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We argue that the importance of family relationships for individual well-being varies across societies as a function of a society’s degree of cultural heterogeneity. To examine the role of family relationships, we analyzed the responses from 13,009 participants in 50 societies on their life satisfaction across societies varying in their levels of historical and contemporary cultural heterogeneity. Such heterogeneity creates differences in the frequency of interacting with unfamiliar groups, which leads families to become more central to their members’ satisfaction with life. Multi-level analyses showed that historical and contemporary cultural heterogeneity moderated the pattern such that greater historical or contemporary cultural heterogeneity of society promoted a stronger positive relation between family relationship satisfaction and individual life satisfaction. Our results also revealed that the moderating role of historical cultural heterogeneity was more reliable than that of contemporary cultural heterogeneity. These findings demonstrate the importance of societal demography in shaping people’s psychological processes in different historical periods, suggesting a universal, trans-historical cultural process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly become a global health crisis, leading people to change their interpersonal behaviours to contain the spread of the virus. Italy has rapidly become the country hit second hardest in the world by the COVID-19 pandemic and the first one in Western countries. To reduce the spread of the COVID-19, people are required to change their interpersonal behaviours, reducing their social interactions in close contacts. The lockdown impact on the economy as well as on social and psychological processes is relevant, we conducted an exploratory study to examine which social factors are associated with the psychological reactions of Italians during the COVID-19 lockdown. Participants (n = 690) self-reported their social identification on three levels (i.e., Italians, Europeans and humankind), their trust toward social and political actors, and their level of welbeing, interdependent-happiness, and distress. Results showed that the relation between trust and the level of wellbeing and distress was mediated by identification with Italians and humankind, only the identification with humankind mediated the relationship between trust and the level of interdependent-happiness. The identification with Europeans did not emerge as a mediator in such relationships. The implications for dealing with COVID-19 lockdown in Italy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluated the impact of a school-based program designed to reduce implicit prejudice towards migrants in fifth-grade school children. The program used empathy and perspective taking and direct and indirect contact as strategies to reduce ethnic prejudice. Multiple activities were used, including drawings by migrant children as instruments to promote inclusive behaviors. One hundred and five students were divided into two groups (control, experimental), and the children in each completed the Child-IAT (Implicit Association Test) before and after the program, to measure their implicit prejudice. Only the experimental group participated in the program. The results showed a significant reduction in the implicit prejudice in the experimental group after the educational program, but not in the control group. The results are discussed considering the practical implications of such a school program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an introductory paper to the special section "Multilingual learning and social inclusion of children: The development of educational programmes to connect school and family". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present experiment examined the relationship between different types of discourse linked hand movements and deception. Hand gestures were experimentally studied during truth telling and deception, and in situations with either weak or strong suspicion. Participants (128 Italian psychology students) were interviewed twice about the possession of an object. In one interview they were asked to lie and in the other asked to tell the truth (veracity factor). In both conditions, suspicion was raised after the interview: Participants were accused of lying by the interviewer and asked to repeat their account a second time (suspicion factor). Results indicate that lying was associated with a decrease in deictic gestures, and an increase in metaphoric gestures (main effect of veracity). Also a decrease in self-adaptor gestures was found. Strong suspicion was associated with an increase in metaphoric, rhythmic, and deictic gestures and a decrease in self-adaptor, emblematic, and cohesive gestures (main effect of suspicion). No interaction effect was found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]