Detecting distinctions between the styles of classical music (e.g. Baroque and Romantic) is often viewed as the privilege of musicians. However, this elite perspective underestimates the abilities of non-musicians. We report that Western musicians and non-musicians, and non-Westerners (i.e. Chinese participants) rated pairs of excerpts presented auditorily as more similar as their compositional...

Patients with thick skin mainly exhibit the aging processes of sagging, whereas patients with thin skin develop wrinkles or volume loss. Asian skin is usually thicker than that of Westerners; and thus, the sagging of skin due to aging, rather than wrinkling, is the chief problem to be addressed in Asians. Asian skin is also relatively large in area and thick, implying that the weight of tissue ...

This easy-to-read, scrupulously researched, and fascinating book addresses two critical, but stubborn problems which threaten to reduce the effectiveness of many externally-funded HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs in Africa. First is the reluctance by biomedical and public health practitioners to recognize the essential value of qualitative and ethnographic data for the success of AIDS...

In this paper, I tackle the relat ionship between East and West from a cultural perspective.Though the difference is wide, they have in common a considerable number of social norms. Try ing to make a focuson how the West regards the East on the level of normal individuals, I analyse Kim Barnes’ novel “In the Kingdom of Men”. Her protagonists migrate from hometown ‘Oklahoma’ to ‘Saudi Arab ia’ o...

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has changed remarkably since 1949. The country was closed to Westerners until 1978, when a number of modernizations were introduced and an open door policy was initiated to move the country from a ‘command’ toward a ‘socialist market’ economy (Warner and Joynt, 2002). Western businesses subsequently flooded into the country to take advantage of cheaper labor...

Previous research suggests that members of East Asian cultures show a greater preference for dialectical (vs. nondialectical) thinking than do members of Western Cultures. We suggest this difference is rooted in a greater chronic fear of isolation (FOI) in East Asians than in Westerners. To explain this hypothesis, we manipulated fear of isolation in a group of Western college students and asse...

Soyfoods have been a part of Asian diets for centuries. Today, there is a growing interest in these foods among westerners because of their proposed health benefits and also because their versatility makes them valuable for replacing meat and dairy foods in the diet. Soybeans provide excellent nutrition and contain a number of biologically active components that collectively may be responsible ...

The present study investigated whether personality and leadership evaluations based on photographs of Chinese CEOs made by Western raters were accurate at predicting organizational outcomes. Consistent with implicit leadership prototypes held by Westerners, perceived effectiveness was associated with higher levels of perceived intelligence, dominance, and positivity. However, actual organizatio...