Judith Gibbons

Saint Louis University | SLU · Department of Psychology

Adolescents in today's globalized world construct their identities within complex and intersecting ecologies. In majority world countries, such as Guatemala, adolescents are exposed to external influences through international media, travel, and visitors from other cultures. In this study, 131 middle and high school adolescents (53% girls, M age =...

Adolescents who identify as cis-gender girls or boys, transgender, or non-binary experience different cultural ecologies and negotiate their gender development in distinct ways. Research comparing boys and girls has revealed differences in romance and sexuality, relationships with parents and peers, as well as risks and psychological disorders. The...

Knowledge from the Global South, including Latin America, has enriched our understanding of developmental science. Despite underrepresentation in the published literature, research from Latin America has advanced the psychology of parenting and child and adolescent development. An ecological approach is valuable in adding meaning and specificity to...

Parenting beliefs and practices are deeply embedded in cultural values, ideologies, and norms. The cultural ecologies of Guatemala, a Central American country, highlight familism, religiosity, and collectivism. To understand the parenting goals, parental ethnotheories, and parenting practices of a group of highly educated, economically advantaged G...

Our world faces potentially catastrophic climate change that can damage human health in multiple ways. The impact of climate change is uneven, disproportionately affecting the lives and livelihoods of women and girls. This conceptual article compiles evidence for a model that argues that climate change has more detrimental consequences for women th...

Although women produce, process, and market much of the world’s food, they are disempowered in agriculture. They are less likely than men to control land or manage farms. Their productivity in farming is less than that of men due to cultural restrictions and lack of resources such as knowledge about best practices and access to credit and technolog...

Documenting Reproductive Injustice, Striving for Reproductive Justice What are the critical issues faced by women worldwide? At the 2022 meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA) Division 52’s (International Psychology) International Committee for Women (ICfW), we recognized the wide scope and severity of the challenges women face, in...

The lives of adolescents and youth in Guatemala are marked by diversity – economic, ethnic, gender, and place of residence, urban or rural. Although Guatemala has been described as collectivist, a more valid unfolding of cultural values shows that the cultural influences on Guatemalan adolescents and youth include familism, spirituality and religio...

Peace treaties were signed in Guatemala in 1996 after 36 years of civil war; nonetheless, it remains as one of the most violent countries in the world. Little is known about the individual/personal factors associated with violent or peaceful behaviors. The goal of this study was to better understand world views and gender role attitudes associated...

Across the years as interest in culture grew in the field of psychology, women contributed to its growth by leading research into new areas, such as children’s socialization and family dynamics, and acknowledging the critical role of the social and environmental context. Moreover, women were significant partners in team-led projects, developing met...

Higher education, a key driver of women’s empowerment, is still segregated by gender across the world. Agricultural higher education is a field that is male-dominated, even though internationally women play a large role in agricultural production. The purpose of this study was to understand the experience, including challenges and coping strategies...

School communities around the world have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. School leaders, teachers, and students have experienced sudden and unprecedented ruptures to their personal and professional or academic lives. The purpose of the present case study was to investigate the response of a school community in Guatemala to the changes impos...

Many of today’s youth, including those in Central and South America, are integrating local identities based on familial, community, and religious traditions with global identities fueled by exposure to international media. Extant literature was categorized according to the four different domains of identity – personal, relational, public, and colle...

Gender role ideologies are embedded in cultural values and assumptions about life. Women’s greater endorsement of egalitarian beliefs may stem from gender differences in world views as indexed by social axioms. The purpose of this study was to examine potential mediators of gender differences in gender ideologies among university students in Guatem...

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, motherwork has increased. Mothers, including in Guatemala, have taken on expanded responsibilities of virtual schooling and keeping the family safe and healthy, in addition to prepandemic familial and professional contributions. Twelve Guatemalan mothers of children under age 7 were interviewed about how the...

Around the world, adolescents use technology for education, to further their identity and socio-emotional development, to access health information, engage in civic activities, and for entertainment. For many, technological advances, especially social media, have drastically influenced how they communicate with family, friends, and romantic partner...

“Everything for my children” is a common sentiment among Guatemalan parents displaying an unwavering, unconditional commitment to their children. Although this saying suggests that a strong family unit is at the heart of Guatemalan culture, only limited research exists about parenting Guatemalan adolescents. Research on how the country’s prevalent...

Latin American psychology, although greatly under-represented in international journals, can provide important lessons for international psychologists. Mexican psychologist Rogelio Díaz-Guerrero was one of the first to describe would now be labeled an indigenous psychology. Latin American theorists such as Paolo Freire and Ignacio Martín-Baró have...

Gender is one of the most salient influences on children’s social development. As infants, girls and boys are often difficult to distinguish, yet from birth onward gender matters and is defined within the child’s cultural context. Differential gender socialization determines children’s names, how they are dressed, the toys they are given, the playm...

Around the world children grow up in a variety of different cultural settings that shape their social relationships in ways that are adaptive for the societies and the social worlds in which they live. The physical and social setting, the family configuration, parents’ ethnotheories about appropriate childrearing practices and parenting styles, and...

Over the years, children’s social development has generated much research interest, beginning with the early twentieth-century observational studies of children in nursery school settings. However, examination of those studies, and later ones, indicates that most research has focused upon children in the Western English-speaking world. Much less is...

Young children around the world help others. Yet, the ways in which they help and the conditions under which they provide assistance differ by age and cultural context. Prosocial behavior can be defined as instrumental, empathic, or altruistic, or conceptualized as helping, sharing, or comforting. In this chapter, we explore the developmental trend...

This chapter explores what it means to be an adolescent using the three domains of development—biological, cognitive, and socio‐emotional—through a cultural lens to reveal similarities and differences in the adolescent experience. It also explores the close connections between adolescent development and cultural context. Adolescents face many healt...

The social emotions gratitude and envy are central to the lives of Guatemalan youth and to their society more broadly. Perspective-taking, the social- cognitive process that allows one to assume another's point of view, may affect both the experience and expression of gratitude and envy. In this convergent mixed-methods study, perspective-taking wa...

This book addresses cultural variability in children’s social worlds, examining the acquisition, development, and use of culturally relevant social competencies valued in diverse cultural contexts. It discusses the different aspects of preschoolers’ social competencies that allow children – including adopted, immigrant, or at-risk children – to cre...

This chapter draws from published literature and case stories to explore commonalities of grandparenting in the countries of Central America and Mexico, and diversity rooted in culture, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic conditions. It employs the framework of Pinazo Hernandis to describe mutual help and support between grandparents and grandchil...

Women's empowerment in family planning strengthens families and communities. Using 2014/2015 Demographic and Health Surveys data from 7,168 Guatemalan women, ages 35 and above with at least one living child, we examined indicators of empowerment in four domains – economic, educational, social, and contraceptive – and their relation to the number of...

Expressing gratitude is central to the lives of Guatemalan youth. Despite limited empirical evidence on gratitude in Guatemala, anecdotal reports and cultural values point to its importance, providing a rich cultural context to continue Baumgarten-Tramer’s work. We have situated the current sample of 104 Guatemalan youth (M = 10.85, SD = 2.28, 53.8...

Adolescents' social and emotional lives reflect and inform their well-being. Yet, we know little about how social emotions, like gratitude and envy, are expressed in social relationships and shape well-being among adolescents living outside of wealthy, minority world settings. In many parts of the world, including Guatemala, poverty and economic ha...

The empowerment of women and girls has been at the center of international aid efforts for decades. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the current status of women around the world with a particular focus on the 13 countries profiled in the subsequent chapters of this book. Those countries represent six world regions: Asia, Europe, Latin Ame...

Life for South African women post-apartheid reflects both legislative advances and lingering challenges. Despite progress in the post-apartheid world, South Africa is still characterized by a high level of economic disparity, meaning that daily life for individual women can be quite different depending on one’s race, socioeconomic status, and age....

This wide-ranging collection analyzes the status and advancement of women both in a national context and collectively on a global scale, as a powerful social force in a rapidly evolving world. The countries studied—China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Egypt, Cameroon, South Africa, Italy, France, Brazil, Belize, Mexico, and the United States—represent a...

Fostering the well-being of Latin American and Caribbean youth is vital to the region's success. Despite their significant presence in the population, many youth face extraordinary challenges, such as poverty, exposure to violence, and lack of access to quality education. We review some successful interventions from an ecological perspective that a...

It is important to identify stereotypes about indigenous people because those stereotypes influence prejudice and discrimination, both obstacles to social justice and universal human rights. The purpose of the current study was to document the stereotypes, as held by Guatemalan adolescents, of indigenous Maya people (e.g., Maya) and nonindigenous L...

Intercountry adoption (ICA) is the subject of polarized and contentious debates that can be expressed as “child rescue” versus “child trafficking.” This article describes the parallels between ICA and human trafficking, the international agreements that govern ICA and human trafficking, the evidence for fraud and corruption in some ICAs, and the co...

Reviews the book, Midwives and Mothers: The Medicalization of Childbirth on a Guatemalan Plantation by Sheila Cosminsky (see record 2016-56621-000 ). Although birth is considered one of the few universals of the human experience, Cosminsky illustrates through its rituals and traditions how childbirth is culturally informed. Drawing on decades of fi...

Globalisation is transforming the lives, ideals and development of youth worldwide, including adolescents in Guatemala. We hypothesised that the attitudes of today’s Guatemalan adolescents as reflected in their views of the ideal man and woman would more closely converge with those of the global adolescent compared to their compatriots 25 years ear...

The future of any community of applied research practice rests on its early career scholars and practitioners. Such connections are the lifeblood of any journal. They may add an additional pool, actually waves of talent who can be reviewers and proposers of special issue sections, lead articles, and reviews for the journal. This kind of carrying ca...

Globalisation is transforming the lives, ideals and development of youth worldwide, including adolescents in Guatemala. We hypothesised that the attitudes of today’s Guatemalan adolescents as reflected in their views of the ideal man and woman would more closely converge with those of the global adolescent compared to their compatriots 25 years ear...

Equine-facilitated interventions have shown promise for facilitating emotional and behavioural changes in diverse groups. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of an equine workshop for vulnerable Guatemalan youth using a mixed-method approach. The 37 participants (Mage = 18.22, SD = 2.25, 14 girls) came from difficult circumstances includi...

Psychological sequelae of war and genocide can potentially persist into adulthood for child survivors of such tragedies. However, few studies have investigated child survivors' particular experiences with such sequelae in adulthood, and fewer still distinguish between orphaned and nonorphaned child survivors' experiences. The present study examined...

This comprehensive reference analyzes psychological and anthropological studies concerning child and adolescent development across cultures, digging into often-forgotten topics like street children, child soldiers, and parenting in war-torn countries. Traditionally, research on child and adolescent development has focused on American youth, inadver...

Community and family violence are endemic in Guatemala. We evaluated the effectiveness of a horse-handling program to reduce violent attitudes and aggressive behavior. Eighteen community members who worked with horses in their daily lives (16 men, 2 women, ages 15 to 58) participated in four weekly sessions of embodied experiences with horses. The...

Intercountry adoptions from Guatemala were highly controversial, because of the large numbers of children being adopted to the USA, along with evidence of corruption and child theft. Since the implementation of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in 2008, Guatemala's central authority for adoption has prioritized domestic placements for c...

Reviews the book, The Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective edited by Lene Arnett Jensen (see record 2015-16948-000 ). The book aims to provide a “comprehensive synopsis of theory and research on life course development” (p. 3). The handbook largely achieves its purpose. This book addresses human develop...

Community and family violence are endemic in Guatemala. We evaluated the effectiveness of a horse-handling program to reduce violent attitudes and aggressive behavior. Eighteen community members who worked with horses in their daily lives (16 men, 2 women, ages 15 to 58) participated in four weekly sessions of embodied experiences with horses. The...

Although the ubiquity of gratitude and envy would suggest they are important in the daily lives of adolescents, those social emotions have been relatively unexplored by psychologists. Interviews of 25 adolescents (ages 14 through 16) from the Midwestern US provided narrative accounts that revealed the contexts, antecedents, consequences and meaning...

Parental ethnotheories, or parents’ beliefs about their children’s development, provide a framework for cultural transmission of values and behaviors. In this study we aimed to understand Guatemalan mothers’ beliefs about children’s learning, what is “good” and “bad” behavior, and the desired qualities of grown-up children. Twenty-two low-income mo...

This phenomenological study explored ten Guatemalan nonbelievers’ worldview, within the context of a highly religious, predominantly Christian, patriarcal society. The sample included two women and eight men, all ladinos, between 20 and 55 years of age, ranging from middle to upper class, with university-level studies. The data were obtained throug...

The present study investigated “marianismo” in different generations of Guatemalan women in order to examine whether such beliefs are held over generations. We evaluated a total of 50 Guatemalan women of different generations using the Marianismo Beliefs Scale, developed by Castillo, Perez, Castillo and Ghosheh (2010). The scale measures five aspec...

Las etnoteorías de los padres sobre el desarrollo de sus hijos proporcionan un marco para la transmisión cultural de valores y comportamientos. El objetivo de este estudio fue comprender las creencias de un grupo de madres guatemaltecas sobre el aprendizaje de los niños, los comportamientos "buenos" y "malos," y las cualidades deseadas de los hijos...

The lives of women and men living in the Central American countries of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama are diverse with respect to gender roles, attitudes, and ideologies. However, there is evidence that gender plays out in the domains of development, work and home lives, health, violence, and sexuality. D...

For most of its history, the field of psychology has been tied to the cultures of the countries in which it originated—the United States and the nations of Western Europe.1 As a result, psychology is culture-bound (limited to the findings, evidence, and assumptions of the United States and Europe) and culture-blind (overlooking and disregarding the...

Did you know that there are 26,000 psychologists in the Caribbean and that half of those are in Cuba? Did you know that Barbados has the highest rate of publications per capita among psychologists in the Caribbean? These are just a few of the facts that were revealed in a recent conference. This November psychologists from around the Car-ibbean an...

Reviews the book, Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain by Jessaca B. Leinaweaver (see record 2013-27766-000 ). Leinaweaver provides a framework for viewing intercountry adoption as a type of migration. The author presents the results of her extensive anthropological fieldwork in Peru and Spain in an introduction, six chapters, and a conclus...

Migrants’ social remittances—ideas, ways of thinking, and social practices—may change families and communities of origin and drive sociopolitical development. From a small town in the northern highlands of Guatemala, 16 diverse returned internal and international migrants were interviewed about perceived changes in their sense of citizenship, pover...

Background: The Vietnamese American gulf coast communities have experienced recent disasters, in-cluding both hurricane Katrina and the gulf (BP) oil spill. The objectives of this study were to examine the impact of the 2010 gulf oil spill on the Vietnamese American Gulf Coast communities and to offer recommendations on how to effectively work with...

This phenomenological study explored ten Guatemalan nonbelievers’ worldview, within the context of a highly religious, predominantly Christian, patriarcal society. The sample included two women and eight men, all ladinos, between 20 and 55 years of age, ranging from middle to upper class, with university- level studies. The data were obtained throu...

Parental ethnotheories, or parents’ beliefs about their children’s development, provide a framework for cultural transmission of values and behaviors. In this study we aimed to understand Guatemalan mothers’ beliefs about children’s learning, what is “good” and “bad” behavior, and the desired qualities of grown- up children. Twenty-two low-income m...

RESUMEN El presente estudio investigó las creencias marianistas en diferentes generaciones de mujeres guatemaltecas con el objetivo de identificar si tales creencias se sostienen de generación en generación. Se evaluó un total de 50 mujeres guatemaltecas de 5 generaciones distintas con quienes se utilizó la Escala de Creencias Marianistas, elaborad...

The present study investigated “marianismo” in different generations of Guatemalan women in order to examine whether such beliefs are held over generations. We evaluated a total of 50 Guatemalan women of different generations using the Marianismo Beliefs Scale, developed by Castillo, Perez, Castillo and Ghosheh (2010). The scale measures five aspec...

Despite a 60-plus–year history of international adoption (IA) placements, the body of research exploring counseling and psychological interventions for those affected by IA is still in its infancy. This critical review of the state of the literature addresses research, theory, and practice relevant to the international adoption triad (adoptive pare...

A wealth of studies has revealed cross-cultural differences and similarities in the life stage of adolescence, defined by the World Health Organization as the second decade of life. Recent research has focused on brain growth and plasticity during adolescence, identity development, adolescents' relationships with families and peers, gender differen...

Intercountry or international adoption has become a significant component of international migration as people wanting to form a family, or increase the number of children in their existing families, adopt children from abroad. Estimates indicate that up to a million children have been adopted internationally, peaking in 2004 with approximately 45,...

The purpose of our study was to determine if acculturation variables from different acculturation domains form empirically extracted acculturation clusters [based on Berry’s (1997) model], and if the clusters are related to the life satisfaction of first and second generation immigrant college students. One hundred twenty-two students attending a u...

The purpose of our study was to determine if acculturation variables from different acculturation domains form empirically extracted acculturation clusters [based on Berry's (1997) model], and if the clusters are related to the life satisfaction of first and second generation immigrant college students. One hundred twenty-two students attending a u...

Reviews the book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond (see record 2013-02340-000 ). It has become de rigueur to point out that most psychological research is conducted with a narrow range of participants and that those participants are WEIRD ( W estern, E ducated, I ndustrialized, R ich, and D e...

Adolescence may be a critical period for the development of altruism. Guatemalan adolescents (seventy-three 11- to 16-year-olds from urban and rural Mayan communities) participated in a project in which they described their lives through photographs and short descriptions of the photographs’ significance. Their written descriptions were coded for t...

We tested a model for predicting adoption attitudes: that remembered parental warmth is associated with more positive attitudes toward adoption and that this relationship is mediated by motivation to parent and liking of children. One hundred and eighty-seven university students participated in the study. Controlling for participant gender and adop...

Review of the book Socioemotional Development in Cultural Context, by Xinyin Chen and Kenneth H. Rubin

Before the recent implementation of the Hague Convention requirements on intercountry adoption in Guatemala, most children in the process of being adopted by foreign nationals were cared for by foster parents. In the present study, 16 Guatemalan foster parents were interviewed regarding their experiences with and attitudes toward international and...

A lthough F aith Development T heory (F D T), developed in North A merica by James Fowler, is the prevailing theory of religious or faith development, it has not been systematically tested cross-culturally. A ccording to F D T , the transition from lower to higher stages requires the formation of a personal/individual faith. Because the cultural di...