1. Multinational corporations’ entry and China’s independent R&D: a study based on data from manufacturing enterprises
LUO Wei;GE Shunqi
The Journal of World Economy,Vol 38,No. 12
The paper evaluates the impact of multinational corporations on China’s independent R&D through a study of the practice and strength of Chinese enterprises based on R&D expenditure data of manufacturing enterprises above designated size between 2005–2007. The results show that multinational enterprises’ entry has lowered both the tendency and strength of Chinese manufacturing enterprises’ R&D. On the one hand, the independent R&D level of foreign-funded enterprises in China is lower than that of domestic enterprises, thus pulling down the average independent R&D level, showing a direct inhibitory effect. On the other hand, foreign-funded enterprises exert obvious adverse effects on other enterprises’ independent R&D, displaying an indirect inhibitory effect. The former direct inhibition effect is most obvious among foreign holding enterprises, especially foreign-funded enterprises, while the latter indirect effect is more obvious among provincial enterprises. In addition, both the direct and indirect inhibitory effects increase with the increase of the entry level, enterprise scale, the technical level and the increase of market concentration, and decrease with the improvement of enterprises’ liquidity status.
2. Race Categorization and Perceptual Discrimination of Morphing Faces Are Modulated by Perceptual Adaptation
YAN Linlin;WANG Zhe;LI Yuanyuan;ZHONG Ming;SUN Yuhao;ZHANG Zhijun
Acta Psychologica Sinica,Vol 47,No. 01
The other-race effect(ORE) refers to the own-race discrimination advantage and the other-race categorization advantage. The perceptual expertise theory explains the ORE as a result of people's long-term perceptual exposure to own-race faces much more than the other-race faces. However, recent findings suggest that shortterm, social-cognitive factors, such as reduced motivation to individuate other-race faces, may also contribute to the ORE. To examine the effect of short-term factor on face perceptual processing, we manipulated perceptual adaptation in three experiments and investigated participants' face race perception and discrimination. In Experiment 1, 20 Asian participants were presented with 704 color Asian-Caucasian morphed face stimuli for a race categorization task. These stimuli were generated with morphing software(Morph TM), allowing thecreation of 11 blended face stimuli(from 0:100 to 100:0 for Asian:Caucasian proportions, respectively) for each of 64 Asian-Caucasian continua. In each continuum, the face that was equally often categorized as Asian and as Caucasian was identified as the ambiguous-race face. Result showed that the 52 Asian-Caucasian ambiguous faces were extracted and used as face stimuli in experiment 2 and experiment 3. In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of perceptual adaptation on face race categorization performance by presenting the ambiguous-race faces after prolonged exposure(5 seconds) to a Caucasian or an Asian face. Results showed that prolonged exposure to Asian faces causes the identical ambiguous-race morphed faces to appear distinctly Caucasian, vice versa. Furthermore, the identical ambiguous-race morphed faces were categorized faster when the faces were perceived as Caucasian but slower when the faces were perceived as Asian. In experiment 3, we examined the effects of perceptual adaptation on face discrimination by presenting the ambiguous-race faces after prolonged exposure(5 seconds) to a Caucasian or an Asian face. Results showed that the identical ambiguous-race morphed faces were discriminated more accurate when the faces were perceived as Asian but less accurate when the faces were perceived as Caucasian. Collectively, these findings indicate that the short-term, perceptual adaptation may affect participants' face race categorization and perceptual discrimination, suggesting social-cognitive factors also play a role in the ORE.
3. Predictors of Action Picture Naming in Mandarin Chinese
CHEN Yongxiang;ZHU Liqi
Acta Psychologica Sinica,Vol 47,No. 01
Nouns and verbs are two main categories of content words, and they are learned early by children. It remains in hot debate regarding whether Mandarin Chinese is a verb-friendly language for children. However, few studies examined verb processing in Mandarin, and there were no standard experimental materials that are available for researchers. Therefore, it is unclear what factors may influence action picture naming in Mandarin and whether it is similar to the rules in object picture naming. Thirty-six adults participated in picture naming and 112 adults participated in rating tasks. All participants were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The materials were 275 pictures from the IPNP website (see http://crl.ucsd.edu/experiments/ipnp/) (Szekely et al., 2004), of which 10 pictures were deleted because Chinese adults could not name them correctly. Chinese verb names, naming reaction time, name agreement, H value, familiarity, visual complexity, image agreement, and oral age of acquisition (AoA) were obtained for the 265 action pictures. Results from stepwise regression analysis showed that H value familiarity and visual complexity explained 72.4% of the variances in picture naming reaction time, whereas other variables such as word frequency and Ao A were excluded from the final model. Moreover, the pictures were categorized into five levels of difficulty based on the naming reaction time. A comparison of the present study to previous studies that examined object picture naming in Mandarin showed that action picture naming (with a mean reaction time of 1617 ms) was more difficult than object picture naming (with a mean reaction time of 1324 ms or 1044 ms, Liu, Hao, Li, & Shu, 2011; Zhang & Yang, 2003). In addition, name agreement of action pictures was lower than that of object pictures, and visual complexity of action pictures was higher than that of object pictures. These results indicated that action picture naming was difficult for adult participants. One possibility is that it might be particularly difficult for Mandarin speakers to extract meaning out of the static action pictures and verbalize them. More investigations are needed to explore the mechanisms of verb processing in Mandarin Chinese, and the measures obtained from the present study can provide valuable tools for future researchers to examine verb processing in Mandarin.
4. Age Alters the Effects of Emotional Valence on False Memory: Using the Simplified Conjoint Recognition Paradigm
XIAO Hongrui;HUANG Yifan;GONG Xianmin;WANG Dahua
Acta Psychologica Sinica,Vol 47,No. 01
Previous research has revealed robust differences between young and older adults' accurate emotional memory. Typically, negative emotion prompts memory performance in young adults, while positive emotion benefits memory performance in older adults. Relatively, much less efforts have been devoted to investigating how emotion divergently influences false memory in older adults comparedto young adults. The main purpose of the present study is to explore, first, how age alters the effects of emotional valence on false memory; and second, what are the cognitive mechanisms for the interaction effect of age and emotional valence on false memory. The Fuzzy Trace Theory(FTT) uses verbatim memory traceand gist memory trace to interpret individuals' false memory, especially false memory under the framework of Deese-Roediger-Mc Dermott(DRM) paradigm. According to recent research, we proposed some flaws of traditional paradigms(such as the Remember-Know paradigm) in the area of false memory; and we also argued that it would be critical to include response bias in addition to verbatim and gist memory trace to investigate false memory. To fulfill this need, the simplified conjoint recognition(SCR) paradigm, combined with a statistical method of multinomial processing tree model, was used in the present study to investigate false memory and its associated cognitive mechanisms. A sample of 34 young adults(aged 23 ± 2 years) and 28 older adults(aged 68 ± 5 years) completed the SCR task. In the task, the Cornell/Cortland emotion word lists, along with neutral word lists adopted from previous research, were implemented as experimental materials. The results displayed a significant interaction effect of emotional valence and age on false memory(i.e. false alarm). Specifically, positive emotion decreased older adults' false memory, while negative emotion decreased young adults' false memory. The method of multinomial processing tree model was further employed to model, parameterize and inference the cognitive mechanisms related to the effect of emotional valence on false memory within young and older group. It was found that negative emotion contributed to a lower level of false memory in young adults by lowering their response bias toward negative words. As to older adults, positive emotion boosted retrieval of verbatim memory trace and hampered retrieval of gist memory trace, then led to less false memory for positive words. Our study uncovered interesting age-related differences in emotional false memory; it also confirmed the necessity of a simultaneous consideration of verbatim memory trace, gist memory trace and response bias when investigating false memory.
5. The Role of Visual Perceptual Stress in Primary Mental Ability Aging
MAO Xiaofei;PENG Huamao
Acta Psychologica Sinica,Vol 47,No. 01
Sensory function is considered a basic resource for the aging of cognition. According to the information- degradation hypothesis (Schneider & Pichora-Fuller, 2000), the decline of sensory function reduces the input of peripheral stimulating information to the central neural system of older adults, and so more attention resources are demanded to process the limited quality sensory information. With the result of fewer resources being left for cognitive processing, older adults have worse cognitive performance than younger adults. The present study adopted a 2 (age: old and young) × 4 (visual perceptual stress: high, medium, low, no-noise) mixed design, with age as a between-subject variable and visual perceptual stress as a within-subject variable, to examine the role of visual function on cognitive aging. Three primary mental abilities (PMA), spatial orientation ability, numerical ability and inductive reasoning ability, were used as the indexes of cognitive functions. All cognitive tests were displayed under four different levels of visual perceptual stress by standardized programs on the computer. The visual perceptual stress was created by covering stimuli with Gaussian noise. Notably, the visual perceptual stress of each subject was determined by the condition of each individual. Therefore, all participants undertook equal visual perceptual stress towards task-related stimuli in each stress condition. It was expected that the age-related differences would decrease significantly or disappear completely when the older and younger participants undertook the same level of visual perceptual press. Thirty-three younger adults (aged 18 to 33 years old) and thirty-one older adults (aged 62 to 87 years old) were recruited. Two-way repeated measures ANOVA analysis showed that: 1. The performance of the younger group for spatial orientation ability was significantly worse in the high visual perceptual stress condition (F(1,60) = 5.02, p < 0.05), while no significantly difference was found than that of the older group in medium stress condition (F(1,60) = 0.01, p > 0.05), in low stress condition (F(1,60) = 0.41, p > 0.05) and in no-noise condition (F(1,60) = 0.25, p > 0.05). 2. The older group’s performance of numerical ability was significant lower than that of the younger group in medium stress condition (F(1,55) = 20.28, p < 0.001), in low stress condition (F(1,55) = 13.58, p < 0.01) and in no-noise condition (F(1,55) = 210.95, p < 0.001), except in the high stress condition (F(1,55) = 0.99, p > 0.05). The age differences reduced gradually when the visual perceptual stress increased. 3. Significant age differences were found in inductive reasoning ability when the visual perceptual stress was matched between younger and older adults. The younger performed better in the four levels of visual perceptual stress than the older in medium stress condition (F(1,46) = 36.40, p < 0.001), in low stress condition (F(1,46) = 53.23, p < 0.001) and in no-noise condition (F(1,46) = 28.05, p < 0.001), while no difference was observed in the high stress condition (F(1,46) = 3.61, p = 0.064). The age differences also decreased gradually when the visual perceptual stress increased. The results supported the information-degradation hypothesis to some degree. The decline of visual function plays an important role in the aging of numerical ability and inductive reasoning ability. The relationship between visual perception and the aging of spatial orientation ability needs to be considered deeply. In conclusion, visual function may play an important role in the aging of PMA, while the role of visual function in the aging of PMA may be moderated by cognitive resource.
6. Impact of Reward/punishment Conditions on Behavioral Inhibition and Automatic Physiological Responses in the Stages
GU Li;BAI Xuejun;WANG Qin
Acta Psychologica Sinica,Vol 47,No. 01
Though the revised reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) provides a biological interpretation for the relationship between emotions and behavioral inhibition aroused by reward/punishment, it is still somewhat limited when attempting to explain specific phenomena. This may be attributed to factors such as the type, degree, and duration of reward/punishment stimuli, which have differed across studies. For instance, in many studies reward/punishment is a within-subjects factor, however, in clinical situations a cumulative and constant reward/punishment model is more commonly encountered, such as persistent praise or criticism of a certain individual. Furthermore, the emotion triggered by cumulative reward/punishment could manifest at any stage of the task completing process. Accordingly, this research investigated the impact of cumulative reward/punishment conditions on inhibition and automatic physiological responses during different time stages.Forty-five college students were allocated to a reward group, punishment group, or control group at random. The experiment used the Super Lab system to present stimuli and record the response time and rate of error inhibition shown by the subjects during the stop-signal task. Automatic physiological responses were collected continuously throughout the whole procedure(preparatory stage, working stage, feedback stage and reward/punishment stage) by a 16-channel physiological recording system. The results showed that:(1) in the absence of the stop-signal task, the response time of the reward group and punishment group was significantly longer than that of control group, and during the stop-signal task, the error inhibition rate of the reward group and punishment group was significantly lower than that of control group. However, there were no difference between the reward group and punishment group;(2) Heart rates within the reward group were much higher than those in the punishment group and control group, and finger temperatures were much higher than those in the control group; however, skin conductance responses in the reward group weremuch lower than those in the punishment and control groups;(3) Compared with other stages, the variation of these physical signals was much lower at the feedback stage;(4) The three groups differed in heart rate, finger temperature, and finger pulse rate at all stages, but skin conductance responses did not show significant differences across the groups. The results reveal that behavioral arousal is not synchronized with physiological arousal during reward and punishment conditions. Both the reward and punishment conditions showed inhibition to the behavioral measures, but they showed significant differences in physical arousal.
7. The Impact of Pre-Service Teachers' Emotional Complexity on Facial Expression Processing: Evidences from Behavioral, ERP and Eye-Movement Study
WANG Haibin;LU Jiamei;YAO Benxian;SANG Qingsong;CHEN Ning;TANG Xiaochen
Acta Psychologica Sinica,Vol 47,No. 01
Propositional knowledge for emotional complexity is also called emotional awareness, which has been regarded as the most fundamental skill to emotional intelligence. It refers to the ability of recognizing and describing one's own and others' emotions. This kind of ability is important to the processing of individual mental health and interpersonal interaction. In the present study, the electrophysiological correlates and the eye movement of the facial expression processing among the pre-service teachers who have different emotional awareness were investigated. To screen participant of high or low emotional awareness, 800 pre-sdervice teachers were surveyed by the Chinese version of leaves of emotional awareness scale(LEAS). As paid volunteers, 40 pre-service teachers were recruited to take part in study1 and the other 60 pre-service teachers in study 2. The participants in the experiment were all right-hand, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and had no neurological or psychological disorders. This study was approved by the local ethics committee, and all participants signed an informed consent form prior to their inclusion in the experiment. The participants were instructed to judge the emotion of faces(happy, anger, fear and sadness) while recording EEG and eye movement. Behavioral results showed that the mean accuracy rate was higher for pre-service teachers who have high emotional awareness score group than that of the low score group, and the mean reaction time of the high score group was significantly shorter than that of the low score group. Relative to the case of the low score group, it was observed that the amplitudes of P100, N170 and LPP were higher while the amplitudes of VPP, P200 and N200 were lower in high score group. Eye movement results showed that the number of total eye fixation, monitoring frequency and the diameter of the pupil of high score group were higher than the low score group, while their saccadic time and saccade amplitude were lower. These results suggested that the emotional complexity has an influence on the processing of the emotional facial expressions. Pre-service teachers with higher emotional complexity were more sensitive to the categorization information of emotion, and probably adopt a more efficient and better pattern.
8. The Influence of Facial Attractiveness and Personality Labels on Men and Women’s Mate Preference
WANG Yuqing;YAO Pengfei;ZHOU Guomei
Acta Psychologica Sinica,Vol 47,No. 01
Abstract: As a complex social, cultural and psychological phenomenon, mate selection has in recent years become a hot research topic in both psychology and sociology. Some studies have found that when it comes to mate selection, physical attractiveness of a romantic partner such as appearance, figure are more important to men than they are to women while ability, resources and personality of a romantic partner show an opposite pattern. However, this view has recently been challenged by researchers who propose that a partner’s physical attractiveness may be as important to women as it is to men (Eastwick, Eagly, Finkel, & Johnson, 2011; Eastwick & Finkel, 2008; Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica, & Simonson, 2006). Choosing a lover is an important and complicated issue that deserves further study with experimental investigation. The present study manipulated the degree of face attractiveness and personality traits. We evaluated the partner choices made by both men and women. As for face attractiveness and personality traits, people think that beautiful people have more positive qualities, and their unique characteristics or qualities can get more favorable perception (Lorenzo, et al, 2010). On the other hand, people who have positive qualities are often judged as more beautiful (Gross, Crofton, 1977). To understand the influence of facial attractiveness and personality labels on men and women’s mate preferences, we included the two independent variables in one experiment and examine their interactive effects on men and women’s mate preferences. Chinese male faces and female faces along with Big-Five personality information materials were presented to 30 female students and 30 male students for rating of attractiveness and desirability as a lover (only for opposite-sex photos) .The results showed that: (1) When seeing a photo of a beautiful opposite-sex face, men were more willing to have her as a lover than women. (2) Those people whose photos were labeled with positive personality were more likely to be chosen as lovers by women. (3) Compared with those labeled with negative personality, photos with positive personality were more likely to be chosen as lovers and such likelihood was clearly increased when the photos were more beautiful. (4) All the five dimensions of Big-Five personalities influenced mate preferences of men and women, with the power gradually decreasing from conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, emotional stability to extroversion. While women preferred extrovert men, whether or not women were extrovert had no effect on men’s mate preferences. These findings provide further evidence for understanding sex differences in mate selection.
9. The Role of Discourse Context on Semantic Integration Normal
CHEN Shuang;CHEN Lijing ;YANG Xiaohong ;YANG Yufang
Acta Psychologica Sinica,Vol 47,No. 02
How do readers integrate incoming words into the local and global discourse context is a central issue in discourse comprehension. Some researchers have suggested that the integration of incoming information with local, proximal context is an automatic and default process. However, the integration of incoming information with the global discourse context employs more attention and may be delayed. On the other hand, some researchers have suggested that incoming information is immediately integrated into the global discourse context. Previous studies also obtained discrepant results concerning the time course of contextual modulation, which might be due to the fact that different types of knowledge violations were used in different studies. Two kinds of knowledge violations were used in previous studies: selectional restriction violations and world knowledge violations. Selectional restriction refers to the semantic constraints on verb's arguments, which are considered as lexical information. Previous studies have shown that the processing of selectional restriction takes precedence over that of world knowledge. However, it is still unclear whether the precedence of selectional restriction would affect the modulation of global context. Therefore, the current study set out to explore how different kinds of knowledge violations affect global integration in discourse context in an eye-tracking experiment. We constructed discourses consisting of three sentences. The first and second sentences made up a non-fictional or a fictional discourse context. The third sentence was either in(1) selectional restriction violation,(2) world knowledge violation or(3) congruent conditions. In the non-fictional context, sentences in both the selectional restriction and world knowledge violation conditions were incongruent while only the congruent sentences were sensible. However, in the fictional context, all the three kinds of sentences were congruent. 26 university students participated in the experiment. Two were removed due to excessive track losses. Data from 24(12 males, Mean age = 22.92) participants were used in the statistical analysis. Results showed that for selectional restriction violations, the effect of context was significant in first fixation time, go-past time, total time and number of fixations on the target word as well as first fixation time, total time, number of fixations and regression out count on the post-target region. However, for world knowledge violations, the effect of context was only found in total time and number of fixations on the target region as well as on the post-target region. Participants read the target words and post-target words longer, more frequently in fictional context than in non-fictional context. These results revealed that when object nouns violated selectional restriction, discourse context affected both the early and later stages of word processing. When object nouns violated world knowledge, contextual modulation was only observed on the later time measures. The present study demonstrated that discourse context could override local anomalies, irrespective of the kinds of knowledge that are violated. However, the time course of the integration process was modulated by the kinds of knowledge that are violated. These results establish kinds of knowledge as an important factor for semantic integration in discourse context.
10. Facing Orientation Effect on Representational Momentum
DONG Rui
Acta Psychologica Sinica,Vol 47,No. 02
Representational momentum(RM) is the term used to refer to a systematic misrepresentation in memory of an object's position in space. In contrast to using simple patterns as the stimuli, the use of naturalistic objects as stimuli enabled researchers to learn more about typical-motion effects. Nagai and Yagi(2002) thought that the finding of typical-motion effects might imply that a pointed-shaped object moving in the direction of its point produced larger forward displacement than did a pointed-shaped object moving in the opposite direction, because the objects used in these studies had a clear sharp point at their fronts. However, was pointedness the only cause of typical-motion effects? We hypothesized that another possible cause of typical-motion effects was the facing orientation effect, by which we mean, the direction that the face is facing. It was necessary to separate these two factors in exploring the causes of typical-motion effects. One possible way to do this is to use symmetrically shaped naturalistic objects to exclude the influence of pointedness. The present research aimed to explore whether facing orientation influences representational momentum through four experiments. We used a 2(facing orientation: forward vs. backword) ×2(direction of motion: leftward vs. rightward/ upward vs. downward) within-subjects design and used implied motion paradigms in all four experiments. The dependent variable was a weighted measure. In experiment 1, we used symmetrical figures, which included eyes to manifest facing. We chose the hedgehog figure because in the real world a hedgehog only moves forward. In experiment 2, we changed the design of experiment 1 by using a more abstract figure that was symmetrical and only included eyes manifest facing. In experiment 3, we used Pacman as a stimuli. Pacman was a game software made by Namco, a game software company. Pacman was a little yellow guy with a big head and a really large smile who run away from the ghosts trying to eat all the pellets. The mouth in Pacman manifests facing, and the shape of the mouth is a sharp angle. Because the contour of Pacman contains a sharp angle and facing orientation at the same time and their orientation are in contradiction, we can compare the size of the pointedness and the facing effect. In experiment 4, we used Pacman as stimuli. The motion direction was vertical. We wanted to explore whether the results of the first 3 experiments were influenced by reading habits because the weighted mean for moving forward motion was larger than moving backward in the level of moving right in experiments1, 2, and 3. The results of experiment 1 and 2 indicated that facing orientation effect was the most likely causes of typical-motion effects. Experiment 3 found that facing orientation effect was stronger than pointedness effect when both effects occurred simultaneously, and had opposing effects. Experiment 4 found that facing orientation effect also occurred when stimuli moved vertically. In summary, facing orientation effect was a possible cause of typical-motion effects. Because facing orientation effect only occurred when the stimulus was moving right and down, lateral reading habits and gravity were suggested to be the underlying reason of facing orientation effect. The representational momentum is cognitively penetrable.
