Previous studies on shallow orthographies and clear syllable boundaries of languages—such as Spanish, German, and French—report an inhibitory effect in lexical decision tasks when targets have more densely frequent syllable neighborhoods (MFSNs). However, these results do not indicate whether the inhibitory effect derives from orthographic syllable representations or phonological syllable representations, because the target words in those studies were mixed in terms of orthographic and phonological representations. The present study investigated whether an inhibitory effect due to lexical competitors derives from phonological or orthographic syllables, using two lexical decision tasks with Korean bisyllable words. In Experiment 1, when a target had MFSNs that controlled for orthographically related sublexical variables (e.g., bigram frequency, the density of orthographic neighborhoods, and the density of more frequent orthographic syllable neighborhoods), the facilitative effect occurred. In Experiment 2, a typical inhibitory effect in a lexical decision task was elicited by a dense MFSN in a phonologically defined syllable, while a dense MFSN in an orthographically defined syllable did not create the inhibitory effect. The results suggest that an inhibitory effect due to lexical competition might not be derived from orthographic syllables, but from phonological syllables.

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This study investigated whether an emotional valence conveyed by verbal content would influence the production of facial displays. Undergraduate students were asked to describe three kinds of intense emotional episodes (involving joy, anger, or sadness) to an experimenter (listener). Their facial displays were simultaneously videotaped via a prompter. The results revealed that overall, speakers maintained positive facial displays as they talked, regardless of the type of emotional episodes. While they described a positive emotional episode (i.e., joy), their verbal protocols were likely to co-occur with a gaze directed at the listener and a positive facial expression. In contrast, while they described a negative emotional episodes (i.e., anger or sadness), their verbal protocols were less clearly associated with gaze and facial expression. These findings implicate that during social interactions, gaze and facial expression reflect both the emotional valence of a verbal message and the attitudes toward a listener.

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Recently, considerable attention has been paid to the reputational basis of punishment. The current study examines two issues: the justifiability of punishments and individual differences among observers. Participants evaluated the traits and likability of justified and unjustified punishers and were classified into two groups by the dictator game: monopolists and non-monopolists. As predicted, justified punishers were considered as having favorable traits and unjustified punishers were not. Additionally, we found that non-monopolistic participants regarded justified punishers as good partners, while monopolistic participants did not. Multiple regression analysis showed that this pattern cannot be explained by similarities between punishers and participants. It is likely that monopolists would avoid any punishers, due to the higher possibility that they would be targeted by punishers.

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This study examined personality trait and intelligence scores as predictors of school- level academic performance (AP) (British GCSE; America Grade 10) in various arts (i.e. languages) and science subjects. The participant sample consisted of 80 school pupils from a British Sixth Form College. Conscientiousness and Openness-to-Experience of the Big Five personality factors (Costa & McCrae, 1992) were found to account for 13% of unique variance in AP. Intelligence (Wonderlic, 1992) accounted for the initial 10% of unique variance in AP. For science subjects (maths, science) intelligence accounted for more of the variance than personality traits, while for English language (literature, language) subjects the opposite was true. The results further support the use of personality measures being used in academic selection procedures and confirms that personality can predict AP at school level. Limitations of the study are discussed.

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The present study examined the relationships among conditional inference, working memory (WM) and prepotent response inhibition (PRI) across different age groups. Participants (N = 112) of this study included preschoolers (6-year-olds), third graders (8-year-olds), fifth graders (11-year-olds) and eighth graders (13-year-olds). There were two conditional inference tasks, one based on a factual proposition and another based on a counterfactual proposition. The backward digit span task and Stroop task were used as the measures of WM and PRI, respectively. Results of the present study revealed that conditional inference was related to WM in all age groups, but was related to PRI in only the preschoolers, third graders and fifth graders. Data suggested that the role of WM and PRI varied with age development.

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