Researching learning across cultures

The aim of this paper is to invite readers to share the uncertain beginnings of my PhD in which I am seeking to hold reflexive conversations about learning with a group of international postgraduates studying in the UK. As a higher education lecturer in counselling I want to be able to understand the learning stories of such students, how their stories are affected by the learning experiences they encounter in the UK and how my own story is changing as a result of my involvement with them. My struggle to develop an appropriate conceptual framework within which to conduct cross‐cultural research will be described, paying particular attention to the reflexivity of the research activity and how it relates to the counselling process.     

Personality dimensions across cultures

In order to generalize the dimensional structure of personality-relatively independent groups of covarying traits-across languages and cultures, a large number of cultures must be studied. Until recently only a few worldwide personality datasets have been available. The first large-scale studies indicate that the pattern of covariation between personality traits is universal and is relatively easily generalizable across languages and cultures. In contrast to the structure of personality, the comparison of the mean trait scores across cultures is much more problematic because cross-cultural differences turned out to be very small in their magnitude, about one-third of the magnitude of individual differences within culture. More integral (e.g., the similarity between personality profiles) or subtle (e.g., the disparity between positively and negatively worded items) measures can reveal more systematic relationships with relevant socioeconomic and geographic variables than the mean scores themselves. Relatively modest sizes of cross-cultural differences in the mean values may imply that a reasonable scalar equivalence can be achieved, and all individuals, irrespective of their language and culture, can be represented in a common metric.     

Consistency-based compliance across cultures

A field study investigated cross-cultural differences in choice-congruent behavior and its impact on compliance. U.S. and Asian participants received a request to complete an online survey and a month later they were approached with a larger, related request. Compliance with the initial request had a stronger impact on subsequent compliance among the U.S. participants than among the Asian participants. Despite their lower rate of compliance with the initial request, the U.S. participants who chose to comply were more likely than their Asian counterparts to agree to the subsequent request. Further analyses revealed that this effect was driven by differences in the individualistic/collectivistic orientation of the participants from the two cultures. Within both cultures, the more individualistic participants showed stronger consistency with their earlier compliance than the more collectivistically oriented participants.     

Cognitive arithmetic across cultures.

Canadian university students either of Chinese origin (CC) or non-Asian origin (NAC) and Chinese university students educated in Asia (AC) solved simple-arithmetic problems in the 4 basic operations (e.g., 3 + 4, 7 - 3, 3 x 4, 12 divided by 3) and reported their solution strategies. They also completed a standardized test of more complex multistep arithmetic. For complex arithmetic, ACs outperformed both CCs and NACs. For simple arithmetic, however, ACs and CCs were equal and both performed better than NACs. The superior simple-arithmetic skills of CCs relative to NACs implies that extracurricular culture-specific factors rather than differences in formal education explain the simple-arithmetic advantage for Chinese relative to non-Asian North American adults. NAC's relatively poor simple-arithmetic performance resulted both from less efficient retrieval skills and greater use of procedural strategies. Nonetheless, all 3 groups reported using procedures for the larger simple subtraction and division problems, confirming the importance of procedural knowledge in skilled adults' performance of elementary mathematics.     

Religious cultures and gender cultures: tracing gender differences across religious cultures

This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Religion focuses on varying empirical connections and theoretical relations between ‘religion’ and ‘gender’. The introduction to this special issue suggests a theoretical approach which is sensitive to culture by drawing on a phenomenological understanding of culture that is based on knowledge and meaning production and sense making. At first sight, this may not sound convincing because ‘culture’ is a category that is most notably used in combination with religion and gender in culturalist ways. In the migration societies of contemporary Europe, religion has become a metaphor for cultural difference and symbolic boundary-making. The core element of this approach is the conceptualisation of culture as a social web consisting of symbolic forms based on signs of meaning that shape social action, orientation, and experience in the world, including the religious sphere. This entails an understanding of religion as a distinct province of meaning that is structured by processes of social symbolisation just like any other sphere of life. This approach reveals that culturalist conceptions of both religion and gender have specific social meanings as meaningful signs in the symbolic order of secular modernity.     

Unique pathways to resilience across cultures

An international mixed methods study of resilience of 14 sites in eleven countries identified seven tensions that youth resolve in culturally specific ways. Resolution of these tensions is foundational to experiences of resilience. This paper reports on the qualitative findings from interviews with 89 youth. Results support a culturally embedded understanding of positive youth development that better accounts for young people's resilience in western and non-western countries. Specifically, the seven tensions identified include: access to material resources, relationships, identity, cohesion, power and control, social justice, and cultural adherence. Findings show that no one pattern in the resolution of these tensions predicts resilience better than another. A case study of a Palestinian boy demonstrates the intersection of the seven tensions and the uniqueness of their resolution. The implications of this work for interventions is discussed.     

Emotional reactions to crime across cultures

Information about the emotions experienced by observers when they witness crimes would have important theoretical and practical implications, but to date no study has broadly assessed such emotional reactions. This study addressed this gap in the literature. Observers in seven countries viewed seven videos portraying actual crimes and rated their emotional reactions to each using 14 emotion scales. Observers reported significantly high levels of negative emotions including anger, contempt, disgust, fear and sadness‐related emotions, and anger, contempt and disgust were the most salient emotions experienced by viewers across all countries. Witnesses also reported significantly high levels of positive emotions as well (compared to not feeling the emotion at all), which was unexpected. Country moderated the emotion ratings; post‐hoc analyses indicated that masculine‐oriented cultures reported less nervousness, surprise, excitement, fear and embarrassment than feminine cultures.     

Theory of mind development in Chinese children: a meta-analysis of false-belief understanding across cultures and languages

Theory of mind is claimed to develop universally among humans across cultures with vastly different folk psychologies. However, in the attempt to test and confirm a claim of universality, individual studies have been limited by small sample sizes, sample specificities, and an overwhelming focus on Anglo- European children. The current meta-analysis of children's false-belief performance provides the most comprehensive examination to date of theory-of-mind development in a population of non-Western children speaking non-Indo-European languages (i.e., Mandarin and Cantonese). The meta-analysis consisted of 196 Chinese conditions (127 from mainland China and 69 from Hong Kong), representing responses from more than 3,000 children, compared with 155 similar North American conditions (83 conditions from the United States and 72 conditions from Canada). The findings show parallel developmental trajectories of false-belief understanding for children in China and North America coupled with significant differences in the timing of development across communities-children's false-belief performance varied across different locales by as much as 2 or more years. These data support the importance of both universal trajectories and specific experiential factors in the development of theory of mind.     

Uncertainty regulation across cultures: An exploration of individual differences in Chinese and Canadian children in the classroom

This research investigates whether individual differences in uncertainty orientation affect classroom behavior for Chinese and Canadian children. Uncertainty orientation distinguishes between uncertainty-oriented individuals, or those who attempt to attain clarity by finding out for themselves, and certainty-oriented individuals, or those who attempt to maintain clarity by adhering to predictable environments. Although uncertainty orientation is considered an informational variable, uncertainty-oriented children in both countries had higher self-ratings, ratings by other students and ratings by their teachers than certainty-oriented children on a variety of social and achievement behaviours. These results suggest that encouraging a discovery learning style of uncertainty regulation in “UO-centric” cultures may be beneficial.     

Cross-situational consistency of affective experiences across cultures

This study examined cross-situational consistency of affective experiences using an experience-sampling method in Japan, India, and the United States. Participants recorded their moods and situations when signaled at random moments for 7 days. The authors examined relative (interindividual) consistency and absolute (within-person) consistency. They found stable interindividual differences of affective experiences across various situations (mean r =.52 for positive affect.51 for negative affect) and cultural invariance of the cross-situational consistency of affective experiences. Simultaneously, the authors found a considerable degree of within-person cross-situational variation in affective experiences, and cultural differences in within-person cross-situational consistency. Thus, global affective traits exist among non-Western samples, but the degree to which situations exert an influence on the absolute level of affective experience varies across cultures.     

Retrieval-induced forgetting of arithmetic facts across cultures

Retrieving a single-digit multiplication fact (3×4 =12) can slow response time (RT) for the corresponding addition fact (3+4=7). The present experiment investigated effects of problem type (i.e., tie addition problems such as 3+3 vs. non-ties such as 3+4) and cultural background on this retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) phenomenon in young adults. Canadians answering in English (n=36), Chinese adults answering in English (n=36), and Chinese answering in Chinese (n=36) received four blocks of multiplication practice and then two blocks of the addition counterparts and control additions. Tie addition problems presented a robust RIF effect that did not differ between groups, but only the Canadian group showed RIF for non-ties and only for small non-ties with sum≤10 (3+4). The Chinese groups' RIF effect for addition ties, but not small non-ties, converges with recent evidence that ties are solved by direct memory retrieval whereas small non-ties may be solved by highly efficient procedural processes in skilled performers.     

Risk factors for adolescent marijuana use across cultures and across time.

An integrated analysis of the data from 3 different studies was conducted to examine the early psychosocial predictors of later marijuana use among adolescents. Longitudinal analysis of interview data was performed. The data used in the analysis were derived from (a) a sample of 739 predominantly White adolescents representative of the northeastern United States, (b) a sample of 1,190 minority adolescents from the East Harlem section of New York City, and (c) a sample of 1,374 Colombian adolescents from two cities in Colombia, South America. In 2 of the samples, participants were interviewed in their homes, and in the 3rd study, participants were assessed in school. The predictors included a number of variables from (a) the personality domain, reflecting the adolescents' conventionality and intrapsychic functioning; (b) the family domain, representing the parent-child mutual attachment relationship and parental substance use; (c) the peer domain, reflecting the peer group's delinquency and substance use; and (d) the adolescents' own use of legal drugs. The dependent variable was adolescent marijuana use. The results of the analysis demonstrated remarkable consistency in the risk and protective factors for later marijuana use across the 3 samples, attesting to the robust nature of these predictors and their generalizability across gender, time, location, and ethnic/cultural background. These findings have important implications for designing intervention programs. Programs aimed at preventing adolescent marijuana use can be designed to incorporate universal features and still incorporate specific components that address the unique needs of adolescents from different groups.     

Communicating across cultures: A social skills perspective

This paper considers some of the difficulties that people experience when communicating with people from another culture. The concept of culture shock is discussed in some detail. The best predictors of the successful business sojourn are then described. Five methods of training in interpersonal skills are discussed followed by typical examples of cultural differences in social behaviour.     

The structure of goal contents across 15 cultures

The authors investigated the structure of goal contents in a group of 1,854 undergraduates from 15 cultures around the world. Results suggested that the 11 types of goals the authors assessed were consistently organized in a circumplex fashion across the 15 cultures. The circumplex was well described by positioning 2 primary dimensions underlying the goals: intrinsic (e.g., self-acceptance, affiliation) versus extrinsic (e.g., financial success, image) and self-transcendent (e.g., spirituality) versus physical (e.g., hedonism). The circumplex model of goal contents was also quite similar in both wealthier and poorer nations, although there were some slight cross-cultural variations. The relevance of these results for several theories of motivation and personality are discussed.     

Perceived social image and life satisfaction across cultures

We studied the relationship between perceived social image and life satisfaction in four different cultural groups. One-hundred nine Indian (63 females, 46 males), 67 Pakistani/Bangladeshi (36 females, 31 males), 76 White British (43 females, 33 males), and 94 European Americans (43 females, 48 males) completed measures on the cultural importance of social image, positive and negative emotions, academic achievement, and perceived social image. Indian and Pakistani/Bangladeshi participants valued social image more than White British and European-American participants. Consistent with this value difference, a positive perceived social image predicted life satisfaction among Indian and Pakistani/Bangladeshi participants only. For these participants, perceived social image predicted life satisfaction above and beyond the effects of emotions and academic achievement. Academic achievement only predicted life satisfaction among White British and European Americans. Emotions were significant predictors of life satisfaction for all participants.     

Nature and nurture: Williams syndrome across cultures

This study is concerned with ways in which children with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare neurodevelopmental disorder arising from a hemizygous deletion in chromosome band 7q11.23 including the gene for elastin (ELN) and approximately 20 surrounding genes, are affected by social mores of vastly differing cultures: the United States and Japan. WS presents a compelling model for the investigation because its genetic phenotype is well defined and results in an uneven cognitive profile as well as a social phenotype typical of the syndrome including overt over-friendliness toward strangers. While a number of research groups have been studying the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of individuals with WS in various countries, there have not been studies to date that explore the social phenotype in WS across different cultures. This study examines the ways in which social behavior in WS, stemming from specific genetic underpinnings, might be mediated by cultural expectations. We conducted a cross-cultural study using an instrument that measures aspects of sociability commonly found among people with WS. Quantitative analyses revealed a significant effect of diagnostic category in that in both countries, children with WS were rated as significantly higher in global sociability and more likely to approach strangers than were their normal counterparts. There was also an effect of culture, in that regardless of category, WS and normal children in Japan were rated lower than their counterparts in the US. We suggest that the excessively social phenotype of children with Williams syndrome, although markedly present across cultures, appears to vary in its intensity by culture. This is an intriguing illustration of interactions between nature and nurture.