Young-Hoon Kim

The self is defined and judged differently by people from face and dignity cultures (in this case, Hong Kong and the United States, respectively). Across 3 experiments, people from a face culture absorbed the judgments of other people into their private self-definitions. Particularly important for people from a face culture are public representations--knowledge that is shared and known to be shared about someone. In contrast, people from a dignity culture try to preserve the sovereign self by no

People's judgments about their own moral status and well-being were made differently by those from a Dignity culture (Anglo-Americans) and by those from a Face culture (Asian Americans). Face culture participants were more influenced by information processed from a third-person (compared with first-person) perspective, with information about the self having a powerful effect only when seen through another's eyes. Thus, (a) Asian Americans felt the greatest need for moral cleansing when thinking

Contrary to the popular assumption that self-enhancement improves task motivation and future performance, the authors propose that both inflated and deflated self-assessments of performance are linked to an increased likelihood of practicing self-handicapping and having relatively poor performance in future tasks. Consistent with this proposal, we found that irrespective of the level of actual performance, compared with accurate self-assessment, both inflated and deflated self-assessments of tas

The authors contend that although people in both Eastern and Western cultures are motivated to make favorable self-evaluations, the actual likelihood of expressing favorable self-evaluations in a concrete situation depends on (a) the dominant self-presentation norms in the culture, (b) how salient the norm is in the immediate situation, and (c) the availability of normatively permissible means to make favorable self-evaluations. The authors tested this proposal in three studies. Study 1 showed t

Past studies showed that compared to North Americans, East Asians have lower self-esteem and their self-esteem scores do not predict self-esteem-related motivations and self-perceptions. These findings have been interpreted in terms of a lack of the need for positive self-regard in East Asian contexts. We posit that the East – West difference in self-esteem may arise from the popularity of the dialectical self (the idea that one can have both a positive and negative self) in East Asia and of the

Despite the popularity of the idea in American culture that self-enhancement confers psychological benefits, the evidence for this idea is mixed. In the present research, we tested the contention that overly positive self-assessments could lead to psychological distress. In two correlational studies (Studies 1 and 2), we addressed some previous problems related to the measurement of self-enhancement. By measuring self-enhancement through the discrepancy between self-assessments of relative task

We attempt to develop an integrative model of the factors that give rise to the overestimation of their abilities among the incompetent and underestimation of the competent by decomposing the specific conditions of the cognitive and motivational components underlying the self-assessment phenomenon from a statistical point of view. Hong Kong (Study 1) and European American participants (Study 2) took an ability test and assessed their performance. By plotting estimated relative ability against ac

To study the effects of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs) in the management of cognitive impairments in patients with schizophrenia, we investigated the effects of 12 weeks of adjunctive therapy with donepezil on their cognitive impairments. Twenty-four subjects stabilized on haloperidol treatment (5-30 mg/day) for a minimum of 3 months were entered into a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of donepezil as an adjunctive treatment. Subjects were randomly assigned under double-blind con

The present study aimed to uncover culturally different ways in which emotion suppression affects life satisfaction. To do so, we manipulated American and Hong Kong Chinese participants to perceive that they had suppressed their emotions to either a greater extent (high suppression) or a lesser extent (low suppression). In the control condition, there was no manipulation. Then, participants indicated how satisfied they were with their lives. We found that American participants reported lower lif

Giving effective negative feedback is not only important but also challenging. Often people struggle as to how ; and perhaps even more so when the feedback receiver comes from a different culture . Building on the regulatory fit theory, the current research examined how negative feedback framing (gain- vs. loss framed) would affect feedback receivers’ motivation as a function of their regulatory focus. We found that European Americans were in general more promotion-focused than Chinese (Study 1)

The current work examined conditions under which parental praise leads to higher academic achievement and better psychological health in schoolchildren. We tested the hypothesis that perceptions of accurate praise, both by parents and by children, are associated with outcomes optimal for children. Our results showed that parents’ perceptions of over- or underpraising (vs. accurately praising) their children’s schoolwork predicted poorer school performance and higher depression in children. From

We assessed the changes of plasma haloperidol concentrations and clinical responses repeatedly up to 4 weeks after coadministration or discontinuation of rifampin in 12 schizophrenic patients taking haloperidol alone (group I) and 5 patients taking haloperidol and antituberculotic drugs (group II). After coadministration of rifampin in group I, daily trough haloperidol concentrations rapidly decreased and reached 63% of baseline level by day 3, 41.3% by day 7, and 30% by day 28. On the other han

Most people rate their abilities as better than "average" even though it is statistically impossible for most people to have better-than-median abilities. Some investigators explained this phenomenon in terms of a self-enhancement bias. The present study complements this motivational explanation with the parsimonious cognitive explanation that the phrase "average ability" may be interpreted as below-median ability rather than median ability. We believe people tend to construe an "average" target

Previous research found that poor performers tend to overestimate how well their performance compares to others'. This unskilled and unaware effect has been attributed to poor performers' lack of metacognitive ability to realize their ineptitude. We contend that the unskilled are motivated to ignore (be unaware of) their poor performance so that they can feel better about themselves. We tested this idea in an experiment in which we manipulated the perceived self-relevancy of the task to men and