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Since the introduction of commercial video games in the 1970s, video game players have attracted the perhaps undeserving but negative stereotype of being unpopular and socially dysfunctional. However, with gamers increasing in numbers that now reach billions worldwide, the contents of gamer stereotypes may be in flux. The current study investigated the content of gamer stereotypes along the dimensions of physical/social attractiveness, warmth, competence, and morality as a function of genre violence level and gamer identity. Male and female participants (656 U.S. and 428 Indian) completed an online survey on the MTurk platform, rating social stereotypes of gamers in high‐violence and low‐violence genres on 22 adjective pairs and answering questions about gamer identity. Results revealed positive gamer stereotypes, especially in the low‐violence genres in both the United States and India. Low‐identifiers' stereotypes were less favourable in the high‐violence than in the low‐violence genres; this tendency diminished among high‐identifiers. This study suggests that, whereas once gamers were seen negatively, they are now seen remarkably positively. The implications of such positive views of those engaging in violent gaming are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societal threats that face the world today seem overpowering, especially for young generations who will need to develop creative solutions. The present study examined the relationships between societal threats and social motives. Social motives function to orient individuals toward the social world and prepare them to engage socially. This adaptive function of social motives may be particularly useful when threats are looming in the environment. We thus expected that perceived societal threats would correlate positively with activation of social motives, especially among individuals with lower self‐esteem, who tend to show higher interdependency when threatened. Our cross‐cultural samples from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, the Philippines, China (Macao), Malaysia (Sabah), and Austria (N = 1,269) showed evidence to support these expectations. Perceived societal threats correlated positively with all social motives (Belong, Understand, Control, Esteem, and Trust); however, the link was most vital for the Control motive, and especially in the United States and China. In line with our expectations, higher perceived societal threats were associated with more robust social motives, especially among those with low self‐esteem. Potential mechanisms through which social motives assist adaptation to societal threats and country‐specific contents of threats are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new scale to measure core social motives was developed based on the BUC(K)ET framework (Belong, Understand, Control, Esteem, and Trust). The scale was completed by 1,516 university students from seven countries: Australia, the United States, New Zealand, the Philippines, Malaysia, China (Macao), and Austria. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis supported the scale's full scalar invariance between Australia and the United States and between Australia and Austria. Partial scalar invariance was established for all countries after omitting the Understand motive, suggesting that the remaining four subscales can be used to compare levels of social motives across diverse cultural groups with caution. We further established the scale's construct validity by examining its correlations in the nomological networks involving several individual difference variables. The profile of social motives was remarkably similar across countries and gender groups, although three Asian groups showed higher motives to belong than non‐Asian groups, and women showed generally stronger core social motives than men, especially the Belong motive. Implications and possible directions of research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationships between cultural dimensions and the language use involving pronoun drop (whether the subject of a sentence can be dropped when it is a personal pronoun) and the number of second-person singular pronouns (2PS) available in a language (one or multiple) reported by Kashima and Kashima were reexamined by using a new, correct coding for Hindi and Urdu. The reanalysis reconfirmed the major part of our previous results but indicated the need to revise the previous report that the availability of multiple 2PS pronouns was associated with higher Integration. namely, harmonious interpersonal relationships. The new analysis showed that availability of multiple 2PS and Integration were independent of each other. Keywords: cultural dimensions; language and culture; language use; individualism; personal pronouns

In this article, the authors report an investigation of the relationship between terror management and social identity processes by testing for the effects of social identity salience on worldview validation. Two studies, with distinct populations, were conducted to test the hypothesis that mortality salience would lead to worldview validation of values related to a salient social identity. In Study 1, reasonable support for this hypothesis was found with bicultural Aboriginal Australian participants (N = 97). It was found that thoughts of death led participants to validate ingroup and reject outgroup values depending on the social identity that had been made salient. In Study 2, when their student and Australian identities were primed, respectively, Anglo-Australian students (N = 119) validated values related to those identities, exclusively. The implications of the findings for identity-based worldview validation are discussed. Keywords: terror management; mortality salience; social identity; self-categorization; Indigenous Australians; Australian culture

Although differences in self-conception across cultures have been well researched, regional differences within a culture have escaped attention. The present study examined individual, relational, and collective selves, which capture people's conceptions of themselves in relation to their goals, significant others, and ingroups, comparing Australians and Japanese participants living in regional cities and metropolitan areas. Culture, gender, and urbanism were found to be related to individual, relational, and collective selves, respectively. Australians emphasized individual self more than Japanese, women stressed relational self more than men, and residents in regional cities regarded collective self as more important than their counterparts in metropolitan areas. These findings provide support for the tripartite division of the self and suggest a need to construct a culture theory that links self and societal processes. Keywords: culture; self; urbanism; globalization

Affluence and climate are related to individualism, suggesting the importance of the material environment on culture. However, the symbolic environment, as represented by language, may also play a significant role. The effects of gross national product (GNP) per capita, latitude, and pronoun drop (whether the subject of a sentence can be dropped) as variables that tap the material and symbolic environments on Hofstede's individualism were examined. GNP per capita and latitude had overall positive effects on individualism, but this was moderated by pronoun drop. The effect of economic affluence on culture was greater, but the effect of climate smaller, in the countries whose language does not permit pronoun drop than in those countries where pronouns can be dropped in utterances. A moderating effect of symbolic factors on the material environnment-culture relationship was discussed.

The relationship between culture and language was examined across 39 languages spoken in 71 cultures. Correlations were computed across languages and cultures between the use of first- and second-person singular pronouns (e.g., 'I' and 'you') and global cultural dimensions such as Individualism, which were previously extracted in large-scale cross-cultural surveys. The personal pronouns were analyzed in terms of the number of first- and second-person singular pronouns and whether the pronouns can be dropped when used as the subject of a sentence in speech. Cultures with pronoun drop languages tended to be less Individualistic than those with nonpronoun drop languages. The number of personal pronouns correlated with some cultural dimensions that reflected different conceptions of the person. Personal deixis (person-indexing pronouns) may provide a window through which cultural practices can be investigated., The relationship between language and culture has been a major issue of concern for psychology and anthropology since Sapir (1970) and Whorf (1956) advanced their hypothesis that language determines, or [...]

A study on the perceptions of general variability of social groups presents a model of perceived general variability, alternatively called the dual predictor model. According to this model, perceived group variability is a function of similarity and difference of the members of the group. Results from an experiment seeking to validate the model indicates that the greater the perceived difference among group members, the greater their variability.

Reports a study that examined the influence of authoritarianism on the formation of behavioral intentions by female college students. High authoritarians took subjective norms less into account relative to low authoritarians, providing support for the theory that personal and subjective norms can be distinguished empirically. (LS)