Perpetual foreigner stereotype and bicultural management difficulty are two understudied acculturative stressors frequently experienced by Asian Americans. This study expanded the family stress model to examine how parental experiences of these two acculturative stressors relate to measures of adolescent adjustment (depressive symptoms, delinquent behaviors, and academic performance) during high school and emerging adulthood through interparental and parent-child relationship processes. Participants were 350 Chinese American adolescents (M age  = 17.04, 58 % female) and their parents in Northern California. Path models showed that parental acculturative stressors positively related to parent-child conflict, either directly (for both mother-adolescent and father-adolescent dyads) or indirectly through interparental conflict (for mother-adolescent dyads only). Subsequently, both interparental and parent-child conflict positively related to a sense of alienation between parents and adolescents, which then related to more depressive symptoms, more delinquent behaviors, and lower academic performance in adolescents, for mother-adolescent and father-adolescent dyads. These effects persisted from high school to emerging adulthood. The results highlight the indirect effects of maternal and paternal acculturative stressors on adolescent adjustment through family processes involving interparental and parent-child relationships.

This study examined whether Chinese American parents’ acculturation and enculturation were related to parenting practices (punitive parenting, democratic child participation, and inductive reasoning) indirectly through the mediation of parents’ bicultural management difficulty and parental depressed mood. Data came from a two-wave study of Chinese American families in Northern California. Mothers and fathers were assessed when their children were in early adolescence and then again in middle adolescence (407 mothers and 381 fathers at Wave 1; 308 mothers and 281 fathers at Wave 2). For both waves, we examined cross-sectional models encompassing both direct and indirect links from parental cultural orientations to parenting practices. We also used individual fixed-effects techniques to account for selection bias in testing model relationships at Wave 2. At Wave 1, via bicultural management difficulty and depressive symptoms, American orientation was related to less punitive parenting and more inductive reasoning for both parents, and Chinese orientation was related to more punitive parenting and less inductive reasoning for fathers. The findings indicate that bicultural management difficulty and parental depressed mood are important mechanisms to be considered when studying the relation between Chinese American parents’ acculturation/enculturation and parenting.

BackgroundTraditional Chinese medicine stagnation (“yu”) syndrome is characterized by a cluster of mind/body obstruction-like symptoms. Previous studies have operationalized the concept as a psychological construct through scale development, producing a three-factor 16-item inventory with good psychometric properties.PurposeThe study aimed to further validate the Stagnation Scale by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and examine self-appraisal of stagnation as an illness.MethodA cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted on a random community sample of 755 adults recruited by cluster sampling in Hong Kong.ResultsCFA revealed a good fit of the three-factor model (CFI = .95; RMSEA = .077; SRMR = .043). ROC analysis suggested a cutoff score at 50 on stagnation total score for predicting self-appraisal of an illness condition, with false positive and negative rates at 25.8% and 23.3%, respectively. Overall, 6.2% participants self-appraised to suffer stagnation symptoms to a degree of an illness, and for it, 1.9% participants intended to seek treatment. Stagnation showed positive correlations with physical distress, depression, and anxiety (r = .59–.76, p < .01) and negative correlation with age (r = −.22, p < .01).ConclusionThe Stagnation Scale appeared to be robust in factorial and construct validity. With prevalence of illness by self-appraisal at 6.2% and intention for treatment at 1.9%, stagnation is a fairly common condition associated with treatment-seeking behaviors.

Previous research has demonstrated the positive effects of congruent personal and environmental characteristics on creativity. None of them, however, has tested the formal theory of person-environment fit for predicting creativity in the context of multicultural experiences. This study examined the effects of two versions of person-environment fit (Demands-abilities fit and Needs-supplies fit) on employee creativity in China, taking into account the moderating role of multicultural experiences. The results, based on the data of East Asian Social Survey in the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) in 2015, showed employees with demands-abilities fit have lower creativity than those with demands-abilities misfit; nevertheless, the demands-abilities fit creates a growing impact on employee creativity with increasing multicultural experience. Additionally, the higher the needs-supplies fit, the stronger the employee creativity; and, the needs-supplies fit creates a growing impact on employee creativity with increasing multicultural experience. It shows that different versions of person–environment fit have different effects on employee creativity and multicultural experience moderated the effects of person-environment fit on employee creativity. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Associative learning is thought to require coordinated activities among distributed brain regions. For example, to direct behavior appropriately, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) must encode and maintain sensory information and then interact with the cerebellum during trace eyeblink conditioning (TEBC), a commonly-used associative learning model. However, the mechanisms by which these two distant areas interact remain elusive. By simultaneously recording local field potential (LFP) signals from the mPFC and the cerebellum in guinea pigs undergoing TEBC, we found that theta-frequency (5.0–12.0 Hz) oscillations in the mPFC and the cerebellum became strongly synchronized following presentation of auditory conditioned stimulus. Intriguingly, the conditioned eyeblink response (CR) with adaptive timing occurred preferentially in the trials where mPFC-cerebellum theta coherence was stronger. Moreover, both the mPFC-cerebellum theta coherence and the adaptive CR performance were impaired after the disruption of endogenous orexins in the cerebellum. Finally, association of the mPFC -cerebellum theta coherence with adaptive CR performance was time-limited occurring in the early stage of associative learning. These findings suggest that the mPFC and the cerebellum may act together to contribute to the adaptive performance of associative learning behavior by means of theta synchronization.