Previous research has found that musicians’ pitch judgments, unlike non-musicians’, are influenced by syllable names. Although non-musicians fail to identify absolute pitches, they acknowledge the direction of pitch change. The present experiment investigated whether non-musicians’ judgments of pitch change can be influenced by the direction of syllable name change. Moreover, we examined the spatial, magnitudinal and sequential nature of pitches and syllable names. Participants (N = 33) were asked to hear two successive tones sung by syllable name and to judge the direction of pitch change by pressing vertically arranged buttons. Participants’ accuracy of pitch change judging was found to be influenced by the direction of syllable name change. However, the response location was not found to interact with pitch change or syllable name change. The distance effect was found in pitches but not in syllable names. A sequence effect was found that trials with early-in-sequence syllable names were responded faster than trials with late-in-sequence syllable names. These results suggest that syllable names can influence non-musicians’ pitch judgments in a relative context. We suggest that it is the sequential order of syllable names that is the product of cultural activities that interfere with the judgment of pitch change.

People tend to see faces from non-face objects or meaningless patterns. Such illusory face perception is called face pareidolia. Previous studies have revealed an interesting fact that there are huge individual differences in face pareidolia experience among the population. Here, we review previous findings on individual differences in face pareidolia experience from four categories: sex differences, developmental factors, personality traits and neurodevelopmental factors. We further discuss underlying cognitive or neural mechanisms to explain why some perceive the objects as faces while others do not. The individual differences in face pareidolia could not only offer scientific insights on how the brain works to process face information, but also suggest potential clinical applications.

The goal of this study was to examine the relationship between three parenting styles (warmth, rejection, and overprotection), coping efficacy and risk-taking behavior in Chinese young adults. A total of 719 subjects completed three instruments: the Egna Minneu av Bardndosnauppforstran, the Coping Efficacy Questionnaire and the Adolescent Risk-Taking Questionnaire. Structural equation modeling results showed that maternal warmth (negatively) and rejection (positively), but not overprotection, correlated with risk-taking behavior via coping efficacy, whereas paternal rejection and overprotection (positively), but not warmth, correlated with risk-taking behavior via coping efficacy. These results suggest that parenting styles indirectly associate with risk-taking behavior through coping efficacy in young adults.

This study investigated age differences in false memory for visual scenes and the effect of immediate recall on subsequent recognition. Eighty children (7–9 years), 74 adolescents (14–16 years), 92 young adults (19–26 years) and 82 older adults (50–80 years) studied four visual scenes and then took a recognition test after either a free-recall task or a filler task. Results showed an age-related decline in false recognition for visual scenes, but this trend was eliminated when participants were asked to free-recall before recognition. Prior recall decreased false recognition in children, but increased false recognition in older adults. Across the lifespan, adolescents had the loosest criterion, children had the lowest false recall, and prior recall increased true recognition in older adults.

The current research sought to better understand the effect of mindfulness on well-being by examining self-connection as a potential mediator. We define self-connection as: (1) an awareness of oneself, (2) an acceptance of oneself based on this awareness, and (3) an alignment of one’s behavior with this awareness. Based on this definition, we measured self-connection, mindfulness and well-being using two distinct samples and two different operationalizations of well-being. In Study 1, we recruited 101 people from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and asked them about their connection to themselves, mindfulness and flourishing. In Study 2, we surveyed an additional 104 people from MTurk, again measuring mindfulness and self-connection. However, this time we operationalized well-being as satisfaction with life. As expected, mindfulness predicted self-connection and well-being in both studies. Self-connection also predicted well-being and partially mediated the relationship between mindfulness and well-being. These results suggest that mindfulness bolsters self-connection, which in turn increases people’s well-being.

P values and confidence intervals (CIs) are the most widely used statistical indices in scientific literature. Several surveys have revealed that these two indices are generally misunderstood. However, existing surveys on this subject fall under psychology and biomedical research, and data from other disciplines are rare. Moreover, the confidence of researchers when constructing judgments remains unclear. To fill this research gap, we surveyed 1,479 researchers and students from different fields in China. Results reveal that for significant (i.e., p < .05, CI does not include zero) and non-significant (i.e., p > .05, CI includes zero) conditions, most respondents, regardless of academic degrees, research fields and stages of career, could not interpret p values and CIs accurately. Moreover, the majority were confident about their (inaccurate) judgements (see osf.io/mcu9q/ for raw data, materials, and supplementary analyses). Therefore, as misinterpretations of p values and CIs prevail in the whole scientific community, there is a need for better statistical training in science.

A culture- and age-appropriate instrument for measuring emotion regulation ability is needed for the research and practice of Chinese adolescents’ emotion regulation. This study developed and validated a situational judgment test of emotion regulation ability for Chinese youth (STER-CY). Three samples were recruited, and approximately 4380 5th- to 11th-grade students (but no 9th-grade students) participated in the study. Researchers collected emotional situations and responses based on the life of indigenous samples and examined the reliability and validity of the test scores. The results showed that Cronbach’s alpha and test–retest correlations provided evidence for the reliability of the test scores. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis supported unidimensionality. Construct validity was further verified by convergent and discriminant validity. Criteria-related validity was confirmed by the correlations between this test and some outcome variables related to emotion regulation. It was also found that girls scored higher on this test than boys did and that emotion regulation ability significantly increased from 5th to 7th grade, but it did not improve from 7th to 11th grade. Considered together, these findings showed that the STER-CY is a psychometrically sound measure of emotion regulation ability and can be used in future research and practice.

The present study examined the association between relational aggression and depressive symptoms, and the serial mediation of relational victimization and attachment insecurity in this association from a gender-informed approach. Participants consisted of 35 students (77% female; age: 18–25) for the pilot qualitative study and 206 students (68% female; age: 18–25) for the main quantitative study. Both sets of participants were recruited at the same public university in Guam. The qualitative data were transcribed verbatim and coded by three trained researchers (interrater agreement = 90%). From the qualitative data, several themes, such as relational aggression and victimization, physical aggression and victimization, negative affect and emotion, and culture emerged. All participants reported the use of relational aggression and showing negative emotions in a close relationship. Gender differences in the content of the themes were also found, such that relational aggression and victimization seemed to be more emotionally stressful for women than men. In line with these qualitative findings, the quantitative data showed that relational aggression was associated with depressive symptoms, and this association was mediated by relational victimization and attachment anxiety (not avoidance) only for women, while the contributions of physical aggression and victimization were controlled for. No direct and indirect links for physical aggression was evidenced. These findings are discussed from clinical, developmental and cultural perspectives.

Secrecy involves the active concealment of information from others, which can cause undesirable consequences for cognitive, perceptual and health psychology, but empirical research linking secrecy to charitable behaviors remains relatively scarce. This research examined whether secrecy weakens people’s desire to engage in charitable behaviors. Two experiments demonstrated that as a mental burden, secrets decreased people’s donation desire, including their intentions to volunteer and donate, and their tangible charitable behavior. In Experiment 1, recalling a personal secret increased the tendency to donate less money than recalling a neutral experience. Study 2 showed that this weakening effect of secrecy on charitable behaviors is mediated by fatigue (but not negative affect).

Meditation is a type of mental training commonly applied in clinical settings and also practiced for general well-being. Brain functional connectivity (FC) patterns associated with meditation have revealed its brain mechanisms. However, the variety of FC methods applied has made it difficult to identify brain communication patterns associated with meditation. Here we carried out a coordinate-based meta-analysis to get preliminary evidence of meditation effects on changing brain network interactions. Fourteen seed-based, voxel-wise FC studies reported in 13 publications were reviewed; 10 studies with seeds in the default mode network (DMN) were meta-analyzed. Seed coordinates and the effect sizes in statistically significant regions were extracted, based on 170 subjects in meditation groups and 163 subjects in control groups. Seed-based d-mapping was used to analyze meditation versus control FC differences with DMN seeds. Meditation was associated with increased connectivity within DMN and between DMN and somatomotor network and with decreased connectivity between DMN and frontoparietal network (FPN) as well as ventral attention network (VAN). The pattern of decreased within-DMN FC and increased between-network FC (FPN and DAN with DMN) was more robust in highly experienced meditators compared to less experienced individuals. The identified neural network interactions may also promote meditation’s effectiveness in clinical interventions for treating physical and mental disorders.

Women experience both physical and psychological changes during different phases of the menstrual cycle (MC), which can affect their decision making. The present study aims to investigate the impact of the MC on women’s preferences for conspicuous consumption. In three studies, women in the low-fertility phase were found to be more inclined toward conspicuous consumption, with the MC effect on conspicuous consumption being mediated by the extent of pride. We assumed that women in the low-fertility phase would feel less proud due to an evolutionary drive and that they would consume conspicuous products as a means of compensation. Meanwhile, women who were only children did not manifest such behavior. We infer that women from one-child families may have a greater sense of security and confidence, which buffers the mediating effect. This research contributes to both evolutionary psychology and marketing research and provides new insights for future studies.

Self-conscious emotions are a distinct category of emotional responses that are rooted in social contexts. Previous findings suggest that negative self-conscious emotions might be elicited by a specific social factor, that is, symbolic intergroup threat. The present study tested the hypothesis that this is true, with three experiments conducted in the Chinese-context. In particular, the Mandarin words for shame (羞愧), guilt (内疚) and loss of face (丢脸) were examined. Symbolic threats were manipulated in all three experiments, with participants randomly divided into a symbolic threat condition and a control condition in each experiment. As expected, participants in the symbolic threat condition always reported more negative self-conscious emotions compared to participants in the control condition. These results suggest that symbolic intergroup threat can lead to self-conscious emotions as well as basic emotions, as was demonstrated by previous research.

Bastian, Jetten, and Ferris (2014) reported that shared pain enhances people’s bonding and cooperative behavior, but that shared no-pain has no such effect. They concluded that shared pain is a type of social glue that can improve people’s cooperation. However, in real life, both painful and painless experiences are often nonshared. Logically, the most direct way to determine whether sharing is the important element or not is to compare shared conditions with nonshared conditions. We conducted two experiments to investigate the relative effects of pain and sharing on enhancing people’s bonding and cooperative behavior by adding conditions of unshared pain and unshared no-pain. In experiment 1, we replicated Bastian, Jetten, and Ferris’s (2014) findings, and found that the effect of pain on bonding was mediated by empathy. In experiment 2, we used a 2 (pain/no-pain) × 2 (shared/unshared) design and found that while shared pain still induced more cooperative behavior than shared no-pain, unshared pain did not induce more cooperative behavior than unshared no-pain. Moreover, we found that empathy significantly mediated the relationship between pain and bonding when participants shared the experience. These results suggest that sharing is a necessary component for pain to act as social glue.

This article provides an accessible tutorial with concrete guidance for how to start improving research methods and practices in your lab. Following recent calls to improve research methods and practices within and beyond the borders of psychological science, resources have proliferated across book chapters, journal articles, and online media. Many researchers are interested in learning more about cutting-edge methods and practices but are unsure where to begin. In this tutorial, we describe specific tools that help researchers calibrate their confidence in a given set of findings. In Part I, we describe strategies for assessing the likely statistical power of a study, including when and how to conduct different types of power calculations, how to estimate effect sizes, and how to think about power for detecting interactions. In Part II, we provide strategies for assessing the likely type I error rate of a study, including distinguishing clearly between data-independent (“confirmatory”) and data-dependent (“exploratory”) analyses and thinking carefully about different forms and functions of preregistration.

Two studies were conducted to examine the relationship between three different types of intergroup contact (i.e., direct contact, extended contact, and online contact) and outgroup evaluation, and the moderating effect of group status and sociopolitical contexts across two cultural contexts. A total of 75 European Americans (majority) and 44 Chinese Americans (minority) participated in Study 1; whereas 61 Javanese (majority) and 72 Chinese Indonesians (minority) participated in Study 2. In both studies, participants completed an outgroup feeling thermometer as well as a set of questionnaires measuring intergroup contact, perceived outgroup political power, perceived outgroup economic power, perceived government support, and perceived quality of the current intergroup relations. Results from the two studies revealed that although contact was beneficial in both cultural contexts, there were notable moderators of the links between contact and outgroup evaluations. Specifically, the value of direct contact was greater for the minority group members in the United States, extended contact only mattered in a specific condition when the perceived government support was taken into account in the United States, and online contact was beneficial across group status in the Indonesian context. Overall, the findings provide evidence of the need to take into account the role of specific sociopolitical relations between the two groups in intergroup relations research.

Excessive smartphone use has recently become a topic of interest. Prior studies have suggested that psychological well-being variables and motivations are important predictors of excessive smartphone use. However, few have examined the internal mechanism of these factors in leading to excessive smartphone use. Based on Compensatory Internet Use theory, we investigated the moderating role of psychological resilience between two types of motivation — escapism and social interaction — and excessive smartphone use. Selecting 576 typical smartphone users, we found: (1) Escapism motivation and psychological resilience significantly correlate with excessive smartphone use, whereas social interaction motivation does not; (2) Psychological resilience moderates the relationship between both escapism and social interaction motivation and excessive smartphone use. Our study demonstrates the mechanism of different types of motivation and the protective effect of psychological resilience on excessive smartphone use. Thus, we emphasize resilience training that would help train people to be able to cope with life problems more effectively.

Theoretically, a living wage is a threshold that, once crossed, may transform qualities of work life, including from wage injustice to justice, organizational disengagement to commitment, and life dissatisfaction to satisfaction. Initial studies from New Zealand, South Africa and Thailand have found a threshold-like cusp in the relationship between wages and quality-of-work-life. Our aim in this study was to explore whether we would replicate a cusp in a localized study within China, among 135 employees in Shandong Province, Northern China. Survey data used minimal assumption and exploratory techniques to probe links between levels of employees’ (1) take-home wage and (2) net household income; and (3) perceived wage justice, (4) commitment to employing organization, and (5) life satisfaction. Measures were locally aligned and statistically reliable. Consistent with living wage theory, as a participant’s wage tended to cross a pay threshold of (1) RMB 4–5000 personally per month and (2) RMB 7–8000 household monthly, workers tended to report (3) wage justice (in place of injustice), (4) presence (replacing absence) of organizational commitment, and (5) satisfaction with life (replacing dissatisfaction). Our replication aim was met, but generalizing to any kind of national living wage across China would require a larger and more representative study and sample.

Physical and emotional punishment of children is highly prevalent in the Asia-Pacific region. These actions predict a range of physical and emotional harms, prompting a worldwide effort to eliminate them. A key strategy in this effort is to change parental beliefs regarding the acceptability of physical and emotional punishment. The Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting (PDEP) program was designed to change those beliefs by teaching parents about child development and strengthening their problem-solving skills. A sample of 377 parents in the Asia-Pacific region completed the program: 329 mothers and 47 fathers of children ranging in age from infancy to adolescence. The parents lived in Australia (n = 135), Japan (n = 172) or the Philippines (n = 70). In all three countries, parents’ approval of punishment in general, and physical punishment specifically, declined and they became less likely to attribute typical child behavior to intentional misbehavior. By the end of the program, at least 75% of parents in each country felt better prepared to respond nonviolently to conflict with their children.

Assessing shy symptoms via computerized adaptive testing (CAT) provides greater measurement precision coupled with a lower test burden compared to conventional tests. The computerized adaptive test for shyness (CAT-Shyness) was developed based on a large sample of 1400 participants from China. Item bank development included the investigation of unidimensionality, local independence, and exploration of differential item functioning (DIF). CAT simulations based on the real data were carried out to investigate the reliability, validity, and predicted utility (sensitivity and specificity) of the CAT-Shyness. The CAT-Shyness item bank was successfully built and proved to have excellent psychometric properties: high content validity, unidimensionality, local independence, and no DIF. The CAT simulations needed 14 items to achieve a high measurement precision with a reliability of .9. Moreover, the results revealed that the proposed CAT-Shyness had acceptable and reasonable marginal reliability, criterion-related validity, and sensitivity and specificity. It not only had acceptable psychometric properties, but also had a shorter but efficient assessment of shyness, which can save significant test time and reduce the test burden for individuals with less information loss.