Against the background of Chinese culture, we investigated the relationship between family socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s reading ability. Participants included 2294 middle-school students in grade 8. SES was measured by parents’ education level, parents’ occupational prestige, and family property, and children’s reading ability was estimated with item response theory. In addition, we adopted an 8-item parent–child relationship scale and a 22-item learning motivation scale that included four dimensions. We examined whether the parent–child relationship mediated the relationship between family SES and reading ability and whether this was moderated by learning motivation. The results indicated that the parent–child relationship played a mediating role in the relationship between SES and reading ability. This relationship was moderated by students’ learning motivation. The direct effects of SES on reading ability at high, medium, and low levels of learning motivation were 0.24, 0.32, and 0.40, respectively.

Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments were performed to answer this question. Experiment 1 investigated the network of moral aesthetic judgments and facial aesthetic judgments. Participants performed aesthetic judgments and gender judgments on both faces and scenes containing moral acts. The conjunction analysis of the contrasts ‘facial aesthetic judgment > facial gender judgment’ and ‘scene moral aesthetic judgment > scene gender judgment’ identified the common involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), inferior temporal gyrus and medial superior frontal gyrus, suggesting that both types of aesthetic judgments are based on the orchestration of perceptual, emotional and cognitive components. Experiment 2 examined the network of facial beauty and moral beauty during implicit perception. Participants performed a non-aesthetic judgment task on both faces (beautiful vs common) and scenes (containing morally beautiful vs neutral information). We observed that facial beauty (beautiful faces > common faces) involved both the cortical reward region OFC and the subcortical reward region putamen, whereas moral beauty (moral beauty scenes > moral neutral scenes) only involved the OFC. Moreover, compared with facial beauty, moral beauty spanned a larger-scale cortical network, indicating more advanced and complex cerebral representations characterizing moral beauty.

The present research was aim to examine whether the relationship between work engagement and objective task performance is moderated by perceived organizational support (POS). Based on the existing literature, perceived organizational support is hypothesized to strengthen the positive association between employees’ work engagement and their objective task performance. The hypotheses were tested on a sample of 1049 employees. Results of hierarchical regression analysis show that: (1) work engagement is positively related to objective task performance, and (2) the relationship between work engagement and objective task performance is moderated by POS, such that the positive relationship is more significant when POS higher than lower. In the end, theoretical and practical implications, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Previous studies on the effect of color on cognitive task performances and have led to two different views. Some researchers think that the influence of red and blue on cognitive tasks is modulated by the difficulty of the task, and other researchers suggest that the influence mainly depends on the type of task. The current study combined these factors to investigate the effect of color on cognitive task performance. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the difficulty of the task to investigate the effect of red and blue on detail-oriented task performance (the proofreading task), whereas in Experiment 2 we manipulated task difficulty to explore the effect of red and blue on creative task performance (the Remote Associates Test). The results showed that red enhanced the performance on a simple detail-oriented task. However, blue improved the performance on a difficult detail-oriented task as well as on both simple and difficult creative tasks. The results of the current study indicate that the type and difficulty of the task together modulate the effect of color on cognitive performances.

This study tested the extent to which there are neural correlates of the influence of affective personality information on face processing, using event-related potentials (ERPs). In the learning phase, participants viewed a target individual’s face (with a neutral expression or faint smile) paired with negative, neutral or positive sentences describing the target’s previous typical behavior. In the following EEG testing phase, participants completed gender judgments of the learned faces. Statistical analyses were conducted on measures of neural activity during the gender judgment task. Repeated measures ANOVA of ERP data showed that faces described as having a negative personality elicited larger N170 than did those with a neutral or positive description. The early posterior negativity (EPN) showed the same pattern, with larger amplitudes for faces paired with negative personality than for others. The size of the late positive potential (LPP) was larger for faces paired with positive personality than for those with neutral and negative personality. The current study indicates that affective personality information is associated with an automatic, top-down modulation of face processing.