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We examined how individualistic versus collectivistic cultural backgrounds affected the psychological experience of social exclusion. We found that Turkish, Chinese and Indian participants (collectivistic background) differed in their experience of social exclusion from German participants (individualistic background): German participants experienced lower fulfilment of psychological needs in response to social exclusion, whereas Turkish, Chinese and Indian participants were affected to a lesser extent (Turkey, India, Hong Kong) or not at all (mainland China) by social exclusion manipulations. Testing two different explanatory mechanisms in Study 3, we found that the difference in dealing with social exclusion was not associated with activating social representations in participants with collectivistic background but with exclusion being associated with more threat in participants with individualistic background. In Study 4, cultural differences emerged also on the physiological level: German

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme and phoneme levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest when age, general intelligence and the pretest scores were controlled statistically. The findings suggest that phonological awareness instruction embedded in vocabulary learning activities might be beneficial to kindergarteners learning English as a second language.