Samar Zebian

Lebanese American University | LAU · Department of Social Sciences

The Living in History (LiH) effect is a litmus test for the degree to which historical events reorganise autobiographical memory. The LiH effect was studied in two Lebanese samples: a Beiruti sample that lived in the epicentre of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and another group from the Bi'qa region who lived in an area that was indirec...

Children’s sense and reasoning about territory and land ownership may develop differently in contexts of poverty and where narratives of dispossession are a part of daily life and are of political and historical significance, as is the case in the Palestinian refugee context in Lebanon. In this study we looked at how 3- and 5-year-old refugee Pales...

The study of numerical magnitude processing provides a unique opportunity to examine interactions between phylogenetically ancient systems of semantic representations and those that are the product of enculturation. While nonsymbolic representations of numerical magnitude are processed similarly by humans and nonhuman animals, symbolic representati...

The inclusion of the social and cultural characteristics of groups in the concept of national development highlights the contributions that culturally sensitive psychological research can make to development efforts. It also highlights the relevance of assessing and promoting such research, especially in majority world countries where development n...

We introduce a new construct called Context Differentiation (CD), and describe how it functions on both the individual and cultural levels. We derive several measures of it from a multi-context measure of cultural display rules for emotional expressions obtained from 33 countries, and examine country and cultural differences on it, and relate those...

The study of everyday numeric thinking in adults directs our attention to several aspects of number cognition that have received almost no attention in the experimental cognitive science literature, namely the influences of socially situated artifact use on numeric processing. The current studies explore numeral recognition and conceptualisation pr...

Despite the importance of the concept of cultural display rules in explaining cultural differences in emotional expression, and despite the fact that it has been over 30 years since this concept was coined (Ekman & Friesen, 1969), there is yet to be a study that surveys display rules across a wide range of cultures. This article reports such a stud...

Contemporary psychologists in the Arabic-speaking world remain deeply concerned with many of the same foundational issues that have impeded the development of sustainable research traditions since at least the 1950s. As a means of assessing historical and current trends in regional research practices, the project reported in this article employs a...

Integrative cognitive style among Middle Eastern immigrants to Canada and native-born Euro-Canadians was assessed by looking at their performance on a multidimensional classification task and an object sorting task. Results showed high levels of integrative thinking in Middle Eastern immigrants compared with Euro-Canadians. The contrasting differen...