Showing papers by "Chi-Yue Chiu published in 2014"

Openness to Experience: its lower level structure, measurement, and cross-cultural equivalence.

Abstract: Openness to Experience is an important but relatively poorly understood personality construct. Advances in openness research require further construct clarification as well as establishment of a common framework for conceptualizing and measuring the lower level structure of the construct. In this article, we present data from 3 studies to address this research need. In Study 1, we identify 6 facets of Openness to Experience--intellectual efficiency, ingenuity, curiosity, aesthetics, tolerance, and depth--based on a factor analysis of 36 existing Openness-related scales. In Study 2, we present further validity evidence for the 6-facet structure based on a newly developed measure of Openness. Data from this study also suggest the presence of 2 intermediate-level factors (i.e., aspects) of Openness: intellect and culture. In Study 3, we present a short form of the newly developed measure, retaining items that showed the highest internal consistency and measurement invariance across 3 samples: U.S. undergraduates, Chinese MBA students, and Chinese undergraduates. Together these 3 studies offer a more nuanced understanding of the multifaceted nature of the Openness construct.

Self-Organization and Social Organization: U.S. and Chinese Constructions

Abstract: From the writings of William James (1890) onward, the construct of the social self has been widely employed in North American and European social psychology (see Markus & Cross, 1990, for a review). Many of the most influential theoretical perspectives in social psychology concern how a per­ son cognitively represents and emotionally identifies with groups: social identity theory (Hogg & Abrams, 1988; Tajfel & Turner, 1979), social catego­ rization theory (Turner, 1987), and the group value model (Lind & Tyler, 1988). Although James and many of his Western intellectual heirs have voiced the caveat that the social self is experienced differently in other cultural systems, until very recently there has been little psychological research on this issue.

The role of instrumental emotion regulation in the emotions–creativity link: How worries render individuals with high neuroticism more creative.

Abstract: Based on the instrumental account of emotion regulation (Tamir, 2005), the current research seeks to offer a novel perspective to the emotions-creativity debate by investigating the instrumental value of trait-consistent emotions in creativity. We hypothesize that emotions such as worry (vs. happy) are trait-consistent experiences for individuals higher on trait neuroticism and experiencing these emotions can facilitate performance in a creativity task. In 3 studies, we found support for our hypothesis. First, individuals higher in neuroticism had a greater preference for recalling worrisome (vs. happy) events in anticipation of performing a creativity task (Study 1). Moreover, when induced to recall a worrisome (vs. happy) event, individuals higher in neuroticism came up with more creative design (Study 2) and more flexible uses of a brick (Study 3) when the task was a cognitively demanding one. Further, Study 3 offers preliminary support that increased intrinsic task enjoyment and motivation mediates the relationship between trait-consistent emotion regulation and creative performance. These findings offer a new perspective to the controversy concerning the emotions-creativity relationship and further demonstrate the role of instrumental emotion regulation in the domain of creative performance.

When Does Life Satisfaction Accompany Relational Identity Signaling: A Cross-Cultural Analysis

Abstract: Economists have proposed that signaling one’s social identity can increase a person’s subjective utility or happiness. However, there is little cross-cultural research on this relationship. The present research fills this knowledge gap. Using relational identity signaling as an illustration, in two studies, the authors showed that relative to European Americans, Asians (Chinese and Indians) value the relational self more and have relatively high intention to signal their relational identities publicly. Furthermore, for Asians, relational identity signaling is accompanied by higher life satisfaction (the cognitive component of happiness) only when the assimilation motive is salient. In contrast, for European Americans, a positive relationship between relational identity signaling and life satisfaction emerges only when the differentiation motive is salient. These findings suggest that relational identity signaling can confer utility to both Asians and European Americans. Moreover, whether relational identity signaling would increase life satisfaction in a certain culture is a joint function of what the normative practice is in the culture and the motivation to seek social connection of the self to or differentiation of it from others.

Communication and culture: A complexity theory approach

Abstract: In the target paper, Kashima (2014) harvests insights from communication research, shared reality theory in social psychology, diffusionism in cognitive anthropology and connectionism in cognitive psychology to propose a neodiffusionist account of culture. A major contribution of this account is that it offers a social psychological explanation of the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. According to this account, cultural ideas and practices are those that are widespread within a designated human group; they are ‘generated (largely randomly), socially transmitted, and retained within a human population due to their adaptive advantage’ (p. 81). Communication and context-specific shared reality The focus in Kashima’s analysis is thesocial transmission of knowledge through grounding of meaning in interpersonal communication. Communication is a joint activity through which socially bounded participants negotiate meanings in concrete physical, temporal, and social settings. A primary goal of communication is to attain mutual acceptance of meanings in a conversation at a sufficient level so that the conversation can move forward. Successful grounding requires perspective taking and the coordination of effort and perspectives. As a result, compared to messages intended for the self (e.g. private or internal speeches), messages intended for a social audience typically contain fewer idiosyncratic expressions and more expressions that the communicators assume to be comprehensible to the audience (audience design). Once shared meanings are established through communication, they become part of the intersubjective reality shared among the communicators. From this perspective, grounding is a dynamic, recursive process whereby communicators initiating a new conversation rely on their initial common ground to formulate messages for each other, modify their common ground as the conversation moves forward, and establish mutually accepted meanings at the conclusion of the conversation. The neo-diffusionist account resonates with the postWhorfian approach to communication and culture (Krauss & Chiu, 1998), which argues that ‘through communication, the private cognitions of individuals can be made public and directed toward a shared representation of the referent’ (p. 53). Specifically, using language to describe a state of affairs can evoke or create an internal representation that differs from and may overshadow the internal representations of the same state of affairs evoked or created by other means of encoding. Moreover, how a state of affairs is described in verbal communication is affected by the contexts of language use, including the ground rules and assumptions that govern usage, audience design, and the immediate, ongoing, and emerging properties of the communication situation. Furthermore, the linguistic representations evoked or created in communication can affect a language user’s subsequent cognitions (Chiu, Krauss & Lee, 1999; Chiu, Leung & Kwan, 2007; Lau, Chiu & Lee, 2001; Lau, Lee & Chiu, 2004). Indeed, consistent with the neo-diffusionist account, our research on referential communication shows that in the process of interpersonal communication, each communicator assesses the partner’s view of the referent based on the partner’s community membership, prior communications, the referent context, and the emergent properties of the communication situations, and tailors a message that is appropriate to the common ground (Lau, Chiu & Hong, 2001). Once consensus is reached on the meaning of the referent, the consensual meaning becomes a part of the communicators’ shared reality and may overshadow previous representations of the referent (Chiu, Krauss & Lau, 1998).

Aligning inside and outside perspectives of the self: A cross-cultural difference in self-perception

Abstract: Past research shows that European Americans tend to take a first-person perspective to understand the self and are unlikely to align the inside look with the outside gaze, whereas Asians tend to take a third-person perspective and are likely to shift their inside look in the direction of the outsize gaze. In three experiments, we compared Asians and European Americans' self-perceptions when the presence of their parents in the background of self-perception was primed or otherwise. Without the priming, both European Americans and Asians viewed themselves more positively from their own perspective than from their parents' perspective. With the priming, only Asians lowered the positivity of their self-perceptions to match the perceived positivity of the self in the parents' perspective. These results suggest that Asians do not have a static, passive tendency to assimilate their self-views into the perceived external assessments of the self. Rather, their self-views are fluid and flexible.

Priming Bush (vs. Obama) increases liking of American brands: The role of intersubjectively important values

Abstract: Past research has shown that exposure to cultural symbols can influence personal preferences. The present research extends this finding by showing that cultural symbols acquire their cultural significance in part through their associations with intersubjectively important values—values that are perceived to be prevalent in the culture. In addition, cultural symbols can influence personal preferences through the activation of perceived normative preferences. In Study 1, perceived liking of Bush among Americans was linked to the perceived popularity of intersubjectively important values in the USA. In Study 2, both priming Bush and personal endorsement of intersubjectively important values increased Americans' liking of iconic brands (brands that symbolize American culture). Furthermore, perceived normative preferences for iconic brands fully mediated this effect.

Conformist Opinion Shift as an Accommodation-Motivated Cognitive Experience in Strong and Weak Situations

Abstract: The authors introduce accommodation motivation as an individual difference construct that predicts personal preference to display conformist opinion shift, or the tendency to align opinion of the self with that of the group. The authors hypothesize that the relationship between accommodation motivation and conformist opinion shift will be stronger when the situational press for conformity is weak. Having clarified the conceptual meaning of accommodation motivation, the authors present evidence from two experiments that accommodation-motivated individuals readily display conformist opinion shift in anticipation of discussing with disagreeing others when conformity demand is weak (vs. strong). The second experiment offers initial support for a mediated interaction model: Accommodation-motivated individuals' conformist opinion shift was attributable to the heightened experience of conflict-related emotions that ensued from misalignment of personal and group opinions. The authors discuss the implications for ...

Holistic Versus Analytic Thinking Explains Collective Culpability Attribution

Abstract: Classical attribution theories of behavioral responsibility attribution emphasize that individuals should not be blamed for their mere association with a wrongdoer. Nonetheless, perceivers sometimes blame the wrongdoer's associates for the wrongdoer's misdeed even when those associates are not causally connected to the wrongdoing. In an experiment conducted in Singapore, we found that collective culpability attributions result from holistic thinking—the tendency to attribute causal connectedness between discrete entities or events. Activating holistic thinking enhanced perceptions of causal impacts of distal events and facilitated collective culpability attributions. We discuss these results in terms of their implications for understanding the nature of collective culpability and research on holistic thinking.

Culture and Consumer Behavior

Abstract: 1. The Importance of Cultural Literacy in Marketing 2. What Is Culture? 3. Cultural Variations in Consumption Patterns 4. Size Matters! Ecology, Culture and Consumption 5. Within-Cultural Variations 6. When Do Consumers Behave Culturally? 7. Conclusions and Future Directions

Detecting the Needs for Happiness and Meaning in Life from Google Books

Abstract: Research has shown that subjective well-being has two related but distinct dimensions, eudaimonic well-being and hedonic well-being. Hedonic well-being refers to one's overall positive affective experiences, while eudaimonic well-being is related to having a meaningful and noble purpose for life. While people are striving to have a happy and meaningful life, their motivations can be influenced by socio-economic conditions and contexts. In this study, we analyzed words frequencies in the Google Books corpus to measure the changing needs for eudaimonic and hedonic well-being and their relationships with economic growth. Results show that the frequencies of words related to hedonic well-being decrease while those related to eudaimonic well-being increase over the years. Furthermore, when people are poor, their motivation for hedonic well-being is relatively high. The hedonic motivational strength dramatically decreases and becomes stable when income reaches at a certain level. In contrast, people have relatively low motivation for eudaimonic well-being when they are poor. The eudaimonic motivational strength dramatically increases and becomes stable when income reaches at a certain level. Our study demonstrates an example of measuring subjective well-being through analysis of digital media. Index Terms—Psychology, Google, happiness, well-being, wealth.