Influence of social mindfulness and Zhongyong thinking style on cooperative financial decision making in a Western sample.

Social mindfulness and Zhongyong thinking style are of high importance when evaluating relevant co-actors in the social world. The current study investigates the influence of social mindfulness and Zhongyong thinking style on cooperative financial decision making in a public goods game among a Canadian sample. We hypothesize that higher perceived social mindfulness and higher perceived Zhongyong thinking style will increase the amount of money contributed to a joint project in a public goods game. The sample was a prolific-based online recruited sample of n = 125 Canadians. We observed a significant main effect of Zhongyong thinking style on the amount of contributed money in the public goods game. Social mindfulness did not reach significance. The influence of Zhongyong thinking style was qualified by a significant Zhongyong by gender interaction, indicating that females but not males reduced their contributions if the Zhongyong thinking style of the co-actor was manipulated as being low. It is shown that Zhongyong thinking style is also relevant in a Western cultural setting. Future research is needed, however, to investigate further the reasons for the differences between females and males.

Examining the trajectory of meaning violation and its bidirectional relationship with perceived posttraumatic growth.

Despite extensive theoretical discussions on the dynamic process of meaning violation (MV) and restoration, empirical research on this topic remained lacking. This study aimed to explore the trajectory of MV and the bi-directionality between MV and perceived posttraumatic growth (PPTG). This study employed a 3-wave longitudinal design spanning over 3 months, and a sample of participants from China who experienced any distressing event within the past 3 months was considered eligible. Participants (N = 215; aged 18-38 years old) were instructed to assess MV and PPTG regarding a chosen event. A latent growth model was used to examine changes in MV over time and a random intercept cross-lagged panel model was used to analyze bidirectional associations between MV and PPTG. Results revealed that, at the within-person level, MV at T1 negatively predicted PPTG at T2, while PPTG at T2 negatively predicted MV at T3. These results indicate that the sense of MV may have impeded PPTG in the initial stages, whereas PPTG might serve as a predictor for diminished MV at later stages. At the between-person level, a positive relationship between these two constructs was observed, suggesting that individuals who experienced higher levels of MV, in general, also tended to report greater PPTG. These findings reflect the complex and dynamic nature of meaning reconstruction processes and provide empirical evidence for the meaning-making model.

Child Maltreatment as a Risk Factor for Rejection Sensitivity: A Three-Level Meta-Analytic Review.

Theoretical and empirical evidence has suggested that child maltreatment victimization is associated with rejection sensitivity. However, empirical evidence on this association is inconsistent. Therefore, this meta-analysis aimed to examine the overall association between child maltreatment and rejection sensitivity, and to investigate variables that may affect the strength of this association. Studies eligible for inclusion were searched in the databases: Web of Science, Science Direct, PubMed, MEDLINE, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure after which relevant studies were coded. Studies were synthesized in advanced three-level meta-analytic models in R. A total of 16 studies (N = 5,335 participants) yielding 41 effect sizes were included. Results showed that child maltreatment is significantly and positively related to rejection sensitivity (mean r = 0.230; p < .001), and to a small extent. Furthermore, this association is stronger for emotional abuse (r = 0.275) than for physical abuse (r = 0.157). It is not affected by the mean age and gender distribution of primary study samples nor by sample type (community sample versus clinical sample). It is concluded that child maltreatment is a risk factor for developing rejection sensitivity later in life. Therefore, interventions for rejection sensitivity should consider potential trauma resulting from prior child maltreatment experiences.

Is Difficulty Mostly About Impossibility? What Difficulty Implies May Be Culturally Variant.

Difficulty can signal low odds (impossibility) and high value (importance). We build on culture-as-situated cognition theory's description of culture-based fluency and disfluency to predict that the culturally fluent meaning of difficulty is culture-bound. For Americans, the culturally fluent understanding of ability is success-with-ease-not-effort, hence difficulty implies low odds of ability. This may disadvantage American institutions and practices-learning requires gaining competence and proficiency through effortful engagement. Indeed, Americans (Studies 1, 3-8; N = 4,141; Study 2, the corpus of English language) associate difficulty with impossibility more than importance. This tendency is not universal. Indian and Chinese cultures imply that difficulty can equally signal low odds and value. Indeed, people from India and China (Studies 9-11, N = 762) are as likely to understand difficulty as being about both. Effects are culture-based; how much people endorse difficulty-as-importance and difficulty-as-impossibility in their own lives did not affect results.

Are talented people more virtuous in the eyes of others? Positive effects of competence on perceived morality.

Existing research on competence and morality focuses on their role in impression formation, overlooking their impact on each other. In five studies, we explored whether a target person's competence influences perceived morality of the target through interpersonal attraction. The results showed that perceived competence of a target individual was positively correlated with interpersonal attraction, which in turn positively correlated with morality (Study 1). Using an experimental design, we further found that competent individuals were considered more attractive, making them being perceived more moral than incompetent ones (Studies 2-4). In addition, an initially immoral individual was perceived as being moral when he was described as highly competent (Study 3) whereas an initially moral individual was perceived as being immoral when he was described as having low competence (Study 4). These findings were not completely accounted for by the halo effect (Study 5). The results supported that competence information promotes perceptions of morality in person perception.

Interpersonal mindfulness and forgiveness: Examining the mediating roles of anger rumination and state anger.

Measuring mindfulness without accounting for specific contexts may lead to controversial results. This study attempted to examine whether the newly proposed construct of interpersonal mindfulness, mindfulness as it happens within the interpersonal context, was connected to forgiveness and the mechanisms behind this connection. Data were collected from 312 participants using measures of interpersonal mindfulness, trait mindfulness, anger rumination, state anger, self-reported forgiveness, and forgiving behavior. Results showed that interpersonal mindfulness was significantly associated with both self-reported forgiveness and forgiving behavior even while accounting for trait mindfulness. Mediation analysis revealed that anger rumination and state anger could mediate this link separately and sequentially, but only when trait mindfulness was uncontrolled. When controlling for trait mindfulness, the mediating role of state anger remained significant, but neither anger rumination nor the serial combination did. An alternative model was also supported, showing that after controlling for interpersonal mindfulness, trait mindfulness was indirectly associated with forgiveness through anger rumination and the serial mediating effect of anger rumination and state anger, but not state anger. These findings suggest that interpersonal mindfulness is more suitable for predicting interpersonal forgiveness than trait mindfulness. State anger may operate as a proximal mechanism in explaining how mindfulness relates to interpersonal forgiveness, whereas anger rumination may operate at a more distal level.

Self-control as a mediator of age on students' compulsive buying.

Prior research on compulsive buying addresses a negative association with dispositional self-control and a decreasing effect of age. However, there is currently no sufficient explanation for the observation that older individuals show a reduced risk for compulsive buying patterns. Our empirical contribution is to test the assumption of a reducing effect of dispositional self-control on compulsive buying in a cross-cultural sample of Chinese (n = 268) and German (n = 247) college students with the Short Form of the Self-Control Scale and the Compulsive Buying Scale. We observed that females show a higher proneness to compulsive buying and older participants show decreased compulsive buying. Mediation analysis reveals that age has a reducing effect on compulsive buying that is fully mediated by dispositional self-control. According to the last observation, our study delivers an explanation of the reduced compulsive buying proneness of older individuals. We discuss limitations and alternative explanations of our study.

Left behind, not alone: feeling, function and neurophysiological markers of self-expansion among left-behind children and not left-behind peers.

Four in 10 young rural Chinese children are 'left behind' by parents migrating for economic opportunities. Left-behind children do as well academically and imagine as many possible futures for themselves as their peers, implying that they must compensate in some ways for loss of everyday contact with their parents. Three studies test and find support for the prediction that compensation entails self-expansion to include a caregiving grandmother rather than one's mother in self-concept, as is typical in Chinese culture. We measured self-expansion with feeling, function and neurophysiological variables. Twelve-year-old middle school left-behind children (Study 1, N = 66) and 20-year-old formerly left-behind children (now in college, Studies 2 and 3, N = 162) felt closer to their grandmothers and not as close to their mothers as their peers. Self-expansion had functional consequence (spontaneous depth-of-processing) and left a neurophysiological trace (event-related potential, Study 3). Left-behind participants had enhanced recall for information incidentally connected to grandmothers (Studies 1 and 3, not Study 2). Our results provide important insights into how left-behind children cope with the loss of parental presence: they include their grandmother in their sense of self. Future studies are needed to test downstream consequences for emotional and motivational resilience.

The revising of the Tangney Self-Control Scale for Chinese students.

Recent studies have characterized self-control as a vital psychological variable that helps explain various problems. Tangney's Self-Control Scale (SCS) is a self-report measurement to assess individual differences in traits of self-control. It has gained popularity in social and psychological science research. In China, there are a few Chinese-version scales measuring general self-control, which can be applied to college students. The purposes of the present study were to evaluate: (a) the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of Tangney's SCS using confirmatory factor analysis, and (b) whether higher scores on the scale correlated with positive outcomes in China. The final sample in this study consisted of 371 Chinese college students aged 17-23 years. The Full SCS and Brief SCS were both found to have a reasonable fitness, which also had satisfactory internal consistencies and a high correlation. Higher scores on the SCS correlated with higher self-esteem, extraversion, better harmony in interpersonal relationships and an appropriate anger expression, less impulsiveness, and state and trait anger. The test-retest reliability was confirmed in two additional samples. Tangney's SCS could be used in China.

Common and distinct neural mechanisms of the fundamental dimensions of social cognition.

In the present study, we used a valence classification task to investigate the common and distinct neural basis of the two fundamental dimensions of social cognition (agency and communion) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results showed that several brain areas associated with mentalizing, along with the inferior parietal gyrus in the mirror system, showed overlap in response to both agentic and communal words. These findings suggest that both content categories are related to the neural basis of social cognition; further, several areas in the default mode network (DMN) showed similar deactivations between agency and communion, reflecting task-induced deactivation (TID). In terms of distinct activations, the findings indicated greater deactivations for communal than agentic content in the ventral anterior cingulate (vACC) and medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). Communion also showed greater activation in some visual areas compared to agentic content, including occipital gyrus, lingual gyrus, and fusiform gyrus. These activations may reflect greater allocation of attentional resources to visual areas when processing communal content, or inhibition of cognitive activity irrelevant to task performance. If so, this suggests greater attention and engagement with communion-related content. The present research thus suggests common and differential activations for agency- versus communion-related content.

Left behind or moving forward? Effects of possible selves and strategies to attain them among rural Chinese children.

Are possible selves and strategies to attain them universally helpful even among children with few resources? We test this question in rural China. Rural Chinese children are commonly "left behind" (LB) by parents seizing economic opportunities by migrating, hoping the family will "move forward" and their children will attain their predestined better future. Media, teachers, and peers negatively represent LB children as unruly and undisciplined, with negative fates, making LB a negative stereotype that includes the idea of destiny or fate. Indeed, making the idea of LB salient increases children's fatalism (Study 1 n = 144, Study 2 n = 124). However, having strategies to attain possible future selves predicts better in-class behavior, fewer depressive symptoms, and better exam performance even a year later and controlling for prior performance (Study 3 n = 176, Study 4 n = 145). Possible selves have mixed effects, not always predicting better grades and undermining LB children's self-control.

Different facets of compulsive buying among Chinese students.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Compulsive buying is a severe phenomenon, especially among younger consumers. It is well documented in Western industrial societies like the USA and Germany, and nowadays an increasing interest in compulsive buying in non-Western countries is on the rise. METHODS: In the current study, we measured the prevalence of compulsive buying tendencies among Chinese female and male students by using a Chinese translation of the German Compulsive Buying Scale (Raab, Neuner, Reisch & Scherhorn, 2005). We examined the influence of gender, location and age using ANCOVA, and binary logistic regression. RESULTS: Factor analysis identified three factorial dimensions of compulsive buying tendencies which are impairment of impulse control and reactive or compensatory aspects, reduced rationality according to money spending, and post-purchase guilt. Our results indicated that about 6.7% of the sample shows a compulsive buying pattern, and that females are more affected. For location, a geographic difference between Chongqing and Fuzhou was found for the overall compulsive tendencies, but not for the percentages of compulsive buyers. CONCLUSIONS: In sum, the existing study provides evidence that Chinese consumers have a factorial structure which differs somewhat in compulsive buying from Western samples. Observations about gender and location were considered. These findings give a deeper understanding of China's compulsive buying behavior.