East Asian cognition has been held to be relatively "holistic", that is, attention is paid to the field as a whole. Western cognition, in contrast, has been held to be object-focused and control-oriented. We compared East Asians (mostly Chinese) and Americans on detection of covariation and field dependence. The results showed that (1) Chinese participants reported stronger association between events, were more responsive to differences in covariation, and were more confident about their covariation judgments; (2) These cultural differences disappeared when participants believed they had some control over the covariation judgment task; (3) American participants made fewer mistakes on the Rod-and-Frame test, indicating that they were less field dependent; (4) American performance and confidence, but not that of Asians, increased when participants were given manual control of the test. Possible origins of the perceptual differences are discussed. Characters (with spaces): 958 Culture, Control and Perception 3 Scholars in many disciplines have maintained that people in Asian cultures, especially the East Asian cultures of China, Korea and Japan, have a relatively holistic cognitive orientation, emphasizing relationships and connectedness. The traditional Chinese view, from ancient times forward, is that "the world is a collection of overlapping and interpenetrating stuffs or substances…" (Hansen, 1983, p. 30). Since the Chinese saw the world as interpenetrating and continuous, their attempts to understand it caused them to be oriented toward the complexities of the perceptual or conceptual field taken as a whole (Moore, 1968, p. 3). For the Chinese, the individual object was "not a primary conceptual starting point" (Moser, 1996, p. 169) "[T]he background scheme [of Chinese thought was] that of mass substances rather than that of objects and properties" (Hansen, 1983, p. 31).

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Based on our early research, we predicted that the Chinese may be more optimistic and less pessimistic than North Americans in response to negative life events. A survey was conducted to investigate optimism cross culturally in the context of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreaks in Canada and China. Chinese students in Beijing and European Canadians in Toronto answered questions about their perceptions of SARS. No significant cultural difference was found on dispositional optimism, as measured by the Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT‐R). Unrealistic optimism was measured in the context of SARS. Both groups demonstrated unrealistic optimism (i.e. reporting that the self was less likely than an average person to get infected with SARS). Such optimistic bias was stronger among Chinese than among Canadians. Compared to the actual infection rates in Beijing and Toronto, both Chinese and Canadian participants overestimated their own chances of getting infected, indicating that they were being pessimistic. Indeed, Chinese were less pessimistic than Canadians. In addition, even though the Chinese reported more inconvenience brought by SARS than did Canadians, they also reported more positive changes brought by SARS, reflecting the Chinese dialectical views of events. Implications for research on optimism in context are discussed.

Researchers have proposed that the emergence of religion was a cultural adaptation necessary for promoting self-control. Self-control, in turn, may serve as a psychological pillar supporting a myriad of adaptive psychological and behavioral tendencies. If this proposal is true, then subtle reminders of religious concepts should result in higher levels of self-control. In a series of four experiments, we consistently found that when religious themes were made implicitly salient, people exercised greater self-control, which, in turn, augmented their ability to make decisions in a number of behavioral domains that are theoretically relevant to both major religions and humans' evolutionary success. Furthermore, when self-control resources were minimized, making it difficult for people to exercise restraint on future unrelated self-control tasks, we found that implicit reminders of religious concepts refueled people's ability to exercise self-control. Moreover, compared with morality- or death-related concepts, religion had a unique influence on self-control.

The authors investigated cultural differences in the way people perceive and represent temporal information. It was hypothesized that Chinese would attend to the past information more than would Canadians. In Studies 1 and 2, Canadian and Chinese participants read a description of a theft along with a list of behaviors that occurred in the past or present. Chinese participants rated behaviors that had taken place in the remote and recent past as more relevant to solving the case than did Canadians. Study 3 showed that Chinese participants recalled greater detail about past events than did Canadians. Studies 4A and 4B showed that Chinese perceived past events as being closer to the present than did Canadians, suggesting that Chinese had a greater awareness of the past. Overall, Chinese attended to a greater range of past information than did Canadians, which has significant theoretical and practical implications.