The present study aimed to examine the portrayal of men and women in television advertisements in two different television channels (English and Chinese medium) in Hong Kong. The study involved a content-analysis of how men and women are portrayed on television using the well-used coding scheme. The Chinese channel had significantly more gender stereotypic adverts compared to the English channel (6 out of 10 attributes compared to only 2 out of 10 attributes). Results were compared to previous studies done in Asia as well as in the rest of the world.

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Exploratory and confirmatory analyses were used to examine the Satisfaction With Life Scale in a sample of Hong Kong university students. The exploratory analyses showed that the Satisfaction With Life Scale had good internal consistency reliability and that it appeared to measure a unidimensional construct. Comparison of Hong Kong students’ scores on the Satisfaction With Life Scale with the normative data for American students and mainland Chinese and Korean students showed that Hong Kong students were more similar, on average, to the American students than to the Asian students in their overall satisfaction with life. Further analysis of the scale’s structure using confirmatory factor analysis found that a modified two-factor model defined by present and past life satisfaction items and which allowed the error variances for two items to correlate fit the data best. However, inspection of the fit indices for the modified two-factor model suggested that it over fit the data, while a modified one-factor model, with correlated errors, also showed acceptable fit. Since the modified one-factor model was more parsimonious and agreed with the theoretical development of the scale as a unidimensional measure of general overall life satisfaction, it was retained. It is suggested that because of the Satisfaction With Life Scale’s good reliability and cross-cultural validity along with its brevity and broad-band nature in assessing overall satisfaction with life it could have wide applicability as an ancillary measure in a number of research areas.

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This study examined the psychological profile of effeminates (n = 45) in comparison with matched-groups of normal males (n = 45) and females (n = 45). Respondents were Malaysian students aged between 19-24 years. Results of the one-way analyses of variance showed that effeminate students were similar to females in terms of their perceptions of their body image, thinking, and gender characteristics. However, they were more androgynous than normal female students. Although effeminates reported the lowest level of self-esteem, contrary to prediction, they showed low psychological distress. The results are discussed with respect to their current situation as well as the general literature in this area.

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We examined whether eye gaze triggers reflexive attentional shift in autism. First, autistic individuals who were lacking both joint attention behaviors and theory-of-mind abilities were examined. Targets were randomly presented to either the left or right side of a gazing face. Autistic subjects localized the targets faster when targets were congruent with than against gaze directions. The occurrence of this gaze-triggered attentional shift was further examined using different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) in autistic individuals and non-autistic controls. Autistic subjects similar to non-autistic controls responded faster when the targets were congruent with than against gaze directions for short SOA conditions. These results suggest that autistic individuals, even those lacking joint attention behaviors, respond reflexively to another person’s gaze directions.

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The present study applied the false memory experimental paradigm to the functional independence-interdependence issue of bilinguals. Seventy-four Japanese university students who had learned English for at least seven years participated in a list-learning experiment. Most of them were considered as Japanese-dominant bilinguals. Twelve 15-word-list (180 words) were successively presented. Each list was constructed so that a non-presented word (CNW) would be falsely recognized. Six lists were presented in Japanese and the other six lists were presented in English. Half of the recognition test words were presented in English and the rest in Japanese. These factors were orthogonal. The results showed that, although hit rates were higher when the list language and the test language matched, false-alarm rates of CNWs were higher when the test language was Japanese. These supported the unbalanced, independent storage model, which was proposed in the present study.

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The ability to use abstract rules is very important in applying our experience to new situations. To examine the system governing such rule-guided behavior, we developed a recurrent neural network model of rule-guided behavior and simulated a physiological experiment involving a rule-guided delayed task (Wallis, Anderson, & Miller, 2001). Our model was constructed using neural system identification (Zipser, 1992), and a fully recurrent neural network model was optimized to perform a rule-guided delayed task. The model’s hidden layer contained rule-selective units, and an examination of connection weights substantiated the postulate that rule-selective neurons maintain encoded rule information and contribute to rule-guided responses indirectly. The simulation results predicted functional interactions among neurons involved in various task-related activities. The similarity between the behavior of the model units and biological neurons shows that the brain uses mechanisms like those of the model, and that ample mutual connections in the prefrontal cortex are the basis for promoting flexible learning.

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