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People care about their own well-being and about the well-being of their families. It is currently, however, unknown how much people tend to value their own versus their family's well-being. 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 d s =.20, range −.02 to.48), but present in 98% of the studied countries, with statistical significance in 73% to 75%, and variance across countries <2%. 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 d s for Latin America =.15 and.18), while in Confucian Asia cultures lowest on relational mobility, this effect was closer to medium (d s >.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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories link threat with right-wing political beliefs. We use the World Values Survey (60,378 participants) to explore how six types of threat (e.g., economic, violence, and surveillance) are associated with multiple political beliefs (e.g., cultural, economic, and ideological identification) in 56 countries/territories. Multilevel models with individuals nested in countries revealed that the threat-political belief association depends on the type of threat, the type of political belief, and the country. Economic-related threats tended to be associated with more left-wing economic political beliefs and violence-related threats tended to be associated with more cultural right-wing beliefs, but there were exceptions to this pattern. Additional analyses revealed that the associations between threat and political beliefs were different across countries. However, our analyses identified few country characteristics that could account for these cross-country differences. Our findings revealed that political beliefs and perceptions of threat are linked, but that the relationship is not simple. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assessed empirical support for (a) the widely held notion that across so-called "honor, dignity, and face cultures," internal and external components of self-esteem are differentially important for overall self-esteem; and (b) the idea that concerns for honor are related to internal and external components of self-esteem in honor cultures but not in dignity and face cultures. Most importantly, we also set out to (c) investigate whether measures are equivalent, that is, whether a comparison of means and relationships across cultural groups is possible with the employed scales. Data were collected in six countries (N = 1,099). We obtained only metric invariance for the self-esteem and honor scales, allowing for comparisons of relationships across samples, but not scale means. Partly confirming theoretical ideas on the importance of internal and external components of self-esteem, we found that only external rather than both external and internal self-esteem was relatively more important for overall self-esteem in "honor cultures"; in a "dignity" culture, internal self-esteem was relatively more important than external self-esteem. Contrary to expectations, in a "face" culture, internal self-esteem was relatively more important than external self-esteem. We were not able to conceptually replicate earlier reported relationships between components of self-esteem and the concern for honor, as we observed no cultural differences in the relationship between self-esteem and honor. We point toward the need for future studies to consider invariance testing in the field of honor to appropriately understand differences and similarities between samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on part-time employment suggests that this type of employment hampers career advancement especially for women. Conversely, role congruity theory suggests that part-time employment hampers career advancement for men. In view of the often confounded nature of gender and job status in research, we studied the main and interaction effects of job status and gender on perceived job alternatives and four subdimensions of organizational career growth. The data (N = 211) revealed (1) a main effect of job status on job alternatives: compared to part-time employment, full-time employment leads to more perceived job alternatives; (2) an interaction effect of job status and gender on career goal progress, ability development, and promotion speed: men working part-time experienced less progress, development, and promotion speed than men working full-time and women in general. These results are explained by gender-role incongruence and challenge the idea that part-time work affects women in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of literature is exploring the link between social support and international students' psychological adjustment. So far, however, there has been no systematic assessment of the overall relationship, and no indication which types and sources of social support may be most strongly associated with psychological adjustment. Our meta-analysis of 257 effect sizes across 76 studies fills this gap and assesses (a) the magnitude of the overall association between social support and international students' psychological adjustment, (b) how different types (subjective, objective, and mixed) and sources (host, conational, international, mixed, and unspecified) of social support moderate the relationship between social support and psychological adjustment, and (c) whether the relationship between social support and psychological adjustment holds across different operationalizations of psychological adjustment. We find a positive overall association (r =.20, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [0.16, 0.23]) between social support and international students' psychological adjustment. Types and sources of social support matter as well: Subjective social support relates more strongly to psychological adjustment than objective social support. The data revealed that only support from mixed sources (i.e., not distinguishing between internationals, host, or conationals) is associated with a stronger effect of social support than support from conationals or from fellow international students (compared with support from host sources). We find no differences in the relation between social support and positive or negative adjustment. We outline recommendations for future research based on the meta-analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested whether the perceived physical attractiveness of a group is greater than the average attractiveness of its members. In nine studies, we find evidence for the so-called group attractiveness effect (GA-effect), using female, male, and mixed-gender groups, indicating that group impressions of physical attractiveness are more positive than the average ratings of the group members. A meta-analysis on 33 comparisons reveals that the effect is medium to large (Cohen’s d = 0.60) and moderated by group size. We explored two explanations for the GA-effect: (a) selective attention to attractive group members, and (b) the Gestalt principle of similarity. The results of our studies are in favor of the selective attention account: People selectively attend to the most attractive members of a group and their attractiveness has a greater influence on the evaluation of the group. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Masculine honor has been found to explain the relationship between insults and aggression in the USA. However, detailed accounts of Mediterranean honor cultures suggest that family honor may be more important in explaining cross-cultural differences in aggression. Two studies revealed that people from Turkish honor culture intended to aggress more after being insulted than Dutch people from a nonhonor culture (Study 1), and that this effect was driven by differences in family honor rather than differences in masculine honor (Study 2). We posit that family honor may be a key factor in explaining insult-related aggression in Mediterranean honor cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]