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Whether a cognitive process is operated automatically or in a controlled manner has been a long-standing question in cognitive psychology. However, this issue has not been investigated in the activation of metaphoric association. A primed word valence judgement task is often used to test the activation of metaphoric association, in which participants first see a prime (bright/dark square or fixation point moving up or down from the centre of the screen) and then make a valence judgement to a target word. Metaphoric congruency effect occurs when participants make faster judgements to the target with valence being matched with the prime (good followed bright/top prime) than being mismatched with the prime (good followed dark/bottom prime). In the present two experiments, we manipulated prime-target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and proportion of metaphorically congruent trials (congruency proportion) to tease apart the effects of automatic and controlled activation of brightness-valence and spatial-valence metaphoric associations on word valence judgements. Results showed an overall effect of congruency proportion on brightness-valence and spatial-valence metaphoric congruency effect, which was independent of prime-target SOA. The effect was enhanced or reversed when congruency proportion was higher or lower than 0.5, respectively, suggesting that the activation of metaphoric association could be modulated by strategic control. The implications of these findings on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and semantic priming theories are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the terror management theory, people tend to favour their worldview and in‐group members after being reminded of death (i.e., mortality salience [MS] effect). However, inconsistent findings of the MS effect were found among Chinese people. In the present study, we examined the MS effect with Chinese samples and tested whether the effect would depend on participants' cultural orientation and relational self‐esteem. In Studies 1 (N = 227) and 2 (N = 221), we examined the roles of participants' cultural orientations and relational self‐esteem in their evaluations on moral transgression and/or perceived regard from people around after being primed with mortality (vs. dental pain) salience. We obtained the interaction effects of mortality salience, cultural orientations, and relational self‐esteem. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of Chinese culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four experiments used signal detection analyses to assess recognition memory for lists of words consisting of differing numbers of exemplars from different semantic categories. The results showed that recognition memory performance, measured by da, (a) increased as category length (CL, the number of study-list items selected from the same semantic category) increased from 1 to 8 but then decreased as CL further increased from 8 to 14, (b) was greater when 2 studied items from the same category occurred back to back, rather than being separated by 5-11 items from other categories, and (c) was greater for the first studied 2 exemplars than for the last studied 2 exemplars from blocked categories with CLs of 8 or 14. For all CLs, all z-coordinate receiver operating characteristic (z-ROC) functions were linear with slopes significantly less than 1.0, and none had a significant quadratic component. These results pose a challenge for three major classes of recognition memory models: item-noise, context-noise, and dual-process models.

The present study examined the intergenerational factors in transmitting autobiographical memories from one generation to the next. Older adults from Beijing, China reported a collection of personally important autobiographical memories and their middle-aged children recalled important parental memories. The parent-child dyads independently recalled and provided ratings of mnemonic characteristics for the memories. Across generations, consensus memories, which refer to the memories that both parents and children considered as important in the parent's life, were characterised by the substantial material change that the events brought about in their lives. While parent-child interaction affected the number of events passed onto children, it only affected the number of script-divergent events that were not recorded in the life script of a culture, but not the number of script-consistent events. In addition, children whose parents were rusticated and relocated to rural areas during the Cultural Revolution remembered more historical memories than children whose parents were not rusticated. The findings shed light on the process that one generation gains the biographical knowledge and historical experience of a prior generation. Theoretical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]