While observing others in the society, people make explanations and judgements about others’ behaviors. However, thereshould be cultural differences in affecting behavior judgments. The aim of the present study is to examine whether there arecognitive or emotional differences between Eastern and Western cultures while judging other peoples behaviors. Vignettesstimuli and the questions developed by Knutson et al. (2010) were used to measure how Taiwanese participants thinkand react while making behavior judgements. Factor analysis is conducted to compare the results with the original studycompleted in the US. The results revealed that for the Taiwanese participants, emotional aversion was more related tothe norm violation, while for the American participants, according to the original study, aversion was more related to thesocial affect. The results of this comparison have demonstrated cultural differences between Taiwan and the US in howaversion could be evoked by observing others behaviors.

Individual’s judgment on the appropriateness of social norm includes perceiving others mental states (theory of mind), butit might differ with the intervention aspects in real social contexts. Therefore, in this study we mainly focus on evaluatingwhether affective and cognitive theory of mind would affect social norm violation judgments and investigate whetherthe timing of mentalization involves the judgments. As a result, preconceived intention intervention (both affective andcognitive theory of mind) significantly affected the judgments of the appropriateness. However, only cognitive theory ofmind in attributing violation intentions after encountering the social norm statement was found to affect in the judgmentsof the appropriateness of norm violations. In summary, theory of mind plays an important role on the judgment ofappropriateness for social norm violation, but the timing of intervention matters significantly.

The present research aimed to investigate children’s comprehension of Chinese classifiers. Sixty-five Chinese-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 recruited in Taiwan participated in the experiment. The results indicate thatchildren can make generalization based on their understanding of classifiers instead of solely relying on classifier-noun associ-ations. The results also show that the participants performed equally on both shape-based and feature-shared classifiers, whichsuggests that children not only use shape salience to learn Chinese classifiers, but are also sensitive to other relations betweenobjects classified by the same Chinese classifier. Besides, the complex patterns in the results imply that in spite of the exposureto classifiers, the semantic transparency between classifiers and objects varies considerably in both semantic types of classifier,which might be the primary reason that some classifiers are more difficult for children to acquire.

This research aimed to study the impact of context on the status of empathy in terms of emotion judgment towardsothers. Specifically, how empathy would be mediated by different conditions was further investigated. Descriptions ofmoral/unmoral conditions were designed and hypothesized to influence the status of empathy accordingly. Study partic-ipants were instructed to rate pictures using TAPS (Taiwan Affective Picture System) for judging the emotion valenceand arousal of human facial expression. As a result, low-level empathy group was found to show an alternation for theiremotion judgments on both valence and arousal as the picture context changed, especially in the moral situation. Onthe contrary, high-level group only show an alternation for their emotion judgments on valence, in the unmoral situationthe most. The findings indicated that different status of empathy might be determined the emotion judgments under thecontexts where other social cues are presented.

In this research, English and Korean students were divided into 2 groups to find out how one’s semantic structure ofnative tongue affects the performance of learning Chinese classifier. The experiment was designed to present participantsthe word pairings consisted of sortal/mensural classifiers and Chinese/English/Korean nouns as the priming stimuli. Theparticipants were asked to decide if the nouns and the classifier are correctly paired for common use. The results showedthat only English speakers judgment of the correct rate for sortal classifiers is higher than the mensural classifiers pairs.However, both Korean and English students have longer response time for the mensural classifiers. In addition, the primingeffect of nouns appeared in affecting participants performance for judging the correctness of pairing in native Chinesespeakers and the English/Korean learners. The findings indicated that a cross-language semantic activation occurreddespite the competition processing between L1/L2 while learning Chinese classifiers.

It is found that the concepts of interdependence and independence expressed in the measurement of self-consturals mayvary with cultural patterns, which also affects the strength of social norm. Therefore, in this study, we mainly focused onexploring the effect of social norm on self-construals. Participants who grew up in Taiwan were asked to complete thequestionnaire of tightness and looseness attitude regarding daily life and to proceed the of norm violation task. As a result,we concluded that cultural pattern of tightness or looseness is related to the strength of social norm. Interestingly thefinding indicated that strong norm would relate to detecting greater freedom, which leads to higher creativity. In addition,the perception of the tightness of culture would be more related to interdependent self-constural and nation identification.

Individuals’ judgments about social norm may have different sensitivities depending on personality and attitude, includingtheir sensibility to social situation. Therefore, in this study we mainly focused on evaluating whether such perceivingothers mental states (theory of mind) is related to social norm violation. Some social and personality traits also wereexplored to examine how they involve the sensitivity to detecting social norm violation. Both asking participants to judgethe appropriateness of various behaviors occurred in different everyday situations/locations and collecting ToM statusand other personality and social trait questionnaires were conducted for investigating the relationships with social normviolation. As a result, understanding others mind states through non-verbal manners has more tolerance in terms of thejudgments of the appropriateness of social behavior. However, Nationalism was found to cause the opposite relationship.Furthermore, attitudes of cultural tightness and looseness is found associated with the sensibility of detect norm violations.