Cross-Cultural Research

To examine cultural, parental, and personal sources of young adults’ long-term romantic partner preferences, we had undergraduates (n = 2,071) and their parents (n = 1,851) in eight countries (Canada, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Philippines, the United States) rate or rank qualities they would want in the student’s partner. We introduce and use a method for separating preference patterns into normative patterns (shared across families and generations) and distinctive patterns (that characterized particular families or individuals). We found that youth everywhere wanted partners who aligned with both their own dispositions and their parents’ preferences, and these alignments reflected both culturally normative preferences and preferences distinctive to specific individuals or families. Students also predicted their parents’ responses: Their predictions were reasonably accurate reflections of what a typical parent prefers, but also reflected distinctive assumed agreement (i.e., they overestimated the degree to which their particular parents shared their particular preferences for qualities that diverged from culturally normative ideals). Culturally normative patterns exerted a stronger influence on actual or assumed parent–child agreement and accuracy in relatively collectivistic Southeast Asia (Philippines and Malaysia) than in relatively individualistic English-speaking North America (the United States and Canada). Conversely, preferences for partners who shared one’s distinctive personal dispositions were stronger in Western than Asian countries.

We assessed empirical support for (a) the widely held notion that across so-called “honor, dignity, and face cultures,” internal and external components of self-esteem are differentially important for overall self-esteem; and (b) the idea that concerns for honor are related to internal and external components of self-esteem in honor cultures but not in dignity and face cultures. Most importantly, we also set out to (c) investigate whether measures are equivalent, that is, whether a comparison of means and relationships across cultural groups is possible with the employed scales. Data were collected in six countries (N = 1,099). We obtained only metric invariance for the self-esteem and honor scales, allowing for comparisons of relationships across samples, but not scale means. Partly confirming theoretical ideas on the importance of internal and external components of self-esteem, we found that only external rather than both external and internal self-esteem was relatively more important for overall self-esteem in “honor cultures”; in a “dignity” culture, internal self-esteem was relatively more important than external self-esteem. Contrary to expectations, in a “face” culture, internal self-esteem was relatively more important than external self-esteem. We were not able to conceptually replicate earlier reported relationships between components of self-esteem and the concern for honor, as we observed no cultural differences in the relationship between self-esteem and honor. We point toward the need for future studies to consider invariance testing in the field of honor to appropriately understand differences and similarities between samples.

Veiling is an ancient cultural practice endorsed by religion, social institutions, and laws. Recently, there have been adaptive arguments to explain its function and existence. Specifically, it is argued that veiling women is a form of male mate guarding strategy, which aims to increase sexual fidelity by decreasing overt displays of his mate’s physical attractiveness, thereby helping to secure his reproductive success. Furthermore, it is suggested that such mate retention strategies (veiling) should be more important when child survival is more precarious, as cues to sexual fidelity support higher paternal investment. Using publicly available data from the PEW Research Center encompassing 26,282 individuals from 25 countries, we tested the hypotheses that men should be more supportive of women’s veiling and this support should be more important in harsher environments, particularly those with poor health and high mortality rates, where paternal care is presumably more important. Our results show that men were more supportive of veiling than women, and this support increased as the environments became harsher. Overall, these findings support the male mate retention argument as well as the idea that the practice of veiling is sensitive to environmental differences.

This article proposes a culturally implicit perspective of emotional intelligence and introduces the notion of culture-specific emotional intelligence (CSEI). Emotional intelligence (EI) as a construct has predominantly been associated with the individual. Given that emotions are also implicit beliefs and that their experience, expression, and management are known to be driven by cultural values, we suggest EI to be culturally embedded. We therefore suggest that EI is culture-specific. Culture-specific EI serves as an important social resource affecting behaviors. We provide a brief review of literature that elucidates the multi-level nature of EI and highlights the role of culture as both antecedent and moderator of CSEI. Implications for theory and cross-cultural phenomena are discussed.