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People care about their own well-being, but also about the well-being of their families. It is currently however unknown how much people tend to value their own and their family’s wellbeing. A recent study documented that people value family happiness over personal happiness across four cultures. In this study, we sought to replicate this finding across a larger sample size (N = 12,819) and a greater number of countries (N = 49), We found that the strength of the idealization of family over personal happiness preference was small (average Cohen’s ds = .20 with country levels varying from -.02 to almost .48), but ubiquitous, i.e., direction presented in 98% of the studied countries, 73-75% with statistical significance and < 2% variance across countries. We also found that the size of this effect did vary somewhat across cultural contexts. In Latin American cultures highest on relational mobility, the idealization of family over personal happiness was very small (average Cohen’s ds for Latin America = .15 and .18), while in Confucian Asia cultures lowest on relational mobility, this effect was closer to medium (ds > .40 and .30). Importantly, we did not find strong support for traditional theories in cross-cultural psychology that associate collectivism with greater prioritization of the family versus the individual; country level individualism-collectivism was not associated with variation in the idealization of family versus individual happiness. Our findings indicate that no matter how much various populists abuse the argument of “protecting family life” to disrupt emancipation, family happiness seems to be a pan-culturally phenomenon. Family well-being is a key ingredient of social fabric across the world, and should be acknowledged by psychology and well-being researchers, and by progressive movements too.

Past research has shown that economic inequality shapes individuals’ self-construals. However, it has been unclear which dimensions of self-construal are associated with and affected by economic inequality. A correlational (Study 1: N = 264) and an experimental study (Study 2: N = 532) provided converging evidence linking perceived economic inequality with two forms of independent (vs. interdependent) self-construal: Difference from Others and Self- Reliance. In Study 3 (N = 12,634) societal differences in objective economic inequality across 48 nations predicted feelings of Difference from Others, but not Self-Reliance. Importantly, we found no significant associations of economic inequality with the other six dimensions of self-construal. Our findings help extend previous results linking economic inequality to forms of “social distance.”

We explore to what extent previously observed pan-cultural association between dimensions of self-construal and personal life satisfaction (PLS) may be moderated by three national-contextual variables: national wealth, economic inequality, and religious heritage. The results showed that MSelf-reliance (vs. dependence on others) predicted PLSpositively in poorer countries but negatively in richer countries. Connectedness to others (vs. self-containment) predicted PLS more strongly in Protestant-heritage countries. Self-expression (vs. harmony) predicted PLS more weakly (and non-significantly) in Muslim-heritage countries. In contrast, previously reported associations of self-direction (vs. reception-to-influence), consistency (vs. variability), and decontextualized (vs. contextualized) self-understanding with personal life satisfaction were not significantly moderated by these aspects of societal context. These results show the importance of considering the impact of national religious and economic context.

The extent to which culture moderates the effects of need for approval from others on a person's handling of interpersonal conflict was investigated. Students from 24 nations rated how they handled a recent interpersonal conflict, using measures derived from face-negotiation theory. Samples varied in the extent to which they were perceived as characterised by the cultural logics of dignity, honour, or face. It was hypothesised that the emphasis on harmony within face cultures would reduce the relevance of need for approval from others to face-negotiation concerns. Respondents rated their need for approval from others and how much they sought to preserve their own face and the face of the other party during the conflict. Need for approval was associated with concerns for both self-face and other-face. However, as predicted, the association between need for approval from others and concern for self-face was weaker where face logic was prevalent. Favourable conflict outcome was positively related to other-face and negatively related to self-face and to need for approval from others, but there were no significant interactions related to prevailing cultural logics. The results illustrate how particular face-threatening factors can moderate the distinctive face-concerns earlier found to characterise individualistic and collectivistic cultural groups.

How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and interdependent happiness focusing on individual and family, collected mostly from students, across forty-nine countries. We demonstrate that the relative idealization of the two types of well-being varies across cultural contexts and are associated with culturally different models of selfhood. Furthermore, we show that rankings of societal well-being based on life satisfaction tend to underestimate the contribution from interdependent happiness. We introduce a new culturally sensitive method for calculating societal well-being, and examine its construct validity by testing for associations with the experience of emotions and with individualism-collectivism. This new culturally sensitive approach represents a slight, yet important improvement in measuring well-being.

© 2020 SAGE Publications. This study compares the individual-level and sample-level predictive utility of a measure of the cultural logics of dignity, honor, and face. University students in 29 samples from 24 nations used a simple measure to rate their perceptions of the interpersonal cultural logic characterizing their local culture. The nomological net of these measures was then explored. Key dependent measures included three different facets of independent versus interdependent self-construal, relevant attitudes and values, reported handling of actual interpersonal conflicts, and responses to normative settings. Multilevel analyses revealed both individual- and sample-level effects but the dignity measure showed more individual-level effects, whereas sample-level effects were relatively more important with the face measure. The implications of this contrast are discussed.

Fil: Smith, Peter B. University of Sussex. School of Psychology; Reino Unido Fil: Easterbrook, Matthew J. University of Sussex. School of Psychology; Reino Unido Fil: Al-Selim, Heyla. King Saud University. Department of Psychology; Arabia Saudí Fil: Lun, Vivian Miu Chi. Lingnan University. Department of Applied Psychology; Hong Kong Fil: Koc, Yasin. Groningen University. Department of Social Psychology; Países Bajos Fil: Gul, Pelin. Iowa State University. Department of Psychology; Estados Unidos Fil: Papastylianou, Dona. University of Athens. Department of Psychology; Grecia Fil: Grigoryan, Lusine. Ruhr University. Faculty of Psychology; Alemania Fil: Torres, Claudio. University of Brasilia. Institute of Psychology; Brasil Fil: Efremova, Maria. HSE Universit. Centre for Sociocultural Research; Rusia Fil: Hassan, Bushra. International Islamic University. Department of Psychology; Pakistan Fil: Ahmad, Abd Halim. Universiti Utara Malaysia. Department of Psychology; Malasia Fil: Al-Bayati, Ahmed. Lawrence Technological University. Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering; Estados Unidos Fil: Anderson, Joel. Australian Catholic University and La Trobe University. School of Health and Behavioural Science; Australia Fil: Cross, Susan E. Iowa State University. Department of Psychology; Estados Unidos Fil: Delfino, Gisela. Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina. Facultad de Psicología y Psicopedagogía; Argentina Fil: Gamsakhurdia, Vladimer. Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. Department of Psychological Anthropology; Georgia Fil: Gavreliuc, Alin. West University of Timisoara. Department of Psychology; Rumania Fil: Gavreliuc, Dana. West University of Timisoara. Department of Teacher Training; Rumania Fil: Gunsoy, Ceren. Clemson University. College of Behavioral, Social and Health Sciences; Estados Unidos Fil: Hakobjanyan, Anna. Yerevan State University. Faculty of Philosophy and Psychology; Armenia Fil: Lay, Siugmin. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Escuela de Psicología; Chile Fil: Lopukhova, Olga. Kazan Federal University. Institute of Pedagogy and Psychology; Rusia Fil: Hu, Ping. Renmin University. Department of Psychology; China Fil: Sunar, Diane. Istanbul Bilgi University. Department of Psychology; Turkey Fil: Mendes Texeira, Maria Luisa. Mackenzie University. Department of Postgraduate Business Administration; Brasil Fil: Tripodi, Doriana. Gioia Tauro. Private practice; Italy Fil: Diaz Rivera, Paola Eunice. Universidad Autónoma de México. Facultad de Psicología; México Fil: Van Osch, Yvette. Tilburg University. Department of Social Psychology; Países Bajos Fil: Yuki, Masaki. Hokkaido University. Department of Behavioral Science; Japón Fil: Abbas, Ammar. University of Baghdad. Department of Chemical Engineering; Irak Fil: Ogusu, Natsuki. Hokkaido University. Department of Behavioral Science; Japón Fil: Kwantes, Catherine T. University of Windsor. Department of Psychology; Canadá Fil: Díaz Loving, Rolando. Universidad Autónoma de México. Facultad de Psicología; México Fil: Perez-Floriano, Lorena. Universidad Diego Portales. Escuela de Psicología; Chile Fil: Chaleeraktrakoon, Trawin. Thammasat University. Department of Psychology; Tailandia Fil: Chobthamkit, Phatthanakit. University of Kent. School of Psychology; Reino Unido Abstract: Sex differences in aspects of independent versus interdependent self-construal and depressive symptoms were surveyed among 5,320 students from 24 nations. Men were found to perceive themselves as more self-contained whereas women perceived themselves as more connected to others. No significant sex differences were found on two further dimensions of self-construal, or on a measure of depressive symptoms. Multilevel modelling was used to test the ability of a series of predictors derived from a social identity perspective and from evolutionary theory to moderate sex differences. Contrary to most prior studies of personality, sex differences in self-construal were larger in samples from nations scoring lower on the Gender Gap Index, and the Human Development Index. Sex differences were also greater in nations with higher pathogen prevalence, higher self-reported religiosity, and in nations with high reported avoidance of settings with strong norms. The findings are discussed in terms of the interrelatedness of self-construals and the cultural contexts in which they are elicited and the distinctiveness of student samples.

Measures of personality have been shown to predict employee satisfaction at work and in life, but these findings arise mostly from research conducted in national cultures of Anglo heritage. To broaden the generality of such findings, we explore the relationships between Big Five dimensions of personality and satisfaction with life across representative samples of 13,265 employed persons in 18 nations. We argue that the strength of relationships between these personality dimensions and life satisfaction will be moderated by a national economic culture characterized by wealth and by competitiveness, since employees derive their satisfaction with life from the personality qualities especially valued in such economic systems. Using data from the World Values Survey and its Wave 6 short-form measure of the Big Five, we find that the dimensions of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability predict higher life satisfaction pan-nationally for employed persons. Cross-level moderation effects were found: national wealth enhances the linkage of conscientiousness and emotional stability to life satisfaction; agreeableness links to life satisfaction in wealthier but not in poorer nations; extroversion predicts life satisfaction in more competitive nations but not in less competitive nations. To explain this variability in the relationships of Big Five personality dimensions with the life satisfaction of employed persons, we reason that the national cultures of wealth and of competitiveness surrounding working life establish an incentive context within which enactments of these personality dispositions will generate greater social and personal rewards from the experience of work, yielding higher levels of life satisfaction among employed persons.

Popular self-help materials claim that reading and internalizing positive self-statements promotes well-being. Four studies were conducted to examine how these materials may instead heighten indivi...

In the midst of an increasingly changing world, the ability to think critically has become a crucial attribute expected of university graduates. However, the endorsement of critical thinking in higher education has been challenged by the growing cultural diversity in university classrooms. Concerns about Asian students' lack of critical thinking and the appropriateness of critical thinking instruction in international education have been raised by teaching professionals. The present dissertation sought to understand the influence of culture on the teaching and learning of critical thinking in higher education. Chapter 2 presented a study examining the instructional contexts of Hong Kong and New Zealand. It was found that similar assessment methods were employed in the university courses in both cultures, but university courses in Hong Kong placed more emphasis on knowledge development whereas those in New Zealand explicitly described critical thinking in the course objectives. Chinese international and New Zealand European postgraduate students were individually interviewed to investigate the exact influence of cultural-educational contexts in Asia and New Zealand on university students' conception and practice of critical thinking (Chapter 3). Both samples of students held similar conceptions of critical thinking, but reported differences in their socialization experiences regarding the practice of critical thinking in their respective cultures. Specifically, stronger inhibition on students' practice of critical thinking was noted in Asia than in New Zealand. In Chapter 4, two studies that investigated the differences in critical thinking skills between Asian and New Zealand European students are presented. In both studies, New Zealand European students were found to perform better than their Asian counterparts on an objective measure of critical thinking skills. The difference was explained by students English language ability but not cultural factors such as cultural differences in cognitive styles or behavioral adoption of New Zealand culture. It was suggested that observed cross-cultural difference in critical thinking skills is related more to language ability rather than cultural variables. A significantly positive relationship between critical thinking skills and academic performance was found, and the relationship was not significantly different between Asian and New Zealand European student samples (Chapter 5). The relationship was also not different as a function of students' adoption of New Zealand culture, indicating that pedagogy with an emphasis on critical thinking is similarly applicable to both Asian and New Zealand European students. Overall, the present findings indicated that culture has an important influence on students' practice of critical thinking. Although there is cross-cultural difference in critical thinking skills between Asian and Western student samples, the difference appears to be related more to language ability rather than cultural factors. The present thesis provided empirical evidence to show that culture influences the educational practice of critical thinking, but the influence of culture does not necessarily impede the application of critical thinking instruction in international classrooms. With appropriate adaptation, critical thinking instruction can be beneficial to the intellectual development of students regardless of their cultural backgrounds.

This paper provides a unique perspective for understanding cultural differences: representation similarity - a computational technique that uses pairwise comparisons of units to reveal their representation in higher-order space. By combining individual-level measures of trust across domains and well-being from 13,823 participants across 15 nations with a measure of society-level tightness-looseness, we found that any two countries with more similar tightness-looseness tendencies exhibit higher degrees of representation similarity in national interpersonal trust profiles. Although each individual’s trust profile is generally similar to their nation’s trust profile, the greater similarity between an individual’s and their society’s trust profile predicted a higher level of individual life satisfaction only in loose cultures, but not in tight cultures. Using the framework of representation similarity to explore cross-cultural differences from a multidimensional, multi-national perspective can provide a new and fuller understanding of culture and its influence on human well-being.

The Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality has been repeatedly found to predict life satisfaction (LS), but cultural variations have been noted in the effects of each FFM dimension. In this research, we compared the prediction of LS with Extraversion and Neuroticism via the pathways of individual depressive state and interdependent happiness between American (n = 155) and Chinese community adults (n = 248). In both samples, Extraversion and interdependent happiness positively predicted LS, whereas Neuroticism and depressive state negatively predicted LS. Using structural equation modeling, we found that interdependent happiness mediated the effects of Extraversion and Neuroticism on LS in both samples, and there was no significant cultural difference in the indirect effect of interdependent happiness. Depressive state mediated the effect of Neuroticism on LS in American adults, but it did not explain the effects of Extraversion and Neuroticism on LS for the Hong Kong Chinese adults. We interpret the different effect of depressive state by referring to the literature on cultural differences in emotion. These findings support the notion that the specific effect of each FFM dimension on LS should be examined with reference to the cultural context.

Erworben im Rahmen der Schweizer Nationallizenzen (http://www.nationallizenzen.ch), Numerous studies document that societal happiness is correlated with individualism, but the nature of this phenomenon remains understudied. In the current paper, we address this gap and test the reasoning that individualism correlates with societal happiness because the most common measure of societal happiness (i.e., country-level aggregates of personal life satisfaction) is individualism-themed. With the data collected from 13,009 participants across fifty countries, we compare associations of four types of happiness (out of which three are more collectivism-themed than personal life satisfaction) with two different measures of individualism. We replicated previous findings by demonstrating that societal happiness measured as country-level aggregate of personal life satisfaction is correlated with individualism. Importantly though, we also found that the country-level aggregates of the collectivism-themed measures of happiness do not tend to be significantly correlated with individualism. Implications for happiness studies and for policy makers are signaled.

This article presents a short research report on the relationship between perceived antagonism in social relations measured using the Belief in a Zero-Sum Game (BZSG) scale, life satisfaction, and positive and negative affect. Given that individuals who believe that life is like a zero-sum game are likely to perceive their daily interactions with others as unfair, we expected that individuals with high BZSG experience more negative affect and fewer positive one, resulting in a lower satisfaction with life. In addition, we examined whether country-level BZSG may play a moderating role in these associations. Data were collected from student samples (N = 7146) in 35 countries. Multilevel modelling revealed that perceived social antagonism in social relations is negatively associated with satisfaction with life and that this relationship is mediated by both positive and negative affect at the individual level. The relation of individual BZSG and negative affect on satisfaction with life were weaker in societies with higher country-level BZSG, suggesting that the effects of BZSG may be less detrimental in these countries. These findings extend previous knowledge about predictors of life satisfaction and suggest that social beliefs might also be an important factor that influences subjective well-being. The contribution of the study is that the separate treatment of life satisfaction and positive and negative affect may be helpful in many research situations, particularly from a cross-cultural perspective.

ObjectiveThe Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF) is a brief scale measuring positive human functioning. The study aimed to examine the factor structure and to explore the cross-cultural utility of the MHC-SF using bifactor models and exploratory structural equation modelling.MethodUsing multigroup confirmatory analysis (MGCFA) we examined the measurement invariance of the MHC-SF in 38 countries (university students, N=8,066; 61.73% women, mean age 21.55 years).ResultsMGCFA supported the cross-cultural replicability of a bifactor structure and a metric level of invariance between student samples. The average proportion of variance explained by the general factor was high (ECV=.66), suggesting that the three aspects of mental health (emotional, social, and psychological well-being) can be treated as a single dimension of well-being.ConclusionThe metric level of invariance offers the possibility of comparing correlates and predictors of positive mental functioning across countries; however, the comparison of the levels of mental health across countries is not possible due to lack of scalar invariance. Our study has preliminary character and could serve as an initial assessment of the structure of the MHC-SF across different cultural settings. Further studies on general populations are required for extending our findings.

Past research on the mere ownership effect has shown that when people own an object, they perceive the owned objects more favorably than the comparable non-owned objects. The present research extends this idea, showing that when people own an object functional to the self, they perceive an increase in their self-efficacy. Three studies were conducted to demonstrate this new form of the mere ownership effect. In Study 1, participants reported an increase in their knowledge level by the mere ownership of reading materials (a reading package in Study 1a, and lecture notes in Study 1b). In Study 2, participants reported an increase in their resilience to sleepiness by merely owning a piece of chocolate that purportedly had a sleepiness-combating function. In Study 3, participants who merely owned a flower essence that is claimed to boost creativity reported having higher creativity efficacy. The findings provided insights on how associations with objects alter one's self-perception.

Inequalities between men and women are common and well-documented. Objective indexes show that men are better positioned than women in societal hierarchies-there is no single country in the world without a gender gap. In contrast, researchers have found that the women-are-wonderful effect-that women are evaluated more positively than men overall-is also common. Cross-cultural studies on gender equality reveal that the more gender egalitarian the society is, the less prevalent explicit gender stereotypes are. Yet, because self-reported gender stereotypes may differ from implicit attitudes towards each gender, we reanalysed data collected across 44 cultures, and (a) confirmed that societal gender egalitarianism reduces the women-are-wonderful effect when it is measured more implicitly (i.e. rating the personality of men and women presented in images) and (b) documented that the social perception of men benefits more from gender egalitarianism than that of women.

Prior research on the mere ownership effect demonstrated how mere ownership of an object could affect one's evaluation of an object per se, such as judging an owned object more favorably than an unowned object. Recent research found that mere ownership could also affect one's evaluation of domain specific self-efficacy, such as perceiving the self as having greater efficacy when experiencing mere ownership (vs. without-ownership) of an object. Three studies were conducted to examine the boundary conditions of this efficacy-based mere ownership effect. We propose that the self-enhancing tendency via mere ownership is not simply a positivity effect to restore positive valence in the self-concept, but is contingent on how important the owned object's functional attribute is to the self, especially when the self-concept is threatened. We demonstrated that efficacy-based mere ownership effect occurred only when the self-concept was threatened (vs. not threatened) (Study 1), and when the attributes of the owned object was central (vs. not central) to the idiosyncratic self-concept (Study 2), or culturally-derived self-concept (Study 3). The implications of and future research direction on efficacy-based mere ownership effect are discussed.

This study used the latent profile transition analysis (LPTA) to analyze whether emotional labor profiles change across time and how these profiles relate to occupational well-being (i.e., job satisfaction, quality of work life, psychological distress, and work-family conflict). A total of 155 full-time Chinese employees completed the questionnaire survey at two time points. Three latent profiles were identified at Time 1 and the same profiles were replicated at Time 2. We determined that the majority of the participants retained the original profiles. Lastly, occupational well-being differed significantly across the identified profiles. The limitations and implications of this study were also provided.

This study examined the association between emotional labor and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and the mediation of work engagement in this relationship. A total of 264 teachers in Mainland China were recruited for this study. Bivariate correlation showed that both deep acting and the expression of naturally felt emotion were positively related to the two dimensions of OCB, namely, OCB toward the individual (OCBI) and OCB toward the organization (OCBO), whereas surface acting was not related to the OCB dimensions. Work engagement was also positively associated with both OCB dimensions. Regression results showed that work engagement partially mediated the relation between deep acting and OCBO, and that between the expression of naturally felt emotion and OCBI. Work engagement also fully mediated the association between deep acting and OCBI, and that between the expression of naturally felt emotion and OCBO. In light of these findings, strategies that encourage employees to display emotions consistent with their inner experience were discussed.

Self-help materials inculcating individuals with positive self-statements are popular in recent years, although the effectiveness of such self-statements on improving individuals’ psychological well-being has not yet been confirmed. Using a control-group pre-test/post-test design, we examined how positive self-statements may or may not benefit individuals’ mood. Individual characteristics and modes of delivery were found to moderate mood changes resulting from positive self-statements. Specifically, we found that participants experienced negative mood change after reading positive self-statements, if they have low level of need satisfaction. However, we also found that participants experienced a mood boost after listening to positive self-statements, and this effect was unrelated to self-esteem or need satisfaction. These findings suggest that self-help materials with a focus on positive self-statements should be used with caution.

In the last three decades, emotional labor has been conceptualized as comprising three strategies, namely, surface acting, deep acting, and expression of naturally felt emotion. Research suggested that each emotional labor strategy relates differently to various health and job outcomes, such as burnout and job satisfaction. These findings and the conclusions drawn are predicated on compartmentalized treatment of the three strategies. A fundamental yet unresolved question concerns whether employees adopt more than one type of emotional labor in the workplace. In this study, we adopted latent profile analysis (LPA) to examine the behavioral profile (i.e., class) of employees’ deployment of emotional labor strategies and how these profiles relate to job satisfaction and burnout. Three latent classes were identified, and the results showed that employees with these different profiles reported significantly different levels of job satisfaction and burnout. These results provide support to a person-centered approach to understand the outcomes of performing emotional labor.

We propose that one’s subjective well-being (SWB) arises from the satisfaction of one’s basic needs, but that the importance of attaining specific needs will vary according to one’s gender, age, and national culture. We argue that the role of one’s national-cultural background in that process can best be unpackaged in terms of the emphasis of a nation’s citizens on the goals for socializing children, namely, self-directedness versus other-directedness and civility versus practicality. Accordingly, we analyzed the responses of 65,025 persons across 50 nations to questions on the World Values Survey about their perceived state of health, financial satisfaction, trust of in-group members, and sense of personal control over events. Using HLM analysis, we showed that all four factors were significant predictors of SWB pan-nationally, but that the linkages of financial satisfaction and trust of in-group members to SWB were moderated by a nation’s self-directedness and civility; those of financial satisfaction and health were moderated by age. These results indicate that the socialization emphases characterizing one’s national culture operate to make some of the key contributors to one’s SWB more or less predictive. Cross-national studies are thereby vindicated in their capacity to reveal nation-specific formulas for psychological processes leading to SWB.

The cognitive science of religion examines the naturalness of religious phenomena by identifying universals in the human cognitive apparatus and process, then exploring the nomological nets surrounding them. There is variation both within and across populations in these constructs and in their linkages, thereby enabling cultural examination of these religious phenomena that have so far been operationalized. We hypothesize that religious phenomena so approached occur within a social-psychological context characterized by affordances that channel their realization and enactments. A fuller understanding of any religious outcome-of-interest will be better understood by considering the characteristics of these contexts that may impinge upon the religious phenomena experienced by a given person. In this essay, we consider the available evidence supporting this hypothesis in multi-national data sets addressing religious beliefs and practices, particularly with regard to their implications for a person’s subjective well-being. The available results support the notion that religion differentially matters to the life of an individual in different cultures. However, the data sets are few, their measures atheoretically conceived, piecemeal, and survey-derived. To encourage more thoughtful, culturally embedded research on the naturalness of religious phenomena, we conclude by exhorting colleagues to address these shortfalls and broaden their conceptual range and empirical reach in the scientific study of religion.

The ecological, political, religious and economic constraints and opportunities characterizing a nation crystallize to set the agenda for socializing children, its future citizens. Parented accordingly, members of those nations would come to adopt the values, beliefs, skills and attitudes that constitute the requisite human capital to sustain that nation. This study reports on the profiling of 55 nations by two dimensions of the socialization goals for children extracted from the World Values Survey, viz., Self-directedness versus Other-directedness, and Civility versus Practicality. An affluent, less corrupt and more gender-equal society is associated with greater focus on Self-directedness and Civility. Both dimensions show convergent and discriminant validities in their correlation with nation-level psychosocial variables such as citizen subjective well-being, values, beliefs, pace of life and trust of out-groups. These dimensions are also shown to connect a nation's ecological construct to the outcomes of its citizens, adding a psychological-developmental perspective to examine nation-building and cultural transmission.

Religion and spirituality have often been associated with the higher subjective well-being of individuals, but departures from this relationship have also been noted in previous research. We identified two important issues that may affect this relationship: the various measurements of religion, spirituality, and subjective well-being used, and the national cultural contexts in which the relationship is examined. Using the World Values Survey (World Values Survey Association, 2009, World Values Survey: 1981–2008. Official Aggregate, Version 20090901, ASEP/JDS, Madrid, Spain, http://www.wvsevsdb .com/wvs/WVSitalicData.jsp), we found that both life satisfaction and happiness were positively associated with many measures of religion and spirituality, except for that of spiritual practice in different national contexts. In national cultures in which socialization for religious faith is more common, spiritual practice was positively related to subjective well-being, whereas in cultures where religious socialization is less prevalent, the relationship between spiritual practice and subjective well-being was reversed. In nations where social hostility toward religious groups is more intense, the positive association between belief in the authority of religious leaders and subjective well-being was stronger than in nations where such hostility was weaker. Different measures of religion and spirituality thus have varying relationships with measures of subjective well-being in different national contexts. Future research must accommodate this variability in conceptualizing the interface between cultural contexts and the psychology of religion and spirituality.

Smiling individuals are usually perceived more favorably than non-smiling ones—they are judged as happier, more attractive, competent, and friendly. These seemingly clear and obvious consequences of smiling are assumed to be culturally universal, however most of the psychological research is carried out in WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and the influence of culture on social perception of nonverbal behavior is still understudied. Here we show that a smiling individual may be judged as less intelligent than the same non-smiling individual in cultures low on the GLOBE’s uncertainty avoidance dimension. Furthermore, we show that corruption at the societal level may undermine the prosocial perception of smiling—in societies with high corruption indicators, trust toward smiling individuals is reduced. This research fosters understanding of the cultural framework surrounding nonverbal communication processes and reveals that in some cultures smiling may lead to negative attributions., La lista completa de autores que integran el documento puede consultarse en el archivo, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación

Interest in family functioning across cultures has become more widespread, but our instruments have not kept pace by measuring constructs that are especially relevant outside the West. We present the psychometric properties of the Concord Index (CI) in the family context. The CI examines (qihe), translated most closely into English as concord. The term includes concepts of harmony and mutuality, and is a characteristic of dyadic relationships valued in Chinese cultural groups that form about a fifth of the world's population. The scale was adapted to measure 2 types of family relationships: specific dyadic relationships within the family between any individual family member and another (the A-P perspective), as well as an individual's composite assessment of all his/her family relationships (the A-FAM perspective). The 10-item measure was internally consistent, stable over 2 weeks, and showed factor invariance across gender, age, relationship, and household size for A-P and A-FAM perspectives. The A-P correlated negatively with disagreement with the partner. The A-FAM correlated with measures of family functioning, well-being, leisure time spent with family members, and with measures of emotional but not physical symptoms. Furthermore, the A-FAM measure added predictive power to individual measures of emotional functioning in assessing subjective happiness. The CI adds to other "imported" instruments designed to measure family function in Chinese populations because of its brevity, its adaptability for measuring dyadic and global family relationships across family roles, its easily understood items, and its incremental validity in predicting well-being beyond individually focused measures.

This research revealed the joint impact of personality traits, social axioms, role relationships and the privacy of social situations on the enactment of three types of modesty, namely, avoiding attention, self-effacement, and enhancement of others, among Hong Kong Chinese teenage females. The modest personality trait was found to relate positively to these modest behaviours. An individual's belief in reward for application significantly predicted self-effacement, and the belief in social cynicism significantly predicted avoiding attention and enhancement of others. Contextual variables as measured by the role relationships and the privacy of the social setting also significantly affected the levels of these modest behaviours.

Critical thinking is deemed as an ideal in academic settings, but cultural differences in critical thinking performance between Asian and Western students have been reported in the international education literature. We examined explanations for the observed differences in critical thinking between Asian and New Zealand (NZ) European students, and tested hypotheses derived from research in international education and cultural psychology. The results showed that NZ European students performed better on two objective measures of critical thinking skills than Asian students. English proficiency, but not dialectical thinking style, could at least partially if not fully explain these differences. This finding holds with both self-report (Study 1) and objectively measured (Study 2a) English proficiency. The results also indicated that Asian students tended to rely more on dialectical thinking to solve critical thinking problems than their Western counterparts. In a follow-up data analysis, students' critical thinking was found to predict their academic performance after controlling for the effects of English proficiency and general intellectual ability, but the relationship does not vary as a function of students' cultural backgrounds or cultural adoption (Study 2b). Altogether, these findings contribute to our understanding of the influence of culture on critical thinking in international education.

Relationships are formed to meet individual goals, and one consequence of this joint effort towards mutual goal fulfillment will be a level of relationship harmony achieved between the interaction partners. The present study investigated the personality correlates associated with the achievement of relationship harmony in a group setting and its consequences for group performance. Students from a social psychology course formed groups for completing task assignments. After a 3-month collaboration, each student evaluated his or her level of relationship harmony attained with each of his or her other group members. It was found that a member’s agreeableness positively predicted his or her achievement of relationship harmony in the group, but that conscientiousness and openness to experience had detrimental effects on the relationship harmony achieved with other group members. A group whose members attained higher relationship harmony performed better on its group assignments, suggesting that relationship harmony among members of a group might have beneficial effects on group processes like performance focus and shared exchange at least in a collectivist, Chinese culture.

In work settings, individuals are selected and promoted based on their cognitive capacities and motivations; pupils are selected into classes or universities based on their academic record and mental abilities and the assessment of motivational factors and mental capabilities of clients is important for making appropriate diagnoses in the mental health domain. Therefore, there is a need to address to what extent existing tests are adequate and can be used with culturally diverse populations. This chapter outlines criteria and principles for assessing equivalence and bias of psychological tests and provides a brief review of methods that could be used for examining the applicability of tests and specific domains with their cross-cultural applicability. The focus is on tests of mental ability as used in educational and work settings and assessment of motivation in work settings using measures of commitment to the organization.

Researchers have extended the literature on strategies of gaining compliance with a request to incorporate cultural variations into the analytic framework. In the present investigation, the authors sought to go beyond previous studies of the factors increasing compliance rates by reexamining how researchers conceptualize and measure personal, social, and cultural influences on compliance behavior in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong. The authors found that different levels of compliance were affected by culture, principles of influence, and the individual's personal orientation of idiocentrism/allocentrism (I/A). In the present study, the authors extended previous cross-cultural work by decomposing the I/A into 2 separate individual difference variables: normative perceptions and evaluative perceptions. The interaction of person and situation on compliance showed the power of situational demands and the strength of different aspects of personal collectivism. Different patterns of compliance at the culture level revealed the importance of culture in shaping this behavioral tendency. Thus, the authors' integration of personal, social, and cultural influences provided an interactive model to help researchers explain compliance more comprehensively.