement characteristics. We tested amount of children’s reading level (approximately 200 children) in each grade. Based on their test scores, we selected three groups of children in each grade: the top 15 children were encoded as high-reading level group; the medium 15 children were encoded as medium-reading level group; the last 6-20 children were encoded as low- reading level group. Then, we instructed participants to read five age-appropriate texts when their eye movements were recorded. The results showed that, high-level groups of 9-year-old children in 3rd grade made significantly longer saccade amplitude, more forward saccades, and higher reading speed than the medium, and low groups of children, and no significant differences were found between the latter two groups of children for all the eye movement measures we adopted; for 10-year-old children in the 4th grade, high-level groups of participants made significantly less forward saccades and higher reading speed than those in low-group of participants, and no significant differences were found between the high- and medium- level groups of children; for 11-year-old children in the 5th grade, there were no reliable differences across three groups of children on all the eye movements measures. Based on the two hypothesis in terms of how children’s eye movements develop during reading, we argue that both linguistic proficiency and oculomotor tuning cause the development of children’s eye movement’s characteristics.

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    Maternal positive parenting behaviors and toddler’s compliance: Prediction from maternal sensitivity in infancy and bidirectional effects of autonomy encouragement in toddlerhood
    DONG Shuyang, LIANG Xi, ZHANG Ying, WANG Zhengyan
    2017, 49 (4):  460-471.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00460
    Abstract ( 2687 )   PDF (691KB) ( 105 )  

    Children’s compliance is considered as an important developmental milestone in the process of socialization and self-regulation during toddlerhood. Two forms of compliant behaviors have been distinguished in previous studies: committed compliance, with children complying to directives with willing stance; situational compliance, with children needing adult’s frequent prompt to behave properly. And committed compliance but not the situational compliance were found to show its implication for internalization in preschool years. In addition, parental control strategies and power-assertive behaviors were found to be correlated to children’s compliance, but only have limited explanation for individual differences in compliant behaviors. Thus, the aim of the present study was to examine whether positive parenting behaviors make contribution to early development of compliance. Among the positive parenting practices, maternal sensitivity and autonomy encouragement were highlighted in current study. According to the attachment theory, mothers who displayed adequate sensitivity to their children’s needs for nutrition and security in infancy would establish secure attachment relationship with their children. These secure attached children could regulate their emotion and behaviors better than their insecure counterparts, and thus, would willingly cooperate while encountering maternal requests and prohibitions in later development. It should be noted that children’s urge for autonomy is booming after 2 years old. According to self-determination theory, parents should support children’s assertion for autonomy in order to attain children’s obedience and cooperation during this period. Therefore, autonomy encouragement would show developmentally appropriate influence on committed compliance and help to build reciprocal relationship between mother and child in toddlerhood. Given the above considerations, this longitudinal study was conducted to investigate whether maternal sensitivity in infancy and autonomy encouragement in toddlerhood have different impact on children’s two forms of compliant behaviors in different developmental phases. In this study, 84 infants (37 boys and 47 girls) and their mothers were recruited from local communities in Beijing and included as participants in this study. When children were 6 months old (T1), their temperaments were reported by mothers, and 4 mother-child interactions were videotaped during 1.5 hours’ home visit and further coded to obtain maternal sensitivity by Maternal Behavioral Q-Sort. When the children were 14 months old (T2), maternal sensitivity was recorded and then coded using the same procedure as T1. When the children were 25 months old (T3), maternal autonomy encouragement was indexed by a coding system that focuses on autonomy- or connectedness-oriented parenting behaviors during three interactions at home, and children’s compliant and noncompliant behaviors were coded based on the clean-up task. At T4, the children were 38 months old and were invited to visit the laboratory for 2 hours. Maternal autonomy encouragement and children’s compliance were recorded and then coded using the same procedures as T3. As hypothesized, the results indicated that maternal sensitivity in infancy was positively associated with 2-year-olds’ committed compliance at a marginally significant level and negatively associated with children’s situational compliance at 2 and 3 years old. Moreover, after taking into account continuity in children’s compliance and maternal autonomy encouragement during 2 years old to 3 years old, positive reciprocal influences were found between children’s committed compliance and maternal autonomy encouragement, but none of the cross-lagged path coefficients was found between children’s situational compliance and maternal autonomy encouragement. In summary, maternal sensitivity in infancy, as a contributor to children’s secure attachment, was found to have promotive effect on children’s committed compliance only at 2 years old but not at 3 years old. These findings suggest that when the toddlers are at an age struggling for self-achievement and self-confidence, it is important to highlight maternal autonomy encouragement as another developmentally appropriate parenting practice. Moreover, this longitudinal study further provided evidence for maternal autonomy encouragement as a positive parenting practice for cultivating children’s committed compliance during 2 to 3 years old of age. That is, during toddlerhood, mothers who encourage their child to be autonomous would find their children more cooperative and compliant, which, in turn, prompts mothers to give more autonomy to their children. Thus, by adjusting their positive parenting behaviors from sensitivity to autonomy encouragement when children are during the transition from infancy to toddlerhood, parents will exhibit positive influence on children’s committed compliance. The findings of this study suggest that if parenting practices interventions are successful at matching children’s needs in different developmental phases, this may help cultivate children’s committed compliance. That is, for the development of children’s compliance to proceed well, parents should have adequate sensitivity to their children’s needs for nutrition and security in infancy, and give their children more opportunities to regulate behaviors in daily lives with increase of need for autonomy in toddlerhood.

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    Work and happiness of the newly retired in urban China
    ZHANG Qilin; ZHOU Yimeng
    2017, 49 (4):  472-481.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00472
    Abstract ( 2369 )  

    As the Chinese population ages, there is a growing consensus that the demographic which is nearing retirement may have to return to work or delay retirement so as to confront the challenge of such an aging population. However, so far few studies have investigated the issue from the perspective of an individual's subjective well-being. This study focused on the relationship between work and happiness of the newly retired group in urban China, and it aimed to understand the relationship between the two factors. Drawing upon the activity theory, we hypothesized that work and happiness of the newly retired were positively correlated. Specifically, income, social capital, and personal attitude caused a positive mediating effect on the relationship between work and happiness, while leisure caused a negative mediating effect. To test the above hypotheses, we employed the survey data of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) in 2010. We collected a sample of 3,406 newly retired residents in urban China, including men aged from 60 to 69, and women 50 to 69 years old. The sample was distributed in 25 provinces, which excluded Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Sinkiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia and Hainan. In the questionnaire, we focused on the following battery of questions, such as work, self-reported happiness, annual income, social capital, individual attitude, amount of leisure time, and leisurely activities. We also controlled for socio-demographic factors, support of family, and personal health, etc. After conducting an independent samples t test and regression analysis, we found that the newly retired who were working were less happy than those who were retired. In other words, work and happiness were negatively correlated, which was opposite to the hypothesis. Furthermore, results of the mediation effect model suggested that leisure was a significant mediating variable, while factors such as income, social capital and personal attitude were insignificant. Thus we concluded that the negative effect of work on happiness through the loss of leisure could not be offset by the positive effects caused by the change of income, social capital and personal attitude, which demonstrated why work and happiness were negatively correlated. This study firstly constructed a theoretical framework to explain the relationship between work and happiness of the newly retired and tested the hypotheses by using multiple mediator models with a Chinese national-wide data set. The study also has several practical implications to promote the subjective well-being of the older generation who are working in a increasingly ageing society. According to these findings, the labor market needs to be improved for senior citizens, and more concern needs to be given to their social and spiritual needs.

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    Protest encounters setback: Effects of emotional reactions on participation intention in context of frustrate collective action
    YIN Rong; ZHANG Feifei; WANG Yuanyuan; ZANG Rixia
    2017, 49 (4):  482-499.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00482
    Abstract ( 1592 )  

    Like any goal-oriented behavior, collective action is accompanied by successes, setbacks, and failures, all of which are likely to cause protestors’ complex psychological reactions. Although there is a vast literature on the structural and psychological factors that mobilize collective action, little is yet known about how outcomes of collective action affect emotional experience and continued engagement. The present article focused on two emotions that seem particularly relevant in the context of frustrated collective action: anger, which is supposed to increase effort in the future, and frustration, which is supposed to result in withdrawal. Moreover, we proposed that group identity and group efficiency are two central variables in determining the intensity of emotions. Both group identity and group efficiency could be positive predictors of anger and negative predictors of frustration. Four studies were conducted to examine above-mentioned hypothesis. In study1 we tested the assumption that non-attainment of a group goal would trigger group members’ intense anger or frustration. Group identity and group efficency were manipulated to investigate the effects of these two psychological variables on participants’ emotional reactions to failure of collective action in study2 and study3. Using a longitudinal survey, study4 verified research conclusions within the background of a real event. Results indicated that when facing setbacks, participants’ feeling of anger was positively related with future action intentions, and their feeling of frustration was negatively related with future action intentions. That’s to say, in the context of frustrated collective action, anger could motive people to pursue further action, while frustration could suppress their sustaining engagement. Furthermore, the intensity of anger was positively predicted by group identity and group efficiency, and the intensity of frustration was negatively predicted by these two factors. Thus, participants who identified with the ingroup or perceived their group as efficacious were more likely to experience anger about the non-attainment of a group goal and less likely to feel frustration. The present work highlights the importance of taking into account outcomes of collective action with their associated achievement emotions, proves the hypothesis that collective action would feed back into appraisals of emotions, and fits into recent calls to develop dynamic theoretical models of collective action. It also provides a useful experimental paradigm through which researchers could study the reciprocal relations between emotions and collective action. Another important theoretical implication of this research is that it empirically investigates the motivating role of pride in the context of collective action. Future research should replicate these findings in other contexts of collective action to examine that whether these findings are generalizable, and explore when and why setback of collective action could motive people come to opt for non-normative action.

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    Taking money and environment together: The role of relative values in composite risky decision-making
    CHEN Jiaxin, HE Guibing
    2017, 49 (4):  500-512.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00500
    Abstract ( 1958 )   PDF (763KB) ( 85 )  

    Risk is one of the core attributes of environmental decision-making. Most often, the alternatives of environmental risky decision-making would involve monetary outcomes as well as environmental outcomes, triggering the tradeoff between profit seeking and environmental protection. Expected-value theory, Prospect theory, Equate-to-differentiate theory, as well as models such as MAUT, DRIFT, ITCH, however, solely focus on the decision-making process of homogeneous outcomes. Thus, it’s a novel topic in behavioral decision research to explore how individuals evaluate, integrate and make choices on composite outcomes. Given that the conflict between environmental and monetary values is one of the primary causes that leads to the antagonism of profit seeking and environment protection, the present research focused on the effect of relative values on risky decision-making of composite money-environment gains. A total of 417 college students—specifically, 206 students participated in Experiment 1, 64 in Experiment 2, and 147 in Experiment 3 — participated in the study. In Experiment 1, New Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP) and Money Ethics Scale (MES) were used to measure individual’s environmental and monetary values respectively. We inspected the effect of relative values, which was represented by the d-value of MES and NEP, on individuals’ preference in the composite risky choice task in which two options had the same expected values based on pilot study. Experiment 2 examined the role of outcome weights in the influence of relative values on composite risky decision-making. Implicit association test was used to identify relative money-oriented and environment-oriented individuals. Experiment 3 used a scrambled-words task to prime one’s monetary or environmental value orientation and explored its effect on weights allocation and composite risk preference. The results indicated that individuals with different relative values will differ in value evaluation and risk preference on the composite gains. The effect remained consistent whenever the relative values was measured by scale, implicit association test, or primed by scrambled-words task. Environment-oriented individuals tended to assign larger weights to the environmental gain in the composite than did money-oriented ones. In addition, compared to money-oriented individuals, environment-oriented individuals were more inclined to take risk in money for the sake of ensuring environmental benefits and more risk-seeking for an extra environmental improvement in the composite outcomes. Overall, the results suggested that activating and shaping decision makers’ relative values could change their risk preference in decision making of composite money-environment gains and thereby promote pro- environment choices. Furthermore, this research initiated a new decision frame in which the options expanded from homogeneous sequential outcomes to heterogeneous composite outcomes.

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    Salty food brings obesity? The effect of saltiness on calorie estimation
    ZHOU Yuanyuan, CHEN Rui, ZHENG Yuhuang
    2017, 49 (4):  513-525.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00513
    Abstract ( 4085 )   PDF (669KB) ( 136 )  

    Consumer’s calorie estimation plays an important role in food consumption choices. However, calorie estimation is often objective and biased based on many factors. One of the most important factors is saltiness. Hardly any studies exist to show the influence of saltiness on food consumption. While the association of saltiness and unhealthiness is obvious in daily life routines, it is very likely to have an effect on calorie estimation. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of saltiness on calorie estimation. We conducted four studies to examine our hypothesis. We adopted a laboratorial food taste task in study 1. Participants were randomly assigned into two groups (saltiness: strong vs. weak). They were asked to estimate the calorie content of the peanuts after eating them. The stimuli in two groups were the same except for the salt content. In order to examine the robustness of the effect among different age-groups and people from different regions, we enlarged our sampling to include young adults and elders, northerners and southerners in study 2. Participants were randomly assigned into two groups (saltiness: strong vs. weak) then they were shown a description of the type of food. Additionally, the mediating role of perceived healthiness is tested in study 2. We manipulated the healthy perception of salt in study 3 to test the mechanism indirectly. In the manipulated group, the participants were shown a report implying that salt could benefit us, while in the control group, the report showed that a smile was healthy. In study 4, we examined further the moderating role of food category as well as the mediating role of perceived healthiness in the effect of saltiness on calorie estimation with a 2 (saltiness: strong vs. weak) × 2 (food category: healthy vs. unhealthy) between subject design. Participants were randomly divided into 4 groups and showed a description of food (e.g., chips mixed with salt). In all studies, participants needed to estimate the calorie content of the food described. As predicted, we found that consumer’s estimation in calorie would significantly increase when food was saltier. The effect is robust among different age groups as well as participants from Southern China and Northern China. Nevertheless, when salt was primed to be a healthy element to our body, the increase of calorie estimation in saltier food no longer existed. Moreover, food categories played a moderating role. Consumers were more likely to overestimate the number of calories in saltier healthy food than in unhealthy ones. Furthermore, the results showed that participants perceived healthiness mediate the effect of saltiness in calorie estimation. As perceived healthiness increased, consumers’ estimation of calorie increased as well. The mediating effect existed only in healthy foods. These results enrich literature regarding calorie estimation. First, this study explored the field of taste in which it is the most related factor in food consumption. Secondly, it added the evidence that calorie estimation is irrational and easily biased due to salt itself contains zero calories. Third, we examined the perceived healthiness as a mechanism to the effect. Moreover, this study has shown some insight for companies. By making food products less salty, sales may increase not only because it may seem healthier to consumers but it may also cause consumers to underestimate the amount calorie intake.

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    Does company’s humor resolve consumer complaining: The match of humor types and relationship norms
    ZHU Huawei; ZHANG Yanyan; GONG Xuan
    2017, 49 (4):  526-538.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00526
    Abstract ( 1855 )  

    Complaints document consumers’ dissatisfaction with the products or services, which bring out overwhelmingly detrimental consequences like decreasing purchase intention and even threatening brand loyalty. The proliferation of social media further expands such undesirable communications. Therefore, how to deal with consumers’ complaining has become one of the greatest challenges for companies. Adapted to the entertainment characteristics of social media, companies are increasingly adopting humorous tactics to cope with consumer’ complaints. Previous studies have explored the effects of humor on communication from both cognitive and affective perspectives, these literatures surprisingly achieve no consistent conclusions. To be specific, there are at least two limitations in prior research. One is that most studies make no differentiation on humor design, especially on humor typology. The second is that extant research pays less attention on norms of the relationship between humor communication transmitters and receivers. Contributing new insights to existing work on the topic, the present research tackles this question by investigating the interplay of humor types and relationship norms on brand attitude. To start with, we classify humor responses into self-enhancing humor and self-deprecating humor. By the benign violation theory, these two humor complaining responses may differ in their ability to improve consumer attitude toward the brand. Building on the notion that relationship norms affect consumer behavior in various manners, we put forward that for complaints triggered by lower arousal negative emotions, self-enhancing humor is more effective in improving brand attitude of consumers under communal relationship norm. In contrast, self-deprecating humor has similar effects in improving the brand attitude of consumers under communal and exchange relationship norms. To enrich our understanding on humor, we examine the mediating role of benign appraisal based on benign violation theory. Three studies investigated the hypotheses. In the pretest, we collected 175 sellers’ responses to consumers’ complaining reviews and coded them as humorous and non-humorous. The analysis of secondary data showed that humorous responses to complaints were followed by more supplementary reviews and more positive supplementary reviews from consumers. Based on these results, study 1 aimed to provide a more robust test on the effect of different humor responses to consumer complaints. Results of the 2 humorous responses (self-enhancing humor vs. self-deprecating humor) and 2 non-humorous response (accommodative strategy vs. defensive strategy) indicated that compared to non-humorous responses, humorous responses exhibited more positive effect on consumers’ brand attitude. Study 2 examined the interactive effect of humor types and relationship norms, and also the mediating role of benign appraisal. As expected, the 2 (Humorous responses: self-enhancing humor vs. self-deprecating humor) × 2 (Relationship norms: exchange vs. communal) between-subject design showed that participants in exchange norm condition were more willing to accept self-deprecating humor as response strategies. This is not the case for those in communal norm, for whom the benefits of both self-enhancing humor and self-deprecating humor appear similar. The results further demonstrated that benign appraisal mediated the relationship between humor types and consumers’ brand attitude. The research has some theoretical contributions. First, it applies humor to company’s complaining responses, which sheds new lights on the studies of complaints management. Second, it contributes to the humor theory by differentiating humor into two types: self-enhancing humor and self-deprecating humor. Third, it deepens our understanding on humor communication by exploring the match between humor types and consumer relationship norms, which is a crucial boundary condition. The availability of and exposure to humorous responses has significantly increased with the growth of the Internet and associated digital communication platforms. Besides theoretical contributions aforementioned, our findings also provide useful implications for companies to respond to consumers’ complaining.

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    The influence of high commitment organization on employee voice behavior: A dual-process model examination
    DUAN Jinyun; SHI Jiayi; LING Bin
    2017, 49 (4):  539-553.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00539
    Abstract ( 1975 )  

    Voice behavior, one of the ways of employees' participation in making organizational decisions, is more and more significant for the development and innovation of organizations, and it attracts much attention from organizational behavior scholars. Hirschman (1970) is the person who firstly put forward the concept of voice behavior in nearly 40 years ago, and then the studies of voice behavior never stop. Gradually, organizations pay more attention than before to employee relationship with organizations. In the big data era, organizations are facing too many challenges and opportunities. In addition, many researchers have suggested that a variety of factors can influence employees' voice behaviors. High commitment work systems (or high commitment organizations) are popular in successful multinational enterprises such as Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Disney, and much research had proved that high commitment work systems could lead to more benefits for organizations. The present study is an examination that we explored roles of high commitment work system, perceived career opportunity, and job satisfaction in predicting voice behavior. We proposed the following hypothesis: (1) High commitment work system has positive effect on employee speaking-up. (2) High commitment work system has positive effect on speaking-out. (3) High commitment work system has positive effect on perceived career opportunity. (4) Perceived career opportunity mediates the relationship between high commitment work system and employee speaking-up. (5) High commitment work system has positive effect on job satisfaction. (6) Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between high commitment work system and employee speaking-out. (7) Performance moderates the relationship between perceived career opportunity and employee speaking-up. (8) Interpersonal relationship moderates the relationship between job satisfaction and employee speaking-out. The data consists of 223 surveys' responses from 36 organizations. We analyzed the data by using Mplus and SPSS, and the results showed that: (1) High commitment work system has positive effect on voice behavior, including employee speaking-up and speaking-out. (2) Perceived career opportunity mediates the relationship between high commitment work system and employee speaking-up; and job satisfaction mediates the relationship between high commitment work system and employee speaking-out. (3) Employee performance moderates the relationship between perceived career opportunity and employee speaking-up; it also moderates the ‘high commitment work system-perceived career opportunity-employee speaking-up’ linkage. (4) Interpersonal relationship moderates the relationship between job satisfaction and speaking-out; it also moderates the ‘high commitment work system-job satisfaction and-employee speaking-out’ linkage. Implications, limitations and future directions of these findings are discussed as well.

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    A microhistory of psychology in letters: What happened to I. Huang’s research reports on the size-weight illusion?
    YAN Shu-Chang; GAO Zhipeng
    2017, 49 (4):  554-568.  doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2017.00554
    Abstract ( 992 )  

    In the recent development of history and sociology of science, peer review practice has been scrutinized. However, historians have not paid any attention to this important topic in the history of Chinese psychology. Primarily based on thirteen recently discovered letter correspondences among leading scholars such as I. Huang, Siegen K. Chou, and Wu Youxun, this paper studies the complicated stories behind I. Huang’s two publications on the size-weight illusion using a microhistory approach. I. Huang (1903-1944) was an important Chinese psychologist who received trainings in child psychology and Gestalt psychology from Arnold Gesell and Kurt Koffka in the USA. A few years after returning to China, Huang’s research was severely impeded by the Sino-Japanese War, poverty, and terminal cancer. Nonetheless, Huang persevered in conducting research in hopes of delivering two research reports to international colleagues. Unexpectedly, in 1941 and again in 1943, the only two state-run international outlets both invited the same reviewer, Wang Jingxi, a physiological psychologist heading the Psychology Institute of Academia Sinica, who kept criticizing Huang’s reports. Unconvinced by Wang’s criticisms, Huang wrote letters to the editors in defense of his reports as well to his old classmate and colleague, psychologist Siegen K. Chou, for support. These correspondences discussed a number of core issues in the peer review practice: evaluation criteria, the composition and qualifications of reviewer (s), dispute resolution, and institutional and social factors that shape research activities. For example, various evaluation criteria – originality, theoretical contribution, methodological rigor, sample size, experimenter effects, the suitability of the statistics used, replicability, referencing, and language style – were brought up and discussed. In Huang’s view, Wang nitpicked about language style while downplaying other more important criteria, failed to appreciate that high reliability and statistical significance can overcome the limitation of the small sample size, and did not possess appropriate expertise to evaluate his research. When Wang criticized Huang’s study as repetitive of extant literature, Huang argued, first, that successful replication is not entirely useless, and, moreover, that his research was mainly aimed at theoretical integration rather than empirical findings. Huang admitted that his reports did indeed have certain shortcomings but argued that the wartime scarcity of literature and research equipment had made these inevitable. For instance, such scarcity had led to Huang’s lack of awareness of extant literature resembling his independent theoretical innovation. In order to resolve the disagreements, Huang contended that his methodological and language choices were no different than those of authoritative psychologists. When Huang called upon Siegen K. Chou to mediate the dispute, Chou delicately voiced his support of Huang, his intimate friend and colleague, while paying due respect to Wang, the leading figure in Chinese psychology. Chou echoed Huang’s proposal of recruiting additional reviewers, and offered further suggestions to improve the peer review process. Finally, Huang refused the two state-run outlets’ sympathetic offers of acceptance of the articles along with remuneration. He instead submitted the articles to The Journal of General Psychology based in the USA. Unfortunately, Huang soon passed away in extraordinary hardship before his articles were published. It is worth noting that the published papers include editorial footnotes about their having been accepted by Arnold Gesell, who deeply respected and mourned his former student.

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