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In most societies the ability to write has become a significant criterion in judging one's "success or "failure" in becoming literate. This paper focuses on the classroom literacy practice called "writing," inasmuch as learning to write in a specific kind of way is part and parcel of children's literacy learning expectations. It is based on a study which examined cohesion patterns found in expository writing samples of sixth grade urban African American, urban Appalachian, and mainstream culture children attending a middle school in a large midwestern urban school system in the United States. This paper challenges the prevailing notion that ethnicity, social class and language variation influence the quality of writing these children produce.

This article examines how gender ideologies linked to global processes such as migration and the spread of youth popular culture pose certain challenges for teenage girls who live in patriarchal social contexts. Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic data at a multiethnic middle school in Cyprus, the article focuses on the ways in which language practices mediate this experience and the possibilities that language envelops in the process of gender identity formation in globalizing times. At the intersection of contradictory ideologies ranging from the school’s religious gender discourse, which promotes modesty and chastity, to the predominant media discourse of femininity, which highlights female sexuality, girls’ gender identity claims become fraught with moral implications. In the local peer culture, girls are placed on a fabricated and culturally widespread “virgin-whore” continuum along which different cultural groups – which are often equated with ethnic groups – are evaluated. Paradoxically, girls who embrace sexual freedom (either in practice or rhetorically) may in fact exercise agency and become empowered precisely because of early adolescents’ fascination with sexuality. These girls draw largely on the dominant discourse of femininity abundantly marketed by global media and the pop culture. They thus manage to explore alternative ideas about agency and gender in a locally rebellious manner that defies the traditionalist female roles that school and church promote.

The Amur River basin is widely known as one of the regions where the earliest pottery first appeared, however few are aware that it happened simultaneously in two separate areas associated with two different archaeological complexes -the Gromatukha and Osipovka. This duality is confirmed here through three lines of inquiry. The first section reviews the most recent general data on both complexes including radiocarbon ages and stone tool assemblages, the second gives detailed descriptions and analysis of both cultures’ pottery including composition, forming, and decorating techniques, and the third provides data on their changes over time. The primary distinctions between the two complexes are stressed including the distribution area, pottery and stone tool production, chronological discrepancies, complex origins, and affiliations. Based on these observations we conclude that the Osipovka and Gromatuka pottery are likely produced by different cultural groups in distinct regions, with little cultural interactions. These observations provide a more complex view of the invention and development of pottery within a smaller regional setting, facilitating future comparisons of the general context of pottery invention and opening new pathways for the reconstruction of human behavioral reactions to cultural, climatic, and environmental challenges in the past.

Despite growing attention towards the efficacy of culturally adapted cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) programs for children and adolescents, there is still little empirical and practical information available to therapists who adapt original treatment protocols to suit clients of a specific culture. The current study aimed to compare therapeutic interactions across CBT treatment delivered with two different cultural groups. We developed an observational coding system to examine behaviors exhibited by child, parent, and therapist during CBT sessions conducted in Australia and Japan for children with anxiety disorders. Our results demonstrated significant differences between the two countries with respect to the treatment readiness of children, the proportion of talking during the sessions by parents and children, therapists’ laughter, length of silence during the first session, and parent indices of accommodation. In terms of transitions over time (i.e., first to last CBT session), parents in both countries tended to talk more during the last CBT session, whereas only Australian therapists talked less over time. The proportion of silence decreased over time during the Japanese sessions, and the amount of interruptions by parents increased over time for Australian sessions. Finally, our exploratory analyses demonstrated that a number of behavioral observations were correlated with anxiety treatment outcome at post-treatment. This study suggests that interactions between a child, parent, and therapist during CBT sessions may be affected by the culture in which the CBT session occurs, which could have implications for culturally adapted CBT programs.

Studies of religious and other cultural groups tend to be particularistic or focus on one or more axes of variation. In this article we develop a more comprehensive approach to studying cultural diversity that emulates the study of biological diversity. We compare our cultural ecosystem approach with the axis approach, using the distinction between “tight” and “loose” cultures as an example. We show that while the axis approach is useful, the cultural ecosystem approach adds considerable value to the axis approach. We end by advocating the establishment of field sites for the study of religious and cultural diversity, comparable to biological field sites.

本研究では、集団における協力場面 (社会的ジレンマ状況) において、多数派同調バイアスが観察されるかどうかを検討する。多数派同調バイアスとは、集団内の多数派 (e.g., 60%) が採用する行動を、それを超える確率 (e.g., 80%) で模倣する傾向のことである。Natsumeda et al. (in press) は、社会的ジレンマ状況において、多数派同調バイアスが観察されないとの結果を示した。しかし、この研究では日常的な場面を描いたシナリオが用いられたため、多数の交絡要因の統制が十分でないという限界点があった。そこで、本研究では、実験室実験を描いたシナリオを用いて、結果の頑健性を検証する。

The origin of human cooperation poses an evolutionary puzzle. In order for cooperation to evolve, our Pleistocene ancestors must have overcome the free rider problem, in which noncooperators reap the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs. Cultural group selection accounts offer a potential solution to this problem. In this article, I evaluate Boyd and Richerson’s influential account. I argue that it cannot explain the evolutionary origins of human cooperation because it presupposes cooperative behaviors among our Pleistocene ancestors. Although Boyd and Richerson’s account may explain the expansion of cooperation in hominin evolution, it cannot explain how cooperative behaviors first emerged.

Experiential marketing has emerged as an effective strategy to promote hedonic tourism and hospitality experiences through stimulating tourist imagination and positive emotions. This study aims to broaden the existing literature by exploring potential imagination facilitator and/or inhibitor in the context of a local tourism event, “The White Party” on the Gold Coast, with a sample of 655 participants. Structural equation model (SEM) using SmartPLS software and cluster analysis using SPSS were conducted to test research hypothesis and identify three audience groups (event dreamers, indecisive audience, and uninterested audience). Research outcomes demonstrate that video is more effective than poster in evoking tourist imagination and positive emotions, leading to stronger intentions to attend the promoted event. More importantly, prior knowledge is found as an imagination facilitator while psychological distance plays the role of an imagination inhibitor. This study provide valuable insights into how the effectiveness of experiential marketing varies depending on the audience characteristics. Therefore, event managers can optimize the effectiveness of experiential marketing by (1) targeting more receptive audience groups (i.e., event dreamers and indecisive audience); (2) adding more “psychologically close” details of the promoted event (e.g., similar age or cultural groups) and (3) enhancing message repetition.

Background The ability to effectively regulate one's emotions has been established as an important transdiagnostic mechanism in the development and maintenance of psychopathology. To date, much of the research on emotion regulation (ER) has been conducted in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) samples. Specifically, there is a dearth of cross-cultural construct equivalence studies on measures of ER. Establishing measurement equivalence is an important first step to facilitate future research on ER in culturally diverse samples. Methods The present study sought to validate the latent structures of three commonly used ER measures: the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS-10), and Acceptance subscale of the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ-AS). Measurement equivalence was examined across 123 American and 121 Indian participants (Mage = 36.60) and across gender. Results Cross-cultural confirmatory factor analyses revealed configural equivalence (i.e., same factor structures) in both cultural groups across all three measures. The RRS-10 met weak invariance across cultures; however, factor loadings were not equal across the two samples for all items on the ERQ or FFMQ-AS. Consequently, a partial invariance solution was identified, and all measures subsequently met criteria for Level 2 strict cross-cultural invariance. Across gender, full invariance was found on all measures except the FFMQ-AS. Conclusion Findings suggest that the structure of ER processes is largely invariant across these two cultural groups, with a few notable exceptions, pointing to the importance of continued work in this area.

Social and cultural groups are characterised by shared systems of social objects and issues that constitute their objective reality and their members' identity. It is argued that interpersonal interactions within such groups require a system of comprehensive representations to enable concerted interaction between individuals. Comprehensive representations include bits and pieces of the interactant's representational constitution and potential values and behaviours to reduce possible friction in interactions. On a larger scale, the same is true in encounters, communication, and interaction between members of different cultural groups where interactants need to dispose of a rough knowledge of the other culture's relevant characteristics. This mutual knowledge is called meta-representations that complement the actors' own values and ways of thinking. This concept complements Social Representation Theory when applied to cross-cultural and inter-ethnic interactions.

Extensive research, in Western countries, links parental mood and parenting styles with child outcomes including emotional and behavioural adjustment. However, the effects of cultural differences, particularly between Australia and Indonesia on such linkages have not been adequately addressed in the existing literature. This cross-cultural study aims to examine the relationship between perceived parental mood, parenting styles, and child emotional and behavioural adjustment among both Australian and Indonesian parents. Using an online survey, a total of 436 parents (125 Australian and 311 Indonesian parents) with at least one typically developing child between the age of 3 and 9 years participated in this descriptive, exploratory study. Results indicated that in comparison to Australian parents, Indonesian participants reported greater anxiety symptoms, lower levels of depression, and more use of an authoritarian style in parenting. Similar patterns in the associations of observed variables were found between different cultural groups. High levels of parental stress and less use of authoritative parenting were revealed to be predictors of child emotional and behavioural problems while the authoritative parenting style was the predictor for child competencies within both cultures. This study provides evidence for the inconsistency between cultural preference in parenting style and the predicted factors for child outcomes.

Objective Explore the nature and dimensions of restrictive feeding with mothers of 6-year-olds. Design Semistructured interviews with mothers. Conversations were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Setting Brisbane and Adelaide, Australia. Participants Twenty-nine mothers of 6-year-olds. Phenomenon of Interest Mothers’ restrictive feeding practices. Analysis Qualitative thematic analysis. Results This study revealed 6 key themes relating to the restrictive feeding phenomenon: restriction of specific foods and drinks; restrictive feeding practices; mothers’ motivation; mothers’ preferences for restricted foods; patterns over time; and relationships with other controlling feeding practices. Parents’ restrictive feeding practices are likely to be inherently inconsistent, with mothers reportedly varying their practices across different restricted foods, contexts, day to day, and as children age. Mothers intended to either totally restrict or restrict a food/drink in moderation, and these intentions presented qualitatively distinct characteristics across themes. Mothers commonly referred to foods/drinks restricted in moderation as treats, and their liking for these restricted foods/drinks was related to higher child access. Conclusions and Implications This study provides insights into the nature and dimensions of restrictive feeding. Further research is proposed to clarify these findings and examine the effects of child access, types of restrictive feeding practices, and parent communication on child preferences for restricted foods and drinks across a range of cultural groups.

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been significant variations in the level of adoption of public health recommendations across international jurisdictions and between cultural groups. Such variations have contributed to the dissimilar levels of risks associated with this world-changing viral infection and have highlighted the potential role of culture in assigning meaning and importance to personal protective behaviours. The purpose of this study is to describe the cultural factors during the COVID-19 pandemic that shaped protective health behaviours in the Chinese-Canadian community, one of the largest Chinese diasporas outside of Asia. Methods A qualitative descriptive design was employed. Content analysis was used to analyze the data from semi-structured virtual interviews conducted with 83 adult Chinese-Canadian participants residing in a metropolitan area in the Province of Ontario, Canada. Findings The cultural factors of collectivism, information seeking behaviour, symbolism of masks, and previous experience with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged as themes driving the early adoption of personal protective behaviours within the Chinese-Canadian community during the first wave of COVID-19. These protective behaviours that emerged prior to the first nation-wide lockdown in Canada included physical distancing, mask use, and self-quarantine beyond what was required at the time. Conclusion These findings have implications for the development of future public health interventions and campaigns targeting personal protective behaviours in this population and other ethnic minority populations with similar characteristics.

Despite the fact that in most communities interaction occurs between the child and multiple speakers, most previous research on input to children focused on input from mothers. We annotated recordings of Sesotho-learning toddlers living in non-industrial Lesotho in South Africa, and French-learning toddlers living in urban regions in France. We examined who produced the input (mothers, other children, adults), how much input was child directed, and whether and how it varied across speakers. As expected, mothers contributed most of the input in the French recordings. However, in the Sesotho recordings, input from other children was more common than input from mothers or other adults. Child-directed speech from all speakers in both cultural groups showed similar qualitative modifications. Our findings suggest that input from other children is prevalent and has similar features as child-directed from adults described in previous work, inviting cross-cultural research into the effects of input from other children.

There is a chronic underrepresentation of Māori and Pacific academics in our university sector in Aotearoa New Zealand. Sitting behind the disparity are a range of practices that support some groups in Aotearoa New Zealand to succeed and move more freely through higher education institutions than others. In response to scholarship highlighting this issue, a collective of students and staff at Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington came together to organise an action-oriented workshop to draw attention to ways that universities are governed through power relations. Attention was also paid to mitigating power imbalances in the organisation, format, and delivery of the event, and between attendees, presenters, and event facilitators from dominant and non-dominant ethnic and cultural groups. This reflection piece is not so much a recounting of the event itself but rather an opportunity to share with the wider academic world ways in which the collective attempted to hold our university accountable for failing in their responsibilities to the people on whose ancestral lands they exist.

Technology is ubiquitous and culturally situated, influencing and impacting lives every second of every day. As humanity emerged, so did technological development. Diverse cultural groups developed technologies, related knowledge, and processes, to meet emerging needs or realise opportunities—such as trade. There is little doubt that some technological processes and knowledge travelled with people as they explored the world. Other technological development is likely to have evolved in parallel, in response to cultural needs and situations. Some technological knowledge and processes became unique to specific cultural groups, with others crossing boundaries. A boundary is defined here as something that indicates confines or limits. Boundaries are represented in diverse ways in this paper, such as in ethnic, cultural, and geographical bounds. As humans evolved from apes they became bipedal, thus freeing their hands for other tasks. This evolution, coupled with the emergence of the thumb, enabled significant manipulation of the environment and materials, leading in turn to the development of technological outcomes and processes. As humans became distributed around the world, so did their technological know-how. Survival across a range of geological locations and climates meant the modification of existing technologies and processes, and emergence of others. The authors use their professional experience as technology educators to situate their arguments, and apply food preservation processes to illustrate similarities across technologies, which resulted from geological, cultural, and time boundaries. In some cases, these responses were a result of food supply issues, during times of short supply in droughts, winter, busy times, or travel. The article identifies two key ideas pertinent to a developing understanding of the nature of technology as defined in the New Zealand Curriculum; that technology has always been transformative, that technological development is not linear, but at times occurs in parallel—across geographical and cultural boundaries.

In a period where racial inequities in the United States have garnered more attention and discussion as a result of social media (e.g., increased use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag; Anderson et al., 2020) and newer generations (Tatum, 2017b), it is important to ensure that communication between cultural groups is effective and produces systemic change. This paper will review the failures of a “post-racial” society, with emphasis on ineffective communication between Black, Indigenous People of Color and non-Black, Indigenous People of Color. The role of the listener during intercultural verbal exchanges will be examined, while highlighting the barriers and harmful results of ineffective communication. A behavioral conceptualization of effective listener behavior will be presented, which if implemented, may maintain and sustain social equity, inclusion, and justice. A call to action will be made to further investigate intercultural communication using behavior-analytic research methodologies and how such research might inform on how to functionally and precisely mediate reinforcement in the fight against racism.

The study of plant-insect interactions and how cultural groups perceive and manage them constitutes one of the interests of ethnoentomology. This work describes the association between host plants and longhorn beetles (Order: Coleoptera; Family: Cerambycidae), an important food among the Guaraní peoples of the province of Misiones, Argentina. Different management methods of host tree species are analyzed in order to promote the rearing of larvae for edible use. We also discuss a story about the mythical origin of cerambicids relayed by the Ava Chiripa Guaraní community. We reflect on the importance of the local worldview in the maintenance of ancestral practices, such as the cultural tasks involved in slash-and-burn agriculture and the intimate knowledge of biological relationships between the cerambycids and their woody host plants.

The ways caregivers perceive and respond to challenging behavior (CB) could depend, in part, on their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Yet, limited research is available on the definitions, perceptions, and response strategies of CB across cultural groups, particularly among caregivers of young children with disabilities. In this exploratory multimethod study, data were collected from four diverse caregiver groups (i.e., Black, Korean American, Mexican American, and White) with young children with disabilities to understand (a) what behaviors they considered challenging and (b) how they responded to those behaviors. Data revealed similarities and differences in the types of behaviors reported and indicated caregivers rely on preplanned consequence strategies and unplanned responses.

This paper investigates how ethnic diversity influenced capital formation in West African countries using a cross-country dataset ranging from 1991 to 2017. Using the fully modified ordinary least square method, the results showed that one of the important factors responsible for capital formation in the region is ethnic diversity. Other factors found influencing capital formation in the region were interest rate, foreign direct investment, inflation rate and financial development. Thus, the government should ensure that the countries' resources are not controlled and beneficial to the people with the same cultural groups as it accounted for the poor state of the region's investment base.

The present research adopted both an individual and a sociocultural approach to expand previous knowledge of the mechanisms underlying reported variance in life satisfaction. Given the gratitude-oriented lifestyle and daily rituals of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, gratitude may serve as a central vehicle to its members’ high reported levels of life satisfaction. Thus, Study 1 explored the mediating role of gratitude through a cross-cultural comparison between ultra-Orthodox and secular samples. Study 2 explored the moderating effect of optimism on the relationship between the sociocultural group and gratitude, which, in turn, affects life satisfaction. Based on two matched samples of ultra-Orthodox and secular individuals, the findings indicate that the relationship between cultural group and life satisfaction was fully mediated by gratitude. Moreover, optimism was found to moderate the relationship between cultural group and gratitude so that the difference in gratitude levels between the two cultural groups was higher for individuals with low levels of optimism. The findings hold significant conceptual and practical implications for a better understanding of life satisfaction and its contributors.

The introduction of new animals into hunter-gatherer societies produces a variety of cultural responses. This article explores the role of rock art in western Arnhem Land, Australia, in helping to mediate contact-period changes in Indigenous society in the nineteenth century. The authors explore etic and emic perspectives on the ‘re-emergence’ of water buffalo into Aboriginal cultural life. Merging archaeological analysis, rock art and ethnographic accounts, the article demonstrates how such artworks were used as a tool for maintaining order in times of dramatic social change. The results of this research have significant implications for understanding how cultural groups and individuals worldwide used rock art during periods of upheaval.

Scales measuring cultural beliefs and values within African cultural contexts are rare. However, it is important to consider these beliefs to understand organizational behaviors in the actual context of the internationalization of work. This article presents a scale grasping cultural beliefs and values in Cameroon. Two questionnaire-based cross-sectional surveys were conducted on 525 participants (study 1) and 444 participants (study 2), all belonging to various cultural groups in Cameroon. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of data revealed three dimensions of cultural beliefs and values in Cameroon: beliefs and values associated with the protection and celebration of life, beliefs and values related to the identification with and belonging to a cultural group, and beliefs and values associated with manifestations of joy. The overall scale and its three dimensions had good psychometric properties in both studies. The importance of taking into account the cultural beliefs and values in intercultural studies is discussed.

Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality (ETI) have been responsible for the major transitions in levels of selection and individuality in natural history, such as the origins of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms, and eusocial insects. The integrated hierarchical organization of life thereby emerged as groups of individuals repeatedly evolved into new and more complex kinds of individuals. The Social Protocell Hypothesis (SPH) proposes that the integrated hierarchical organization of human culture can also be understood as the outcome of an ETI—one that produced a “cultural organism” (a “sociont”) from a substrate of socially learned traditions that were contained in growing and dividing social communities. The SPH predicts that a threshold degree of evolutionary individuality would have been achieved by 2.0–2.5 Mya, followed by an increasing degree of evolutionary individuality as the ETI unfolded. We here assess the SPH by applying a battery of criteria—developed to assess evolutionary individuality in biological units—to cultural units across the evolutionary history of Homo. We find an increasing agreement with these criteria, which buttresses the claim that an ETI occurred in the cultural realm.

German and South Korean cultural groups are examined in two studies to demonstrate the link between media communication about sustainability and its impact on eWOM and purchase intentions in luxury and non-luxury contexts. A mediation brand attitude model is used to compare groups across cultural, economic, environmental, and social sustainability dimensions, with trust as a moderator. Results indicate that sustainable communication is more effective for non-luxury brands in a cultural setting that features high awareness of needs for sustainability. The study indicates that luxury and non-luxury fashion brand advertisers should carefully consider cultural settings when providing sustainability information. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.