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The current study tested whether the perception of angry faces is cross-culturally privileged over that of happy faces, by comparing perception of the offset of emotion in a dynamic flow of expressions. Thirty Chinese and 30 European-American participants saw movies that morphed an anger expression into a happy expression of the same stimulus person, or vice versa. Participants were asked to stop the movie at the point where they ceased seeing the initial emotion. As expected, participants cross-culturally continued to perceive anger longer than happiness. Moreover, anger was perceived longer in in-group than in out-group faces. The effects were driven by female rather than male targets. Results are discussed with reference to the important role of context in emotion perception.

The study reported in this article examined the relationship between affect and interpersonal behaviors by identifying the intersection between Yik’s (2009b) Chinese Circumplex Model of Affect (CCMA) and Wiggins’ (1995) Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC). Past research on the relationships between circumplexes has relied on zero-order correlations and principal components analysis, but neither method provides a definitive test of the connections between two structural models. In the present study, Michael Browne’s CIRCUM-extension procedure was used to locate each circumplex within the other. The results show that the two circumplexes overlap on one axis: 37° within the CCMA (pleasant feelings with medium arousal) and 76° within the IPC, which is close to where extraversion lies.

We examined properties of culture-level personality traits in ratings of targets (N = 5,109) aged 12 to 17 in 24 cultures. Aggregate scores were generalizable across gender, age, and relationship groups and showed convergence with culture-level scores from previous studies of self-reports and observer ratings of adults, but they were unrelated to national character stereotypes. Trait profiles also showed cross-study agreement within most cultures, eight of which had not previously been studied. Multidimensional scaling showed that Western and non-Western cultures clustered along a dimension related to Extraversion. A culture-level factor analysis replicated earlier findings of a broad Extraversion factor, but generally resembled the factor structure found in individuals. Continued analysis of aggregate personality scores is warranted.

In his commentary on my paper (Yik, 2007), Schimmack (2009 this issue) reanalysed the published correlations and concluded that dialectical thinking moderates bipolarity in rating momentary affect. In this response, I attempt to integrate our interpretations of the data. Overall, bipolarity prevails in all five language groups. At one point of time, when one is happy, one is not sad. The explanations for the small differences provide avenues for future research.

This study examined if the relation between momentary positive and negative affect varies with culture and gender. In eight samples covering five languages (English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) with 3084 respondents (1305 males and 1779 females), I tested this proposal through structural equation models that controlled for random and systematic errors of measurement. In all eight samples, female respondents yielded a more negative correlation between positive and negative affect than did male respondents, but the differences were tiny and only two were statistically significant. In a multi-sample confirmatory factor analysis, the correlation was found to be substantial and negative in all five languages (Fs ranging from /.80 to /.91). All values from the total samples and from males and females separately were consistent with the bipolarity of positive and negative affect.

The structure of momentary affect among Cantonese-speaking Chinese was explored by developing questionnaire scales in four response formats. Scales can be scored for dimensions defined by Feldman Barrett and Russell; Thayer; Larsen and Diener; and Watson and Tellegen. In a study of recalled affect (N = 487), the newly translated scales were found to support all but Watson and Tellegen’s structural model originating from English. Results cross-validated well in a second sample (N = 402). Affect dimensions were interrelated as found with English-speaking Canadians and they could be integrated into a two-dimensional bipolar space.

This article shows that fundamental aspects of the structure of momentary affect are similar in Japanese and Canadian societies. We developed questionnaire scales in Japanese in four different formats for assessing self-reported momentary affect. Scales can be scored for dimensions defined by Feldman Barrett and Russell (1998), Thayer (1996), Larsen and Diener (1992), and Watson and Tellegen (1985). We administered these newly developed affect scales and NEO five-factor inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992) to a sample of 450 Japanese respondents. The affect scales were found to be psychometrically sound and to be interrelated, as found with English-speaking Canadians. Dimensions could be integrated into a two-dimensional affective space. Personality correlated with momentary affect, though not in the same pattern as found in Canada.

Reviews of the self-report literature suggest that shyness is more prevalent among East Asians than among those of European heritage. We evaluated the generalizability of that claim with four studies comparing students of Asian heritage (AH) and European heritage (EH). Study 1 ( N =897) confirmed a substantially higher rate of self-reported shyness among AH students (68%) than among EH students (44%). In Study 2 ( N =309), the ethnic difference in self-reported shyness was substantially higher for classroom than for social situations. In Study 3 ( N =213), the ethnic difference was strong for cross-ethnicity socializing but nil for same-ethnicity socializing. In Study 4 ( N =250), a behavioral index—classroom participation—was recorded and coded. The observed ethnic difference in participation rate showed a medium effect size comparable to the self-report difference. There was no ethnic difference, however, in the mean complexity and challengingness of the classroom participations or in final course grades. We conclude that the ethnic difference is maximal for classroom participation because the latter situation combines several key contributing factors to Asian shyness.

Current affect has been described with various dimensions and structures, including J. A. Russell's (1980) circumplex, D. Watson and A. Tellegen's (1985) positive and negative affect, R. E. Thayer's (1989) tense and energetic arousal, and R. J. Larsen and E. Diener's (1992) 8 combinations of pleasantness and activation. These 4 structures each presuppose bipolar dimensions and have been thought of as interchangeable or 45° rotations of one another, but past data were inconsistent. Huge but not perfect overlap among these four structures was found here in 2 studies of self-reported current affect (Ate = 198 and 217) that controlled for random and systematic errors of measurement. The 4 structures were integrated into a common space defined by 2 bipolar dimensions. Current affect has been described with various dimensions and structures, including Russell's (1980) circumplex, Watson and Tellegen's (1985) positive and negative affect, Thayer's (1989) tense and energetic arousal, and Larsen and Diener's (1992) eight combinations of pleasantness and activation. In this article, we argue that it is possible to integrate these various concepts in a simple scheme, thereby taking a large step towards unifying dimensional approaches to affect as a person experiences and reports it. There have been three major approaches to the broad, general dimensions of reported affect. One approach has focused on activation (also known as arousal, energy, tension, and activity). Sleep, drowsiness, alertness, activation, hyperactivation, and, finally, frenzied excitement describe increasing degrees of activation. Activation was prominent in psychological writing throughout most of this century (Berlyne, 1960; Cannon, 1927; Duffy, 1957; Hebb, 1955; Lindsley, 1951; Mandler, 1984; Schachter & Singer, 1962; Zillmann, 1983). Thayer (1989, 1996) has spearheaded a research program on the causes and consequences of everyday affect, conceptualized in terms of types and degrees of activation, demonstrating that self-reported activation is related to everything from diet to personality to neurochemistr y.

From his Behavioural Ecology perspective, Fridlund (1994) theorised that facial expressions evolved to convey social intents and contingencies, yet offered no evidence that observers interpret faces in this way. Canadian, Chinese, and Japanese respondents were shown standard '“facial expressions of emotion'” and asked to select one of Fridlund's predicted social messages. For comparison, an independent group of respondents selected among the emotion messages predicted by Ekman and Friesen (1976). N o significant difference in the amount of agreement was found between social and emotion conditions, both across three cultures and within each culture. Faces convey social messages with about as much consensus as they convey emotional ones.

English-speaking Canadian, Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese, and Japanese speaking Japanese adults were shown 13 still photographs of the facial expressions of Chinese babies subjected to various emotion-elicitation procedures. Some respondents were asked to give an emotion label of their choice for each photograph, others to judge its pleasant-unpleasant quality. Only facial expressions taken during the “happy”; condition showed agreement by a majority across all three cultural samples on a specific basic emotion. Agreement on the pleasant-unpleasant quality of the baby's expressions was higher, but still varied with culture.

Correlations between single-item self-reports of intelligence and IQ scores are rather low (.20–.25) in college samples. The literature suggested that self-reports could be improved by three strategies: (1) aggregation, (2) item weighting, and (3) use of indirect, rather than direct, questions. To evaluate these strategies, we compared the validity of aggregated and unaggregated versions of direct measures with four indirect measures (Gough’s Intellectual efficiency scale, Hogan’s Intellect composite scale, Sternberg’s Behavior Check List, and Trapnell’s Smart scale). All measures were administered to two large samples of undergraduates (Ns = 310, 326), who also took an IQ test. Although results showed some success for both direct and indirect measures, the failure of their validities to exceed .30 impugns their utility as IQ proxies in competitive college samples. The content of the most valid items referred to global mental abilities or reading involvement. Aggregation benefited indirect more than direct measures, but prototype-weighting contributed little. Journal of Personality 66:4, August 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. This research was supported by a grant to the senior author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We wish to thank Harrison Gough, Robert Hogan, Robert Sternberg, Paul Trapnell, and several anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft. Correspondence should be addressed to Del Paulhus, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, V6T 1Z4. Electronic mail may be sent via the Internet to dpaulhus@cortex.psych.ubc.ca Can people validly rate their own intelligence? Skeptics argue that such self-reports are hopelessly contaminated with a variety of distortions including self-deception, impression management, and reconstrual. Such defensive reactions may explain the low variance in self-ratings of intelligence: Rarely do people rate themselves as “below average” (McCrae, 1990). Even the most forthright and insightful individuals, skeptics warn, can never confirm the veracity of their self-assessments because the concept itself is so elusive in nature. Despite its elusiveness, the concept of intelligence plays a central role in psychological research, particularly in such contexts as educational evaluation, personnel selection, and child development. To facilitate such research, considerable effort has been devoted to developing self-report alternatives to cumbersome IQ tests of intelligence. Such approaches have progressed well beyond a simple request to “rate how intelligent you are.” Three strategies, in particular, have been recommended. One is the use of indirect assessment to bypass the inevitable defensiveness of a direct request for a self-rating. A second, the aggregation strategy, favors multiple-item over single-item measures. A third strategy, prototype weighting, takes into account the differential importance of items within a measure. In this report we evaluate these three strategies by determining their ability to improve prediction of performance on IQ tests. Use of IQ tests as the criterion for intelligence ratings has not yielded high validities, particularly in college samples. The validities are somewhat higher for observer-ratings than for self-ratings. Values in the range of .25 to .50 have been found when the judgment is made by spouses (Bailey & Mettetal, 1977), by friends and strangers (Borkenau, 1993), by adolescent acquaintances (Bailey & Hatch, 1979), and by long-term discussion-group colleagues (Paulhus & Morgan, 1997). Except in the case of spouses, however, the achievement of these solid validities required aggregation across multiple observers. Self-perceptions typically parallel other-perceptions but, to the extent that the trait being evaluated is highly evaluative (e.g., intelligence), the former are noticeably less valid (John & Robins, 1993). Studies using IQ test scores as the criterion have yielded single-item validities of .32 (Borkenau & Liebler, 1993) and .38 (Reynolds & Gifford, 1996) in 1. The term “validity” is used to mean correlation with a specific criterion. Its use does not imply that IQ is the sole criterion for measuring intelligence. 526 Paulhus et al.

Many studies investigated cultural differences in values, most notably by Hofstede and Schwarz. Relatively few have focused on virtues, a related and important concept in contemporary social science. The present paper examines the similarities and differences between nations, or blocks of - culturally related - nations on the perceived importance of virtues. Adults (N = 2.809 students) from 14 countries were asked to freely mention which virtues they found important to practice in daily life, and next to rate a list of 15 virtues, which reflect the most frequently mentioned categories in The Netherlands, as found in a previous study. The 14 nations included the United States, Mexico, nine European and three Asian nations. For the free-listed virtues, we compared the top-ten lists of most frequently mentioned virtues across the nations. We used a correspondence analysis on the frequency table to assess the relationships between the virtues and nations. For the 15 virtues ratings, a MANOVA, and follow-up ANOVA’s were used to examine effects of nation, age, gender and religion. We found strong evidence for relationships between nations and blocks of culturally related nations and the importance attached to various virtues. There appear to be some country specific virtues, such as generosity in France, but also some relatively universal virtues, most notably honesty, respect, and kindness. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2193-1801-3-223) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The common within-subjects design of studies on the recognition of emotion from facial expressions allows the judgement of one face to be influenced by previous faces, thus introducing the potential for artefacts. The present study (N� 344) showed that the canonical ‘‘disgust face’’ was judged as disgusted, provided that the preceding set of faces included ‘‘anger expressions’’, but was judged as angry when the preceding set of faces excluded anger but instead included persons who looked sad or about to be sick. Chinese observers showed lower recognition of the ‘‘disgust face’’ than did American observers. Chinese observers also showed lower recognition of the ‘‘fear face’’ when responding in Chinese than in English.

This study aimed to delineate the definitions of sexual harassment and their relation with various subject characteristics. Results showed that Chinese students demonstrated a high level of consensus in regarding overt unwelcome physical contact and coercive sexuality as sexual harassment. Only a small percentage of the students classified sexist and misogynistic behaviors, pressure for dates, and unsolicited disclosure of personal and emotional feelings as sexually harassing. Factor analyses indicated that faculty-student sexual harassment was composed of three factors: sexual coercion, physical seduction, and gender harassment. Peer sexual harassment, on the other hand, included four factors: sexual coercion, physical seduction, nonphysical seduction, and gender harassment. Individuals' intolerance toward sexual harassment was related to their support for gender equality and flexible gender roles. Compared to men, women had broader definitions of sexual harassment and were less tolerant of these behaviors.

We examined properties of culture-level personality traits in ratings of targets (N = 5,109) aged 12 to 17 in 24 cultures. Aggregate scores were generalizable across gender, age, and relationship groups and showed convergence with culture-level scores from previous studies of self-reports and observer ratings of adults, but they were unrelated to national character stereotypes. Trait profiles also showed cross-study agreement within most cultures, eight of which had not previously been studied. Multidimensional scaling showed that Western and non-Western cultures clustered along a dimension related to Extraversion. A culture-level factor analysis replicated earlier findings of a broad Extraversion factor, but generally resembled the factor structure found in individuals. Continued analysis of aggregate personality scores is warranted.

The present study examined the relationship between coping styles and psychological distress in a nonclinical sample of 832 Hong Kong Chinese adolescents. Measures included the General Health Questionnaire and an Adolescent Coping Scale adapted from both Western and Eastern sources. Results from factor analyses suggested that adolescents used relatively similar coping strategies when confronted with problems. Thus four broad coping styles were identified. The coping style of avoidancelblaming was consistently found to be a significant and moderately strong predictor of psychological distress in four different problem areas relating to academic difficulties, conflicts with elders, conflicts with friends, andfuture concerns. A lthough males and females used similar coping styles when confronted with difficulties, they differed in the frequency with which they might use a particular coping style when dealing with a particular problem. Limitations of the study and implications for future research in adolescent coping are also discussed

Past research on Chinese emotion has been plagued by the lack of a measurement map for affective feelings. In this article, I developed a fine-grained circumplex model of affective feelings that is arbitrarily defined by 12 segments. I created twelve 4-item self-report scales to measure affect felt during a clearly remembered moment (N = 395), and I cross-validated them twice with affect felt during the current moment (Ns = 269, 302). The structural and psychometric properties of these scales were strongly supported. The CIRCUM-extension procedure (M. Browne, personal communication, June 12, 1999) that places external correlates into the affective space showed that 28 of 28 mood states and 6 of 13 traits were significantly related to affect. External correlates did not clarify which of the affect dimensions were basic. The newly developed scales will serve as a useful tool in assessing affect among Chinese people and as a platform on which to extend the nomological net of affect.

Despite the importance of understanding the emotional aspects of organizational decision making, prior research has paid scant attention to the role of emotion in escalation of commitment. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the relationship between negative affect and escalation of commitment. Results showed that regardless of whether negative affect was measured as a dispositional trait (Neuroticism) in Studies 1 and 2 or as a transient mood state in Study 3, it was negatively correlated with escalation tendency when one was personally responsible for a prior decision. This pattern of results is consistent with the predictions derived from the coping perspective, suggesting that people seek to escape from the unpleasant emotions that are associated with escalation situations.