Ayse K. Uskul

University of Sussex · School of Psychology

This indispensable collection provides extensive, yet accessible, coverage of conceptual and practical issues in research design in personality and social psychology. Using numerous examples and clear guidelines, especially for conducting complex statistical analysis, leading experts address specific methods and areas of research to capture a defin...

Emotion Recognition Accuracy (ERA) is vital for social functioning and social relationships, yet empirical support for a positive link with well-being has been sparse. In three studies, we show that the Assessment of Contextualized Emotions (ACE) which distinguishes between accurately perceiving intended emotions and bias due to perceiving addition...

Emotion Recognition Accuracy (ERA) is vital for social functioning and social relationships, yet empirical support for a positive link with well-being has been sparse. In three studies, we show that the Assessment of Contextualized Emotions (ACE) which distinguishes between accurately perceiving intended emotions and bias due to perceiving addition...

2440 participants in 12 cultures reported on chronic/state adult attachment, self-construal, and self-other interests. Participants’ anxious and avoidant attachment were meaningfully associated with independent and interdependent self-construal and self vs. other interests. Country-level anxious and avoidant attachment moderated individual-level re...

Sextortion is a scantly investigated crime in which entrusted authority is abused to obtain sex in exchange for a service or benefit. Based on the literature on gender violence, in the present research, we examined the role of moral evaluations of the victims in predicting potential bystanders’ attitudes and behavioural intentions towards a woman w...

Mediterranean societies are often labelled as “honor cultures”, in contrast with presumed “dignity” and “face" cultures of Anglo-Western and East Asian societies. We measured these cultural logics in two large-scale surveys (Study 1&3: N = 2,942 students from 11 societies; Study 2: N = 5,471 adults from 14 societies). Middle Eastern and North Afric...

We examined differences and similarities between groups sampled from the Mediterranean region in social orientation, cognitive style, self-construal, and honor, face, dignity values and concerns using a large battery of tasks and measures. We did this by conducting secondary data set analyses focusing on comparisons between nine pairs of samples re...

How can psychology transform itself into an inclusive science that engages with the rich cultural diversity of humanity? How can we strive towards a broader and deeper understanding of human behavior that is both generalizable across populations and attentive to its diversity? To address these major questions of our field, relying on scholars from...

Cultural logic is a set of cultural scripts and patterns organized around a central theme. The cultural logics of dignity, honor, and face describe different ways of evaluating a person’s worth and maintaining cooperation. These cultural logics vary in prevalence across cultures. In this study, we collaboratively develop and validate a measure capt...

This research addresses the important issue of the connection between corruption and gender-based violence, an area that has gained increasing attention in recent years. It provides a new perspective by comparing the perception of victims of monetary corruption versus sexual corruption. Through an experimental study, we exposed participants to a fi...

Scholars have been working through multiple avenues to address longstanding and entrenched patterns of global and racial exclusion in psychology and academia more generally. As part of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s efforts to enhance inclusive excellence in its journals, the Anti Colorism/Eurocentrism in Methods and Practices...

Adopting a social psychological approach, across three studies ( N = 927) in two western immigrant‐receiving societies (UK and Canada), we examined the role of honour in acculturation variables (i.e., immigrants' heritage and mainstream cultural orientation and well‐being), controlling for some of the commonly studied predictors of immigrant adapta...

The sense of feeling at home by people ‘on the move’ was inquired through an adaptation of the homemaking approach. Two groups of people who make their living by working in agricultural sites (internally mobile seasonal agricultural workers and internationally displaced migrant workers) were reached out to examine associations between feeling at ho...

Greater “emotional fit” with one’s cultural group is often associated with positive psychological and relational outcomes. However, the few empirical studies on this link have been limited to the comparison of Anglo-Western, independent, and East Asian, interdependent cultural contexts. In the current paper, we conceptually replicated findings from...

Scholars have been working through multiple avenues to address longstanding and entrenched patterns of global and racial exclusion in psychology and academia more generally. As part of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s efforts to enhance inclusive excellence in its journals, the Anti Colorism/Eurocentrism in Methods and Practices...

How can psychology transform itself into an inclusive science that engages with the rich cultural diversity of humanity? How can we strive towards a broader and deeper understanding of human behavior that is both generalizable across populations and attentive to its diversity? To address these major questions of our field, relying on scholars from...

The COVID-19 pandemic heightened risk factors for suicide globally. Using prominent sociocultural theories of suicide, we investigated whether the COVID-19 pandemic affected suicide rates differently across demographic groups and regions in the United States of America. In Study 1, we found that after 2020 suicide rates increased especially among y...

Members of honor cultures value engaging in moral behaviors and managing their social image to maintain their honor. These two goals reflect reputation and integrity concerns, which also have bearing on gender roles. In the current study, we examined a) evaluations of women and men described as diagnosed with COVID-19 and as either hiding or disclo...

Social science research has highlighted “honor” as a central value driving social behavior in Mediterranean societies, which requires individuals to develop and protect a sense of their personal self-worth and their social reputation, through assertiveness, competitiveness, and retaliation in the face of threats. We predicted that members of Medite...

Past research has shown that economic inequality shapes individuals’ self-construals. However, it has been unclear which dimensions of self-construal are associated with and affected by economic inequality. A correlational (Study 1: N = 264) and an experimental study (Study 2: N = 532) provided converging evidence linking perceived economic inequal...

Transitional justice can help secure some level of justice for victims of human rights violations and reinforce the possibilities for peace, democracy, and reconciliation in societies that have experienced human rights abuses. Despite growing literature on the drives of transitional justice, little emphasis has been paid to the role of culture on s...

Transitional justice can help secure some level of justice for victims of human rights violations and reinforce the possibilities for peace, democracy, and reconciliation in societies that have experienced human rights abuses. Despite growing literature on the drives of transitional justice, little emphasis has been paid to the role of culture on s...

Introduction. People’s psychological tendencies are attuned to their socio-cultural context and culture-specific ways of being, feeling, and thinking are believed to assist individuals in successfully navigating their environment. Supporting this idea, stronger “fit” with one’s cultural environment has often been linked to positive psychological ou...

Introduction People's psychological tendencies are attuned to their sociocultural context and culture-specific ways of being, feeling, and thinking are believed to assist individuals in successfully navigating their environment. Supporting this idea, stronger “fit” with one's cultural environment has often been linked to positive psychological outc...

In this article, we review research in psychology and other related social science fields that has adopted an honor framework to examine intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup processes taking a culture‐comparative or individual differences approach. In the sections below, we will first review research on the role of honor in interpersonal pr...

In honor cultures, maintaining a positive moral reputation (e.g., being known as an honest person) is highly important, whereas in dignity cultures, self-respect (e.g., competence and success) is strongly emphasized. Depending on their cultural background, people respond differently to threats to these two dimensions of honor. In two studies, we ex...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic social changes for many people, including separation from friends and coworkers, enforced close contact with family, and reductions in mobility. Here we assess the extent to which people's evolutionarily-relevant basic motivations and goals—fundamental social motives such as Affiliation and Kin Care—might have b...

How does psychology vary across human societies? The fundamental social motives framework adopts an evolutionary approach to capture the broad range of human social goals within a taxonomy of ancestrally recurring threats and opportunities. These motives—self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and...

We are very pleased to introduce Volume 9 of the Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology. Over the last 10 years, we have featured programmatic research on culture and psychology to continue to globalize the field. This volume, like its predecessors, showcases contributions from internationally renowned culture scholars who span the discipli...

Why are people around the world willing to sacrifice for honor? This chapter addresses that question with a focus on the little-researched cultural context of Turkey. When compared to European Americans from northern US states, Turkish people have richer conceptions of the concept of honor, and they perceive that a greater variety of situations are...

The belief in a just world (BJW) is the belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. The theory and research findings suggest that believing the world is fair to “me” (personal BJW or PBJW) is associated with positive psychological functioning, whereas believing that the world is fair to people in general (general BJW or GBJW...

This study examined the factors that are likely to be associated with preferred behavioural and emotional responses to honour‐threatening situations and possible differences between a dignity culture (United Kingdom) and an honour culture (Turkey). We examined the role of cultural background, type of social setting, and participants’ causality orie...

To examine the role of deviant status (lower vs. higher rank) and organizational structure (vertical vs. horizontal) on individuals’ responses to workplace deviance. Design/methodology/approach: Two studies (N = 472) were designed to examine the role of deviant status and organizational structure in responses to workplace deviance. Study 1 (N = 272...

The worldwide spread of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since December 2019 has posed a severe threat to individuals’ well-being. While the world at large is waiting that the released vaccines immunize most citizens, public health experts suggest that, in the meantime, it is only through behavior change that the spread of COVID-19 can be controlled....

Anti-effeminacy bias follows a specific pattern with men showing stronger anti-effeminacy bias against male targets than women. Previous explanations focused on men’s higher tendency to stigmatize feminine men as homosexual and motives to maintain a dominant group status. Here, we suggest that certain expressions of anti-effeminacy bias may rather...

Since the seminal publication of Nisbett and Cohen in 1996 linking the higher rates of violence in the Southern United States compared with the Northern United States to a "culture of honor," researchers have paid increasing attention to conceptualizing honor and identifying its underlying psychological mechanisms and its behavioral outcomes. The c...

Anti-effeminacy bias follows a specific pattern with men showing stronger anti-effeminacy bias against male targets than women. Previous explanations focused on men’s higher tendency to perceive feminine men as homosexuals and motives to maintain a dominant group status. Here, we suggest that certain expressions of anti-effeminacy bias may rather b...

Since the seminal publication of Nisbett and Cohen in 1996 linking the higher rates of violence in the Southern U.S. compared to the Northern U.S. to a "culture of honor," researchers have paid increasing attention to conceptualizing honor and identifying its underlying psychological mechanisms and its behavioral outcomes. The concern for reputatio...

Honor means having a good reputation (e.g., being known as an honest person) and self-respect (e.g., being proud of one's own competence). In honor cultures (e.g., Turkey, Southern U.S.), people are more sensitive to threats to their moral reputation (e.g., being called a liar) than in dignity cultures (e.g., Northern U.S.), and they respond more s...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

Social psychological research on honor has been growing rapidly in the last decade and contributing to our understanding of cross-cultural differences in a variety of psychological processes. This growing interest in honor has stimulated research designed to examine the origins of honor cultures which is increasingly adopting creative methodologies...

Although politeness is an important concern in communications across cultures, a prevalent assumption in psychology is that East Asians are more inclined to be polite than members of other cultural groups due to prevalent cultural norms. Yet, evidence for this assumption is mixed. The present research examined this issue by considering the role of...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic partner choice (mate-seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

Despite the rising number of men and women in counter-stereotypical roles, it is rare for men to serve as primary caregivers in families with dependent children. In two studies, we examined how British men and women perceive and emotionally react to primary caregiver (vs. breadwinner) fathers, whether their perceptions and reactions are contingent...

In honour cultures, such as Turkey, reputation management is emphasised, whereas in dignity cultures such as northern US, self‐respect and personal achievements are central. Turkey is also a collectivistic culture, where relationship harmony is as important as reputation management. When Turkish people's reputation is threatened, they may experienc...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate-seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

A growing literature in social and cultural psychology has examined cultures of honour primarily focusing on southern states in the United States and on Mediterranean countries of southern Europe. In this article, we review a programme of research that has extended theories of cultures of honour to an under-researched context: Turkey. We first desc...

The goal of the present study was to examine dating preferences across three different out-group backgrounds (race/culture/ethnic, religious, socio-economic status) in three different cultural settings (the United Kingdom, the United States, India). A second goal was to explore the role of social psychological factors (social approval, social ident...

Individuals’ cultural tendencies of horizontal/vertical individualism and collectivism interact with their dispositional traits and contextual factors to shape social interactions. A key dispositional trait is social value orientation (SVO), a general tendency toward competition (proself) vs. cooperation (prosocial) in social exchanges. The present...

A growing literature in social and cultural psychology has examined cultures of honour primarily focusing on southern states in the US and on Mediterranean countries of southern Europe. In this article, we review a programme of research that has extended theories of cultures of honour to an under-researched context: Turkey. We first describe resear...

The intent of this Special Issue is to be a starting point for a broadly-defined European cultural psychology. Across seven research articles, the authors of this Special Issue explore what European culture(s) and European identity entail, how acculturation within the European cultural contexts takes place and under what conditions a multicultural...

The present research sought to establish how cultural settings create a normative context that determines individuals’ reactions to subtle forms of mistreatment. Two experimental studies (n = 449) examined individuals’ perceptions of high- and low-ranking individuals’ incivility in two national (Study 1) and two organizational (Study 2) cultural se...

The present research examined if cultural differences in the extent to which hierarchical relations dictate individuals' behaviors are embedded in objective institutional regulations. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, we examined codes of ethics of Korean and British organizations in relation to working relationships and corruptive behav...

Article impact statement: Conservation values are unlikely to change through intentional efforts.

Recent research has demonstrated that cultural groups differ in how they experience ostracism and in how they behave in the wake of being ostracized. We review this literature paying particular attention to the role that one key cultural variable, social interdependence, plays in moderating responses to ostracism. Although the data present a comple...

We contend that an ecological account of violence and aggression requires consideration of societal and cultural settings. Focusing on hierarchical relations, we argue countries with higher (vs. lower) power distance are, on average, located closer to the equator, have more challenging climates (e.g., higher temperature; lower temperature variation...

Using ERPs, we explored the relationship between social power and emotional prosody processing. In particular, we investigated differences at early and late processing stages between individuals primed with high or low power. Comparable to previously published findings from nonprimed participants, individuals primed with low power displayed differe...

The hope for creating widespread change in social values has endured among conservation professionals since early calls by Aldo Leopold for a “Land Ethic”. However, there has been little serious attention in conservation to the fields of investigation that address values, how they are formed, and how they change. We introduce a social-ecological sy...

This review introduces the concept of culture-sensitive health communication. The basic premise is that congruency between the recipient's cultural characteristics and the respective message will increase the communication's effectiveness. Culture-sensitive health communication is therefore defined as the deliberate and evidence-informed adaptation...

Across a series of studies, we investigated cultural differences in children's responses to ostracism situations. Working with the children of farmers and herders, we focused on how painful children estimate ostracism to be. Study 1a showed that 4- to 8-year-old children from a socially interdependent farming community estimated ostracism to be les...

The present research investigates the extent to which cultural background moderates empathy in response to observing someone undergoing physical or social pain. In 3 studies, we demonstrate that, East Asian and White British participants differ in both affective and cognitive components of their empathic reactions in response to someone else’s pain...

Experiencing health problems can produce strong emotional responses that may impact psychological well-being and disease outcome. Also emotional states have been found to be associated with the development of disease. Negative emotions have been found to be associated with health complaints. Conversely, positive emotions have been found to be assoc...

Listeners have to pay close attention to a speaker's tone of voice (prosody) during daily conversations. This is particularly important when trying to infer the emotional state of the speaker. Although a growing body of research has explored how emotions are processed from speech in general, little is known about how psychosocial factors such as so...

Two studies investigated retaliatory responses to actual honor threats among members of an honor culture (Turkey) and a dignity culture (northern United States). The honor threat in these studies was based on previous research which has shown that honesty is a key element of the conception of honor and that accusations of dishonesty are threatening...

We investigated how responses to interpersonal conflict differed across Ghana, Turkey, and the northern United States. Due to low levels of interpersonal embeddedness, people from individualistic cultures (northern United States) have more freedom to prioritize individual goals and to choose competitive and confrontational responses to conflict com...

Cultures differ in many important ways, but one trait appears to be universally valued: prosociality. For one’s reputation, around the world, it pays to be nice to others. However, recent research with American participants finds that evaluations of prosocial actions are asymmetric—relatively selfish actions are evaluated according to the magnitude...

Culture is a broad term with a plethora of meanings. Thus any discussion of how it shapes human psychology must lay the groundwork by denning the parameters of the analysis. In this chapter, I situate culture within economic environments, asking how certain socioeco-logical features in a given economic community shape interactions to affect social...

Visualizing oneself engaging in future actions has been shown to increase the likelihood of actually engaging in the visualized action. In three studies, we examined the effect of perspective taken to visualize a future action (first-person vs. third-person) as a function of the degree to which individuals worry about others’ evaluation of themselv...

In a series of studies, we investigated the role of economic structures (farming vs. herding) and source of ostracism (close other vs. stranger) in social exclusion experiences. We first confirmed that herders rely on strangers to a greater extent than do farmers for economic success (validation study). Next, we verified that farmers and herders un...

The main goal of the current research is to investigate emotional reactions to situations that implicate honour in Turkish and northern American cultural groups. In Studies 1A and 1B, participants rated the degree to which a variety of events fit their prototypes for honour-related situations. Both Turkish and American participants evaluated situat...

Research evidence and theoretical accounts of honor point to differing definitions of the construct in differing cultural contexts. The current studies address the question "What is honor?" using a prototype approach in Turkey and the Northern United States. Studies 1a/1b revealed substantial differences in the specific features generated by member...