Cristina Salvador

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Verified

Cristina verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at Duke University

Although individuals of Latin American heritage ( Latin Americans in short) are considered interdependent, they also value traits like uniqueness and positivity, like individuals of European American cultural heritage, who are considered independent. It remains unclear whether this inclination toward positivity extends to a bias in self-perception...

Evidence suggests that Latin Americans display elevated levels of emotional expressivity and positivity. Here, we tested whether Latin Americans possess a unique form of interdependence called expressive interdependence, characterized by the open expression of positive emotions related to social engagement (e.g., feelings of closeness to others). I...

Research in cultural psychology over the last three decades has revealed the profound influence of culture on cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes shaping individuals into active agents. This article aims to show cultural psychology's promise in three key steps. First, we review four notable cultural dimensions believed to underlie cult...

European Americans are self-enhancing, whereas East Asians are sometimes self-critical. However, the mechanisms underlying this cultural difference remain unclear. Here, we addressed this gap by testing 32 Taiwanese and 32 American young adults, who indicated whether their self-esteem would change in various episodes involving success or failure. W...

It has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 transmits through social contact. It stands to reason that the spread of the virus depends on sociocultural ecologies that facilitate or inhibit social contact. In particular, the community-level tendency to engage with strangers and freely choose friends, called relational mobility, entails increased...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) presents a unique emotional pattern that challenges dominant frameworks in the current literature. In many regions, personal success typically elicits pride, while the success of an ingroup member evokes connection—reinforcing a distinction between individual and collective achievement. In contrast, success in SSA—whether o...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is becoming increasingly significant in global cultural, political, and economic contexts. Despite its rich cultural diversity, we hypothesized that many SSA cultures are characterized by a unique combination of intense personal goal pursuit (self-promotion) and strong commitment to ingroup relationships (interdependence)....

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) presents a unique emotional pattern that challenges dominant frameworks in the current literature. In many regions, personal success typically elicits pride, while the success of an ingroup member evokes connection—reinforcing a distinction between individual and collective achievement. In contrast, success in SSA—whether o...

Ideal partner preferences(i.e., ratings of the desirability of attributes like attractiveness or intelligence)are the source of numerous foundational findings in the interdisciplinary literature on human mating. Recently, research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preference-matching (i.e., do people positively evaluate partners who match...

People are motivated to punish others who commit immoral actions when they believe the person willingly committed such an act. Compared with European American individuals, East Asian individuals are more punitive of wrongdoings, yet are less likely to attribute actions to the person. Here, we drew on research in cultural psychology to test the pred...

People are motivated to punish others who commit immoral actions when they believe the person willingly committed such an act. Compared to European American individuals, East Asian individuals are more punitive of wrongdoings, yet are less likely to attribute actions to the person. Here, we drew on research in cultural psychology to test the predic...

Positivity resonance, defined as a co-experienced kind-hearted positive emotion, is commonly observed to strengthen relationships in the United States. However, it is unclear whether levels of positivity resonance differ across cultures. Prior research suggests that in cultures that are perceived as offering more freedom and choice in social ties (...

Although individuals of Latin American heritage (Latin Americans in short) are considered interdependent, they also value traits like uniqueness and positivity, like individuals of European American cultural heritage, who are considered independent. It remains unclear whether this inclination toward positivity extends to a bias in self-perception k...

Do people in different societies experience morality differently in everyday life? Using experience sampling methods, we investigate everyday moral experiences in a sample from 20 countries across 6 continents, thereby replicating and extending a large-scale study originally conducted in the United States and Canada. We aim to replicate key finding...

Do people in different societies experience morality differently in everyday life? Using experience sampling methods, we investigate everyday moral experiences in a sample from 20 countries across 6 continents, thereby replicating and extending a large-scale study originally conducted in the United States and Canada. We aim to replicate key finding...

The commencement of a new editorial tenure within the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition (JPSP: ASC) provides an opportunity for reflection regarding the journal's core mission. The editors recognize that social psychology is at a crossroads due to competing demands that may have led to reduced submissions...

Love and gratitude are key to human flourishing but have been predominantly studied in WEIRD populations, which has limited our understanding of their shared and culturally distinct features. In Study 1, European American, Chinese, and Chilean (N = 296) participants recalled four situations that elicited love and gratitude. Content analyses reveale...

Ideal partner preferences (i.e., ratings of the desirability of attributes like attractiveness or intelligence) are the source of numerous foundational findings in the interdisciplinary literature on human mating. Recently, research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preference-matching (i.e., do people positively evaluate partners who mat...

Cultural psychology—the research field focusing on the mutual constitution of culture and the mind—has made great strides by documenting robust cultural variations in how people think, feel, and act. The cumulative evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Westerners are independent, whereas those in the rest of the world are interdependent....

Language is one powerful vehicle for transmitting norms—a universal feature of society. In English, people use “you” generically (e.g., “You win some you lose some”) to express and interpret norms. Here, we examine how norms are conveyed and interpreted in Spanish, a language that—unlike English—has two forms of you (i.e., formal, informal), distin...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic has taken a massive toll on human life worldwide. The case of the United States—the world's largest economy—is particularly noteworthy, since the country suffered a disproportionately larger number of deaths than all other countries during the first year of the pandemic. A careful analysis may shed n...

In the current cultural psychology literature, it is commonly assumed that the personal self is cognitively more salient for those with an independent (vs. interdependent) self-construal (SC). So far, however, this assumption remains largely untested. Here, we drew on evidence that resting state alpha power (RSAP) reflects mental processes constitu...

Early work by Hofstede (Behavior Science Research, 18 (4), 285–305, 1983) described Costa Rica as among the most culturally collective of 52 countries studied. Later work described the people of Costa Rica as low in group orientation, an outlier compared to other Latin American populations (Oyserman et al. Psychological Bulletin, 128(1), 3–72, 2002...

The disproportionately high rates of both infections and deaths among racial and ethnic minorities (especially Blacks and Hispanics) in the United States during the COVID‐19 pandemic are consistent with the conclusion that structural inequality can produce lethal consequences. However, the nature of this structural inequality in relation to COVID‐1...

Prior evidence suggests that external threat motivates people to monitor norm violations. However, the effect of threat may be attenuated for those high in interdependent self-construal (SC) because this SC affords a sense of protection against the threat. Here, we tested this possibility by priming or not priming young American adults with a patho...

Theories in cultural psychology assume that emotions disrupt social harmony, and thus, emotion moderation is a hallmark of interdependence. However, this assumption is based exclusively on research on East Asians. Here, we tested the hypothesis that Latin Americans are as interdependent as East Asians and more so than European Americans. However, L...

It has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 transmits between individuals. It stands to reason that the spread of the virus depends on sociocultural ecologies that facilitate or inhibit social contact. In particular, the community-level tendency to engage with strangers and freely choose friends, called relational mobility (RM), entails increase...

It has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 transmits between individuals. It stands to reason that the spread of the virus depends on sociocultural ecologies that facilitate or inhibit social contact. In particular, the community-level tendency to engage with strangers and freely choose friends, called relational mobility (RM), entails increase...

It has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 transmits between individuals. It stands to reason that the spread of the virus depends on sociocultural ecologies that facilitate or inhibit social contact. In particular, the community-level tendency to engage with strangers and freely choose friends, called relational mobility (RM), entails increase...

Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination may reduce the risk of a range of infectious diseases, and if so, it could protect against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Here, we compared countries that mandated BCG vaccination until at least 2000 with countries that did not. To minimize any systematic effects of reporting biases, we analyzed the...

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, racial minorities in the United States, particularly Blacks and Hispanics, account for a disproportionate percent of deaths. The unequal distribution of COVID-related fatalities along the racial lines may result from the segregation of Blacks and Hispanics in neighborhoods afflicted with poverty and all accompa...

Prior evidence suggests that external threat motivates people to monitor norm violations. However, the effect of threat may be attenuated for those high in interdependent self-construal (SC) since this SC affords a sense of protection against the threat. Here, we tested this possibility by priming or not priming young American adults with a pathoge...

Prior work suggests that BCG vaccination reduces the risk of different infectious diseases. BCG vaccination may thus serve as a protective factor against COVID-19. Here, we drew on day-by-day reports of both confirmed cases and deaths and analyzed growth curves in countries that mandate BCG policies versus countries that do not. Linear mixed models...

One fundamental function of social norms is to promote social coordination. Moreover, greater social coordination may be called for when tight norms govern social relations with others. Hence, the sensitivity to social norm violations may be jointly modulated by relational goals and a belief that the social context is tight (vs. loose). We tested t...

Over the past three decades, the cultural psychology literature has established that there is systematic cultural variation in the nature of agency in the domains of cognition, emotion, and motivation. This literature adopted both self-report and performance-based (or behavioral) indicators of these processes, which set the stage for a more recent...