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This study addresses several limitations of previous cross-cultural research of intimacy by (a) differentiating meaning and expression of intimacy, (b) developing items reflecting both cultures' concepts of the two constructs, (c) specifying the relationship context rated, and (d) examining mad adjusting cultural response sets in the data set. Findings indicated that the Japanese were more likely to conceptualize intimacy through expressive concepts such as 'consideration/love' and 'expressiveness' than did the Americans toward same-sex best friend. Likewise, 'directly verbalizing how you feel about each other' was more valued by the Japanese than by the Americans toward mother, father, and same-sex best friend, whereas the Americans valued 'indirectly verbalize how you feel about each other' more than did the Japanese toward mother, father, and lover. These results, which are contrary to those typically found in the literature, were discussed in relation to the methodologies used, which we believe reduced the possible cultural bias in research.

This article discusses the relationship between culture, touch, negative emotion, and interpersonal relations in adults and infants. Topics include child development, communication, and behavior disorder.

This article examines how shared beliefs and social representations evolve from individual interactions, with particular regard to the role of communication in this process. The social cognitive processes involved in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of shared beliefs and representations are discussed.

Research presented concerns the relationship between human cognition and culture, focusing on how communication processes relate to the maintenance of cultural stereotypes. A study of the changes that occur to a story when it is transmitted between individuals reveals that stereotype-consistent information is more likely to be passed along than stereotype-inconsistent information.

A mixed quantitative and qualitative research design compared 23 U.S. college students to 25 students from Western Samoa and 25 from American Samoa, with regard to differences in cultural beliefs and attributions. Survey responses suggested that Samoan students endorsed significantly more vertical collective and vertical, individualistic cultural attitudes than U.S. students. Qualitative analysis of narrative responses to four vignettes depicting family conflicts suggested cultural differences in patterns of attribution of blame and responsibility for resolving the conflicts. U.S. students emphasized stable, internal global attributions to character flaws. Samoan students emphasized more easily changed, situation-specific attributions; nonlinear, multifaceted judgments of blame; deference to hierarchy in group relationships; and context-oriented resolutions that avoid individual confrontation and emphasize preservation of relationships.

This study examined how organizational cultures are transmitted and maintained through interactions among organizational members across intergroup boundaries. The major hypothesis of interest was that the total number of individuals' out-group communication network links predicts the degree of individual-out-group transmission of work-related values and beliefs. The research design involved a survey of workers in international organizations with bicultural workforces (U.S. and Japanese). A total of 118 responses were submitted to a series of multiple regression analyses. The results provided evidence to support the relationship between communication and cultural transmission. Theoretically, it addressed two issues that have not been dealt with in social influence theories. First, it identified different types of social influence: agreement, accuracy, and congruency derived from the coorientation model. Second, it identified specific conditions under which social influence takes place by examining relational proximity in three different types of networks.

Children with special needs typically require family accommodation to those needs. We explore here the extent to which cultural forces shape the accommodations mothers make when communicating with young deaf children. Sixteen mother-child dyads (8 Chinese, 8 American) were videotaped at home. In each culture, 4 mothers interacted with their deaf children, and 4 interacted with their hearing children. None of the deaf children knew sign language, nor spoke at age level. We found that mothers adjusted their communicative behaviors to their deaf children, but in every case, those adjustments were calibrated to cultural norms. American mothers, for example, increased their use of gesture with deaf children but stopped far short of the Chinese range--despite the obvious potential benefits of gesturing to children who cannot hear. These findings provide the first cross-cultural demonstration that children are, first and foremost, inculcated into their cultures and, only within that framework, then treated as special cases.

Research indicates that culturally homogeneous work groups perform better than their heterogeneous counterparts. Reasons include participants' perceptions of group receptiveness and cultural distance, which influenced their performance.

Responses to the Twenty Statements Test were obtained from 166 Filipino secondary school children asked to respond either in English or Cebuano, their local language. Contrary to the cultural accommodation hypothesis, the respondents did not provide more independent self-references in the English language condition. Examination of responses indicated that when responding in English, the participants, particularly the males, were influenced by the school context. The females tended to provide more relational self-references., Evaluation of the cultural accommodation approach shows that it does not accurately explain responses by bilingual individuals. The theory posits that one will support perceived values of a culture when responding in that culture's language. Studies of bilingual students, however, indicates there is no effort to accommodate the values of another culture when conversing in that language.

96 university students were asked to imagine that they were suffering from study anxiety to the point of wishing to receive help with the problem. They were then asked to read a booklet detailing either (a) the rationale for systematic desensitization or Rational-Emotive Therapy and (b) told that counselling lasted for 5 or 15 weeks. They then assessed the credibility of the therapy using Borkovec's credibility rating method. Meta-analysis has shown that systematic desensitization has superior outcomes when compared to other treatments, but this could be attributed to the different expectations of benefit that the therapies arouse. This notion has been called the expectancy-arousal hypothesis. Results from the present experiment did not support Shapiro's 1981 findings that systematic desensitization was more credible than Rational-Emotive Therapy, which disconfirms the expectancy-arousal hypothesis, but the basis for this remains unclear.