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Introduction
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Publications
Publications (133)
Judgments of attractiveness have many important social outcomes, highlighting the need to understand how people form these judgments. One aspect of appearance that impacts perceptions of attractiveness is facial femininity/masculinity (sexual dimorphism). However, extant research has focused primarily on White, Western, heterosexual participants’ p...
We examined the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and endorsement of honor. We studied the SES-honor link in 5 studies (N = 13,635) with participants recruited in different world regions (the Mediterranean and MENA, East Asian, South-East Asian, and Anglo-Western regions) using measures that tap into various different facets of honor....
Introduction
This study examined whether adverse childhood experiences, positive emotional expressivity in personal (i.e., expressing positive emotions when good things happened to oneself) and social settings (i.e., expressing positive emotions when good things happened to others such as friends or family), and general trust predict levels of happ...
Self-distancing refers to a process that allows individuals to take a step back from their experiences and reason objectively about them. Previous research has suggested that self-distancing is effective for emotion regulation and self-regulation. A cross-cultural investigation also indicated cultural differences in the ease of self-distancing and...
In the present work, we addressed the relationship between parental leave policies and social norms. Using a pre‐registered, cross‐national approach, we examined the relationship between parental leave policies and the perception of social norms for the gender division of childcare. In this study, 19,259 students (11,924 women) from 48 countries in...
Objective
We investigated the relationship between personal relative deprivation (PRD)—resentment from the belief that one is worse off than people who are similar to oneself—and locus of control.
Background
Research has yet to comprehensively investigate whether PRD is associated with a tendency to favor external (vs. internal) explanations for s...
Lookism encompasses discrimination based on a person's physical appearance. In a society where lookism is prevalent, the question arises concerning the impact of the fear of lookism on one's well‐being. To address this issue, we assessed the fear of anticipated appearance discrimination by constructing a new Fear of Lookism Scale (FLS). By testing...
Previous research has suggested that empathic concern may affect cultural differences in social support-seeking. However, neither the mechanisms through which empathic concern promotes support-seeking nor the explanations for cultural differences in empathic concern are clear. This study attempted to address these questions by conducting three stud...
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...
Working in a field that underrepresents populations outside Western societies, social psychologists in the Asia-Pacific region encounter challenges in conducting research and imparting knowledge about social behaviour that resonates with local contexts. This paper argues that teaching can be a pathway for social psychology to rectify this represent...
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)....
It is well-known that the caudate nucleus is associated with motivational behaviors and subjective well-being. However, no longitudinal studies have examined the relationship between brain structure, behavioral orientations, and subjective well-being. This study analyzes data from our previous longitudinal study to examine whether future subjective...
In this chapter, we describe the theoretical framework of cultural psychological research on self, attentional styles, interpersonal relationships, and emotional expressivity and highlight findings on cultural differences on the symptoms of psychological distress, the perception of stressful situations, and the appropriate form of social support. T...
Previous studies have documented cultural gaps in levels of well‐being, particularly within the contexts of individualistic and collectivistic nations. However, the underlying mechanisms responsible for the disparities remain incompletely understood. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to explore how cross‐cultural differences in the...
It is a well-known fact that the caudate nucleus is associated with motivational behaviors and subjective well-being. However, there are no longitudinal studies that have examined the relationship between brain structure, behavioral orientations, and subjective well-being. This study analyzes data from our previous longitudinal study to examine whe...
In recent years, loneliness and social isolation have become common social problems. Previous research has shown that loneliness affects the structure and function of the brain as well as function of the autonomic nervous system. Our previous study found that loneliness has a negative impact on the computation of relationship value in response to c...
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...
Using data from 15 countries, this article investigates whether descriptive and prescriptive gender norms concerning housework and child care (domestic work) changed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results of a total of 8,343 participants (M = 19.95, SD = 1.68) from two comparable student samples suggest that descriptive norms about unpai...
In six studies, we examined the accuracy and underpinnings of the damaging stereotype that feminists harbor negative attitudes toward men. In Study 1 (n=1,664), feminist and nonfeminist women displayed similarly positive attitudes toward men. Study 2 (n=3,892) replicated these results in non-WEIRD countries and among male participants. Study 3 (n=1...
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 explained political orientation and morality as a consequence of epistemic needs and empathic motivation. In this study, we replicate previous research on the influence of psychological states on moral foundations, system justification, and political orientation among Japanese participants. Consistent with previous findings, empathy i...
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...
Of late, internet addiction among adolescents has become a serious problem, with increased internet use. Previous research suggests that the more people become addicted to the internet, the more they isolate themselves from society. Conversely, it has been suggested that abundant social capital (the networks of relationships among people who live a...
This research explores how culture influences the motivations underlying explicit (emotional and instrumental) and implicit (companionship and attentiveness) support provision. Two studies ( N = 1,106) compared the responses of European Americans and Japanese individuals to a close other’s stressful event. The results showed that European Americans...
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...
Introduction
Social support-seeking is considered to be an effective way for international students to cope with their acculturative stress and contribute to cross-cultural adaptation. In addition to support from people in the host country (close support), the ease of online communication now allows international students to receive additional supp...
The current research examines cross-cultural differences in people’s daily stress experiences and the role of social orientations in explaining their experiences. Using a situation sampling method, Study 1 collected European Canadian and Japanese undergraduates’ examples of stressful interpersonal and non-interpersonal situations they experienced,...
Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender‐based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, we assessed parental‐leave intentions in young adults (18–30 years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identifi...
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...
Differences in national responses to COVID-19 have been associated with the cultural value of collectivism. The present research builds on these findings by examining the relationship between collectivism at the individual level and adherence to public health recommendations to combat COVID-19 during the pre-vaccination stage of the pandemic, and e...
Viewing humans as cultural agents, we argue that language provides a framework to perceive and experience emotions in a culturally prescribed manner, and thus is part and parcel of the cultural self. We first define our perspective on culture and the self and review comparative and contrastive cultural studies on emotional processes, specifically,...
Objective
Caring, sensitive parenting is known to be associated with higher levels of engagement in support-seeking behaviors among children and young adolescents. However, no study has yet explored the role of perceived parental attention in social support seeking in early adulthood. Growing evidence suggests that the µ-opioid receptor gene polymo...
To obtain further evidence to support spontaneous attention to vocal tones in Japanese, in this study, we developed a new set of stimuli, including positive and negative emotions, and investigated responses to facial and vocal displays of emotion by using behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measurements. Japanese participants either judged...
Acting is closely related to theory of mind and empathy, which are fundamental abilities to maintain interpersonal relationships and facilitate cooperation among people. Acting experience intervention is known as one instrument to foster theory of mind and empathy; however, empirical evidence on the effects of brief acting experience in a laborator...
Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries show...
Prior research has found that East Asians are less willing than Westerners to seek social support in times of need. What factors account for this cultural difference? Whereas previous research has examined the mediating effect of relational concern, we predicted that empathic concern, which refers to feeling sympathy and concern for people in need...
Previous studies in population genetics have proposed that the Y-chromosomal (Y-DNA) haplogroup D ancestor likely originated from Africa. The haplogroup D branch next started Out-of-Africa migration, rapidly expanded across Eurasia, and later diversified in East Asia. Y-DNA haplogroup D-M55, one of the branches of haplogroup D, is only found in mod...
A single nucleotide polymorphism in the serotonin 2A receptor gene (HTR2A rs6311 guanine [G] vs. adenine [A]) appears associated with positive emotional contagion (social sharing of happiness) in Japanese people. However, it remains unknown whether the HTR2A polymorphism also impacts the social sharing of happiness in Western cultures. The present...
This study investigated whether aspects of early life environment (quality of parental relationship, frequency of parental violence including disciplinary violence, amount of parental attention, and family income during childhood) would affect one's subjective well-being and loneliness later in life (i.e., during young adulthood). This study also i...
The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) is associated with novelty-seeking and risk-taking behaviors that have had an adaptive value in the history of human migration. It also plays a role in moderating the extent to which people adhere to cultural norms and practices. The aim of this study was to replicate previous findings about how DRD4 polymorphis...
Drawing on recent evidence suggesting that individuals having the G allele of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) polymorphism are especially susceptible to socio-cultural environmental influences, including cultural norms, the present study investigated the interplay of culture and two OXTR polymorphisms (rs53576 and rs2254298) in the domain of emotional...
This research investigated cross-cultural differences in strategic risky decisions in baseball—among professional baseball teams in North America and Japan (Study 1) and among baseball fans in the United States and Japan (Study 2—preregistered). Study 1 analyzed archival data from professional baseball leagues and demonstrated that outcomes reflect...
Over the last decades, cultural psychologists have explored the relationship between culture and the mind and have reported that psychological processes, including daily emotional experiences, vary across cultures. In this chapter, we describe the theoretical framework of emotions from a cross-cultural perspective and review a selection of related...
Auditory images for speech are preserved and can be accessed during reading. This research, conducted in Japan, examined whether and to what extent previous findings on the influence of speaker-specific auditory images in reading can be generalized to non-English speakers in a different cultural context. In two studies, Japanese participants were a...
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...
Early-life environments have been associated with various social behaviors, including trust, in late adolescence and adulthood. Given that the oxytocin receptor gene polymorphism (OXTR rs53576) moderates the impact of childhood experience on social behaviors, in the present study, we examined the main effect of childhood adversity through a self-re...
Previous research has demonstrated that the presence of a mirror does not influence Japanese people’s self-evaluation and cheating behaviors, which reflects their tendency to habitually think of themselves based on their imagined perspectives of others. The present work extends the evidence by manipulating the presence of the participants’ own voic...
Socioeconomic status (SES) is a multidimensional construct based on access to material resources and one's own rank relative to others in a social hierarchy. It fundamentally shapes individuals' psychological and behavioral tendencies. In many ways, socioeconomic variation parallels East-West cultural dynamics. Like East Asian cultures, lower SES f...
What kind of life do people want? In psychology, a good life has typically been conceptualized in terms of either hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. We propose that psychological richness is another neglected aspect of what people consider a good life. In study 1 (9-nation cross-cultural study), we asked participants whether they ideally wanted a ha...
Previous research has demonstrated that when people have to choose a product for which they do not have a preference and can observe their partners’ choices in advance, they are more likely to imitate their partners’ choices when choosing privately, whereas they are likely to choose differently when they are with their partners. The present study e...
Résumé
L’aptitude innée au pardon est associée au bien-être subjectif et à des résultats positifs en matière de santé. Cependant, des chercheurs ont récemment affirmé que, dans les cultures collectivistes, le pardon dépend essentiellement de normes culturelles qui accordent de la valeur à l’harmonie sociale, et que la disposition au pardon est moin...
We conducted two studies to examine the hypothesis that residential mobility would evoke anxiety and foster sensitivity to signs of disapproval, such as the disappearance of happiness. American and Japanese participants were asked to watch happy‐to‐neutral movies and sad‐to‐neutral movies and judge the point at which they thought that their initial...
Extending the literature on culture and the personal or interpersonal construction of choices, this research investigates consequences of an ingroup member’s vicarious decision for the entire group and the mechanism behind cultural variation. In Study 1, Japanese people showed, compared to Germans, greater acceptance of vicarious choice and evaluat...
Previous studies have shown that a cytosine (C) to thymine (T) single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the human cannabinoid receptor 1 (CNR1) gene is associated with positive emotional processing. C allele carriers are more sensitive to positive emotional stimuli including happiness. The effects of several gene polymorphisms related to sensitivity...
Main effects of country, sex, and cannabinoid receptor 1 (CNR1) genotype on the Subjective Happiness Scale score.
Results are expressed as means ± standard errors of the mean. Variables were compared using a 2 (country: Japan, Canada) × 2 (sex: male, female) × 3 (CNR1 genotype: CC, CT, TT) ANOVA followed by Bonferroni-corrected multiple comparisons...
Main effects of country, sex, and cannabinoid receptor 1 (CNR1) genotype on situation-specific happiness.
Results are expressed as means ± standard errors of the mean. The variables were compared using a 2 (country: Japan, Canada) × 2 (sex: male, female) × 3 (CNR1 genotype: CC, CT, TT) ANOVA, followed by Bonferroni-corrected multiple comparisons. S...
Correlations between the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) scores and situation-specific happiness in Japanese participants.
The table shows Pearson’s correlation coefficients. Asterisks indicate statistically significant correlations after false discovery rate correction. For each item of the SHS, the rating score of general happiness was positivel...
Correlations between the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) scores and situation-specific happiness in Canadian participants.
The table shows Pearson’s correlation coefficients. Asterisks indicate statistically significant correlations after false discovery rate correction. For each item of the SHS, the rating score of general happiness was positivel...
Previous research has indicated that, reflecting East Asians’ holistic attentional style, they are likely to emphasize more somatic symptoms and perceive their internal visceral states less accurately as compared with Westerners. Based on these findings, comparing representative samples of Americans and Japanese participants, this research examined...
One’s generosity to others declines as a function of social distance, which is known as social discounting. We examined cultural similarities and differences in social discounting and the mediating roles of the two aspects of interdependence (self-expression and distinctiveness of the self) as well as the two aspects of independence (harmony-seekin...
This research examined whether socioeconomic status (SES) predicts reactions to situations in which a group member decides for the entire group, thereby depriving other group members of personal choice. We found, as predicted, that Americans with higher subjective SES accepted choice deprivation less and demanded personal choice more than subjectiv...
People have to make different decisions every day, in which culture affects their strategies. This research examined the role of analytic versus holistic thinking style on resource allocation across cultures. We expected that, analytic thinking style, which refers to a linear view about the world where objects’ properties remain stable and separate...
Happiness is regarded as one of the most fundamental human goals. Given recent reports that positive feelings are contagious (e.g., the presence of a happy person enhances others' happiness) because of the human ability to empathize (i.e., sharing emotions), empathic ability may be a key factor in increasing one's own subjective level of happiness....
Previous research suggests that the benefits of different types of social support depend on cultural background. However, cultural variations in the underlying motivations for seeking social support and the emotional implications of receiving support have not yet been clearly explored. We hypothesized and found that European Americans emphasized th...
East Asians tend towards holistic styles of thinking whereas Westerners generally think more analytically. Recent work has shown that Western participants perceive emotional expressions in a somewhat holistic manner, however. Specifically, Westerners interpret emotional facial expressions differently when presented with a body displaying a congruen...
Recent findings have re-examined the linguistic influence on cognition and perception, while identifying evidence that supports the Whorfian hypothesis. We examine how English and Japanese speakers perceive similarity of pairs of objects, by using two sets of stimuli: one in which two distinct linguistic categories apply to respective object images...
Previous studies showed that East Asians are more sensitive than North Americans to contextual information, and that the cultural differences in context sensitivity emerge in preschool children. Yet, little is known about whether this generalizes to children’s emotional judgments. The present study tested Canadian and Japanese preschool childre