Table of Content

15 April 2009, Volume 25 Issue 2

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Development Trend of False-belief Understanding among 3-to 5-Year-Olds

LI Yan-ling, CHEN Ying-he

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  1-7. 

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This study,based on the previous research results supporting expression accounts,used phased false-belief task to explore development trend of young children's false-belief understanding.101 3-to 5-year-olds participated in this study,and method of experiment was conducted.Results suggested that (1) This new task reserved the advantages of classical false belief task and it could outline the development trend of young children's false-belief understanding.(2) 3-to 5-year-old children had different levels of false-belief understanding.(3) By analyzing these children's development models,it was found that false-belief understanding of each age group was the base of their further development,which supported expression accounts.

An investigation of Imaginary Character in Children’s Fantasy Play

LI Xiu-shan, LI Hong, LEI Yi, SUN Xin-yi, LI Xiu-li

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  8-12,27. 

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145 preschoolers aged 4-to 6-years were measured with structured interview to investigate the situation of imaginary character in Chinese children.And the imaginary character included the phenomenon of imaginary companion and impersonation.The results showed that:(1) the phenomena are relatively common in China,42.7% children with imaginary companion,and 44.8% with impersonation.(2) the invisible type of imaginary companion is rare,almost all imaginary companions are personated toys.Most preschoolers think their imaginary companions are younger.Among them,boys tend to animal identity and girls are likely to have the human being type imaginary companion.(3) boys are apt to impersonation,especially impersonating cartoon characters.(4) the children with imaginary characters show higher fantasy than those without participating in imaginative predisposition investigation.

The prediction of Behavioral Inhibition of the Children from Two to Seven Years Old for Problem Behavior and School Adjustment

HOU Jing, CHEN Hui-chang, CHEN Xin-yin

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  13-20. 

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The present study examined the behavioral inhibition of the children from two to seven-years-old by lab videotape,and assessed the children's school adjustment by teacher report,as well as their problem behavior by CBCL when these children were seven-years-old.Analysis of Moment Structures(AMOS) indicated that the more inhibited the two-year-old children were,the less learning problem they had when they were seven-years-old; the inhibition of the four-year-old children predicted the seven-year-old children.aggressive behavior,frustration tolerance,task orientation ability,and depression,that is,the more inhibited these children were when they were four years old,the stronger frustration tolerance ability and task orientation ability,as well as more depression problem they had when they were seven-years-old.Moreover,the more inhibited the girls were when they were seven-years-old,the worse task orientation ability and assertive social skill the girls had,while more inhibited the boys were when they were two years old,the better task orientation ability,but more inhibited the boys were when they were seven-years-old,more aggressive behavior they had.

The Relationship between Stability of Victimization Status and Social Competence in Middle Childhood

CAI Chun-feng, ZHOU Zong-kui

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  21-27. 

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This study tested the stability of victimization and the relationships between stability of victimization and social competence.Participants were 522 elementary school children from the second grade to the fouth grade.Data was collect ed at two time points.The results indicated that peer victimization was not fairly stable for primary school students.From one year to the next,about 6.6% of the children were twicely identified to be victims.Repeated measured univariate ANOVA indicated that peer victimization concurrently related to children's development of social competence.Discrimi nant analysis revealed that peer rejection and withdrawn behavior are two major factors for discriminating the stability of victimization.

The Influence of Proactive Interference on the Verbal Working Memory of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder(ADHD) and Reading Disability(RD) Children

ZHANG Wei, LIU Xiang-ping, SONG Hong-yan

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  28-34. 

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Many studies had showed the verbal working memory problems of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reading disability (RD) children,but the deficits of the two disorders were different in specific aspects of verbal working memory.Proactive interference was regarded as one of the most important central executives and contributed to the working memory span.In this study,a new task which consisted of recent probe task and verbal nback task was adopted to explore the disadvantageous influence of proactive interference (PI) on the verbal working memory.The effect of PI could be computed by the subtraction from the performance of the no nrecent probes to the performance of the recent negative probes.Sixty disorder children and seventeen normal children engaged in this study,aged between 7～12 years old.Compared with the no nrecent negative probes,all groups deteriorated in the recent negative probes; ADHD only and ADHD+RD groups decreased greatly (26.44%,28.44%),but the control and RD only groups decreased less (14.62%,15.84%) and no significant differences were found between RD only and control children.The results suggested that ADHD was more easily influenced by PI than RD and the ability of resisting PI of RD was not deficient; they also showed that there were different deficit mechanisms of verbal working memory in ADHD and RD.

The Junior Middle School Students’ Mathematical Estimation Performance and its Relationship with Their Metacognitive Ability

LIU Xiao-zhen, ZHANG Ying-xia, SI Ji-wei

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  35-40. 

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This research aimed to explore junior middle school students'mathematical estimation performance and its rela tionship with their metacognitive ability by self designed estimation tasks and State Metacognitive Inventory (SMI).547 grade one to three students randomly sampling from four secondary schools in Ji Nan City participated this research.The results showed that the junior middle school students'mathematical estimation ability was generally low and didn't reflect a stable gender difference.There was a strong positive correlation between estimation performance and metacognitive ability.Among the four factors of metacognition,self consciousness had significantly positive correlations with measure ment estimation and computational estimation.On the whole,self consciousness had a significant predictable effect on mathematical estimation,especially on measurement estimation and computational estimation.In addition,planning also had strong correlations with numerical estimation and computational estimation.Some of theoretical links between individ ual's mathematical estimation and metacognitive processing were deeply discussed.

Student Perceived Interpersonal Harmony in Class and Its Relationship with Social Behavior

CHEN Bin-bin, LI Dan

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  41-46. 

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To explore perception of interpersonal harmony by students and its association with their social behaviors,453 students sampled from the 4th,5th,7th and 8th graders of four primary schools and junior high school in Shanghai were asked to fill a questionnaire.The results showed:(1) there were differences in perception of interpersonal harmony be tween genders,but the difference between grades only existed in classroom structure.(2) there were differences in peer relation and classroom structure among male students of sociometric statuses,while there were no such differences among female students of sociometric statuses (3) perceived interpersonal harmony by students was positively correlated with their prosocial behaviors,but were uncorrelated with aggressive behaviors; peer relation was negatively correlated with shyness sensitivity.

The Characters of Adolescent Self-consciousness and its Relationship with Social Adaptive Behavior

NIE Yan-gang, DING Li

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  47-54. 

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439 students were investigated about their social adaptive behavior and self-consciousness.The relationship between social adaptive behavior and self-consciousness were explored.The results showed:(1) The adolescents.self-consciousness were at the upper-middle level in general.There was a significant difference in different grades,nor in genders.(2) Self-consciousness was a good predictor of adolescent adaptive behaviors,which could account for 13.50%-39.40% of variance in self-reported social well-adaptive behaviors and for 5.90%-14.90% of variance in selfreported social maladaptive behaviors.(3) Self-motion and morality appraisement were the strongest and steadiest predictors of well-adaptive behaviors and learning adaptive behavior.(4) In different grades,anxiety was the strongest and steadiest predictors of neurosis behavior; self-continence was the strongest and steadiest predictor of social maladaptive behavior.In the different gender samples,self2motion was the strongest and steadiest predictor of independence and economy.

An Experimental Research on Implicit and Explicit Cultural Orientation of Undergraduates

ZHOU Li-qing, SUN Shan

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  55-60. 

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To explore the implicit cultural orientation and its relationship with explicit cultural orientation,the Lmplicit Association Test (LAT) and scales about individualism and collect ivism were used to measure the implicit and explicit cultural orientation of 424 undergraduates.The results showed that:1) The undergraduates major explicit cultural orientation was horizontal individualism.2) The mean reaction time connected between collectivistic information and positive words were significantly smaller than that between collectivistic information and passive words in IAT,the undergraduates major implicit cultural orientation was collect ivism.3) There was not significant correlation between the results from IAT and scale scores on cultural orientation.4) The sexual and parents educat ional level differences were not found in terms of the IAT on implicit cultural orientation,but which were found in explicit cultural orientation.

Interpersonal Trust for Different Domains and Risk Levels:Comparing the Trust Circle of Chinese and Canadians

NIU Jiang-he, XIN Zi-qiang

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  61-67. 

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In everyday life,varied economic and information exchanges frequently occur between one and another,a primary condition of which is both parities trusting each other.In the study,a new construct named as "trust circle" was developed and the size of the circle was used as an index of one's interpersonal trust level.The purpose of the study was to explore how the size of one's trust circle is affected by the trust domain,risk level and culture in China and Canada.An questionnaire was administrated to 100 Chinese residents in China (mean age 32.92) and 102 Canadians (mean age 31.94) who participated in the study voluntarily.The results showed that:(1) the average trust circle size in different domains differs,specifically,the size of the trust circle in the economic situation is the largest,the size is the smallest in the negative information sharing context and it is in the middle in the positive personal/social information sharing context; (2) the trust circle size varies with risk level; as the economic risk increases the trust circle becomes smaller,as the degree of the shared positive information increases the trust circle becomes larger,and as the degree of the shared negative information increases the trust circle becomes smaller; (3) the trust circle sizes in different cultures are not the same,for example,trust circle size of Chinese participants is larger than Canadians' in the economic risk situation,and Canadians,trust circle sizes are larger than Chinese counterparts' in both positive and negative personal/social information sharing domains.Thus,it can be concluded that whether people trust others is affected by the related domain,the risk level,the culture and interactions of two or three factors.Aforementioned results are heuristic for clarifying culture differences of interpersonal trust and for promoting cross culture communication of people from China and Canada.

The Effects of Shared-book Reading and Phonetic Instruction on the Pre-school Children’s Pinyin Skills and Phonological Awareness

TANG Shan, WU Xin-chun

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  68-72. 

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The present study examined the effects of shared book reading and phonetic instruction on the development of middle grade preschool children's Pinyin skills and phonological awareness.The results suggested that 1) Both methods significantly improved children's letter knowledge; 2) While the method of shared book reading significantly improved children's spelling ability,the phonetic method did not; 3) Of the four factors of phonological awareness the method of shared book reading significantly promoted the development of onset rime awareness,and tone awareness,but showed no significant effect on their naturally developed syllable awareness.The phonetic method did not promote the development of any factors.

An Experimental Study on the Comprehension of Adversative Relation and Casual Relation in Chinese

WU Ni-ni, HE Xian-you, XU Yan-na

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  73-77. 

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The purpose of this research was to explore the differences between understanding casual relations and adversative relations in Chinese reading.Two experiments were constructed.Probeverification paradign was used in experiment 1 to examine whether this difference between reading casual sentence and adversaive sentence was existed.The results showed that the time for reading casual sentence was much longer than that of adversative sentence,but there was no differences between the reaction time of probe words in this two different levels.The same technique was applied in experiment 2 to invest igate whether the difference was existed during Chinese passage reading.By comparing the reaction time to probe words in different relations,it could be concluded whether the adversative relations was difficult to comprehend.The results indicated that the reaction time to the probe words in casual relation was much slower than that of adversative relation.It implied that the adversat ive relation was more difficult to comprehend than casual relation.

The Characteristics of the Family Environment and Its Influence on the Life Satisfaction of Migrant Children

HOU Juan, ZOU Hong, LI Xiao-wei

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  78-85. 

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The research investigated the characteristics of the family environment and its influence on the life satisfaction of Migrant Children.1018 migrant children and 447 urban children in Beijing completed the family environment investigate questionnaire,the family functioning inventory,the multidimensional students.life satisfaction scale and students.life satisfact ion scale.The results showed that:(1) Migrant children's level of family economic status and family functioning were significantly lower than those of urban children.(2) Fathers engaging in manual work had a negative relation to migrant children's environment satisfaction; family life index could significant ly predict all dimensions of the migrant children's life satisfaction; and family community environment had a significant impact on the family and environment satisfaction of migrant children.(3) Familial consanguinity had a posit ive effect on all aspects of migrant children's the family satisfact ion,and familial adaptability could significantly predict migrant children's family satisfaction.

The Relationship between Ethno-cultural Identity and School Life Satisfaction of Hani Elementary and High School Students

HU Fa-wen

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  86-90,96. 

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To explore the characteristics of cultural identity and its relation to school life satisfaction for Hani elementary and high school students,Cultural Identity Questionnaire of Hani Adolescent Students (CIQHAS) and School Life Sat isfaction Rating Quest ionnaire for Adolescents were used to test 621 adolescent'students.The results are as follows:(1) Generally speaking,the score of ethno cultural ident ity was higher than median value for Hani adolescent'students,they have a stronger identification of ethnic things preference and racial acceptance than their traditional religious beliefs and social conventions.Family residence differences contributed to ethno cultural identity of Hani adolescent'students.There was stat ist ically significant difference in dimensions of religious belief,social convent ion and the total questionnaire among students who come from the country,town or rural areas; (2) their ethno cultural ident ity existed significant grade difference,and with the transference of grades,the development of their ethno cultural identity was in gradual decline,meanwhile,different dimensions of the quest ionnaire appeared the undulating and non equilibrium developmental tendency; (3) the degree of ethno cultural identity for Hani adolescent'students was relative to their school life satisfaction,and it had posit ive effects on the school life satisfaction.Additionally,the aspects of racial acceptance and social convention were positive or negative associated with their school life satisfaction respectively.

Parent-Adolescent Attachment, Emotional Intelligence, and Aggression in Adolescence

LI Ni-ni, ZHANG Wei, LI Dong-ping, MAI Yu-jiao, WANG Jing-jing, XING Wen-li

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  91-96. 

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A survey using a cluster sample of 370 secondary school students was conducted to examine the mediating and moderating role of emotional intelligence (EI) on the relationship between parent adolescent attachment and aggression in adolescence.The results indicated that (1) both attachment security and EI had protective effects on aggression; and EI partially mediated the relationship between attachment security and aggression.(2) EI also moderated the relationship between attachment security and adolescents' aggressive behavior.The protective effect of attachment was much stronger for emotionally intelligent adolescents compared to their less emotionally intelligent counterparts,which supported the protective protective model.

The Relationship Between Self-Complexity and Subjective Well-Being in College Students

OU Yang-y, WU Ming-xia, ZHANG Da-jun, HU Shan-shan, ZHU Yi

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  97-102. 

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In the present article,188 college students were asked to finish Life Satisfaction Scale and Affect Scales (including Positive Affect,Negative Affect),and adopted methods which is similar to the work done by Linville.The present study found that positive and negative self complexity were (1) independent of each other,and (2) they had different relationship with subjective well being; (3) the proportion of positive and negative words in measuring self complexity,as well as different scales used to measure well being accounted for the above mentioned discrepancies.

The Research on Competency and Coping Strategies which Impacted the Professional Pressure of the Secondary Teachers

YAO En-ju, CHEN Xu, HAN Yuan-ya

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  103-108. 

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Method of questionnaire was used to investigate competency,coping strategies and professional pressure in 262 secondary teachers,and also the mediating effects of the coping strategies between competency and professional pressure through Structural Equation.The results indicated that:(1) The professional pressure of the major and science teachers was higher than that of the assistant teachers; (2) Coping strategies played the mediating roles between competency and professional pressure; (3) Positive coping and negative coping had different mediating effect on professional pressure,and the former was smaller than the latter.

The Study of Relationship Between Communication Patterns and Marital Quality

ZHANG Jin-tao, FANG Xiao-yi, DAI Li-qiong

Psychological Development and Education. 2009, 25(2):  109-115. 

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This study aimed to explore the relationship between communication patterns couples perceived and their marital quality using actor -partner interdependence model,which allowed exploring the actor effect and partner effect simultaneously.A sample of 130 adult couples in Macao were asked to fulfill the questionnaire including the communication pattern questionnaire revised by Chiristensen,and Dyadic adjustment Scales developed by Spanier.After a series statistical analysis including paired t-test,correlation analysis and Structural Equation Modeling,the results indicated that (1) the most communication pattern these couples perceived was mutual constructive communication,and the negative communication pattern,which included demand/withdraw and mutual avoidance communication pattern were less.(2) The communication pattern and marital quality perceived by husbands consistently with those of wives.There was no significant difference between husbands'and wives'scoring on 2 of 3 subscales of communication pattern and 3 of 4 subscales of marital quality.(3) The mutual constructive communication pattern the couples perceived could predict their own marital quality positively,while the demand/withdraw and mutual avoidance communication pattern could predict their own marital quality negatively.(4) After controlling the actor effect,the communication pattern husbands perceived could predict significantly their wives'marital quality,while the communication pattern wives perceived couldn't predict their husbands'marital quality.