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Research has shown that an individual's implicit power motive relates to 2 types of behavioral clusters: either prosocial, socially appropriate behaviors or profligate, impulsive behaviors. The present study examined the relationship between individuals' implicit power motives and their tendency to engage in sexual activities without strong emotional ties (i.e., sociosexuality). For men, but not for women, this relationship was hypothesized to be moderated by an implicit disposition for responsibility. Whereas most research has been limited to Euro-American contexts, the present study examined the relationship between power motive, disposition for responsibility, and sociosexuality among participants recruited in Cameroon, China, Costa Rica, and Germany. Explicit Big Five measures of personality were controlled for. For women, only a main effect of responsibility on sociosexuality was found across cultural groups; for men, the association between power motivation and sociosexuality was moderated by responsibility, independent of cultural group. Traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness were systematically related to lower levels of sociosexuality. Effects for both implicit and explicit measures of personality suggest universality in the processes associated with more enactments of sociosexuality, confirming in part the hypothesized role of responsibility in channeling the realization of the power motive into less impulsive activities. Keywords: need for power, responsibility, sociosexuality, culture, traits DOI: 10.1037/a0020053

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00632.x Byline: Jan Hofer (1), Holger Busch (1), Michael Harris Bond (2), Joscha Kartner (1), Florian Kiessling (3), Ruby Law (4) Abstract: ABSTRACT Research has shown that capacity for accessing implicit motives promotes congruence between the implicit and the explicit motivational system: Individuals able to test a conscious goal for its fit with their implicit motivation commit themselves more fully to self-congruent goals. However, it has not yet been shown whether this is a universal phenomenon or limited to Euro-American cultures in which individual needs are less strictly constrained by the social environment than in other cultural contexts. Thus, the present study examined whether self-determination interacts with the implicit achievement motive to predict how much importance individuals from Cameroon, Germany, and Hong Kong ascribe to achievement goals. Moreover, the importance ascribed to goals should indirectly predict life satisfaction via success in goal realization. Results showed that the associations described above are valid in all three cultural groups and are discussed in terms of their implications for the universal processes characterizing motivation. Author Affiliation: (1)University of Osnabruck (2)Hong Kong Polytechnic University (3)University of Salzburg (4)Chinese University of Hong Kong Article note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jan Hofer, University of Osnabruck, Department of Psychology, Artilleriestr. 34, D-49069 Osnabruck, Germany. E-mail: Jan.Hofer@uos.de.

Three studies examined the social manifestations of modesty in Chinese and Canadian cultures, conceptualizing and operationalizing it as a self-presentation tactic with communal functions. In Study 1, the authors developed a self-report Modest Behavior Scale (MBS) to tap the behavioral aspects of modesty and identified three factors: self-effacement, other-enhancement, and avoidance of attention-seeking. The authors validated the scale by establishing its nomological network with trait modesty, individuation, independent and interdependent self-construals, traditionality, and modernity, in both Hong Kong and Shanghai, which are culturally different regions of China. In Study 2, the MBS was supplemented with additional items, and a different set of predictors, including values, was used to predict the three factors in both Hong Kong and Beijing, China. In Study 3, we administered the MBS in Vancouver, Canada, adding emic items generated from this Canadian sample and using values and other variables as predictors. Gender differences are discussed in terms of the role played by modest self-presentations in promoting intragroup harmony in different cultural settings. Keywords: modesty; modest behavior; individuation; traditionality and modernity; independent and interdependent self-construals

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.00505.x Byline: Sylvia Xiaohua Chen (1), Veronica Benet-Martinez (2), Michael Harris Bond (3) Abstract: ABSTRACT The present investigation examined the impact of bicultural identity, bilingualism, and social context on the psychological adjustment of multicultural individuals. Our studies targeted three distinct types of biculturals: Mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong, Filipino domestic workers (i.e., sojourners) in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese college students. Individual differences in Bicultural Identity Integration (BII; Benet-Martinez, Leu, Lee, & Morris, 2002) positively predicted psychological adjustment for all the samples except sojourners even after controlling for the personality traits of neuroticism and self-efficacy. Cultural identification and language abilities also predicted adjustment, although these associations varied across the samples in meaningful ways. We concluded that, in the process of managing multiple cultural environments and group loyalties, bilingual competence, and perceiving one's two cultural identities as integrated are important antecedents of beneficial psychological outcomes. Author Affiliation: (1)The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2)University of California at Riverside (3)The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The present study examined the relationship between Schwartz's cultural value orientations (2004) and self-reported emotional expression across seven emotions in 25 cultural groups using a multilevel random coefficient modeling technique. Two forms of self-reported emotional expression, i.e., non-verbal and verbal expression, were examined. No clear pattern of moderation by cultural value orientations on the relationships among the emotion variables and emotional expression was found. However, significant relationships were found between cultural value orientations of hierarchy, autonomy-embeddedness, and mastery, and cultural-level means of emotional expression. These findings were discussed in terms of the normative social agendas for cultural groups high on these value orientations. Keywords: emotional expression; cultural value orientations; ISEAR data; hierarchical linear modeling

Despite the importance of the concept of cultural display rules in explaining cultural differences in emotional expression and despite the fact that it has been more than 30 years since this concept was coined, there is yet to be a study that surveys display rules across a wide range of cultures. This article reports such a study. More than 5,000 respondents in 32 countries completed the Display Rule Assessment Inventory. The authors examined five hypotheses concerning the relationship between display rules and individualism-collectivism (IC). The findings indicated the existence of several universal effects, including greater expression toward in-groups versus out-groups, and an overall regulation effect. Individualistic and collectivistic cultures differed on overall expressivity endorsement and in norms concerning specific emotions in in-group and out-group situations. Keywords: display rules; emotion; expression; individualism-collectivism; cultural norms

Death ideation and death anxiety represent the cognitive and affective dimensions of death attitudes, respectively. General beliefs about the world are proposed to be useful defensive mechanisms protecting persons against the death anxiety provoked by death ideation. SEM is employed to test the proposed mediation model, using a sample of 133 Hong Kong Chinese university students. Results showed that death ideation was significantly and inversely linked to belief in social cynicism, reward for application, and fate control. Moreover, higher levels of belief in fate control and lower levels of religiosity predicted greater death anxiety. Only belief in fate control partially mediated the relationship between death ideation and death anxiety. Discussion focused on how social axioms serve as useful defensive mechanisms against death anxiety.

Cross-cultural theories of individualism and collectivism have stimulated the development of the personal constructs of independence and interdependence to help us understand the working out of their cultural dynamics. To delineate the contributions of both personal or independent and interpersonal or interdependent predictors of depressive symptomatology, this study assessed self-efficacy and relationship harmony (peer and family) among adolescents in Hong Kong and the United States. By applying both level- and structure-oriented techniques, the authors tested cultural differences in the levels of the constructs and their linkage across gender and culture. The path leading from self-efficacy to depressed symptoms was significantly stronger for American adolescents than for Hong Kong adolescents, whereas the path of relationship harmony was statistically equivalent across the two cultures. Both pathways supplemented one another in their effects on depressive symptomatology in both cultures, underscoring the importance of managing both agency and communion in promoting psychological health. Keywords: self-efficacy; relationship harmony; depression; independence and interdependence

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. Key words: compliance, cross-cultural studies, idiocentrism/allocentrism, COMPLIANCE WITH A REQUEST -- in the studies of strategies for gaining such compliance, social psychologists have researched intrapersonal influences (e.g., Guadagno, Asher, Demaine, & Cialdini, 2001; Smith, Cody, Lovette, [...]

National rates of homicide vary dramatically and may provide a window into the societal dynamics and their socialized psychological reflections that generate violence. To develop a comprehensive theory of these dynamics, this study examined stable rates of homicide in 56 nations. A selection of societal-level variables was deployed in conjunction with psychological measures of citizen characteristics to predict homicide levels. Using blocked regression, and beginning with economic predictors, the authors discovered that homicide was most powerfully predicted by a linear equation combining societal measures of economic inequality, negative GNP per capita, and the negative sex ratio of men to women. Psychological measures of lower trust in one's fellow citizens, belief in less social complexity, and preference for mates of higher status as opposed to love also predicted national homicide rates and were able to mediate the effects of the three societal variables on these national homicide rates. This study exemplifies the potential usefulness of combining societal and psychological measures in understanding national phenomena, suggesting plausible personality or social psychological factors characterizing a nation's citizenry that are implicated in generating higher levels of any behavior, like homicide. Keywords: homicide: societal factors, psychological factors

There is recognition that an understanding of the situation is essential to our understanding of behavior, but that there is a scarcity of resources for situational analysis. Most studies use individual perceptions of behaviors as input for situational analysis. Such analyses, however, make the situation a projection of personality processes. To identify one aspect of the objective situation, this study extends the work of Marwell and Hage by developing culture-level taxonomies of role dyads, defined in terms of objective context variables, in two cultures: Hong Kong and Australia. The results reveal similarity of culture-level relational space defined by four dimensions: complexity, equality, adversarialness, and containment. Cultural differences are expressed in the location of role dyads within this space. These differing positions of any given role dyad may be combined with personality variables in the future to help explain differences in social behavior.

To broaden our conceptual framework for understanding cultural differences, the present article reports two studies that examined whether pancultural dimensions based on general beliefs, or social axioms, can be identified in persons from five cultures. A Social Axioms Survey was constructed, based on both previous psychological research primarily in Europe and North America on beliefs and qualitative research conducted in Hong Kong and Venezuela. Factor analyses of these beliefs from student as well as adult samples revealed a pancultural, five-factor structure, with dimensions labeled as: cynicism, social complexity, reward for application, spirituality, and fate control. In the second study, this five-factor structure, with the possible exception of fate control, was replicated with college students from Japan, the United States, and Germany. The potential implications of a universal, five-factor structure of individual social beliefs were discussed, along with the relation of this structure to indigenous belief systems and to culture-level analyses.

The authors outline a strategy for introducing a Western psychological construct into a different culture. A series of three studies tested how the construct of individuation functions in a collectivist culture. It was hypothesized that the original one-factor model of individuation would not be sufficient to capture the meaning of individuating behaviors in a collectivist culture. Rather, a culture-specific model with two factors, namely, Taking the Lead and Seeking Attention, was expected. In Study 1, the two-factor model showed a better fit than the original one-factor model in a Chinese sample. In Study 2, replicating the original one-factor model in an individualistic culture eliminated an explanation for the obtained two-factor model based on a methodological artifact. In Study 3, the authors examined the nomological network of the two types of individuation and determined whether the imported construct of individuation changes meanings in the new culture.

D. Oyserman, H. M. Coon, and M. Kemmelmeier (2002) challenge the stereotype that European Americans are more individualistic and less collectivistic than persons from most other ethnic groups. The author contends that this stereotype took firm empirical root with G. Hofstede's (1980) monumental publication identifying the United States as the most individualistic of his then 40 nations. This empirical designation arose because of challengeable decisions Hofstede made about the analysis of his data and the labeling of his dimensions. The conflation of concepts under the rubric of cultural individualism plus psychologists' unwarranted psychologizing of the construct then combined with Hofstede's empirical location of America to set a 20-year agenda for data collection. Oyserman et al. disentangle and organize this mass of studies, enabling the discipline of cross-cultural psychology to forge ahead in more productive directions, less reliant on previous assumptions and measures.

Comprehensive measures of the personality sphere have been developed in the West and widely used in other cultural settings. Such importation has advantages for economizing resources but short circuits the development of local personality theory. This article describes work on indigenous personality measurement in Chinese cultural settings using the lexical and questionnaire approaches of trait theory. In both cases, locally developed measures define the personality sphere differently and reveal a dimension of personality variation not detected by imported and purportedly comprehensive instruments. The additional dimension revealed from the questionnaire approach has been labeled Chinese Tradition. Facets from this dimension have been shown to add power to the imported measures in predicting social outcomes. It may thus be prudent to encourage the development of measures derived from local cultural traditions to ensure a truly comprehensive and effective coverage of the personality sphere.

The present study examines the relationships between the endorsement of filial piety and both universal and indigenous personality trait factors among Chinese subjects. Two groups of college students from Hong Kong and Beijing participated in the study and completed a questionnaire composed of the Filial Piety Scale, the Five Factor Inventory (FFI), and five facets selected from the Chinese Tradition factor of the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI). The results showed that (a) the indigenous CPAI facets can significantly contribute to predicting filial piety scores over and above the universal FFI factors, and (b) among the five factors of the FFI, Neuroticism and Openness significantly predicted filial piety, whereas among the five facets of Chinese Tradition, Harmony and Renqing (relation orientation) were the two significant predictors. Thus, whether filial piety is universal or culture-specific, improved prediction requires using indigenous measures in addition to the FFI., INTRODUCTION Filial piety is one of the paramount guiding ethics governing social behavior in Chinese societies. It has been particularly emphasized by Confucian scholars throughout Chinese history as regulating interpersonal, [...]

The first part of the study confirmed an additive effect of the newly proposed construct of relationship harmony to self-esteem in predicting life satisfaction across student samples from the United States and Hong Kong. As predicted from the dynamics of cultural collectivism, the relative importance of relationship harmony to self-esteem was greater in Hong Kong than in the United States. In the second part of the study, the independent and interdependent self-construals (H. R. Markus & S. Kitayama, 1991) and the 5 factors of personality (P. T. Costa & R. R. McCrae, 1992) were advanced to be the culture-general determinants of life satisfaction, acting through the mediating variables of self-esteem and relationship harmony. Both self-construals and the 5 factors of personality were shown to influence life satisfaction through the mediating agency of self-esteem and relationship harmony in equivalent ways across these 2 cultural groups.

Our complex global economy has dramatically increased the frequency with which managers from one culture are called on to lead work groups and teams composed of members from different cultures. [...]

[A] human race speaking many tongues, regarding many values, and holding different convictions about the meaning of life sooner or later will have to consult al1 that is human. G [...]

This paper attempts to integrate the scattered studies on Chinese emotion and proposes some methodological and substantive suggestions for future work. Emotions are construed as interpretations of physiological response to important social events with these interpretations guiding behavior. Concerning interpretation, the dimensions used by Chinese to understand emotion-eliciting events are the same as those found in many other cultures. Which sorts of events are keyed to these dimensions appear to differ, however, in ways consistent with theorizing about power distance and collectivism. Concerning physiological reactions, there appears again to be evidence for universality in the pattern of response for given emotions. What differs in Chinese culture is the lower frequency, intensity and duration with which emotions are typically experienced. Cultural beliefs about emotions support this general moderation and have implications for conceptions of psychopathology. Concerning the action component of emotions, evidence suggests that the expression of emotion is carefully regulated out of concern for its capacity to disrupt group harmony and status hierarchies. It is concluded that all these features of Chinese emotional responding are likely to be found in other groups that share cultural characteristics with the Chinese.

Data from a survey study of organizational cultures in 20 organizational units in Denmark and the Netherlands were re-analyzed at the individual level, after elimination of between-unit variance. A factor analysis showed individuals' values to be composed of six dimensions, and individuals' perceptions of their organization's practices of another six dimensions, entirely different from the dimensions found earlier to apply at the organizational level. The scores on these new dimensions are related to various demographic characteristics of the respondents. This case is used for a methodological treatise stressing the need to choose the proper level of analysis for the problem at hand, a need which is too seldom recognized. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.), Factor IV5: Alienation .54 Employees afraid to disagree with superiors .49 Not proud working for this organization .45 Most people cannot be trusted .43 Authority crisis in organizations .42 Own [...]

The impact of cultural femininity on preference for methods of conflict processing was examined by studying college students from Canada and The Netherlands. These two countries were selected because the work of Hofstede (1980, Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage) on cultural dimensions stated that they are different in their cultural femininity, but similar along his other cultural dimensions. On the basis of Hofstede's analysis of cultural femininity, it was predicted and confirmed that Dutch subjects preferred harmony-enhancing procedures more, and confrontational procedures less, than did Canadian subjects. It was also found, quite unexpectedly, that Canadians were more likely to give in but less likely to ignore a dispute than were the Dutch. Furthermore, these cultural differences were related to perceived differences in the extent to which the various procedures were believed to facilitate (1) disputant process control and (2) animosity reduction. Implications of these findings for the development of a culture-general model of conflict processing are discussed.

This study is an initial attempt to examine the association between perceived parental styles and practices and academic achievement in Bangladesh, a Muslim culture. Associations among perceptions of parents' styles [...]

This study assessed the assumption that socialization practices relevant to value priorities and autonomy expectations differ between collectivist and individualist cultures. The authors investigated value priorities and autonomy expectations in 58 pairs of Caucasian and 66 pairs: of Asian teenagers and their mothers. This pairing enabled them to address similarities on values and autonomy expectations within families, which has not been done previously. Although Asian and Caucasian teenagers showed similarities on many value priorities, Asian participants' autonomy expectations were delayed compared to those of their Caucasian counterparts. Mother-teenager autonomy expectations were correlated in Asian but not in Caucasian families. Unlike Asian mothers, Caucasian mothers endorsing high value priority for Openness to Change supported earlier autonomy expectations for their teenagers. Parental expectations unpackaged the effect of culture on teenagers' autonomy expectations. These findings support models that predict persistent family interdependence despite adoption of many individualist values in modernizing collectivist cultures.