An explanatory model of adolescent problem behavior (problem drinking, cigarette smoking, and general delinquency) based on protective and risk factors in the individual and in 4 social contexts (family, peer group, school, and neighborhood) is employed in school‐based samples from the People's Republic of China (N=1,739) and the United States (N=1,596). Despite lower prevalence of the problem behaviors in the Chinese sample, especially for girls, a substantial account of problem behavior is provided by the same protective and risk factors in both countries and for both genders. Protection is generally higher in the Chinese sample than in the U.S. sample, but in both samples protection also moderates the impact of risk. Despite mean differences in psychosocial protective and risk factors, as well as in problem behavior, in the 2 samples—differences that may reflect societal variation—the explanatory model has, to a large extent, cross‐national generality.

It has been proposed that recent cultural inventions such as symbolic arithmetic recycle evolutionary older neural mechanisms. A central assumption of this hypothesis is that the degree to which a pre-existing mechanism is recycled depends upon the degree of similarity between its initial function and the novel task. To test this assumption, we investigated whether the brain region involved in magnitude comparison in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), localized by a numerosity comparison task, is recruited to a greater degree by arithmetic problems that involve number comparison (single-digit subtractions) than by problems that involve retrieving facts from memory (single-digit multiplications). Our results confirmed that subtractions are associated with greater activity in the IPS than multiplications, whereas multiplications elicit greater activity than subtractions in regions involved in verbal processing including the middle temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus that were localized by a phonological processing task. Pattern analyses further indicated that the neural mechanisms more active for subtraction than multiplication in the IPS overlap with those involved in numerosity comparison, and that the strength of this overlap predicts inter-individual performance in the subtraction task. These findings provide novel evidence that elementary arithmetic relies on the co-option of evolutionary older neural circuits.

The other-race effect is a collection of phenomena whereby faces of one's own race are processed differently from those of other races. Previous studies have revealed a paradoxical mirror pattern of an own-race advantage in face recognition and an other-race advantage in race-based categorisation. With a well-controlled design, we compared recognition and categorisation of own-race and other-race faces in both Caucasian and Chinese participants. Compared with own-race faces, other-race faces were less accurately and more slowly recognised, whereas they were more rapidly categorised by race. The mirror pattern was confirmed by a unique negative correlation between the two effects in terms of reaction time with a hierarchical regression analysis. This finding suggests an antagonistic interaction between the processing of face identity and that of face category, and a common underlying processing mechanism.

No abstract

To assess the nature of top-down perceptual processes without contamination from bottom-up input, this functional MRI study investigated face detection in pure noise images. Greater activation was revealed for face versus nonface responses in the fusiform face area, but not in the occipital face area. Across participants, positive correlations were found for the degree of greater face-detection activation between the fusiform face area and bilateral inferior frontal gyri, suggesting a top-down pathway generating perceptual expectations. In contrast, the medial frontal, parietal, supplementary motor, parahippocampal, and striatal areas produced negative correlations between degrees of greater face-detection activation and behavioral responses, suggesting a possible role for these areas in selecting and executing appropriate responses that are based on the top-down expectations.

No abstract

Although previous investigations have agreed that Chinese rural-to-urban migrants’ socioeconomic status (SES) increases with their migration, the association between SES and subjective well-being is uncertain. To address this research gap, the present study proposed that the association between objective SES and subjective well-being is mediated by subjective SES. This model was tested with a sample of 432 Chinese rural-to-urban migrants. The results indicate a significant association between objective SES and subjective well-being and a partial mediating effect of subjective SES. Furthermore, subjective social mobility, which is one’s expectation about the possibility to move upward in the social hierarchy, was found to moderate both the direct path from objective SES to subjective well-being and the indirect path from subjective SES to subjective well-being. These findings suggest that Chinese rural-to-urban migrants gained in subjective well-being not only because of direct financial achievement but also because of their perceptions and beliefs about their relative social status.

A theoretical framework about protective factors (models protection, controls protection, support protection) Concern with the context of human action-its content, structure, organization, and implications for behavior-has burgeoned in recent decades; and research designs in social and developmental psychology have increasingly sought to incorporate measures of the social environment along with individual difference measures. The current preoccupation with context was, of course, presaged long ago by Kurt Lewin (1951) and more recently by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1986), as well as by others. Cronbach (1982), for example, argued that "Understanding an adolescent's experience … seems to require a community-wide ecological perspective" (p. 74) and that perspective has animated a wide array of contemporary studies (e.g., Arthur, Hawkins, Pollard, Catalano, & Baglioni, 2002;Beam, Gil-Rivas, Greenberger, & Chen, 2002;Cook, Herman, Phillips, & Settersten, 2002;Crosnoe, Erickson, & Dornbusch, 2002;Eccles, Early, Frasier, Belansky, & McCarthy, 1997;Elder & Conger, 2000;Elliott et al., 2005;Furstenberg, Cook, Eccles, Elder, & Sameroff, 1999;Herrenkohl et al., 2000;Novak & Clayton, 2001). Such studies have encompassed various domains of the social environment including the family, the peer group, the school, and the neighborhood; and they have investigated a wide range of adolescent experience including depression, academic achievement, delinquency, and substance use.We report a cross-national study of adolescent samples in the United States and the People's Republic of China that employed a psychosocial theory of protective factors and risk factors to articulate the content of four key social contexts of adolescent life-the family, the peer group, the school, and the neighborhood. The protection-risk conceptual framework used in this research emerges from a reformulation and extension of Problem-Behavior Theory