Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Categorical perception (CP) effect indicates that people are faster and more accurately at discriminating between two colors from different categories than two colors from the same category, even when between- and within-category chromatic separation sizes are equated. CP effect is an important evidence for the controversy between Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the Universal Evolution theory (UE). Some studies demonstrated that CP is language-driven. They found that CP is left-lateralized and is disrupted by verbal, but not by nonverbal interference task. Moreover, the language-driven CP also got support from the cross-language researches and neurophysiological studies. However, other studies proved the existence of bilateral CP effects and CP effect in pre-linguistic infants. In recent researches, there is a third perspective that CP effect results from both innate mechanism and language-driven mechanism. Evidences supporting language-driven CP, innate CP and the compromised viewpoint can be summarized to explore the mechanism of color CP and the effects of language. Further research should focus on the interaction between perception system and concept system.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Music has a significant and far-reaching impact on human society. Archaeological evidence shows that music first emerged at least 3.5 billion years (Paleolithic Period) ago. Such evidence is an important indication that humans have the advanced capacity to process complex auditory information. Musicology has gradually formed a relatively complete theoretical system. However, it still has several fundamental problems in the theory and practice of modern music, such as the rationale for simultaneous consonance. The core of this problem is how our brain possesses musical chords composed of several tones and why some tone combinations sound relatively pleasant (consonance) while others sound unpleasant (dissonance). This question has fascinated scholars since the ancient Greeks. Physicists have been trying to find answers to the differences between acoustic features of consonance and dissonance harmony. Biologists argue that consonance perception is the basic emotional experience evoked by sound events in the auditory system. Psychologists are more inclined to examine whether musical consonance perception is nature or nurture. Such different content of disciplines can be summarized from three perspectives: 1) Emphasize the physical acoustics of musical stimulation. It is considered that certain acoustic characteristics cause a particular chord to be perceived as consonant, for instance, the simplicity of the fundamental frequency ratios of combined tones. Therefore, many theoretical explanations of musical consonance in mathematical physics had been advocated. 2) Emphasize the physiological or psychological basis of music processing, holding the sense of consonance is the basic emotional experience. For example, Hermann von Helmholtz proposed that the roughness (dissonant experience) is often generated by the dissonant intervals which contain frequency components that are too closely spaced to be resolved by the auditory system. Therefore, many biologists advocate for using physiological acoustics and psychoacoustics methods to reveal this universal processing mechanism. Both of the two theories consider the perception of music consonance is an innate ability of human being. 3) Emphasize the roles of culture aspects, arguing the musical cultural exposure and music training significantly affect consonance perception. This article reviews these empirical researches from various disciplines to analyze the basis of musical consonance and to systematically sorts out the theoretical debates going on for centuries. We also proposed that nature and nurture interact to shape how we experience musical consonance. Although musical consonance has been researched mainly using western theoretical perspectives, studying musical consonance in Chinese traditional music culture is urgently needed. Music is an advanced activity of human cognition and one of the universal ways of emotional expression in life. As the core element connecting music and emotion, the rationale for simultaneous consonance is still unsolved. We hope our work will facilitate further empirical research on musical consonance, especially in Chinese traditional music culture.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： According to linguistic relevance hypothesis (LRH), people have the ability to categorize the world that they have experienced, influenced by language and culture. Thus, researchers who agree with LRH argued that people with different language organizing experiences should have different world schemas.Some relevant arguments came from research on the relationship between color word and color cognition: color perception should be influenced by the physical properties of the light wave and the biological characteristics of the human eye, and also by language and culture. Although there is no clear boundary among the various visible light–waves from red to violet at the perceptual level, the continuous spectrum is divided into different color regions. In the literature, a “color category perception effect” was proposed that people were more likely to distinguish colors from different colors than those that landed in the same area. However, it has still lacked of discussions on the essential mechanism of this effect. Namely, it is still not clear whether this effect is a perceptual phenomenon or cultural phenomenon (i.e., effects from language application and language labels). Using perceptual task (Experiment 1) and classification tasks containing memory (Experiment 2 and 3), assumption that language application and language labels affect color categorizing was tested in the present study. In Chinese, there are clear and distinct language labels for colors RED, PURPLE, BLUE, and GREEN in Chinese, but intensities of relevance between RED and PURPLE and between BLUE and GREEN are different in everyday expressions (language application): connection of the mental conception (conceptual connection) between RED and PURPLE is much closer than those between BLUE and GREEN. With the boundary colors of the “red–purple” color pair (RGB: 255, 0, 255) and the “blue–green” color pair (RGB: 0, 255, 255) as base points, a vertical demarcation line was drawn on the RGB chromatography. Four color blocks of different lightness saturation levels were randomly selected, upon which two colors on both the left and right sides of the boundary were selected respectively. The distance between two neighboring color blocks (including two neighboring colors that are on either side of the color boundary) is equal on the chromatography. In Experiment 1, three colors that have equal optical range constitute one set of experimental material. Participants were asked to judge as quickly and as accurately as possible whether the left or the right color block looked more similar to the middle one, and to press the corresponding button on a response box. 30 college students from the Han nationality participated in the experiment. In Experiment 2, materials were identical to Experiment 1 and 44 college students from the Han nationality were instructed to remember the colors and to identify as quickly and as accurately as possible whether the following colors belong to the left or to the right of the color pair, and to press the corresponding button on a response box.In Experiment 3, using identical materials, 44 participants were asked to judge as quickly and as accurately as possible whether the left or the right color looked more similar to the standard one, and to press the corresponding button on a response box. Results showed that intensity of conceptual connection effect was not involved in perception task, but in classification tasks and recognition tasks. Conceptual connection, rather than language labels, which might be triggered by comparison, was the main reason that affected performances of classification. According to the present findings, we believe that language labels and conceptual connection are both intermediate in color processing, and coding of colors in memory has a direct function in this process.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Kinship words are those that represent each relative in the language system. These words contain a variety of information about genetics, sociology, and culture. Therefore, the study of these words has always been a very popular topic in many research fields.According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), people acquire abstract and difficult concepts by connecting them with some concrete and simple representations. Spatial metaphors are the most basic and universal type of metaphor, which means that spatial concepts often serve as the source domain to help people understand other abstract concepts better. Recent studies have shown that the multidimensional spatial representation of different semantic concepts of Chinese kinship words are psychologically real.Thus far, only a few studies have explored the container metaphorical representations of the nature of the kinship (blood relation vs relation by marriage). A past study has shown that the embodied kinship type might be explained through an inside-outside spatial relation. To be specific, blood kinship inside, marriage kinship outside. Nevertheless, whether the process of kinship automatically activates the inside-outside spatial concept or otherwise has not been explored. Furthermore, the influence of linguistic symbol has not been fully considered in the literature. Some Chinese blood kinship words feature a linguistic symbol “外,” which means “outside” in English, whereas some marriage kinship words contain the linguistic symbol “内,” which means inside. Whether these symbols would influence the association between kinship words and the inside-outside spatial concept thus requires further research. Three experiments were carried out to investigate whether and how the linguistic symbol changed the container metaphorical representation of the embodied relation type. Experiment 1 used a parallel spatial Stroop paradigm. Results showed that the marriage kinship words containing the linguistic symbol “内” have a higher error rate when presenting outside a circle. Moreover, the symbol “外” changed the container metaphorical representations of blood kinship words to react faster when presented outside a circle. Experiment 2 used a spatial attention orientation paradigm, and the results showed that both “内” and “外” changed the direction of the original metaphor schema of the type of kinship words. Experiment 3 actually indicated that activating the inside-outside schema changed how people recognized Chinese kinship words containing the spatial linguistic. The results of Experiment also indicate that the process of Chinese kinship words is serial.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Several components in phonogram characters, such as ‘女’, ‘口’ and ‘马’, can be phonetic radical in the phonetic components’ location or semantic radical in the semantic components’ location. We call these components Chinese wordable components (or Chinese wordable radical), and such components must be a single Chinese character. The location and function of Chinese wordable components vary in Chinese characters. In theory, each wordable components can appear in different parts of Chinese characters. However, the same component appears in different locations of Chinese characters with different characterisation characteristics because of the assumption that the location of components follows orthographic rules, and the frequency of the components’ location is different. However, previous studies have failed to distinguish between components’ location and the frequency of components in various locations and did not explore the effects of wordable components in different locations.This study used the component priming paradigm, which can effectively explore the effect of components’ location on the cognition of Chinese characters. With regard to components that can appear in different locations of Chinese characters, this study investigated the roles of different parts in Chinese character recognition by matching the usage frequency of Chinese characters (all high-frequency characters), stroke numbers and other factors in the component priming paradigm. Experiment 1 adopted the component priming paradigm to investigate the function of wordable components in different locations in Chinese character recognition. The priming stimuli were wordable components of three locations (primary semantic radical, secondary semantic radical and phonetic radical). The target stimuli were Chinese characters that contained these wordable components in three locations. Subjects were asked to identify the true and false characters of the target Chinese characters. Experiment 2 adopted component priming and visual search paradigms to investigate the function of wordable components in different locations. The priming stimuli were similar to those in Experiment 1. The target stimuli were square pictures that contained four Chinese characters. Subjects were asked to determine the presence of true and false characters in the picture, and eye movement data were recorded.The following points were gathered from the results. Firstly, the priming effect of the wordable component in the phonetic radical’s location was stronger than that in the semantic radical’s location. Secondly, when the wordable components were applied as semantic radical, they only appeared in the primary semantic radical’s location rather than in the secondary semantic radical’s location. Lastly, the wordable components in the phonetic radical’s location promoted not only the cognition of Chinese characters containing the phonetic radical’s location components but also the cognition of Chinese characters containing the primary semantic radical’s location components. However, they hindered the cognition of Chinese characters containing the secondary semantic radical’s location components. When priming components appeared in the secondary semantic radical’s location, they had no effect on the Chinese characters containing related components.The study showed that in Chinese character cognition, the effect of component location includes the dual effect of the components’ location and the frequency of the components’ location.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) refers to the phenomenon, in which individuals may forget related information during the retrieval process whenever they try to remember something. Studies have shown that “self-reference” is one of the boundary conditions of RIF in the Western cultural context, indicating that RIF is only eliminated when the recalled materials are related to self-concept (known as the “self-referential effect”). In the Chinese culture, however, RIF was observed under the conditions of self-reference and maternal reference. The Mosuo people are raised in a matrilineal society, in which they are familiar with their mothers and aunts to the same extent. Such people consider their aunts and natural mothers as equally important. Conversely, the Han is a patriarchal society that differs considerably from the orientation of the Mosuo’s. This study aimed to explore the influence of the culture and language of the Mosuo and Han on their self-cognition and processing, especially the influence of their aunts on their self-conception.Tested participants included 131 Mosuo and 126 Han from Yunnan’s Ninglang District. The experiment had a 2 (Nationality: the Mosuo, the Han) × 4 (Conditions: Self-reference, Mother-reference, Aunt-reference, Other-reference) × 3 (Retrieval Factor: Rp+, Rp-, or Nrp items) design. Nationality and condition were manipulated as between-subject factors, and the retrieval factor was manipulated as a within-subject factor. The study had four phases. (1) Study phase: Participants were shown Chinese characters on the monitor, with a series of 32 category exemplars in random order. They were instructed to memorize the exemplars while associating them with the paired category. (2) Retrieval-practice phase: Here, participants were sequentially presented with word-pair forms of eight cues that could probe their memory. Each cue comprised a category name and a first initial character of an exemplar. Participants were asked to recall the target exemplar in the written form in response to each cue. (3) Distractor phase: Participants were requested to perform mathematical operations within three minutes. (4) Final test phase: Participants were required to produce a written recall of as many exemplars as possible in response to each presented category name.Results indicated that (1) in the Mosuo culture context, RIF was not observed under self-referential, mother-referential, and aunt-referential encoding, and was found only for other-referential encoding, and (2) for Han participants, RIF was observed in the aunt-referential and the other-referential encoding, but not in the self-referential and mother-referential encoding. The present findings demonstrate that, first, in the Han and Mosuo cultures, self-reference and maternal reference are the key factors that cause RIF. Second, in the Mosuo culture, aunt-reference is another key factor that influences RIF aside from self-reference and maternal reference. Aunts who are integrated in the self-concept of the Mosuo people are also important to such individuals. Finally, (3) language and culture are crucial factors of self-formation and development.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： In the study of phonetic characters, whether the lexical grammatical information can be independently activated through speech comprehension or production has been a controversial topic. In recent years, increasing evidence has shown that grammar exists independently from semantics and phonetics. Chinese characters are the only ideograms in the world. Chinese do not emphasize the grammatical categories of words, like phonetic characters, because Chinese words can represent a variety of word classes without changing the pronunciation and orthography. The complicated grammatical features of Chinese words make them difficult to be explored, but they still arouse researchers’ interest. Researchers have examined the grammatical activation of Chinese from the perspectives of sentence context, idioms, phrases, and Chinese words. Previous studies have also examined the grammatical features of Chinese words at or beyond the level of words. Accordingly, the present research extended the previous studies through the sub-lexical pathway. Semantic radicals are the ideographic components and concentrated embodiment of Chinese characters. Relevant statistics and studies have shown that semantic radicals also represent grammar. On the basis of these studies, the present work used the semantic radical priming paradigm to investigate the grammatical activation and related influencing factors of Chinese words from the sub-lexical processing level. Experiment 1 includes two small experiments, which examined whether the activation of the semantic radical’s grammatical information under the radical priming paradigm was specific to the task. Experiments 1a and 1b adopted a 2 (semantic radical priming/control priming) × 2 (G+ Chinese characters/G- Chinese characters) two-factor within-subject design. Experiment 1a used lexical decision as the reaction task, whereas Experiment 1b replaced it with grammatical classification. The comparison of results indicate that under the grammatical classification task, the grammatical information of semantic radicals was easier to activate. The discovery also set the foundation for the selection of the reaction tasks for Experiment 2. Experiment 2 further investigated the influence of family size and grammatical consistency on the activation of the semantic radical’s grammatical information. Experiment 2a adopted a 2 (large family size/small family size) × 2 (G+ Chinese characters/G- Chinese characters) two-factor within-subject design to examine the influence of family size on the syntax activation of semantic radicals. The results of this experiment discovered the advantages of a big family. Experiment 2b replaced the family size factor with grammatical consistency, and the results also revealed the advantages of high grammatical consistency. The overall results show that grammatical information can be activated at the sub-lexical level of Chinese words and the semantic radical marks the grammatical information. However, the activation of the semantic radical’s grammatical information is specific to the task. When the task is directly targeted to the grammar of the characters, the grammatical information can be easily activated. Family size and grammatical consistency are important factors that affect the activation of the semantic radical’s grammatical information. The results further manifest the promotion effect of a large family size and high grammatical consistency.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Categorical perception (CP) effect indicates that people are faster and more accurately at discriminating between two colors from different categories than two colors from the same category, even when between- and within-category chromatic separation sizes are equated. CP effect is an important evidence for the controversy between Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the Universal Evolution theory (UE). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that CP is language-driven. They found that CP is left-lateralized and is disrupted by verbal, but not by nonverbal interference task. Moreover, the language-driven CP also got support from cross-language researches and neurophysiological studies. However, the Universal Evolution theory (UE) holds that CP effect results from universal focal colors and is independent from language. The current study presented three experiments that replicated and extended the earlier studies by using the same task but different participants. We compared green-blue discrimination of Chinese Naxi ethnic who speaks Naxi language and Chinese Han ethnic who speaks Mandarin. The two ethnics have different semantic boundaries of green-blue. There are three experiments in the current study. In experiment 1, Participants were given a visual search task that required them to detect a single target color among 11 identical distracters. The stimuli were two colors G1 and G2 from green category (Munsell 7.5G and 7.5BG) and two colors B1 and B2 from blue category (Munsell 2.5BG and 2.5B). Four colors formed a graded series from green to blue, with the green-blue boundary falling between G2 and B1. In the visual search task, each stimulus display consisted of a ring of colored squares surrounding a central fixation marker. All squares were of the same color except the target. Participants were asked to press “F” or “J” key as soon and correctly as possible to indicate whether the target was in the left or right side of the circle. Experiment 2 was to ensure that the difference between the two groups in experiment 1 was not due to the slow reaction of the Naxi people to all colors. In experiment 3 block 1, participants were asked to finish green-blue visual search task and nonverbal interference task at the same time, and visual search task and verbal interference task in block 2. Reaction time and accuracy of the visual search task showed that: 1) It was more difficult for the Naxi speakers, who always use the same word to express green and blue, to discriminate green and blue than the Mandarin speakers; 2) The categorical perception (CP) effect was found both in Naxi and Mandarin speakers. CP of Naxi speakers is probably related to their using similar-color objects to describe different colors in green-blue category; 3) The CP of Naxi and Mandarin speakers are both significant in the right visual field (RVF) and the left visual field (LVF). Moreover, the CP in the LVF was disrupted by the secondary task that engaged spatial working memory. Both the CP in the LVF and the CP in the RVF was disrupted by the verbal interference task. These results indicate that the CP in the LVF is related to the fact that Naxi and Mandarin language activates the right hemisphere. All the findings reported here provide a more complex possible explanation of CP. Firstly, Naxi speakers were significantly more difficult to discriminate green and blue than Mandarin speakers. It supports the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language affects color perception. Secondly, CP appeared notably both in Naxi speakers and Mandarin speakers. It showed the online language effect on color perception, and supported universal category perception as well. Thirdly, CP was found both in the RVF and LVF. Moreover, CP in the LVF was disrupted by the pattern-memory task, and CP in the LVF and RVF were both disrupted by the verbal task. The results support the perspective combining the Universal Evolution theory (UE) and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Recent approaches on embodied cognition and theories of semantic and conceptual “grounding” have emphasized the role of perceptual and motor skills in language comprehension and action understanding. Evidence on the role of sensorimotor information in language processing has been obtained from behavioral and neuroimaging studies. These findings have been taken as a support for the claim that language is understood through sensorimotor simulations of actions and events being described. The theory on Perceptual Symbol Systems holds that the sensorimotor system participates in the language comprehension process, which is an empirical simulation of a situation through a series of complex language cues. Chinese characters may show different characteristics from English words because semantic radicals are linked with the meaning of these characters. These semantic radicals may affect the embodied effect of Chinese characters.In the study, authors used single-character body action verbs in Chinese as experimental materials. Body action verbs are words that use body parts to perform mechanical movements. The directional semantic feature of body action verbs reflects the direction of physical space and can be perceived. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of semantic direction on the spatial judgment of an arrow direction in the motion channel under whole word priming. The repeated measurement design of 2 (Chinese character embodied direction: up/down) × 2 (arrow direction: up/down) was adopted. Thirty-five participants volunteered in this study. Experiment 2 investigated the influence of semantic orientation on the spatial judgment of letter orientation in visual channels under whole word initiation. The repeated measurement design of 2 (Chinese character direction: up/down) × 2 (letter position: up/down) design was used. Thirty-eight participants took part in this experiment. Experiment 3 investigated the embodied simulation of the semantic radical and whole character under the radical priming paradigm. Chinese body action verbs formed by semantic radicals “扌” and “?” were used as experimental materials. A within-subject design of 2 (priming type: semantic radical’s priming/control priming) × 3 (character type: consistent/inconsistent) × 3 (SOA: 43 ms/72 ms/243 ms) was used. Before the behavioral experiment, the participants were asked to hold their hands up for one minute to reinforce the bodybuilding experience of having their hands above and their feet below. Character type shows the direction and orientation between the character and its semantic radical. Consistent character type means that the character and its semantic radical have a similar direction and orientation. For example, the semantic radical “?” means “foot, ” which is below the body. Thus, “蹲” is a consistent character, whereas “跳” is an inconsistent character.Results suggest the following: (1) When Chinese characters are in a downward semantic direction, the downward arrow is judged faster than the upward arrow. When characters are in an upward semantic direction, the direction of the arrow has a null effect. (2) Chinese characters with upward semantic movement can be used to recognize upper letters more quickly and characters with downward semantic movement can be used to recognize lower letters more quickly. (3) In the middle and late stages of Chinese character processing, the response of consistent and inconsistent Chinese characters is significantly different, indicating that the semantic radical is activated from the middle stage of the Chinese character processing until the late stage.The present findings demonstrate the following: (1) An action-character compatibility effect is present in Chinese body movement verbs in the movement and visual channels. Understanding Chinese body movement verbs is a cross-channel embodied simulation process. (2) The semantic radical activation of the phonogram starts from the middle stage to the late stage of Chinese body action verb processing. A semantic understanding of Chinese body action verbs has an embodied simulation at the whole character and component (semantic radical) levels.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Metaphors are among cognitive styles, which refer to the construction of psychological ideas using other concepts. The core of our conceptual system is derived directly from our experience of perception, physical movement, and social characteristics. Embodied philosophy is the philosophical foundation of cognitive linguistics and closely related to the study of metaphors. In terms of spatial metaphors, “up” is generally believed to represent morality, enthusiasm, and high status, while “down” represents immorality, negativity, and low status. With regard to weight metaphors, “heavy” generally denotes high authority and more respect, while “light” depicts low authority and less importance. Kinship is one of the social relationships formed on the basis of blood relations and marriage. In every language, numerous words represent kingship, which are called kinship words. The purpose of this study is to explore whether kinship words can be represented by concepts of “up-down” and “heavy-light” and whether gender culture has an impact on the spatial and weight metaphors of kinship words.Three experiments are conducted in this study, with over 100 volunteer participants for each experiment, involving 30 individuals from three nationality groups. All the participants are from Yunnan Province, with the same academic qualifications but different cultural backgrounds. The kinship words in the materials are paired with gender from the same generation, such as “father-mother”, “brother-sister”, and “son-daughter”. In Experiment 1, a pair of kinship words is presented on the screen vertically, while the participants are asked to judge whether both words are kinship words. In Experiment 2, a pair of kinship words is presented on the screen horizontally before a picture of a balance is shown, and the participants are asked to judge the tilt direction of the balance. In Experiment 3, a picture of a balance appears before a pair of kinship words is presented, and the participants are asked to judge the position of the male/female words.Studies have shown that (1) the Bai, Yi, and Mosuo people are influenced by the concept of seniority when processing kinship words, which is closely related to the tradition of showing respect and love to elders. (2) Kinship words could be represented by “up-down” and “heavy-light” concepts, with “up/heavy” representing high power and more respect and “down/light” representing low power and less importance. (3) Cultural schema affects the metaphorical representation of kinship concepts. Moreover, gender culture has an influence on the spatial space and metaphor of kinship words. Metaphorical consistency between male and “up/heavy” among the Yi people and between female and “up/heavy” among the Mosuo people is observed, whereas male/female concepts are not significantly related to “up/down” and “heavy/light” concepts among the Bai people.Most previous studies on kinship words have studied spatial metaphors and mainly focused on the structure of kinship words. The present study considers spatial and weight metaphors and is innovative in terms of gender culture perspectives. We find that the gender concepts of the three nationalities have different connections with spatial and weight concepts, which demonstrates the impact of gender culture on cognition.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Lying is a common social behavior. When people lie, they are affected by many factors, such as cognitive load and nervousness. Therefore, people act differently when they are lying. Similar to lying, there are also differences in cognitive load and emotions when people speak their native language or a foreign language. When people are speaking a foreign language, the cognitive load and foreign language anxiety are greater than speaking their native language, especially for those with lower proficiency. Therefore, these factors might influence or interact with lying in speaking native or foreign languages. Former studies which observed skin conductance and pupil size have found that comparing to lying in their native language, there are more lying features when people lie in a foreign language. The current study aims to explore the differences in neural mechanism between Chinese-English bilinguals lying in Chinese and English, and focuses on the effects of two specific factors: cognitive load and emotion.The study of 34 Chinese-English bilinguals adopted the misstatement paradigm. During the experiment, participants were required to describe the pictures in Chinese and English on the screen according to the “truth” or “lie” instructions. The accuracy and EEG data were collected for analysis. Two ERP components were found in the study: P200 and CNV (Contingent Negative Variation). P200 is a positive potential that appears at around 200 ms after the stimulus is presented, and is often considered related with emotional arousal. In this study, P200 was used as an indicator for early anxiety. Larger P200 indicates greater anxiety. CNV occurs around 1000 ~ 1500 ms after the emergence stimulation. Larger CNV reflects heavier cognitive load and can be an indicator of lying. By observing P200 and CNV, the results are as follow: (1) Comparing with speaking Chinese, there was a lager P200 when Chinese-English bilinguals speak English, which indicated that speaking a foreign language aroused anxiety; (2) The P200s were not significantly different when lying and telling truth in English. However, the P200s were significantly different when lying and telling truth in Chinese, which indicated that comparing with speaking the native language, the tension induced by lying is not as great as speaking a foreign language; (3) Chinese-English bilinguals showed greater CNV when lying than telling truth, which suggested that lying contained heavier cognitive load than telling truth; (4) There was a larger CNV when Chinese-English bilinguals lied in English than in Chinese, which indicated that lying in a foreign language brought heavier cognitive load; (5) The results of correlation analysis showed that English proficiency was an important variable that affected those differences when lying in both native and foreign languages. The current study suggested that both cognitive load and emotion affected lying behavior in either the native or foreign language. Lying brings heavier cognitive load than telling truth, and lying in a foreign language brings heavier cognitive load than in the native language. Moreover, people are more anxious when speaking a foreign language than their native language, no matter when they are lying or telling truth. Foreign language anxiety takes so much cognitive load that the tension caused by lying is not significant when people lie in foreign language. Further research is suggested focusing more on the contribution and interactions of the factors which have effects on the process.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Humans are quintessentially social, yet much of cognitive psychology has focused on the individual, in individual settings. The literature on joint action is one of the most prominent exceptions. Joint-action research studies the sociality of our mental representations by examining how the tasks of other people around us affect our own task performance. Executive functions are a family of general-purpose cognitive processes that allow us to regulate cognition. The main executive functions are inhibition, shifting, and updating of working memory. Growing evidence suggests that executive functions can be automatically activated in non-social contexts as well as social ones. It is necessary to test whether people automatically engage in doing the tasks their partners do even when it requires executive functions. The Xibe is one of the ethnic groups in China, mainly inhabits Liaoning, Jilin, and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The “westward migration” separated the Xibe in Xinjiang and Northeast China and embarked on different development paths. Xibe living in Xinjiang is in a multilingual culture, which not only retains the Xibe language (part of the Tungus-Manchu group of the Altaic phylum), but also absorbs the language and culture of the surrounding ethnic groups, such as the Uigur and Kazak. While the Northeast Xibe merges with the Han ethnic group and gradually loses their own ethnic culture and language. The present study investigates the influence of multi-language and multi-culture on social cognitive function, using a task-switching paradigm to examine one of the core executive functions, which is switching. In Experiment 1, the classical cognitive switching task was conducted to compare cognitive flexibility between the Xingjiang Xibe and the Northeast Xibe. Participants performed either a parity task (odd or even) or a magnitude task (bigger or smaller than 5), according to the frame around the number (diamond or square). The results showed that Xingjiang Xibe have smaller switch costs in the RT measure and greater accuracy. Experiment 2 employed socially relevant stimuli (faces) to tap into the switching flexibility between 2 types of categories (age and gender) and replicated the cognitive benefits of Xingjiang Xibe. These results showed that Xingjiang Xibe has the switching flexibility advantage in individual setting. Experiment 3 compared the switching flexibility of Xingjiang and Northeast Xibe using task-switching paradigm. A switching task was distributed between two participants. Each participant performed only one of the tasks, and did nothing on the trials of the other. In the social condition, two participants shared a computer. Each performed his task on his trials, and did nothing on the trials of the other participant. In the solo (control) condition, there was only one participant, who passively viewed the stimuli when it was not his turn. There were evident switch costs in the social condition and Xingjiang Xibe showed bigger switch costs compared with the Northeast Xibe, which meant they were more automatically engaged in this joint-action situation. It might be argued that, in the social condition, participants were distracted by the presence of a partner, or that they were sometimes uncertain about whose turn it was, and these factors lowered their efficiency. These costs are referred as turn-taking costs. In order to address this issue, Experiment 4 isolated turn-taking costs from task-switching costs by adding a condition in which two participants took turns, but they performed an identical task. This condition didn’t result in switch costs, indicating that costs in Experiment 3 should be interpreted as switching costs. Experiment 5 applied eye test to further prove that Xingjiang Xibe had strong individual tendency to understand the others’ intentions. In summary, the results showed that multilingualism and multiculturalism have different effects on cognitive switching function, positive effect in individual context and negative effect in social context. The results of this study provide important inspiration for the construction of a multi-ethnic country.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Uyghur is a specific alphabetic language that differs from Chinese. Thus, mastering the Chinese ambiguity words, such as homonyms, homonyms, and heteronyms, is challenging for Uyghur students. To understand the correct meaning of ambiguity words, one has to suppress irrelevant meanings according to the context. Chinese is a high-context language, where as Uyghur is a low-context language. Thus, the present study investigates the effect of contextual facilitation for the Uyghur and Han nationalities and compares the differences in the inhibitory effect during lexical ambiguity resolution. This study conducted a semantic decision task to investigate lexical ambiguity resolution in 36 Uyghur and 32 Han college students. Twenty-five homonymous ambiguity words with dominant and subordinate meanings were selected as final materials. Eight sentences and two target words were formed in two conditions. In the contextual facilitation condition, four sentences were made and ended with the same ambiguity word. Half of the sentences were biased to the subordinate or ordinate meaning, but the others were unbiased to neither meaning. The target words were semantically related to the ordinary or subordinate meaning of the ambiguity word. In this condition, all target words were semantically consistent with the ambiguity word in each sentence. In the inhibitory condition, two sentences were ended with the ambiguity word; one was biased to the ordinary meaning, and the other was biased to the subordinate meaning. The other two sentences without ambiguity were only different from the former two sentences on the last ambiguity word. The target words were the same with the context facilitation condition but were not semantically consistent with the last words. The participants were asked to decide whether the target words were semantically consistent with the ambiguity words. Thus, the right answers in the facilitation condition were all “yes” and the right answers in the inhibitory condition were all “no”. The SOA of ambiguity and target words is 200 ms in Experiment 1 and 1000 ms in Experiment 2. Results indicated a contextual facilitation effect in Han and Uyghur students in two SOAs, and the size of the effect for the Han students was significantly bigger than that of the Uyghur students in 200 ms. The inhibitory reaction effect was found in two SOAs for the Han students but only found in 1000 ms for Uyghur students. In lexical ambiguity resolution, the ability to extract the accurate meaning and suppress the irrelevant meaning according to the context is important. According to the context, the Uyghur students could activate accurate and irrelevant meanings in the sentence but could not immediately reject the irrelative meaning. The Uyghur students took a long time to inhibit the improper meaning of the ambiguity words.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： As a common ingroup, the Chinese nation community has unique characteristics. First, its properties are complex. Second, as an entity, it has various components. However, previous studies focused more on macro analysis, theoretical generalizations, and policy interpretations and less on microscopic arguments and empirical studies. Therefore, an empirical study on the identity of the Chinese nation community must be carried out. This study employs senior high school students who grew up in Tibetan areas and are current hinterland senior high school students to participate in three experiments. The most special characteristic of Tibetan students is their experiences on cross-ethnic communication and cross-cultural life. In Experiment 1, 50 Tibetan students in hinterland senior high school were employed as subjects. The relationship of the container and the community for the Chinese nation was investigated through the Spatial Stroop Paradigm. In Experiment 2, 50 Tibetan students were also employed as subjects. The Emotional Stroop Paradigm was used to explore the attitude of Tibetan students toward domestic and foreign ethnic groups. In Experiment 3, 320 Tibetan students were employed. Situational tasks of Money Helps and Time Helps were used to test the willingness to help someone from the domestic ethnic group or foreign ethnic group. Experiment 1 exhibited that the reaction time was significantly shorter when a domestic name appeared in the circle or a foreign name appeared outside the circle, which revealed that Tibetan students constructed the community for the Chinese nation as a container, placed the domestic ethnic groups in the container, and placed the foreign ethnic groups outside the container. Experiment 2 unveiled that the judgment reaction time of the positive target word was significantly shorter when the prime word was a domestic ethnic group name, and the judgment reaction time of the negative target word was significantly shorter when the prime word was a foreign ethnic group name, indicating that Tibetan students preferred the domestic ethnic groups and prejudiced the foreign ethnic groups. Experiment 3 showed that Tibetan students donated more money and time to someone from the domestic ethnic group who needed help, signifying that Tibetan students in hinterland senior high school had a stronger willingness to help domestic ethnic groups. This study suggests that Tibetan students in hinterland senior high school with rich experience on cross-ethnic communication and cross-cultural life constructed the Community for the Chinese nation as a container, and placed domestic ethnic groups in the container. Conclusively, Tibetan students had varying attitudes and different levels of help willingness toward domestic and foreign ethnic groups.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Social perception research focused on categorization and identity, but most previous studies merely examined the intergroup relations among the perceptually evident and categorically typical groups. The intergroup attitude of the multiethnic individuals is still unclear, including their identity choices and implicit theories. Hence, this study aims to explore these issues with the offspring of interethnic unions in China. Research on mixed race showed that biracial people can flexibly switch between their racial identities, demonstrating that multiracial individuals who grew up in multicultural backgrounds were less likely to hold essentialist views of race. We therefore hypothesize that offspring of Chinese interethnic marriages would have similar implicit theories of ethnicity. Moreover, such offspring would have a less strong identification with their ethnicity and more positive attitudes toward outgroup members compared with their peers of endogamous marriages. A total of 3481 students (ages: 14.38 ± 1.03y) were selected as research participants, among these, the numbers of offspring of exogamous marriage were 1317, and the offspring of endogamous marriage were 2164. The distribution areas of the participants spreading all over the 5 province, and the ethnic types of participants including Han and 14 Chinese minorities (Mongol, Oroqen, Lahu, Dai, Wa, Blang, Maio, Bai, Yao, Dong, Zhuang, Maonan, Tibetan, Daur). The implicit theories, ethnic identity, outgroup attitude, and superordinate identity were measured by using questionnaire method. Descriptive statistics and correlation were analyzed with SPSS 25.0 and the conditional process analysis was using PROCESS 3.3 macro (in SPSS). Based on the hypotheses of Social Identity Theory, the serial mediating role of essentialism and ethnic identity between interethnic marriage types of parents (1: intermarriage, 0: intramarriage) and outgroup attitude of offsprings was investigated. Then, the mediating effect of superordinate identity between parental marriage types and offsprings’ intergroup attitudes was examined based on Common Ingroup Identity Model. Finally, we examine whether the intermarriage is a good indicator of intergroup relation. Results show that offspring of intermarriages (vs. offsprings of intramarriage) are less likely to hold ethnic essentialist beliefs and have a lower sense of their ethnic identity. However, they are reported to have more positive attitudes toward outgroups and higher interest in intergroup contact and are more likely to develop a superordinate level of identity (Chinese nation identity). For the offspring of intermarriages who have successfully built the Chinese Nation identity, the sense of community for the Chinese national identity mediates the impact of parents’ intermarriage on their intergroup attitudes. On the contrary, for those who still hold a subordinate group identity, the ethnic implicit theories (essentialism or social constructionism) and subgroup identity play the chain mediation effect of interethnic marriages on improvement in outgroup perceptions. Additionally, the offspring of intermarriages and intramarriages have more positive interethnic attitudes in ethnicity with higher interethnic marriage rates than with lower interethnic marriage rates. These results demonstrate that the interethnic marriage of parents plays a key role in shaping their children’s ethnic essentialist beliefs and subgroup identity. Moreover, the present finding supports the Common Ingroup Identity Model. The reason is that the offspring of intermarriages are likely to develop a superordinate level of identity, indicating that those multiethnic groups are more flexible in self-identity categorization. In addition, we found that the model of social cognitive theory is unsuitable to the actual ethnic relations in China. That is, the ethnic identity was positive with intergroup attitudes, suggesting that different ethnic groups have unity and harmonious intergroup relations. Finally, we found that social situational factors have an important influence on ethnic essentialist beliefs and intergroup attitudes. Ethnic groups with high levels of inter-ethnic intermarriage can hold relatively high ethnic identities and positive intergroup attitudes, vividly reflecting the pattern of diversity in the unity of the Chinese nation.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： There are three major dialects in Guangdong: Cantonese, Chaoshan, and Hakka. These dialects mainly formed during the southward migration of the Han people in the Central Plains, but they are different in language source, evolution history, and name. From the perspective of language itself, the Hakka dialect is the smallest variation of Mandarin, Cantonese medium, and Chaoshan the largest. In terms of language-variation completion time, the Hakka dialect occurred most recently, followed by Cantonese, with Chaoshan occurring the earliest. Regarding the dialect names, a morpheme of “Ke” exists in the name Hakka, which always reminds its speakers that their ancestors are from the Central Plains, while Cantonese and Chaoshan are named after each locality. An interesting question has been whether these differences among the three dialects affect the speaker’s information processing of the Central Plains group. Guangdong college students who speak only one dialect of Hakka, Cantonese, and Chaoshan were grouped according to their language background in the present study. One hundred and eighty participants took part in two experiments, 90 per experiment. In experiment 1, the group reference R/K paradigm was used to investigate whether speakers of different dialects had a different memory effect on the Central Plains group compared with that on an unrelated group. Experiment 2 adopted the “starting stroop paradigm”; that is, using different group names as the starting stimulus, and personality adjectives with different valences as target stimuli, the participants were asked to judge the color of the target stimuli. Experiment 1 found that the participants had a superior memory of their own group, but only Hakka dialect speakers experienced a group reference effect on the information processing of the Central Plains group, which resulted in a better memory effect on the Central Plains group than that on the unrelated group. The results of experiment 2 showed that the participants had the longest reaction time under the condition that their own ethnic group name was activated, but only the Hakka participants responded more slowly to the Henan ethnic group than to the unrelated ethnic group. The results of both experiments indicated that all the three dialect groups had processing advantages regarding the information of their own groups that manifested in the obvious referential effect of their own groups and the attention bias of their own information. Moreover, the Hakka participants’ cognition regarding the Central Plains group represented by “Henan people” is significantly different from that of Cantonese and Chaoshan dialect speakers. The research results suggested that language evolution affected ethnic information processing. The identity of ethnic groups with the same ancestry could be enhanced by keeping the characteristics of ancestral language completely and strengthening the relationship between dialect and ancestral language. The results have important implications for the construction of Chinese Community Consciousness.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-10-16
Abstract： Music is an advanced activity of human cognition and one of the universal ways of emotional expression in life. As the core element connecting music and emotion, the rationale for simultaneous consonance is still unsolved. The core of this problem is how our brain possesses musical chords composed of several tones and why some tone combinations sound relatively pleasant (consonance) while others sound unpleasant (dissonance). This question has fascinated scholars since the ancient Greeks. Physicists have been trying to find answers to the differences between acoustic features of consonance and dissonance harmony. Biologists argue that consonance perception is the basic emotional experience evoked by sound events in the auditory system. Psychologists are more inclined to examine whether musical consonance perception is nature or nurture. Although musical consonance has been researched mainly using western theoretical perspectives, studying musical consonance in Chinese traditional music culture is urgently needed.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-03-15
Abstract： "
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2019-07-10 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： 采用色环搜索单任务和双任务范式，考察语言中区分蓝、绿的汉族和语言中蓝、绿混用的纳西族对蓝色和绿色的辨别是否存在颜色范畴知觉效应(Categorical perception，以下简称为CP效应)。结果发现：(1)纳西族对蓝色和绿色的区分比汉族困难，体现了语言的作用；(2)语言中蓝、绿混用的纳西族与语言中区分蓝、绿的汉族都出现显著的蓝绿CP效应；(3)两民族被试的左视野的CP效应受到图形记忆次任务的显著干扰，说明左视野的 CP 效应与右脑激活有关。整个研究表明，颜色CP效应既存在普遍的知觉机制，也存在语言驱动机制，语言的作用存在直接效应。研究结果支持颜色词与颜色认知的相互作用理论。
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2019-05-20
Abstract： " Considerable research suggests that musical experience and ability are related to various cognitive abilities. One aspect of cognition that may be related to musical training is executive function (EF), which involves a set of top-down processes that regulate behavior and cognition according to task demands. To date, many studies are investigating this relationship. However, results are mixed and difficult to compare because of not only the variety of EF components examined but also the variety of tasks used to measure EF and the variety of criteria used to categorize participants as “musicians” or “non-musicians.” Moreover, most studies focus more on Western music than Chinese folk music, which has its own unique expression and distinct musical character. Dong Chorus, which is the multipart folk chorus of the Dong people in Guizhou Province, holds an important and unusual position in Chinese polyphonic folk songs. This stature is due to their splendid artistry, long history that can be textually researched, and the great influence of their vivid artistic practice, which gained the favor of numerous musicians. However, only a few scholars have studied the folk songs from the perspective of cognitive psychology or by means of experiments. In this study, we divide EFs into three core components: inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility in auditory and visual modalities. Dong musicians (n=32), Dong non-musicians (n=32), and the Han (n=32) high school students were involved in six experiments to test the effect of Dong Chorus on cognition and the existence and generality of the relationship between musical ability and EFs. Results showed that Dong musicians and non-musicians outperformed Han students in inhibitory control and memory updating in auditory and visual versions of EF tasks, but no significant difference existed among the three groups in terms of shifting, which proved the generality of cognitive advantages of Dong Chorus. Dong non-musicians outperformed Han students in inhibition and switching, which suggested the interaction between language and music. In summary, these results indicated that cognitive advantages associated with Dong Chorus are not limited to auditory processes, but they are limited to specific aspects of EF. This finding supports a process-specific (but modality-general) relationship between musical ability and nonmusical aspects of cognition. Protecting and developing the Dong Chorus are important.
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