H Kim

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom-up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top-down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi-gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.

I have been proposing for ‘christo‐dao’ rather than traditional christo-logy or modern christo‐praxis as a more appropriate paradigm for the understanding of Jesus Christ in the new millennium. This christological paradigm shift solicits a radical change of its root-metaphor, from logos (Christ as the incarnate logos) or praxis (Christ as the praxis of God’s reign) to ‘dao’ (Christ as the embodiment of the Dao, the “theanthropocosmic” Way) with a critical new interpretation. For EastAsian Christians, the christological adoption of dao is as inevitable and legitimate as that of logos for the Western church at the fourth century. This adoption has been operative since the beginning of Korean Christianity. As an example, in this paper, I introduce the intriguing thoughts of Dasŏk Ryu Young-mo 柳永模 (1890-1981). According to John 14:6, Ryu comprehended Jesus as the Dao, the way of the truth toward the life in God. Christ is the brightest way on which we can walk safely (the truth) to attain the unity with God (the life). It coincides with the goal of Confucianism, the anthropocosmic unity of Heaven and humanity. Fromthis vantage point, he further expressed a nobel East Asian definition of God; namely, God is the One who is ‘the Being in Non-Being’ (Ŏpshigyeshin-nim): He believed that this event of Being-in-Non-Being has been historically manifested in the crucifixion (the Non-Being) and the resurrection (Being) of Jesus Christ. Christ is both the Non-Being (the Non-Ultimate, Vacuity) and Being (Great Ultimate, Form). Finally, confessing Jesus as the embodiment of the Dao is none other than Ryu’s East Asian way of saying “the Word made flesh.”

The reverse correlation (RC) method has been widely used, because it allows visualization of mental representations without a priori assumptions about relevant dimensions. We employed the RC method to visualize mental representations of self and examined their relationships with traits related to self-image. For this purpose, 110 participants (70 women) performed a two-image forced choice RC task to generate a classification image of self (self-CI). Participants perceived their self-CIs as bearing a stronger resemblance to themselves than did CIs of others (filler-CIs). Valence ratings of participants who performed the RC task (RC sample) and of 30 independent raters both showed positive correlations with self-esteem, explicit self-evaluation, and extraversion. Moreover, valence ratings of independent raters were negatively correlated with social anxiety symptoms. On the other hand, valence ratings of the RC sample and independent raters were not correlated with depression symptoms, trait anxiety, or social desirability. The results imply that mental representations of self can be properly visualized by using the RC method.

We examine how corporate environmental responsibility affects the cost of equity capital for manufacturing firms in 30 countries. Using several approaches to estimate firms’ ex ante equity financing costs, we find in regressions that control for firm-level characteristics as well as industry, year, and country effects that the cost of equity capital is lower when firms have higher CER. This finding is robust to addressing endogeneity through instrumental variables, to using alternative specifications and proxies for the cost of equity capital, and to accounting for noise in analyst forecasts. We conclude that investment in CER reduces firms’ equity financing costs worldwide.

My thesis focuses on Nietzsche’s ethics. More precisely, its main objective is to explore Nietzsche’s substantive ethical framework in a comprehensive, detailed, and systematic manner. Furthermore, the thesis also attempts to examine the epistemological, non-ethical ground of the Nietzschean substantive ethics. Also, it deals with Nietzsche’s critique of conventional morality, and explains Nietzsche’s criticism of morality in terms of his substantive ethics. The central argument of the thesis is, very briefly, that Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole does have a distinctive, substantive ethical system. Its constitutive elements or contents, being coherently related, are rich, complicated, and concrete. The major category Nietzsche employs in his ethics is the notion of ‘value’ understood as merit or desirability; he is not much concerned with the right or obligatory. Nietzsche views some human qualities, abilities and states and a style of life as noble and desirable for us. Specifically, the creative way of life, creative capacity, self-discipline, the capacity for ‘self-commanding’, knowledge, health, strong affectivity, and vitality constitute the core of Nietzsche’s evaluative standard. Moreover, a variety of dispositions, such as honesty, solitude, courage, and magnanimity, position themselves within his theory of value and are posited as crucial virtues. Finally, my thesis aims at analysing these particular contents of Nietzsche’s substantive ethical system and to examine how the system as a whole works. As such, the thesis is fundamentally an exposition based upon Nietzsche’s own texts, especially, his later works including Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist