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AbstractIntertemporal preference reversals occur when individuals choose future option A over future option B in a direct choice between the two but place a higher 'immediate cash' value on B than on A. Tversky et al. (1990) reported strong evidence of such reversals, which they attributed mainly to valuation biases rather than intransitivity. We find similar levels of reversals, even after adjusting for considerable degrees of variability and imprecision in people's responses. However, we disagree with Tversky et al.'s conclusions about the causes of the majority of these reversals. We find substantial levels of intransitivity in respondents' binary choices as well as differential overvaluation of both options relative to the values inferred from their choices.

AbstractReference-dependence has become a widely established phenomenon in decision making under risk, not only for monetary outcomes but also for other outcomes, e.g., related to health. However, when the prospects involve risk about timing (the time of receipt of outcomes), rather than the outcomes themselves, much less is known about reference-dependence. This study extends discounted utility to incorporate reference-dependence and is the first to test it in timing prospects. We are also the first to estimate the probability weighting function for timing prospects. For both timing and outcome risk tasks, we replicate the typical fourfold pattern of risk attitudes: risk seeking for low-probability gains, risk aversion for high-probability gains, risk aversion for low-probability losses and risk seeking for high-probability losses. In other words, we find substantial pessimism with regard to high probabilities in the gain domain and low probabilities in the loss domain, and probabilistic optimism for low probabilities in the gain domain and high probabilities in the loss domain. Furthermore, we report loss aversion for outcome risks, while for timing risks, we find the opposite result, which we term earliness seeking. In sum, we find substantial empirical support for reference-dependent discounting. Our results show that psychological biases are also important when timing is risky, although the direction of bias may differ.

In this study we explored the degree to which father-child conflict mediated the relationship between father parenting and child adjustment in a sample of 338 Chinese children. It was found that fathers' parenting was associated with child adjustment, and father-child conflict. Father-child
conflict was found to mediate the relationship between fathers' parenting and child adjustment.

With enactment of the universal two-child policy in China in 2016, the two-child family will replace the one-child family as the main family form. In this study we examined the contribution of sibling relationship quality in shaping the mental health of Chinese children in a two-child
family. Parents (N = 280) reported the quality of their children's sibling relationship, and their firstborn's problematic and prosocial behavior, and temperament. Parents' marital satisfaction and coparenting were also assessed. The results showed that after we had
controlled for the child characteristics of age, gender, temperament, sibling age difference, and sibling gender difference, and for the parental characteristics of age and marital satisfaction, and coparenting, sibling negativity and positivity were both significantly related to child problematic
behavior. In addition, sibling positivity was significantly related to child prosocial behavior. The results suggest that parents in a two-child family should provide guidance for their children's sibling relationship, and, in particular, increase the children's positive interaction
to improve their mental health.

Hope is a higher-order cognitive construct relating to expectations of or beliefs in wish fulfillment, which has been conceptualized as consisting of 2 components: pathways thinking (the perceived means available to individuals that allow them to achieve their goals) and agency thinking
(belief in one's ability to succeed in using the identified pathways). We aimed to clarify the measurement structure of the Chinese version of the Adult Dispositional Hope Scale, using a sample of 751 university student participants. We employed confirmatory factor analysis to compare 1-factor,
2-factor, second-order, and bifactor models. The results showed that all models fit the measured data well. However, the bifactor model had the best fit indices, whereas the second-order model was the most consistent with the theoretical measurement model. To verify that hope theory and the
corresponding instruments can be confidently applied to cross-cultural samples, it is necessary to further assess their reliability and validity in a Chinese cultural context through a measurement structure analysis.