American and Japanese women use different coping strategies during normal pregnancy

In this longitudinal study, pregnant women in Japan and the United States reported on three coping strategies. Two are individually phrased: personal influence over outcomes and acceptance of outcomes. The third, social assurance, is grounded in relationships, noting that close others can influence outcomes. A European American sample rated acceptance highest as a strategy, whereas Japanese women rated social assurance highest. For Americans, acceptance correlated with better pregnancy outcomes (less distress over time, better prenatal care, and less weight gain). For Japanese women, social assurance predicted a more positive maternal relationship. Acceptance correlated with less Time 1 distress in both samples. Surprisingly, personal influence generally did not predict positive outcomes in either sample, perhaps because normal pregnancy is a time-limited event with a positive prognosis. The findings are consistent with the view that well-being is related to individual variables in the United States but also to features of social relationships in Japan.     

Cultural Shaping of Self,Emotion, and Well‐Being: How Does It Work?

In this paper, we review the existent literature to propose that (i) different cultures have distinct views of self, which are instrumental in organizing daily routines, practices, and public meanings, (ii) the resulting behavioral environment shapes personal motivational propensities, (iii) the behavioral environment also carries information about normative expectations about what it is to be a 'good' person, and, as a consequence, (iv) culture has substantive influences on emotion, well-being, and health. In making this proposal, we highlight the distinction between personal motivational propensities and the society's normative expectations. The consequences of the cultural views of self on personal motivational propensities and those on the society's normative expectations may typically be concordant and, yet, the concordance can be disrupted especially at times of rapid social change. Directions for future research on culture, emotion, and well-being are discussed.     

Outgroup homogeneity effect in perception: An exploration with Ebbinghaus illusion

An outgroup homogeneity (OH) effect implies that outgroup members are perceived to be more similar than ingroup members. At present, however, it is not clear whether the OH effect is truly perceptual. Here, we used an Ebbinghaus illusion to demonstrate the OH effect in perception. Participants were presented with one central face that was surrounded by four surrounding faces. The central face was judged to be smaller as the size of the surrounding faces increased, thereby demonstrating an Ebbinghaus illusion. As predicted, however, this illusion was significantly greater when the faces allegedly belonged to an outgroup than when they allegedly belonged to an ingroup. This perceptual OH effect bore no significant relationship with cognitive OH measures. The perceptual versus cognitive OH effects might therefore be mediated by separate mechanisms.     

Mnemonic Context Effect in Two Cultures: Attention to Memory Representations?

In two experiments we demonstrate a substantial cross-cultural difference in a mnemonic context effect, whereby a magnitude estimate of a simple stimulus such as a line or circle is biased toward the center of the distribution of previously seen instances of the same class. In support of the hypothesis that Asians are more likely than Americans to disperse their attention to both the target stimulus and its mnemonic context, this effect was consistently larger for Japanese than for Americans. Moreover, the cultural difference was attenuated by an experimentally induced belief in class homogeneity that augmented the context effect itself in both cultures. More important, these belief effects happened in the absence of any objective change in stimulus distribution. Implications for sociocultural shaping of cognition are discussed.     

Which studies test whether self‐enhancement is pancultural? Reply to Sedikides,Gaertner, and Vevea, 2007

What types of studies test the question of pancultural self‐enhancement? Sedikides, Gaertner, and Vevea (2007) have identified inclusion criteria that largely limit the question to studies of the better‐than‐average effect (i.e. 27 out of 29 effects that they include as ‘validated’ and ‘relevant’). In contrast, other effects which they labelled as ‘unvalidated’ or ‘irrelevant’ used methods other than the better‐than‐average effect (i.e. 24 out of 24 effects). Because Sedikides et al. are drawing conclusions about pancultural self‐enhancement and not the pancultural better‐than‐average effect, these excluded studies are relevant to the hypothesis under question. Ignoring the findings from other methods is highly problematic, in particular because these other methods yield results that conflict with those from the better‐than‐average effect. An analysis of effects from all studies reveals no support for pancultural self‐enhancement.     

Is there any "free" choice? Self and dissonance in two cultures

Four experiments provided support for the hypothesis that upon making a choice, individuals justify their choice in order to eliminate doubts about culturally sanctioned aspects of the self, namely, competence and efficacy in North America and positive appraisal by other people in Japan. Japanese participants justified their choice (by increasing liking for chosen items and decreasing liking for rejected items) in the standard free-choice dissonance paradigm only when self-relevant others were primed, either by questionnaires (Studies 1-3) or by incidental exposure to schematic faces (Study 4). In the absence of these social cues, Japanese participants showed no dissonance effect. In contrast, European Americans justified their choices regardless of the social-cue manipulations. Implications for cognitive dissonance theory are discussed.     

Cultural affordances and emotional experience: socially engaging and disengaging emotions in Japan and the United States

The authors hypothesized that whereas Japanese culture encourages socially engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt), North American culture fosters socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride and anger). In two cross-cultural studies, the authors measured engaging and disengaging emotions repeatedly over different social situations and found support for this hypothesis. As predicted, Japanese showed a pervasive tendency to reportedly experience engaging emotions more strongly than they experienced disengaging emotions, but Americans showed a reversed tendency. Moreover, as also predicted, Japanese subjective well-being (i.e., the experience of general positive feelings) was more closely associated with the experience of engaging positive emotions than with that of disengaging emotions. Americans tended to show the reversed pattern. The established cultural differences in the patterns of emotion suggest the consistent and systematic cultural shaping of emotion over time.     

Cultural constructions of happiness: theory and emprical evidence

In a review of recent cross-cultural evidence on happiness and well-being, the authors identified substantial cultural variations in (1) cultural meanings of happiness, (2) motivations underlying happiness, and (3) predictors of happiness. Specifically, in North American cultural contexts, happiness tends to be defined in terms of personal achievement. Individuals engaging in these cultures are motivated to maximize the experience of positive affect. Moreover, happiness is best predicted by self-esteem. In contrast, in East Asian cultural contexts, happiness tends to be defined in terms of interpersonal connectedness. Individuals engaging in these cultures are motivated to maintain a balance between positive and negative affects. Moreover, happiness is best predicted by perceived embeddedness of the self in a social relationship. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Impairment of perception by positive and negative affect

Abstract

This study examined the perceptibility of affectively charged words. It was hypothesised that the affect elicited via preattentive processing of an impinging word amplifies subsequent, attentive processing. According to this hypothesis, the affect should impair the veridical perception when the word is presented in an extremely impoverished manner and, as a consequence, attentive processing is likely to be misdirected to an irrelevant perceptual code. In Experiment 1, 52 subjects were shown an affectively positive, negative, or neutral target word (128 words in total) with an extremely diminished contrast for 100, 150, or 200msec. They then chose, from a pair of equivalently valenced words, the one presented. As predicted, choice accuracy was lower for both affectively positive and negative words than for neutral words in all the three exposure time conditions. In further support of the current analysis, Experiment 2 showed that once the stimulus contrast was increased, the accuracy was no worse for the affective words than for the neutral words.