The suicide rate for females in China is the second highest worldwide, and China is the only country in the world in which the rate of suicides is higher for women than men. Affective instability has been shown to be a strong predictor of suicidal ideation, particularly among women. However, prior research has mainly focused on the impact of women's negative affect on suicidal ideation, ignoring the influence of positive affect on suicidal ideation. Studies have revealed that hopelessness, which is 1.3 times more important than depression for explaining suicidal ideation, is driven more by low levels of positive affect than by high levels of negative affect. Although positive affect has also been found to be related to suicidal ideation, and it demonstrates independent, beneficial effects on mental health, much remains to be learned about the association between positive affective instability and suicidal ideation. Therefore, we investigated the prevalence of suicidal ideation among Chinese working women and explored the differences between working women with and without suicidal ideation in the intensity and daily variability of positive affect. A total of 222 young working women of ages 22–36 years (M = 27.64, SD = 3.73) were recruited from a free weekend psychology lecture. The women subsequently completed a daily diary Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) as well as a suicidal ideation questionnaire. We used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to analyze the data, and the results showed that: (1) 10.81% of participates reported suicidal ideation, the intensity of positive affect (happiness, warmth/friendliness, interest and relaxation/calmness) was significantly lower for women with suicidal ideation compared to women without suicidal ideation; (2) differing diurnal patterns of positive emotions were observed between women with and without suicidal ideation; women with suicidal ideation demonstrated a significantly lower trend of growth and a higher volatility in happiness, warmth/friendliness, relaxation/calmness. Given that lower intensity of positive affect and greater affective instability significantly predicted suicidal ideation in Chinese women, researchers should pay more attention to the role of positive affect in female suicide prevention research and intervention efforts in the future.

Order and disorder are prevalent in everyday life, yet little is known about the neural real-time processing that occurs during the perception of disorder relative to order. In the present study, from a cognitive perspective, by adopting the ERP method, we aimed to examine the elicited real-time neural signals of disorder and order perception when participants processed physical environmental and basic visual disorder and order pictures in an irrelevant red or green rectangle detection task, and we attempted to test the hypothesis of cognitive disfluency in disorder perception. Generally, we observed that at each measured time interval, the ERPs elicited by order stimuli were more positive (less negative) in amplitude than those elicited by disorder stimuli at the frontal electrodes (represented by F7/F8, FT7/FT8, Fz, and FCz), whereas at the posterior electrodes (represented by P7/P8, PO7/PO8, Pz, and POz), the opposite was true. These data reveal for the first time the neural underpinnings of disorder and order perception, extending our understanding of the nature of disorder and order. This study also contributes to the cognitive fluency literature and indirectly expands the research on disorder and order stimuli in cognitive fluency.

No abstract

People attend to the same event or object by using a global or local processing style across different environments. Different physical environmental conditions, such as orderliness and disorderliness, activate different psychological states and produce different kinds of outcomes. However, previous work has rarely examined whether individuals exposed to different orderly or disorderly environments attend to the “global” or the “local” differently. Thus, in the current study, we conducted three behavioral experiments to directly examine the impact of disorder versus order cues on people's types of perceptual and conceptual processing (global vs. local). We asked participants to perform a typical Kimchi–Palmer figures task or a categorization task: with pre‐primed disorderly or orderly physical environmental pictures (Experiment 1), with basic visual pictures (Experiment 2), and imagining a real environment (Experiment 3). The results revealed that in any of the above operations, orderly experience led to global perceptual processing, whereas disorderly experience led to local perceptual processing. This difference in processing style was not influenced by the participants’ daily habits or their preference for the need for structure. However, this difference in perceptual processing style did not spill over to the conceptual processing style. These findings provide direct evidence of the effects of disorderliness versus orderliness on global versus local perceptual and conceptual processing and imply that environmental orderliness or disorderliness may functionally affect cognitive processing (i.e., how we see and think about events and objects). Thus, the findings creatively bridge several lines of research and shed light on a basic cognitive mechanism responsible for perceptions of order/disorder.

Food freshness is an important attribute in judgments of food quality (Curtis & Cowee, 2009). Various food properties, such as flavor, color, odor, and texture, are conventional indicators of food freshness (e.g., Fortin, Goodwin, Thomsen, 2009; Lewis 2002). Based on empirical evidence, motion information contained in images not only conveys crucial information for our survival (Blake & Shiffrar, 2007; Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2010) but also serves as a good indicator of food freshness. Depictions of food with motion (either through live viewing or video) lead to enhanced evaluations of both food freshness and appeal in multiple food domains, categories, and textures (Awad, Moharram,