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Across the years as interest in culture grew in the field of psychology, women contributed to its growth by leading research into new areas, such as children’s socialization and family dynamics, and acknowledging the critical role of the social and environmental context. Moreover, women were significant partners in team-led projects, developing methodologies that have been successfully employed to study cultural similarities and differences. Women have expanded psychological research in many domains, investigating the role of culture in cognitive areas, such as perceptual learning, cognition, and languages, as well as in social areas such as cultural stereotypes, acculturation, self-construal, attributions, and human development. Women have also investigated appropriate psychometric testing for valid assessments, critical for establishing equivalence in cross-cultural research. As women’s research voices grew, they have slowly advanced into important roles in academic organizations, such as IACCP. Although men continue to dominate leadership positions in IACCP and other similar organizations, women have become more visible in recent years. Indeed, women have made important research and leadership contributions to the growth and direction of cross-cultural psychology, and they will certainly continue to do so in the future.

Gender role ideologies are embedded in cultural values and assumptions about life. Women’s greater endorsement of egalitarian beliefs may stem from gender differences in world views as indexed by social axioms. The purpose of this study was to examine potential mediators of gender differences in gender ideologies among university students in Guatemala, a country where traditional views are prevalent. Participants, 2,134 university students from nine campuses in different regions of Guatemala (43% male, 85% emerging adults), completed a Social Axioms Scale, along with three culturally relevant measures of gender ideology: the Historic-Sociocultural Premises Scale (HSCP) and the Machismo Measure that taps both traditional machismo and caballerismo (gentlemanliness). Consistent with previous research in other countries, men held more traditional attitudes about gender and the family than did women on all measures. Gender differences on all scales were mediated by cynicism and religiosity. Fate control mediated the gender differences in traditional machismo and the HSCP. These findings suggest that Guatemalan women and men through socialization, cultural demands, and life experiences develop gender-specific ways of viewing the world, and their attitudes about gender roles are shaped by those worldviews. The achievement of gender equality, a U.N. sustainable development goal, may require attention to the underlying world views of women and men.

The social emotions gratitude and envy are central to the lives of Guatemalan youth and to their society more broadly. Perspective-taking, the social–cognitive process that allows one to assume another’s point of view, may affect both the experience and expression of gratitude and envy. In this convergent mixed-methods study, perspective-taking was studied in relation to gratitude and envy. Sixty-four Guatemalan adolescents, ages 12–17 ( Mage = 13.52 years, SD = 3.66, 53.1% girls), completed scales measuring gratitude, envy, and perspective-taking. For the qualitative portion, they read one gratitude and one envy vignette and completed a series of open-ended questions about the story characters. Two multiple regression analyses revealed that better perspective-takers were more grateful and less envious. Thematic analysis of the open-ended responses uncovered seven levels of perspective-taking. Complex perspective-taking was revealed when adolescents inferred the perspective of both story characters, created positive social outcomes even in situations of envy, and inferred consequences of the interactions. These findings imply that promoting perspective-taking may be one way to decrease envy and promote gratitude in this majority world cultural context. The findings from this study may inform the creation of culturally sensitive social-emotional learning programs that promote well-being through positive interpersonal relationships.

Around the world, adolescents use technology for education, to further their identity and socio-emotional development, to access health information, engage in civic activities, and for entertainment. For many, technological advances, especially social media, have drastically influenced how they communicate with family, friends, and romantic partners. Challenges of technology use include the digital divide, internet addiction, and exposure to cyberbullying. The diversity of adolescents' cultural context results in heterogeneous bidirectional influences of technology and teenagers with respect to education and close relationships. Researchers, parents, and policy makers must consider the role of culture in the complex interactions of teenagers with technology.

Equine-facilitated interventions have shown promise for facilitating emotional and behavioural changes in diverse groups. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of an equine workshop for vulnerable Guatemalan youth using a mixed-method approach. The 37 participants (Mage = 18.22, SD = 2.25, 14 girls) came from difficult circumstances including poverty and other risks. Using a wait-list control group design with random assignment, the effects of a 2-day equine-based workshop were evaluated. Participants completed quantitative measures of leadership, emotion regulation, aggression, and interpersonal response to threat. Mentors completed reports of aggression and prosocial behaviour. Self-reported leadership increased significantly in the group receiving the intervention; mentor reports of aggression revealed significant decreases. Focus groups with participants and family members reported multiple benefits, including improved emotion regulation. Equine-based interventions may provide at-risk Guatemalan youth with tools of leadership, reduced violence and aggression, and better emotion regulation.

Adolescents’ social and emotional lives reflect and inform their well-being. Yet, we know little about how social emotions, like gratitude and envy, are expressed in social relationships and shape well-being among adolescents living outside of wealthy, minority world settings. In many parts of the world, including Guatemala, poverty and economic hardship are among the most common challenges of adolescents. In an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design, Study 1 explored how Guatemalan youth living with scarce resources experience and respond to gratitude and envy. Interviews with 22 Guatemalan adolescents ( Mean age = 14.55 years, SD = .74, 59% girls) about their experiences with envy and gratitude were coded based on Auerbach and Silverstein’s (2003) approach. Findings revealed that envy ignited anger and rifts in close relationships with friends and family. Conversely, gratitude was rooted in reciprocity and often motivated youth to act kindly on another’s behalf. In Study 2, adolescents ( N = 64, Mean age = 14.15, SD = 1.05, 55% girls) completed locally adapted measures of envy, gratitude, and life satisfaction. A multiple regression analysis revealed that envy was associated with lower and gratitude with higher life satisfaction, consistent with studies in other cultural contexts. In sum, the use of locally developed measures of the social emotions envy and gratitude revealed the expected relations with well-being, negative for envy and positive for gratitude. For Guatemalan youth facing daily hardships, discouraging envy and fostering gratitude may help to boost well-being and nurture positive close relationships.

“Everything for my children” is a common sentiment among Guatemalan parents displaying an unwavering, unconditional commitment to their children. Although this saying suggests that a strong family unit is at the heart of Guatemalan culture, only limited research exists about parenting Guatemalan adolescents. Research on how the country’s prevalent gender role ideologies, machismo, caballerismo, and marianismo, shape parents’ treatment and expectations of their adolescent children is even scarcer. In this chapter, we review the extant literature on those gender roles and the available research on Guatemalan adolescents’ own views on gender and gender roles in their communities. We describe the existing literature on parenting in Guatemala, which focuses primarily on young children. A series of future directions argue for continued and more extensive research at the intersection of Guatemalan culture, adolescence, parenting, and gender. Specifically, the merit in methodological diversity and the importance of capturing the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity in Guatemala should emerge as priorities when undertaking future work in this area.

It is important to identify stereotypes about indigenous people because those stereotypes influence prejudice and discrimination, both obstacles to social justice and universal human rights. The purpose of the current study was to document the stereotypes, as held by Guatemalan adolescents, of indigenous Maya people (e.g., Maya) and nonindigenous Ladinos in Guatemala (the 2 main ethnic groups in Guatemala). Guatemalan adolescents (N = 465; 38.3% female; Mage = 14.51 years; SDage = 1.81 years) provided drawings and written characteristics about indigenous Maya and nonindigenous Ladino people, which were then coded for patterns in the data. These patterns included negative stereotypes, such as the Maya being lazy and Ladina women being weak; and positive stereotypes, such as the Maya being caring and warm and Ladino men being successful. There were also interactions between the participants' own gender and ethnicity and how they depicted the target they were assigned. For example, male participants were unlikely to depict male targets of either ethnicity engaging in homemaking activities. Finally, there was evidence of in-group bias based both on gender and ethnicity. These findings suggest that perhaps because indigenous groups around the world share some common negative stereotypes, an understanding of these stereotypes will aid in decreasing prejudice and discrimination against indigenous people, could reduce intergroup conflict, and increase access to basic human rights. (PsycINFO Database Record

Intercountry adoption (ICA) is the subject of polarized and contentious debates that can be expressed as “child rescue” versus “child trafficking.” This article describes the parallels between ICA and human trafficking, the international agreements that govern ICA and human trafficking, the evidence for fraud and corruption in some ICAs, and the conditions under which ICA can be considered trafficking. It concludes with recommendations for reform of ICA: addressing poverty and corruption as root causes, eliminating loopholes in international agreements, and ensuring protection for birth mothers and families.

Although the ubiquity of gratitude and envy would suggest they are important in the daily lives of adolescents, those social emotions have been relatively unexplored by psychologists. Interviews of 25 adolescents (ages 14 through 16) from the Midwestern US provided narrative accounts that revealed the contexts, antecedents, consequences and meanings of gratitude and envy in their daily lives. Transcripts were coded using an established procedure in the literature, and we present the findings at the thematic level. Adolescent gratitude was characterised by feeling cared for and special, while envy was driven by the desire for material possessions. Both emotions may reflect cultural individualism and contribute to social and identity development; for those adolescents gratitude provides recognition and validation of one’s personhood, and envy creates negative social comparisons that can either diminish self-worth or provide the impetus for improvement.

Gender is one of the most salient influences on children’s social development. As infants, girls and boys are often difficult to distinguish, yet from birth onward gender matters and is defined within the child’s cultural context. Differential gender socialization determines children’s names, how they are dressed, the toys they are given, the playmates they interact with, as well as their chores, responsibilities, and education. Nevertheless, in many modern industrialized societies, gender differences have begun to blur with similarities in educational opportunities, occupations, and domestic activities. Cultural expectations about gender shape children’s gender identities, roles, stereotypes, social interactions, and other aspects of gender. These facets of gender development are the focus of the present chapter.

Young children around the world help others. Yet, the ways in which they help and the conditions under which they provide assistance differ by age and cultural context. Prosocial behavior can be defined as instrumental, empathic, or altruistic, or conceptualized as helping, sharing, or comforting. In this chapter, we explore the developmental trends and diversity behind young children’s helpfulness. For example, instrumental helping is most common among younger children and empathic helping becomes more frequent with age; altruism is rare, likely due to its costliness. In addition to developmental patterns, a major focus of our chapter is the role of cultural context in shaping children’s helping behavior. Although most of the laboratory research on children’s prosocial behavior has been conducted in the minority world, the literature outside of those contexts reveals noteworthy cross-cultural differences in a variety of domains including: what constitutes helping, the available opportunities to help, and the necessity of developmental milestones like self-recognition as precursors to prosocial behavior. Given that helping behavior is such a positive component of social relationships, we suggest circumstances that may promote helping across cultures like insuring there are sufficient developmentally appropriate opportunities to help and the role of cultural values (e.g., autonomy, relatedness). Lastly, we argue for the need to understand the mechanism(s) driving cultural differences, using the developmental niche to frame future research in this area.

Around the world children grow up in a variety of different cultural settings that shape their social relationships in ways that are adaptive for the societies and the social worlds in which they live. The physical and social setting, the family configuration, parents’ ethnotheories about appropriate childrearing practices and parenting styles, and the broader social, governmental, educational, and economic context influence the course of the child’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Children learn a great deal over the preschool years as they interact with people in their social networks who help shape various aspects of their social development. Understanding the role of culture is integral to having a more complete, deeper understanding of children’s development in their everyday social worlds.

Psychological sequelae of war and genocide can potentially persist into adulthood for child survivors of such tragedies. However, few studies have investigated child survivors’ particular experiences with such sequelae in adulthood, and fewer still distinguish between orphaned and nonorphaned child survivors’ experiences. The present study examined the experiences of posttraumatic distress and psychological growth among a sample of adults ( N = 40) who, as children, survived Guatemala’s 36-year civil war and genocide. We compared the experiences of orphaned survivors raised at a particular permanent residential home for much of their childhoods ( n = 20) with those of their childhood peers raised by family ( n = 20), all from the same rural mountain town. Findings reveal that both groups report similar long-term posttraumatic distress, yet the orphaned group reported significantly higher posttraumatic psychological growth than their peers. Implications for reconsidering institutional care for child survivors of war and genocide are discussed.

Women's empowerment in family planning strengthens families and communities. Using 2014/2015 Demographic and Health Surveys data from 7,168 Guatemalan women, ages 35 and above with at least one living child, we examined indicators of empowerment in four domains - economic, educational, social, and contraceptive - and their relation to the number of living children compared to the ideal number of children. We reveal our analysis showing that economic, educational, and social empowerment predicted achieving the preferred number of children. Education and control over their own income are two critical empowerment factors for Guatemalan women.

Background: The Vietnamese American Gulf Coast communities have experienced recent disasters, including both hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon (BP) Oil Spill. The objectives of this study were to examine the impact of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on the Vietnamese American Gulf Coast communities and to offer recommendations on how to effectively work with this underserved population. Method: Focus groups were held with Vietnamese coastal residents of three affected Gulf Coast US States (Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi) to assess the impact of the oil spill disaster in the areas of economic hardship, family functioning, and behavioral and mental health issues. Sixty Vietnamese-speaking individuals (65% females) with an age range from 28 - 65 years who had an average of eight years of education participated in the study. Approximately 77% had worked in the seafood industry and about 92% indicated that they spoke English “not very well”. Audio recordings of the focus group discussions were transcribed, recorded on a spread sheet, and categorized into themes by two independent Vietnamese-speaking individuals. A third researcher, also fluent in Vietnamese, checked and compared the spread sheets for accuracy and reliability. Results: Nearly all participants reported being negatively affected by the oil spill disaster. They described loss of income (59%), loss of employment (27%), and inability to pay bills (12%). High levels of stress, anxiety and depression, as well as an increase in behavioral problems were reported. None of the participants claimed to know where or how to seek help for mental health problems. Conclusions: The oil spill disaster has had significant negative consequences for the economic well-being, family functioning, and behavioral and mental health status of the Vietnamese American gulf coast communities. Implications and strategies for working with this population are offered.

Migrants’ social remittances—ideas, ways of thinking, and social practices—may change families and communities of origin and drive sociopolitical development. From a small town in the northern highlands of Guatemala, 16 diverse returned internal and international migrants were interviewed about perceived changes in their sense of citizenship, poverty, labor rights, interethnic relations, and gender norms. Three focus groups of internal migrants, international migrants, and nonmigrants explored the same topics. Interpretive phenomenological analysis of the interviews and content analysis of the focus groups revealed social remittances in all areas, and also increased valuing of education. Social remittances concerning gender equality and the value of education were primarily transmitted to the family, and those about citizenship, poverty, and labor relations to the community at large. Nonmigrants reported observing some of the same positive social remittances, but also negative attitudinal changes among returned migrants. Findings imply that returned migrants perceive changes in themselves and their ideas that are transmitted to their families and communities. Social remittances may hold underutilized development potential in Guatemala.

Despite a 60-plus–year history of international adoption (IA) placements, the body of research exploring counseling and psychological interventions for those affected by IA is still in its infancy. This critical review of the state of the literature addresses research, theory, and practice relevant to the international adoption triad (adoptive parents, birth parents, and adoptees). We highlight the lack of empirical attention to the clinical needs of birth parents, the tendency to overlook the clinical needs of adoptive parents both pre- and post-adoption, early childhood vulnerability in international adoptees, and adolescent identity challenges and the attendant clinical issues.

The empowerment of women and girls has been at the center of international aid efforts for decades. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the current status of women around the world with a particular focus on the 13 countries profiled in the subsequent chapters of this book. Those countries represent six world regions: Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), North America, and sub-Saharan Africa. We review four general indicators of gender (in) equality before detailing the central issues and trends in five specific domains that affect the lives of women and girls internationally. Specifically, we focus on education, employment, political participation, health, and violence against women. The general indicators of gender equality yield various conclusions as each index is calculated using different criteria. A commonality across these indices, however, is that women do not fare better than men in any of the thirteen countries. Education is one area in which women and girls have seen substantial gains in recent years. Conversely, the wage gap in earnings and the gender discrepancy in political participation reveal inequalities that demand continued attention. In addition, the multifaceted consequences of gender-based violence plague approximately a third of the world’s women. We close by briefly describing possible shifts in the status of women as a result of globalization and other ongoing trends.

Life for South African women post-apartheid reflects both legislative advances and lingering challenges. Despite progress in the post-apartheid world, South Africa is still characterized by a high level of economic disparity, meaning that daily life for individual women can be quite different depending on one’s race, socioeconomic status, and age. Thus, the concept of intersectionality is critical to understand what it means to be a woman in South Africa today. Despite advances in girls’ access to education at both the primary and secondary levels, women still face significant challenges when they enter the workforce by way of occupational segregation and stratification. As is the case internationally, South African women are also more likely to engage in unpaid work and to be employed in the informal sector. Taken together, these make it more likely that South African women live in poverty and become victims of interpersonal violence. With respect to health, the risk of HIV infection and the transmission of HIV from mother to baby are paramount concerns for South African women’s health. Recent advances, however, suggest that women are gaining access to quality HIV screening and treatment. Many programs exist in the country to empower women. Two such initiatives are reviewed here: one that empowers women through microfinance loans and a second that promotes self-efficacy and HIV prevention in adolescent girls through a sports-based intervention. In spite of a host of challenges, South African women are enterprising, strong, and resilient.

We tested a model for predicting adoption attitudes: that remembered parental warmth is associated with more positive attitudes toward adoption and that this relationship is mediated by motivation to parent and liking of children. One hundred and eighty-seven university students participated in the study. Controlling for participant gender and adoption experience, the model was supported for maternal warmth, but not for paternal warmth. Specifically, the relationship between recalled maternal warmth and more positive attitudes toward adoption was mediated positively by liking of children and negatively by motivation to parent. The results implicate both childhood experiences and contemporary motives and preferences in adoption attitudes.

The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, designed to protect the best interests of the child in intercountry adoption, has been signed by 83 nations. We evaluate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Convention in achieving this purpose and also in protecting a second vulnerable population, birth families. A case study example of the United States’ implementation of the Hague requirements reveals several weaknesses with respect to non-Convention countries as sending nations, financial oversight, and oversight of foreign collaborators. International birth families, especially birth mothers giving consent to an adoption, are often vulnerable because of a lack of power and resources, as well as different cultural understandings of the nature of family and adoption. We conclude that in order to protect vulnerable children and birth families, individual sending and receiving countries need to supplement the Hague Convention with specific, contextually appropriate laws and regulations.