Michelle Yik

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology | UST · Division of Social Science

This article reviews theoretical and empirical advances achieved in the study of Chinese emotion during the last decade, with an overriding purpose of addressing the question: What is universal and what is unique about Chinese emotion? Several research themes have been pursued in the past decade in studying Chinese emotion. This article focuses on...

Affect is involved in many psychological phenomena, but a descriptive structure, long sought, has been elusive. Valence and arousal are fundamental, and a key question-the focus of the present study-is the relationship between them. Valence is sometimes thought to be independent of arousal, but, in some studies (representing too few societies in th...

The NEO-PI-3 is a fourth-generation instrument which has been shown to improve the psychometrics and readability of its immediate precedent, the NEO-PI-R. We examined the psychometric properties of the Chinese versions of the NEO-PI-R and NEO-PI-3 using three datasets (Ns = 913, 299, 403) collected using both monolingual and bilingual designs. The...

Background: On January 23, 2020, the city of Wuhan, China, was sealed off in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have found that the lockdown was associated with both positive and negative emotions, although their findings are not conclusive. In these studies, emotional responses to the Wuhan lockdown were identified using lexicons based on...

Despite the common belief that Chinese individuals are industrious and determined high achievers, in cross-cultural studies they consistently rate themselves lower on conscientiousness than their Western counterparts. In bilingual studies, Chinese–English individuals rate their conscientiousness lower than that of U.S. individuals, regardless of wh...

Past research has shown that disgust is a heterogeneous category and lacks unity in its defining features. In the two studies reported in this paper, we examined the internal structure of disgust in English, and its translation equivalents of asco in Spanish, Ekel in German, garaf in Arabic, and yanwu in Chinese. In Study 1, 517 participants listed...

Research in cross-cultural psychiatry has asserted that Chinese people have a higher tendency to report somatic symptoms of their psychological distress than people with a European ethnic background. However, recent studies have reached inconsistent conclusions and most have confounded language use with culture in their study designs. Focusing on t...

With the increasingly adverse impact of global warming on extreme weather conditions, including landslides, it is more important than ever to alert the public to landslide risks so that people can take precautionary measures. We report the first major project in Hong Kong assessing the public’s understanding of landslides and perceptions of the Lan...

People can easily infer the thoughts and feelings of others from brief descriptions of scenarios. But how do they arrive at these inferences? Three studies tested how, through anchoring-and-adjustment, people used semantic and numerical anchors (irrelevant values provided by experimenters) in inferring feelings from scenario descriptions. We showed...

Objective: While in general arousal increases with positive or negative valence (a so-called V-shape relation), there are large differences among individuals in how these two fundamental dimensions of affect are related in people's experience. In two studies, we examined two possible sources of this variation: personality and culture. Method: In...

Although large international studies have found consistent patterns of sex differences in personality traits among adults (i.e., women scoring higher on most facets), less is known about cross-cultural sex differences in adolescent personality and the role of culture and age in shaping them. The present study examines the NEO Personality Inventory-...

Although large international studies have found consistent patterns of sex differences in personality traits among adults (i.e., women scoring higher on most facets), less is known about cross-cultural sex differences in adolescent personality and the role of culture and age in shaping them. The present study examines the NEO Personality Inventory-...

Many studies investigated cultural differences in values, most notably by Hofstede and Schwarz. Relatively few have focused on virtues, a related and important concept in contemporary social science. The present paper examines the similarities and differences between nations, or blocks of - culturally related - nations on the perceived importance o...

Abstract Numerous studies have documented subtle but consistent sex differences in self-reports and observer-ratings of five-factor personality traits, and such effects were found to show welldefined developmental trajectories and remarkable similarity across nations. In contrast, very little is known about perceived gender differences in five-fact...

Consensual stereotypes of some groups are relatively accurate, whereas others are not. Previous work suggesting that national character stereotypes are inaccurate has been criticized on several grounds. In this article we (a) provide arguments for the validity of assessed national mean trait levels as criteria for evaluating stereotype accuracy; an...

The common within-subjects design of studies on the recognition of emotion from facial expressions allows the judgement of one face to be influenced by previous faces, thus introducing the potential for artefacts. The present study (N=344) showed that the canonical "disgust face" was judged as disgusted, provided that the preceding set of faces inc...

The current study tested whether the perception of angry faces is cross-culturally privileged over that of happy faces, by comparing perception of the offset of emotion in a dynamic flow of expressions. Thirty Chinese and 30 European-American participants saw movies that morphed an anger expression into a happy expression of the same stimulus perso...

Age trajectories for personality traits are known to be similar across cultures. To address whether stereotypes of age groups reflect these age-related changes in personality, we asked participants in 26 countries (N = 3,323) to rate typical adolescents, adults, and old persons in their own country. Raters across nations tended to share similar bel...

Core Affect is a state accessible to consciousness as a single simple feeling (feeling good or bad, energized or enervated) that can vary from moment to moment and that is the heart of, but not the whole of, mood and emotion. In four correlational studies (Ns = 535, 190, 234, 395), a 12-Point Affect Circumplex (12-PAC) model of Core Affect was deve...

The study reported in this article examined the relationship between affect and interpersonal behaviors by identifying the intersection between Yik’s (2009b) Chinese Circumplex Model of Affect (CCMA) and Wiggins’ (1995) Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC). Past research on the relationships between circumplexes has relied on zero-order correlations and...

We examined properties of culture-level personality traits in ratings of targets (N 5 5,109) ages 12 to 17 in 24 cultures.

College students (N=3,435) in 26 cultures reported their perceptions of age-related changes in physical, cognitive, and socioemotional areas of functioning and rated societal views of aging within their culture. There was widespread cross-cultural consensus regarding the expected direction of aging trajectories with (a) perceived declines in societ...

Past research on Chinese emotion has been plagued by the lack of a measurement map for affective feelings. In this article, I developed a fine-grained circumplex model of affective feelings that is arbitrarily defined by 12 segments. I created twelve 4-item self-report scales to measure affect felt during a clearly remembered moment (N = 395), and...

In his commentary on my paper (Yik, 200718. Yik , M. 2007. Culture, gender, and the bipolarity of momentary affect. Cognition and Emotion, 21: 664–680. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®]View all references), Schimmack (200912. Schimmack , U. 2009. Culture, gender, and the bipolarity of momentary affect: A critical re-examination. Cogni...

This study examined if the relation between momentary positive and negative affect varies with culture and gender. In eight samples covering five languages (English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) with 3084 respondents (1305 males and 1779 females), I tested this proposal through structural equation models that controlled for random and sy...

Despite the importance of understanding the emotional aspects of organizational decision making, prior research has paid scant attention to the role of emotion in escalation of commitment. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the relationship between negative affect and escalation of commitment. Results showed that regardless of whet...

Most people hold beliefs about personality characteristics typical of members of their own and others' cultures. These perceptions of national character may be generalizations from personal experience, stereotypes with a “kernel of truth,” or inaccurate stereotypes. We obtained national character ratings of 3989 people from 49 cultures and compared...

Most people hold beliefs about personality characteristics typical of members of their own and others' cultures. These perceptions of national character may be generalizations from personal experience, stereotypes with a "kernel of truth," or inaccurate stereotypes. We obtained national character ratings of 3989 people from 49 cultures and compared...

This article offers a new method to describe the relationship between two circumplexes, illustrated empirically with Wiggins' (1995) Interpersonal Adjective Scales (IAS) and Yik, Russell, and Steiger's (2004) 12-Point Affect Circumplex Scales (12-PACS). Michael Browne's CIRCUM-extension procedure was used to place each circumplex within the other....

The structure of momentary affect among Cantonese-speaking Chinese was explored by developing questionnaire scales in four response formats. Scales can be scored for dimensions defined by Feldman Barrett and Russell; Thayer; Larsen and Diener; and Watson and Tellegen. In a study of recalled affect (N = 487), the newly translated scales were found t...

This article shows that fundamental aspects of the structure of momentary affect are similar in Japanese and Canadian societies. We developed questionnaire scales in Japanese in four different formats for assessing self-reported momentary affect. Scales can be scored for dimensions defined by Feldman Barrett and Russell (1998), Thayer (1996), Larsen...

This article shows that fundamental aspects of the structure of momentary affect are similar in Korean and Canadian societies. We developed questionnaire scales in Korean in four different formats for assessing momentary affect. Scales can be scored for Feldman Barrett and Russell' s (1998) Pleasant, Unpleasant, Activated, and Deactivated, Thayer's...

Reviews of the self-report literature suggest that shyness is more prevalent among East Asians than among those of European heritage. We evaluated the generalizability of that claim with four studies comparing students of Asian heritage (AH) and European heritage (EH). Study 1 (N=897) confirmed a substantially higher rate of self-reported shyness a...

This study examined the effects of performance appraisal feedback on job and organizational attitudes of tellers (N = 329) in a large international bank. Negative affectivity moderated the link between favorable appraisal feedback and job attitudes. Among the higher rated performers, attitudes were improved 1 month after being notified of favorable...

This chapter examines the relation between the Five-Factor Model of personality and momentary affect in five languages, based on a pooled sample of 2070 (Ns = 535 for English, 233 for Spanish, 487 for Chinese, 450 for Japanese, 365 for Korean). Affect is described with a two-dimensional space that integrates major dimensional models in English and...

This article reports a study (N = 217) predicting self-reported momentary affect from personality. Affect was described with a two-dimensional space that integrates various affect models including the valence/arousal and the positive affect/negative affect models. Three models of personality were compared: Extraversion and Neuroticism, the Five Fac...

Describes the development of a tool to measure momentary affect in a Spanish speaking population, evaluated the generalizability of an integrated structure of momentary affect found with English-speaking Canadians to Spanish-speaking Ss, and conducted a cross-language comparison on the connections between affect and personality. The authors develop...

Current affect has been described with various dimensions and structures, including J. A. Russell's (1980) circumplex, D. Watson and A. Tellegen's (1985) positive and negative affect, R. E. Thayer's (1989) tense and energetic arousal, and R. J. Larsen and E. Diener's (1992) 8 combinations of pleasantness and activation. These 4 structures each pres...

D. Watson and L. A. Clark (1997) announced "two fundamental psychometric principles" (p. 282) of affect: The positive correlation between affects with the same valence tends to be substantial, whereas the negative correlation between affects with opposite valence tends to be weak. These allegedly robust empirical generalizations underlie various co...

From his Behavioural Ecology perspective, Fridlund (1994) theorised that facial expressions evolved to convey social intents and contingencies, yet offered no evidence that observers interpret faces in this way. Canadian, Chinese, and Japanese respondents were shown standard '“facial expressions of emotion'” and asked to select one of Fridlund's pr...

English-speaking Canadian, Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese, and Japanese speaking Japanese adults were shown 13 still photographs of the facial expressions of Chinese babies subjected to various emotion-elicitation procedures. Some respondents were asked to give an emotion label of their choice for each photograph, others to judge its pleasant...

Correlations between single-item self-reports of intelligence and IQ scores are rather low (.20-.25) in college samples. The literature suggested that self-reports could be improved by three strategies: (1) aggregation, (2) item weighting, and (3) use of indirect, rather than direct, questions. To evaluate these strategies, we compared the validity...

Prior research (R.R. McCrae, P.T. Costa, & M.S. Yik, 1996) using a Chinese translation of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory suggested substantial differences between Hong Kong and North American undergraduates. Study 1, with a sample of bilingual Hong Kong students (N = 162), showed that prior findings were not due simply to the translation. St...

The assumption that Chinese tend to self-efface has mixed support in the scanty empirical literature. The conflicting findings may be attributable to measuring different domains in different studies. Therefore, we assessed self-enhancement across eight domains of person perception in a Hong Kong Chinese sample. Twenty-one groups of college students...

The relationship between personality and values was studied in a Hong Kong Chinese university sample. Personality was assessed by the Sino-American Person Perception Scale which is composed of eight personality dimensions whose items had been culled from both the American and the indigenous Chinese written materials. Values were assessed by Schwart...

Sexual harassment of Chinese college students with a focus on their awareness, experiences, responses, and expectations of institutional intervention to the problem was examined. 358 male and 491 female Chinese college students in Hong Kong participated. There were no gender differences in students' awareness of the phenomenon. Students' own experi...

[speculate] about the [uniqueness and universality of the] emotions of the Chinese / [review] writings on Chinese emotions that are available / [delineate] the components rather that constitute an emotional episode / specifically . . . consider the situational antecedents of emotion, its cognitive antecedents, the facial and vocal expression of emo...

This study aimed to delineate the definitions of sexual harassment and their relation with various subject characteristics. Results showed that Chinese students demonstrated a high level of consensus in regarding overt unwelcome physical contact and coercive sexuality as sexual harassment. Only a small percentage of the students classified sexist a...

This research compares the relative effectiveness of imported and indigenous measures of personality perception for Hong Kong Chinese. The first study reports on the extraction of six factors of self-perception using bipolar, adjective rating scales from the U.S.A. tapping the Big Five (Digman, 1990), and Openness to Experience (McCrae & Costa, 198...

The present study examined the relationship between coping styles and psychological distress in a nonclinical sample of 832 Hong Kong Chinese adolescents. Measures included the General Health Questionnaire and an Adolescent Coping Scale adapted from both Western and Eastern sources. Results from factor analyses suggested that adolescents used relat...