The “Fortune Chicken” is a common wedding gift in Taiwanese wedding ceremony, and it possesses the connotation of “Family”, “Fertility” and “Blessing”. The study aims at probing the spherical shape of “Fortune Chicken” with the use of various fabrics in order to bring out different cultural codes and create a deviation in imagery for assisting immigrants in comprehending the cultural implication of Taiwanese wedding. The concept of “Communicating Across Cultures” can be the foundation for selecting “Fortune Chicken” in wedding. The result of study showed among 60 subjects with different backgrounds, 30 immigrants and 30 Taiwanese, preferred the cultural code imagery of the calico fabric from Taiwan for “Fortune Chicken” with red brocade and gold satin weave among the calicos from Taiwan, Japan and the United Sates.

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The design of multi-functional stationery has reached its peak and consumers' demand for stationery enhances from functional orientation to the affective demand level. As people with different lifestyle form different consumption habits, what measures should take to make consumers more satisfied when using products. Thus, lifestyle research becomes an important link between people and products. In order to realize office worker's affective demand and opinions regarding writing stationery, this research used the AIO scale and analysis method of semantic difference to understand the emotional demand and the preference factors of office workers with different life backgrounds for writing stationery, then in-depth interview was applied with designers of stationery industry to explore stationery design trends. Finally, affective design elements were established for future development of writing stationery through cross-contrast between expert's advices and users' preferences. Because of the study, the research is expected to help developers of the stationery industry to develop writing stationery with high quality meet the affective demands of office workers and promote the competitiveness of stationery industry in Taiwan.

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Emotional congruence is a definition of emotional empathy. However, little is known about what types of people are more likely to be emotionally matched with others, and how they perceive emotional congruence. This paper proposes a cognitive model of emotional congruence assuming that people judge their emotional congruence with others based on interpersonal distance by putting the self and the other in emotional dimensions. We asked participants to engage in discussion with each other, and to rate their emotional congruence level in addition to their own emotional states in a valence-arousal space. We observed that i) participants with lower Empathizing Quotient scores exhibited a shorter emotional Euclidean distance from others, ii) when combined together, the overall results for all participants showed significant goodness of fit to the proposed model, and iii) those with higher Systemizing Quotient scores showed stronger goodness of fit.

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Past studies have reported that language-specific color focality has substantial influence on short-term memory (STM) performance of colors of the speakers of the language, which we call the “focality effect.” This study attempts to clarify the continuous patterns of this effect, that is, the manner in which correct recognition possibilities and misrecognition error distances of colors, which are two aspects of the STM performance of colors, change in a gradual fashion along the continuum of color focality. Our experiment, which tests the Japanese language, finds that a U-shaped relationship exists between the focality and the possibility of correct recognition, and that the misrecognition error distance increases as the focality decreases. We speculate that the subjects' frequent and conscious employment of the memorization strategy of coding colors using linguistic color categories is one important cause of the detected effect patterns.

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Color perception in older individuals is affected by the aging of the ocular system. Previous studies have explored the effects of aging on perceived saturation by asking study participants to assign a proportion of overall chromatic content to each stimulus in a series (direct scaling). This investigation aimed to (1) reveal differences in perceived saturation between younger and older observers based on two different scaling methods, namely conventional direct scaling and paired comparison scaling; and (2) examine the effects of three different illuminance levels on perceived saturation. The results indicate that when using direct scaling for high-saturation colors, older observers perceived less saturation than younger subjects. This difference was not observed for trials with low-saturation colors. When paired comparison scaling was used, perception of saturations for yellow and blue, or blue-green, in older observers was different from that in younger observers. Illuminance did not influence perceived saturation in either group.

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The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between recurrent nightmare and indefinite complaints and to determine the explanatory variables of indefinite complaints related to nightmares in hemodialysis (HD) patients. Sleep quality and dream anxiety in nightmare were assessed with the Athens Insomnia Scale and Van Dream Anxiety Scale. Using a visual analog scale and the Beck Depression Inventory, we assessed the presence of indefinite complaints and levels of depressive symptoms, respectively. Moreover, logistic regression analysis was performed to determine the risk factors of dream anxiety in recurrent nightmare. The presence of feelings of malaise was an independent risk factor of recurrent nightmare (OR, 1.360; p = 0.0083). Adjustment for the presence of feelings of malaise could help to reduce the frequency of nightmares or sleep disorders in patients undergoing HD treatment. Our findings will be useful when considering adjustment of the HD dose.

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