Daniel Yang

Publications (13) View all

• Article: Difficulty in understanding social acting (but not false beliefs) mediates the link between autistic traits and ingroup relationships

  Daniel Y.-J. Yang, Renee Baillargeon
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  ABSTRACT: Why do individuals with more autistic traits experience social difficulties? Here we examined the hypothesis that these difficulties stem in part from a challenge in understanding social acting, the prosocial pretense that adults routinely produce to maintain positive relationships with their ingroup. In Study 1, we developed a self-administered test of social-acting understanding: participants read stories in which a character engaged in social acting and rated the appropriateness of the character’s response. Adults who scored 26 or higher on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) questionnaire gave significantly lower ratings than comparison participants (AQ < 26). Study 2 found that difficulty in understanding social acting, but not false beliefs, mediated the link between autistic traits and perceived ingroup relationships.
  Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 01/2013; · 3.34 Impact Factor
• Article: Polarized Attitudes Toward the Ground Zero Mosque are Reduced by High-Level Construal

  Daniel Y.-J. Yang, Jesse Lee Preston, Ivan Hernandez
  Social Psychological and Personality Science. 05/2012;
• Article: Lay Psychology of Globalization and Its Social Impact

  Daniel Y-J. Yang, Chi-Yue Chiu, Xia Chen, Shirley Y. Y. Cheng, Letty Y-Y. Kwan, Kim-Pong Tam, Kuang-Hui Yeh
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  ABSTRACT: As a first step to establish social psychology of globalization as a new area of investigation, we carried out two cross-regional studies to examine lay people's perception of globalization and its related concepts, as well as lay people's appraisal of the social impacts of globalization. The participants were undergraduates from regions with markedly different experiences with globalization (the United States, Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). Despite regional differences in experiences with globalization, cross-regional similarities were found in the way globalization-related issues were classified and how their social impacts were evaluated. Participants in all four regions (1) perceived globalization to be related to but not synonymous with modernization, Westernization, and Americanization; (2) used international trade versus technology, and globalization of consumption versus global consequences as the dimensions to categorize globalization-related issues; and (3) perceived globalization to have stronger positive effects on people's competence than on their warmth.
  Journal of Social Issues 12/2011; 67(4):677 - 695. · 1.96 Impact Factor
• Article: Cultural differences in the lateral occipital complex while viewing incongruent scenes.

  Lucas J Jenkins, Yung-Jui Yang, Joshua Goh, Ying-Yi Hong, Denise C Park
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  ABSTRACT: Converging behavioral and neuroimaging evidence indicates that culture influences the processing of complex visual scenes. Whereas Westerners focus on central objects and tend to ignore context, East Asians process scenes more holistically, attending to the context in which objects are embedded. We investigated cultural differences in contextual processing by manipulating the congruence of visual scenes presented in an fMR-adaptation paradigm. We hypothesized that East Asians would show greater adaptation to incongruent scenes, consistent with their tendency to process contextual relationships more extensively than Westerners. Sixteen Americans and 16 native Chinese were scanned while viewing sets of pictures consisting of a focal object superimposed upon a background scene. In half of the pictures objects were paired with congruent backgrounds, and in the other half objects were paired with incongruent backgrounds. We found that within both the right and left lateral occipital complexes, Chinese participants showed significantly greater adaptation to incongruent scenes than to congruent scenes relative to American participants. These results suggest that Chinese were more sensitive to contextual incongruity than were Americans and that they reacted to incongruent object/background pairings by focusing greater attention on the object.
  Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 06/2010; 5(2-3):236-41. · 6.13 Impact Factor
• Chapter: What is Chinese about Chinese psychology? Who are the Chinese in Chinese psychology?

  Ying-yi Hong, Yung-Jui Yang, Chi-yue Chiu
  05/2010: pages 19-29;