Self in learning: Chinese adolescents' goals and sense of agency

Using an intersectional life course perspective to understand familial environment and its impact on sexuality development among Asian American sexual minority college students

There is a dearth of research understanding the sexual health of Asian American adolescents, and even more so for those who identify as sexual minorities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, asexual, and other sexual orientations). This study is a secondary qualitative analysis focused on young adults' recollections of their formal and informal sex education experiences in childhood and adolescence using a sub-sample of in-depth interviews from students who self-identified as both Asian and sexual minorities living in the USA (n = 9). Results were organised into three sections: (1) latent cultural factors (e.g. stigma surrounding sex, self-sufficiency, filial piety); (2) the downstream effects of latent cultural factors (e.g. sex-related discussions, rules disallowing dating, role of lateral family members); and (3) the impact of deficient familial sex-related discussions (e.g. Internet, resentment). Study findings underscore the links between identity concealment and relationship concealment that are unique to Asian sexual minority individuals. We suggest that interventions involving Asian American US youth and their families should be culturally informed and promote cross-generational sex-related discussion. Future research should further explore the role of chosen family and non-parental family members as a point of intervention as they can be helpful sources of informal sex education.

Metacognitive Effort Regulation across Cultures

Success in cognitive tasks is associated with effort regulation and motivation. We employed the meta-reasoning approach to investigate metacognitive monitoring accuracy and effort regulation in problem solving across cultures. Adults from China, from Israel, and from Europe and North America (for simplicity: "Western countries") solved nonverbal problems and rated their confidence in their answers. The task involved identifying geometric shapes within silhouettes and, thus, required overcoming interference from holistic processing. The Western group displayed the worst monitoring accuracy, with both the highest overconfidence and poorest resolution (discrimination in confidence between the correct and wrong solutions). The Israeli group resembled the Western group in many respects but exhibited better monitoring accuracy. The Chinese group invested the most time and achieved the best success rates, demonstrating exceptional motivation and determination to succeed. However, their efficiency suffered as they correctly solved the fewest problems per minute of work. Effort regulation analysis based on the Diminishing Criterion Model revealed distinct patterns: the Western participants invested the least amount of time regardless of item difficulty and the Israelis invested more time only when addressing the hardest items. The Chinese group allocated more time throughout but particularly in moderate to difficult items, hinting at their strategic determination to overcome the challenge. Understanding cultural differences in metacognitive processes carries implications for theory (e.g., motivational factors) and practice (e.g., international teams, education). The present findings can serve as a foundation for future research in these and other domains.

Psychometric assessment of the Grit Scale: Evidence from US and Chinese samples

To further understand the validity and generalizability of grit, this research investigated the psychometric properties of the Grit Scale in both individualistic (i.e., the US) and collectivistic (i.e., the Chinese) populations. Moreover, this research broadened the contributions of grit to vocational outcomes and showed that grit might be essential to success in other life domains beyond the academic context. Specifically, this cross-cultural research reported two studies that examined the conceptualization of grit proposed by Duckworth et al. (2007) and the concurrent validity of grit to vocational outcomes. Study 1 explored the factor structure of grit in a US general sample ( N = 2140) and a US college student sample ( N = 1935). Study 2 examined the factor structure of grit in a Chinese employee sample ( N = 675) and explored its concurrent validity to occupational well-being and proactive work behavior. Results showed that the bifactor model of grit scale fit best in both the US and Chinese samples. The high omega reliabilities indicated that the general grit score and its two subscales (i.e., perseverance of effort and consistency of interests) could be considered reliable. However, the multiple-group CFA measurement invariance test showed that only partial metric invariance for the perseverance of effort factor was verified across the three samples. Perseverance of effort explained more variance in vocational outcomes than the consistency of interests did among Chinese employees. The findings verified the multidimensionality of the Grit Scale and indicated that the relationships between the two facets of grit and vocational outcomes should be separately investigated.

The Influence of Actual Appraisals of Peers on the Self-Appraisals of Personality Traits for Chinese Late Adolescents: The Mediating Effect of Reflected Appraisals

Reflected appraisals refer to the perceptions of individuals of how they are perceived by others. Numerous studies in cultural psychology have revealed that individuals in the Eastern collectivist culture show an interdependent self-construal, which depends much on the social culture. Hence, the research on reflected appraisals in the Eastern culture can improve the understanding of how the social environment shapes the self-perception of an individual. In this study, we aimed to explore the relationships among self-appraisals, reflected appraisals, and actual appraisals of peers of the Big Five personality for Chinese late adolescents. Participants were divided into 16 groups, with two to four people of each group who were familiar with each other. Each participant was told to fill out the questionnaires of reflected appraisals, actual appraisals of peers, and self-appraisals. Through analyzing 164 sets of data, the results showed the following: (a) The scores of reflected appraisals are significantly lower than that of the actual appraisals of peers. (b) The relationships among the reflected appraisals, actual appraisals of peers, and self-appraisals are distinct on different personalities. For extroversion, there are significant medium- to high-degree relationships among the three types of appraisals; while for the agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness, self-appraisals are highly correlated with reflected appraisals, and reflected appraisals show a low-degree correlation with the actual appraisals of peers. (c) Reflected appraisals play a mediating role between actual appraisals of peers and self-appraisals. Our study suggests that individuals in Chinese culture generally underestimate how their peers perceive them. Furthermore, actual appraisals of peers affect the self-concepts of individuals through reflected appraisals. This study revealed the unique personality feature of self-modesty under the background of Chinese culture and the importance of peers on the development of self-concepts for Chinese late adolescents. This study can shed new light on the understanding of the development of self-concepts for late adolescents under different cultural backgrounds.

The Memory Effect of Reflected Self-Appraisals on Different Types of Others

The development of one's self-concept unfolds within early interactions with intimate significant others for childhood and adolescence. Previous studies suggest that people define themselves in part through internalized perceptions of other people's beliefs about them, known as reflected self-appraisals. Even in adulthood, reflected self-appraisals still remain critically influential on direct self-appraisals, and the affect might depend on the different types of others. In the present study, for the first time, we extend the classic "other-reference" paradigm to the field of reflected self-appraisals in order to examine whether there is a difference in the memory performance of reflected self-appraisals on different types of others in an early adult sample. In the experiment, participants were told to encode personality trait words by judging how different types of others (romantic partners, friends, and classmates) think about the participants themselves. After a retention interval, they received a surprise recognition memory test. The results showed that the memory performance of romantic partners is significantly better than that of friends and classmates, indicating that the memory performance of reflected self-appraisals varies across the others with different levels of closeness. Specifically, the closer the relationship between people and others is, the better the memory performance of reflected self-appraisals will be. Meanwhile, the speed and the encoding deepness of the reflected self-appraisals vary among different genders, leading to the gender effect of recognition memory. This study might help deepen our understanding on the development of self-concept in adulthood.

Autonomy, Social Inequality, and Support in Chinese Urban and Rural Adolescents’ Reasoning About the Chinese College Entrance Examination (Gaokao)

The Gaokao, a mandatory postsecondary entrance examination for all Chinese students, is often associated with psychological stress among Chinese students in their final year of high school. This project was conducted in summer 2017 in urban Beijing and rural Xi’an, China. The purpose is to explore the perspectives of urban and rural secondary school graduates after they have completed the examination, using in-depth clinical interviews. The study draws on Self-Determination Theory and research on moral reasoning to examine several themes surrounding Chinese adolescents’ perceptions of the Gaokao, including general perceptions of the purpose of education, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, sources of support and pressure during study for the Gaokao, and issues of fairness and social inequality. The major findings are that students from all backgrounds reported psychological conflict regarding their general views of the aims of education and the extrinsic pressure deriving from the high-stakes Gaokao examination. Inequality was seen as further exacerbated by family background, resources, and quality of teaching. Urban parents tended to provide more support, both academic and interpersonal. Rural students rated their mental health as significantly lower than urban students during their senior year of high school.

Cultural Influences on the Development of Children's Memory and Cognition

Memory is socially constructed. The types of information that children pay attention to and remember, as well as how children organize and recall their memories can differ as a function of sociocultural background. This chapter presents an overview of cultural variations on children's memory and cognition. We draw attention to the necessity of conducting controlled experiments to examine cultural differences in the specific processes involved in episodic memory (e.g., encoding, retention, discrimination skills). We highlight potential challenges (e.g., language, measurement equivalence) that researchers need to overcome to conduct valid cross-cultural research. In light of cultural transformations in recent decades, we outline promising avenues for future research as well as the applications of this research to important issues for forensics and immigrants and asylum-seekers.

Emotions and Parenting in Learning Among Chinese Children

Learning constitutes a main developmental context for children everywhere. Learning-related emotions can affect cognition, motivation, and achievement and are associated with parenting. Studies on learning-related emotions and how parenting is associated with a child's emotional development in learning have been less conclusive for Chinese children. This article provides an overview of the literature on related emotions as experienced in academic settings in Chinese culture and their relations with parenting. The research on academic, achievement, and domain-specific emotions is presented from a culture-specific perspective. After stressing the functions of emotions for learning and achievement, we discuss the complex relationship between emotions and parenting in the learning context. We propose an integrated model of emotion, parenting, self, and achievement in learning to understand the mechanisms of the interactions between emotions and parenting from a culture-specific perspective. Implications for future research are identified.

Relations Among Cultural Learning Beliefs, Self-Regulated Learning, and Academic Achievement for Low-Income Chinese American Adolescents

This mixed-methods study of urban low-income, English-proficient Chinese American, second-generation 15-year-olds (conducted in 2004; N = 32) examined the relation among the virtue model of learning communicated by parents and adolescents' learning beliefs, self-regulated learning (SRL) behaviors, and academic achievement. Analysis of in-depth individual interviews revealed that for these adolescents, perceptions of family educational socialization predicted students' endorsement of their culture's virtue-oriented learning beliefs and that adolescents' endorsement of these learning beliefs predicted their academic achievement. Importantly, adolescents' reported that use of SRL strategies mediated the relationship between their endorsement of virtue-oriented learning beliefs and their academic achievement. Findings are discussed in the context of further research linking cultural learning beliefs, SRL, and children's academic achievement.

Play or learn: European-American and Chinese kindergartners' perceptions about the conflict

BACKGROUND

Kindergarten is the age at which children's future time perspective emerges. This capacity enables them to form goals based on past and ongoing experiences and project themselves in the future. This development may play an important role in guiding children in self-regulated learning. When faced with the conflict between their need to learn and their desire to play (CLP), children make choices based on their perceptions of CLP. However, their CLP-related perceptions and responses are also influenced by the values their culture upholds. Research shows that Western learning emphasizes more mental activities and positive affect, whereas East Asian learning stresses more social/moral self-perfection. Children's CLP-related perceptions and responses are likely shaped by their respective cultures' values.

AIMS

This study examined kindergartners' emergent perceptions of and responses to CLP. Both commonalities and possible cultural differences were investigated.

SAMPLE

The sample was 130 middle-class European-American and Chinese kindergartners, balanced for culture and gender.

METHOD

Children each heard a story beginning with a picture of a protagonist who is practicing words at home but hears children playing outside. Children were asked to complete the story and were probed further when they mentioned ideas related to learning and play. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed for coding. Tests were conducted for group differences.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

Most children from both groups identified CLP and shared similar views about their need to complete schoolwork, benefits of learning, negativity of neglecting learning, and ways to resist temptation to play. However, large cultural differences also emerged. Chinese children showed greater awareness of CLP and expressed more positive regard for learning, learning virtues, and receptivity to adult expectations.

Self-development: integrating cognitive, socioemotional, and neuroimaging perspectives

This review integrates cognitive, socioemotional, and neuroimaging perspectives on self-development. Neural correlates of key processes implicated in personal and social identity are reported from studies of children, adolescents, and adults, including autobiographical memory, direct and reflected self-appraisals, and social exclusion. While cortical midline structures of medial prefrontal cortex and medial posterior parietal cortex are consistently identified in neuroimaging studies considering personal identity from a primarily cognitive perspective ("who am I?"), additional regions are implicated by studies considering personal and social identity from a more socioemotional perspective ("what do others think about me, where do I fit in?"), especially in child or adolescent samples. The involvement of these additional regions (including tempo-parietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus, temporal poles, anterior insula, ventral striatum, anterior cingulate cortex, middle cingulate cortex, and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) suggests mentalizing, emotion, and emotion regulation are central to self-development. In addition, these regions appear to function atypically during personal and social identity tasks in autism and depression, exhibiting a broad pattern of hypoactivation and hyperactivation, respectively.

Motivation and social contexts: a crossnational pilot study of achievement, power, and affiliation motives

Previous research suggests that there is a relationship between social contexts (e.g., economic growth, engagement in wars) and motives within populations. In particular, high achievement motive is associated with subsequent economic growth, which in turn increases power motive. Increased national achievement and power motives have been argued to precede social changes that lead to decreased affiliation motives, and engagement in wars. The present study aimed to examine differences in achievement, power, and affiliation motives between 266 college students in China (a nation with sustained high economic growth) and 255 college students in the USA (a nation with previously strong but now slowing economic growth, and engaged in war). Analysis of personal strivings suggested that Chinese college students showed significantly higher levels of achievement motive than the American college students, but American college students showed significantly higher levels of affiliation motive than Chinese college students. Overall, males exhibited higher achievement motivation than females. No significant interaction effects were found for gender by location for any of the three motives. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research.