In Search of the Confucian Family

This article presents findings from interviews with 16 middle school students and their parents in Guangzhou, China, about parent-adolescent relationships. Themes revealed from the conversations suggested that adolescents were generally pleased with the good relationships with their parents, that they enjoyed the respect their parents had for them as their parents tended to use peaceful reasoning to communicate parental expectations, and that they themselves cared a lot about academic attainment because it would lead to good jobs in the future. In addition, working-class parents expressed a sense of inadequacy while holding on to the high hopes and expectations for their children, whereas middle-class parents and parents who had middle-class experiences either in their occupation or in their education tried to raise well-rounded children apart from emphasis on academic achievement. In sum, these parents and adolescents represented a generation that was influenced by a myriad of social forces in modern China, including Confucianism, Socialism, and Capitalism, instead of simply and solely by classical Confucianism. In other words, Confucianism, along with the lifestyle that supported it, was far less salient than assumed in a lot of research on Chinese families and parent-child relationships

Immorality East and West

What makes some acts immoral? Although Western theories of morality often define harmful behaviors as centrally immoral, whether this is applicable to other cultures is still under debate. In particular, Confucianism emphasizes civility as fundamental to moral excellence. We describe three studies examining how the word immoral is used by Chinese and Westerners. Layperson-generated examples were used to examine cultural differences in which behaviors are called “immoral” (Study 1, n = 609; Study 2, n = 480), and whether “immoral” behaviors were best characterized as particularly harmful versus uncivilized (Study 3, N = 443). Results suggest that Chinese were more likely to use the word immoral for behaviors that were uncivilized, rather than exceptionally harmful, whereas Westerners were more likely to link immorality tightly to harm. More research into lay concepts of morality is needed to inform theories of moral cognition and improve understanding of human conceptualizations of social norms.Department of Applied Social SciencesDepartment of Management and Marketin

Mechanical and thermal behavior of a prototype support structure for a large silicon vertex detector (BCD)

The Bottom Collider Detector (BCD) has been proposed as a device to study large numbers of events containing B mesons. To identify secondary vertices in hadronic events it will employ the most ambitious silicon strip tracking detector proposed to-date. This report will discuss results from measurements on a first mechanical/thermal model of the vertex detector support structure. The model that was built and used for the studies described here is made of brass. Brass was used because it is readily available and easily assembled by soft soldering, and, for appropriate thicknesses, it will behave similarly to the beryllium that will be used in the actual detector. The trough was built to full scale with the reinforcement webbing and the cooling channels in place. There were no detector modules in place. We plan, however, to install modules in the trough in the future. The purpose of the model was to address two concerns that have arisen about the proposed structure of the detector. The first is whether or not the trough will be stable enough. The trough must be very light in weight yet have a high degree of rigidity. Because of the 3m length of the detector there is question as to the stiffness of the proposed trough. The main concern is that there will sagging or movement of the trough in the middle region. The second problem is the heat load. There will be a great deal of heat generated by the electronics attached to the detector modules. So the question arises as to whether or not the silicon detectors can be kept cool enough so that when the actual experiment is run the readings will be valid. The heat may also induce motion by differential expansion of support components. 26 figs