This study examines lay theories and demographic correlates of happiness in Britain, China (Hong Kong) and Japan among comparable groups. 311 young people completed a questionnaire measuring lay theories of happiness (COHQ) and the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI). The British participants reported highest levels of happiness. The 36 causes factored into six internally coherent and interpretable factors. Only one of the six factors significantly correlated (r= .21, p< .05 to r= .34, p< .01) with the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI) scores. Path analysis, using the OHI as the dependent variable showed that among the lay theory factors, only lay theories about achievement and freedom in life and work was a direct predictor. The role and function of lay theories with respect to happiness are discussed.

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The present experiment places subjects in an abstract medical diagnosis context, in which a similarity judgement is posed with the manipulation of the additive common symptom. Results obtained from eighty-nine subjects (31 males and 58 females) reyeal that the (perplexing) inconsistent responses across the trials without, and with, the common symptom added, are not simply dependent on the symptom evidence, but rather jointly on the type of the common symptom and the pattern of responses to the trial without a common symptom. This result is consistent with the equate-to-differentiate explanation, but not with the independence account.

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The quality of the Motivational Strategies for Learning Questionnaire-Chinese Version (MSLQ-CV) items was assessed with a nonparametric item analysis on a sample of 1292 Hong Kong primary and secondary students. Although a number of items, within each scale needed options combined, the overall quality of these scales in discriminating between trait levels was good. Multivariate analysis on the maximum likelihood estimates of the scale scores showed significant grade and gender differences for some scales, but the effect sizes were small. Correlational analysis of these scales supported earlier research results, and a regression analysis found that four scales significantly predicted participants’ scores on a standardized measure of Chinese language achievement, although the amount of variance explained was less than 5 percent. The advantages of nonparametric item analysis over traditional sample dependent omnibus measures of item and scale quality are discussed.

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The present study investigated the degree of acquisition of honorific expressions by native Chinese speakers with respect to both aspects of grammar and knowledge of Japanese personal relations. Thirty-two native Chinese speakers studying Japanese participated in this study. Sixty incorrect sentences containing honorific expressions (36 with exalted and 24 with humble terms) were used as stimulus items. Participants were required to correct the errors in the sentences. Scores for proper usage of honorific terms for others were higher than those for expressions requiring grammatical changes. Furthermore, scores for proper usage of honorific terms (both exalted and humble) pertaining to others were higher than those for proper usage of such terms pertaining to oneself/family members. The result of the analysis on scores pertaining to the proper reference to the object of politeness showed that native Chinese speakers had quite a lot of difficulty editing sentences requiring humble terms for the object of politeness in the third person.

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An auditory priming experiment with 28 native Cantonese speakers was conducted to examine the effects of phonological overlap between monosyllabic target words and preceding primes. In the experiment, listeners heard a pair of Cantonese monosyllables (prime-target) with 250 milliseconds inter-stimulus interval in between and they were instructed to name aloud the second item (target). Results indicated that facilitation was observed in two conditions: (1) shared rime and tone between primes and targets and (2) shared onset and rime between primes and targets. However, when shared the onset and tone between the monosyllabic prime and target, an inhibition effect was observed. These findings are discussed in terms of the segmental and supra-segmental information of Cantonese.

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This study examined how the image of females smoking was interpreted and whether that interpretation varied according to the smoking behaviour and the sex of the raters. Male and female smokers and non-smokers were shown poses of female models with or without a cigarette or just wearing glasses and rated them for attractiveness, intelligence and extent of being sexually interested. Models in the control pose (not smoking and no glasses) were considered most attractive and the least attractive when wearing glasses. On the ‘sexually interested’ ratings the smoking pose models were rated as the most sexually interested; whereas those wearing glasses were rated as the least sexually interested. Models wearing glasses were rated as the most intelligent and the smokers as the least intelligent. Smokers rated the smoker models as more attractive, but similar in intelligence to non-smokers. Non-smokers however, rated the smokers as less intelligent and less attractive than the non-smokers. No significant gender interactions were found indicating a consensus of agreement across the sexes. It was concluded that the crosses similarity-attraction effect influenced ratings on all dimensions in relation to the smoking pose.

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