Paper
The Processing of Affective Concepts by Adolescents in the Context of the Urbanization of China
- Authors:
- Liusheng Wang; Xiaoxia Rong; Biao Sang
- Abstract
- Urbanization can change population structures and improve citizens’ quality of life. However, little attention has been paid to whether urbanization influences the psychological development of adolescents as new urban citizens. This research compared the processing of affective concepts by adolescents new to urban life with that by children raised in urban environments, while posing different body postures (sitting upright, slumped over). Sixty-five 7th grade children in China participated; some were new to urban environments (new urban citizens), while the others grew up as urban-dwellers (old urban citizens). The participants were required to make lexical decisions which measured how quickly people can differentiate actual words and pseudo-words. The results showed the main effects of body posture, identity and valence, as well as an interaction effect between identity and body posture, an interaction effect between identity and valence. All participants responded faster while slumped over as opposed to sitting upright, the old urban citizens responded faster than new urban citizens did; and both the old and new urban citizens responded faster when slumped over than when sitting upright; but new urban citizens exhibited significantly greater differences between the two postures. The results indicate that, although urbanization can change people very quickly, a gap in psychological development is still present between new and old urban adolescents, and body posture implicitly influences the processing of affective concepts.
- Keywords
- Affective Concept Processing; Embodied Cognition; Adolescent; Urbanization
- StartPage
- 36
- EndPage
- 41
- Doi