Experimental priming of independent and interdependent activity does not affect culturally variable psychological processes

Cultural psychologists have shown that people from Western countries exhibit more independent self-construal and analytic (rule-based) cognition than people from East Asia, who exhibit more interdependent self-construal and holistic (relationship-based) cognition. One explanation for this cross-cultural variation is the ecocultural hypothesis, which links contemporary psychological differences to ancestral differences in subsistence and societal cohesion: Western thinking formed in response to solitary herding, which fostered independence, while East Asian thinking emerged in response to communal rice farming, which fostered interdependence. Here, we report two experiments that tested the ecocultural hypothesis in the laboratory. In both, participants played one of two tasks designed to recreate the key factors of working alone and working together. Before and after each task, participants completed psychological measures of independent-interdependent self-construal and analytic-holistic cognition. We found no convincing evidence that either solitary or collective tasks affected any of the measures in the predicted directions. This fails to support the ecocultural hypothesis. However, it may also be that our priming tasks are inappropriate or inadequate for simulating subsistence-related behavioural practices, or that these measures are fixed early in development and therefore not experimentally primable, despite many previous studies that have purported to find such priming effects.

Subsistence styles shape human social learning strategies

Social learning is a fundamental element of human cognition. Learning from others facilitates the transmission of information that helps individuals and groups rapidly adjust to new environments and underlies adaptive cultural evolution1-6. While basic human propensities for social learning are traditionally assumed to be species-universal1,7, recent empirical studies show that they vary between individuals and populations8-13. Yet the causes of this variation remain poorly understood9. Here we show that interdependence in everyday social and economic activities can strongly amplify social learning. With an experimental decision-making task we examine individual versus social learning in three recently diverged populations of a single-ethnic group, whose subsistence styles require varying degrees of interdependence. Interdependent pastoralists and urban dwellers have markedly higher propensities for social learning than independent horticulturalists, who predominantly rely on individual payoff information. These results indicate that everyday social and economic practices can mould human social learning strategies and they highlight the flexibility of human cognition to change with local ecology. Our study further suggests that shifts in subsistence styles - which can occur when humans inhabit new habitats or cultural niches2 - can alter reliance on social learning and may therefore impact the ability of human societies to adapt to novel circumstances.

The common developmental road: tensions among centripetal and centrifugal dynamics

Western thought since the Enlightenment has been predominantly linear in scope, while Eastern philosophy has focused mostly on the cyclical. Recent advances in complex systems, however, have highlighted the importance of cycles in nature, thereby opening an avenue for new common endeavors. This analysis centers on the role of autocatalytic loops and addresses the evolutionary relationship between competition and cooperation. It posits an evolutionary chain running from individual competition, to individual cooperation, to collective competition, to deep cooperation. We identify the centripetality that is consequent to autocatalysis and define three types of centrifugalities. Development is defined in the context of the tension between these opposing directions. Finally, we propose an evolutionary process consisting of four stages: (i) autognosis, (ii) autocatalytic loop formation, (iii) self-control and (iv) self-realization (sensu Taoism). The developmental narrative promises to become a useful tool for facilitating communication between Eastern and Western cultures.

Onymity promotes cooperation in social dilemma experiments

One of the most elusive scientific challenges for over 150 years has been to explain why cooperation survives despite being a seemingly inferior strategy from an evolutionary point of view. Over the years, various theoretical scenarios aimed at solving the evolutionary puzzle of cooperation have been proposed, eventually identifying several cooperation-promoting mechanisms: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. We report the results of repeated Prisoner's Dilemma experiments with anonymous and onymous pairwise interactions among individuals. We find that onymity significantly increases the frequency of cooperation and the median payoff per round relative to anonymity. Furthermore, we also show that the correlation between players' ranks and the usage of strategies (cooperation, defection, or punishment) underwent a fundamental shift, whereby more prosocial actions are rewarded with a better ranking under onymity. Our findings prove that reducing anonymity is a valid promoter of cooperation, leading to higher payoffs for cooperators and thus suppressing an incentive-anonymity-that would ultimately favor defection.

Cultural shaping of neural responses: Feedback-related potentials vary with self-construal and face priming

Previous work shows that when an image of a face is presented immediately prior to each trial of a speeded cognitive task (face-priming), the error-related negativity (ERN) is upregulated for Asians, but it is downregulated for Caucasians. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that images of "generalized other" vary cross-culturally such that they evoke anxiety for Asians, whereas they serve as safety cues for Caucasians. Here, we tested whether the cross-cultural variation in the face-priming effect would be observed in a gambling paradigm. Caucasian Americans, Asian Americans, and Asian sojourners were exposed to a brief flash of a schematic face during a gamble. For Asian Americans, face-priming resulted in significant increases of both negative-going deflection of ERP upon negative feedback (feedback-related negativity [FRN]) and positive-going deflection of ERP upon positive feedback (feedback-related positivity [FRP]). For Caucasian Americans, face-priming showed a significant reversal, decreasing both FRN and FRP. The cultural difference in the face-priming effect in FRN and FRP was partially mediated by interdependent self-construal. Curiously, Asian sojourners showed a pattern similar to the one for Caucasian Americans. Our findings suggest that culture shapes neural pathways in both systematic and highly dynamic fashion.

Income and Well-Being: Relative Income and Absolute Income Weaken Negative Emotion, but Only Relative Income Improves Positive Emotion

Whether relative income or absolute income could affect subjective well-being has been a bone of contention for years. Life satisfaction and the relative frequency of positive and negative emotions are parts of subjective well-being. According to the prospect theory, hedonic adaptation helps to explain why positive emotion is often so hard to be maintained, and negative emotion wouldn’t be easy to be eliminated. So we expect the relationship between income and positive emotion is different from that between income and negative emotion. Given that regional reference is the main comparison mechanism, effects of regional average income on regional average subjective well-being should be potentially zero if only relative income matters. Using multilevel analysis, we tested the hypotheses with a dataset of 30,144 individuals from 162 counties in China. The results suggested that household income at the individual level is associated with life satisfaction, happiness and negative emotions. On the contrary, at a county level, household income is only associated with negative emotion. In other words, happiness and life satisfaction was only associated with relative income, but negative emotion was associated with relative income and absolute income. Without social comparison, income doesn’t improve happiness, but it could weaken negative emotion. Therefore, it is possible for economic growth to weaken negative emotion without improving happiness. These findings also contribute to the current debate about the “Esterling paradox.”

Social-Class Differences in Consumer Choices: Working-Class Individuals Are More Sensitive to Choices of Others Than Middle-Class Individuals

The present research shows that, when making choices, working-class Americans are more affected by others' opinions than middle-class Americans due to differences in independent versus interdependent self-construal. Experiment 1 revealed that when working-class Americans made decisions to buy products, they were more influenced by the choices of others than middle-class Americans. In contrast, middle-class Americans were more likely to misremember others' choices to be consistent with their own choices. In other words, working-class Americans adjusted their choices to the preference of others, whereas middle-class Americans distorted others' preferences to fit their choices. Supporting our prediction that this social-class effect is closely linked to the independent versus interdependent self-construal, we showed that the differences in self-construal across cultures qualified the social-class effects on choices (Experiment 2). Moreover, when we experimentally manipulated self-construal in Experiment 3, we found that it mediated the corresponding changes in choices regardless of social class.

Innovation in the collective brain

Innovation is often assumed to be the work of a talented few, whose products are passed on to the masses. Here, we argue that innovations are instead an emergent property of our species' cultural learning abilities, applied within our societies and social networks. Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. We outline how many human brains, which evolved primarily for the acquisition of culture, together beget a collective brain. Within these collective brains, the three main sources of innovation are serendipity, recombination and incremental improvement. We argue that rates of innovation are heavily influenced by (i) sociality, (ii) transmission fidelity, and (iii) cultural variance. We discuss some of the forces that affect these factors. These factors can also shape each other. For example, we provide preliminary evidence that transmission efficiency is affected by sociality--languages with more speakers are more efficient. We argue that collective brains can make each of their constituent cultural brains more innovative. This perspective sheds light on traits, such as IQ, that have been implicated in innovation. A collective brain perspective can help us understand otherwise puzzling findings in the IQ literature, including group differences, heritability differences and the dramatic increase in IQ test scores over time.

Geographical Psychology

There is geographical variation in the ways in which people think, feel, and behave. How are we to understand the causes and consequences of such variation? Geographical psychology is an emerging subarea of research concerned with the spatial organization of psychological phenomena and how individual characteristics, social entities, and physical features of the environment contribute to their organization. Studies at multiple levels of analysis have indicated that social influence, ecological influence, and selective migration are key mechanisms that contribute to the spatial clustering of psychological characteristics. Investigations in multiple countries have shown that the psychological characteristics common in particular regions are respectively linked to important political, economic, and health indicators. Furthermore, results from large multilevel studies have shown that the psychological characteristics of individuals interact with features of the local environment to impact psychological development and well-being. Future research is needed to better understand the scale and impact of person-environment associations over time.

Women Tend to Defect in a Social Dilemma Game in Southwest China

Cooperation theories assume that interacting individuals can change their strategies under different expected payoffs, depending on their social status or social situations. When looking at sex differences in cooperation, the existing studies have found that the genders cooperate at similar frequencies. However, the majority of the data originate within Western human societies. In this paper, we explore whether there are gender differences in cooperation in China. An Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game with a punishment option was used to gather data about Southwest Chinese subjects in a culture in which men have a hierarchical advantage over women. Results indicate that men invested into partners significantly more than women did (34% ♂ vs. 24% ♀) while women, in turn, were more likely to defect (65% ♀ vs. 50% ♂). In this region, women have customarily held less economic power and they are used to obtain a payoff typically lower than men. We suggest that the women’s willingness to invest in cooperation has decreased throughout evolutionary time, providing us with an illustration of a culturally-driven shift towards a disparity in gender cooperation interests.

Sex Ideologies in China: Examining Interprovince Differences

In recent decades, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexuality have become increasingly visible in China, leading scholars to claim that a national "sex revolution" is under way. However, China's internal sociocultural diversity calls this nation-level generalization into question. How do sex ideologies vary across China's distinct provinces? To what extent are interprovince variations in sex ideologies associated with distinct macrolevel social factors in China? In this research, data from the 2010 China General Social Survey and the 2011 Chinese Statistics Yearbook were analyzed using multilevel models to test four contending theories of interprovince differences in sex ideologies in China: modernization, Westernization, deindustrialization, and the "rice theory." The modernization theory was unsupported by the results, as socioeconomic development is not significantly associated with sex ideologies. Higher levels of deindustrialization and Westernization were associated with less traditional sex ideologies, but the strength of association varied across the domains of premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexuality. The rice theory was consistently supported, as the distinction between rice and wheat agriculture explained up to 30% of the province-level variance in sex ideologies. The findings underline the roles of both long-standing geographic differences and recent social changes in shaping China's ideational landscape of sex.

Geography of conservation spending, biodiversity, and culture

We used linear and multivariate models to examine the associations between geography, biodiversity, per capita economic output, national spending on conservation, governance, and cultural traits in 55 countries. Cultural traits and social metrics of modernization correlated positively with national spending on conservation. The global distribution of this spending culture was poorly aligned with the distribution of biodiversity. Specifically, biodiversity was greater in the tropics where cultures tended to spend relatively less on conservation and tended to have higher collectivism, formalized and hierarchical leadership, and weaker governance. Consequently, nations lacking social traits frequently associated with modernization, environmentalism, and conservation spending have the largest component of Earth's biodiversity. This has significant implications for setting policies and priorities for resource management given that biological diversity is rapidly disappearing and cultural traits change slowly. Therefore, we suggest natural resource management adapt to and use characteristics of existing social organization rather than wait for or promote social values associated with conservation spending. Supporting biocultural traditions, engaging leaders to increase conservation commitments, cross-national efforts that complement attributes of cultures, and avoiding interference with nature may work best to conserve nature in collective and hierarchical societies. Spending in modernized nations may be a symbolic response to a symptom of economic development and environmental degradation, and here conservation actions need to ensure that biodiversity is not being lost.

Religion and Culture

Religion is an important topic to understand in cross-cultural psychology. More theorizing and empirical work has gone into Western religions than Eastern religions. We briefly review work on cultural differences among Western religious groups, using the framework of individualism and collectivism. Such work raises questions on how religions and cultures affect each other, how diverse cultural groups are, and how confounded country and religious identities are. We then ask some of the same questions about Eastern religions and propose new questions for a cross-cultural psychology of religion, such as what counts as a religion, and whether there are nonreligious parallels of religious constructs that serve similar functions (e.g., belief in a just world [BJW], or social axiom of reward for human application). In all, we propose that a greater attention to both Western and Eastern religions in cross-cultural psychology can be illuminating regarding religion and culture.

Culture Three Ways: Culture and Subcultures Within Countries

Culture can be thought of as a set of everyday practices and a core theme-individualism, collectivism, or honor-as well as the capacity to understand each of these themes. In one's own culture, it is easy to fail to see that a cultural lens exists and instead to think that there is no lens at all, only reality. Hence, studying culture requires stepping out of it. There are two main methods to do so: The first involves using between-group comparisons to highlight differences and the second involves using experimental methods to test the consequences of disruption to implicit cultural frames. These methods highlight three ways that culture organizes experience: (a) It shields reflexive processing by making everyday life feel predictable, (b) it scaffolds which cognitive procedure (connect, separate, or order) will be the default in ambiguous situations, and (c) it facilitates situation-specific accessibility of alternate cognitive procedures. Modern societal social-demographic trends reduce predictability and increase collectivism and honor-based go-to cognitive procedures.

Culture and decision making

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We review the literature on culture and decision making.

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We comprehensively analyze ten decision making phases.

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Possible causes of cultural differences are reviewed and critiqued.

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Big-picture questions for future research are discussed.

The study of culture and decision making addresses variations in how and why people from different cultures sometimes tend to decide differently. This review is organized around what is intended to be a comprehensive analysis of the distinct fundamental questions that people must answer in the process of making virtually all real-life decisions. Our emphasis was on recent developments as well as identifying important yet neglected topics (e.g., how decision episodes get started—or not, and why some decisions are never implemented). Early as well as current efforts have focused mainly on East Asian and North American Caucasian cultures, with little treatment of other populations. In such studies, individualism and collectivism have been the dominant explanatory factors although related but distinct concepts such as “tightness” and “looseness” have been welcome additions to recent discussions. Throughout, the review emphasizes practical concerns, such as the challenges of intercultural learning and collaboration.

Improving Medical Decision Making and Health Promotion through Culture-Sensitive Health Communication

This review introduces the concept of culture-sensitive health communication. The basic premise is that congruency between the recipient’s cultural characteristics and the respective message will increase the communication’s effectiveness. Culture-sensitive health communication is therefore defined as the deliberate and evidence-informed adaptation of health communication to the recipients’ cultural background in order to increase knowledge and improve preparation for medical decision making and to enhance the persuasiveness of messages in health promotion. To achieve effective health communication in varying cultural contexts, an empirically and theoretically based understanding of culture will be indispensable. We therefore define culture, discuss which evolutionary and structural factors contribute to the development of cultural diversity, and examine how differences are conceptualized as scientific constructs in current models of cultural differences. In addition, we will explicate the implications of cultural differences for psychological theorizing, because common constructs of health behavior theories and decision making, such as attitudes or risk perception, are subject to cultural variation. In terms of communication, we will review both communication strategies and channels that are used to disseminate health messages, and we will discuss the implications of cultural differences for their effectiveness. Finally, we propose an agenda both for science and for practice to advance and apply the evidence base for culture-sensitive health communication. This calls for more interdisciplinary research between science and practice but also between scientific disciplines and between basic and applied research.

Right: Left:: East: West. Evidence that individuals from East Asian and South Asian cultures emphasize right hemisphere functions in comparison to Euro-American cultures

We present evidence that individuals from East or South Asian cultures (Japanese college students in Japan and East or South Asian born and raised college students in the USA) tend to exhibit default thinking that corresponds to right hemisphere holistic functions, as compared to Caucasian individuals from a Western culture (born and raised in the USA). In two lateralized tasks (locating the nose in a scrambled face, and global-local letter task), both Asian groups showed a greater right hemisphere bias than the Western group. In a third lateralized task, judging similarity in terms of visual form versus functional/semantic categorizations, there was not a reliable difference between the groups. On a classic, ambiguous face composed of vegetables, both Eastern groups displayed a greater right hemisphere (holistic face processing) bias than the Western group. These results support an "East - Right Hemisphere, West - Left Hemisphere" hypothesis, as originally proposed by Ornstein (1972). This hypothesis is open as to the degree to which social-cultural forces were involved in hemispheric specialization, or the opposite, or both. Our aim is to encourage a more thorough analysis of this hypothesis, suggesting both lateralization studies corresponding to documented East-West differences, and East-West studies corresponding to lateralization differences.

Beyond Dominance and Competence: A Moral Virtue Theory of Status Attainment

Recognition has grown that moral behavior (e.g., generosity) plays a role in status attainment, yet it remains unclear how, why, and when demonstrating moral characteristics enhances status. Drawing on philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and organizational behavior, I critically review a third route to attaining status: virtue, and propose a moral virtue theory of status attainment to provide a generalized account of the role of morality in status attainment. The moral virtue theory posits that acts of virtue elicit feelings of warmth and admiration (for virtue), and willing deference, toward the virtuous actor. I further consider how the scope and priority of moralities and virtues endorsed by a moral community are bound by culture and social class to affect which moral characteristics enhance status. I end by outlining an agenda for future research into the role of virtue in status attainment.

The Chinese Experience of Rapid Modernization: Sociocultural Changes, Psychological Consequences?

Mainland China has undergone profound changes dating back to the nineteenth century, including a contemporary period of rapid modernization that began in the 1980s. The result has been dramatic social, cultural, and economic shifts impacting the daily lives of Chinese people. In this paper, we explore the psychological implications of sociocultural transformation in China, emphasizing two central themes. First, rising individualism: findings from social and developmental psychology suggest that China’s rapid development has been accompanied by ever-increasing adherence to individualistic values. Second, rising rates of depression: findings from psychiatric epidemiology point to increasing prevalence of depression over this same time period, particularly in rural settings. We argue that links between sociocultural and psychological shifts in China can be usefully studied through a cultural psychology lens, emphasizing the mutual constitution of culture, mind, and brain. In particular, we note that the link between social change, individualism, and rising mental illness deserves careful attention. Our review suggests that shifting values and socialization practices shape emotion norms of concealment and display, with implications for depressive symptom presentation. The challenge comes with interpretation. Increasing prevalence rates of depression may indeed be a general response to the rapidity of sociocultural change, or a specific consequence of rising individualism—but may also result from increasingly ‘Western’ patterns of symptom presentation, or improvements in diagnostic practice. We conclude by considering the challenges posed to standard universal models of psychological phenomena.

Contextual Effect of Wealth on Independence: An Examination through Regional Differences in China

The current study disentangled two different effects of wealth on psychological tendency toward independence: one is an effect exerted at the individual level (i.e., being rich) and the other one is a contextual effect (i.e., being surrounded by rich individuals). Past research has found a stronger tendency toward independence among people in economically developed societies. This association has often been explained as a result of a greater amount of choices, and thus more opportunities to express individuality that wealth affords individuals. In addition to this individual-level process, theories in cultural psychology imply that the wealth-independence link also reflects social processes—living in a rich society, regardless of one’s own wealth, promotes independence (contextual effect of wealth on independence). Through a large-scale survey in China, using multilevel analyses, we found that wealth had both the individual-level effect and contextual effect on independence as well as related psychological tendencies (influence orientation and generalized trust), suggesting that individuals are more likely to be independent with greater personal wealth and when surrounded by wealthy others. Possible processes through which independence is promoted by liing in a wealthy area are discussed.

Socio-economic development and emotion-health connection revisited: a multilevel modeling analysis using data from 162 counties in China

Background

Substantial research has shown that emotions play a critical role in physical health. However, most of these studies were conducted in industrialized countries, and it is still an open question whether the emotion-health connection is a “first-world problem”.

Methods

In the current study, we examined socio-economic development’s influence on emotion-health connection by performing multilevel-modeling analysis in a dataset of 33,600 individuals from 162 counties in China.

Results

Results showed that both positive emotions and negative emotions predicted level of physical health and regional Gross Domestic Product Per Capita (GDPPC) had some impact on the association between emotion and health through accessibility of medical resources and educational status. But these impacts were suppressed, and the total effects of GDPPC on emotion-health connections were not significant.

Conclusions

These results support the universality of emotion-health connection across levels of GDPPC and provide new insight into how socio-economic development might affect these connections.

Influence of Cultural Meaning System and Socioeconomic Change on Indecisiveness in Three Cultures

Psychologists have debated two external factors that influence human behaviors: current socioeconomic changes and historically shared cultural meaning systems. By conducting triangular comparisons among Hong Kong Chinese, mainland Chinese, and European Canadians, the current study examined whether these two factors differentially influence people’s indecisiveness. We found that (a) Hong Kong Chinese participants’ level of indecisiveness was highest, and there were no differences between the two other groups; (b) dialectical beliefs facilitated participants’ indecisiveness whereas optimism toward the future attenuated it across cultures and both factors explained cultural variations in indecisiveness; and (c) different from European Canadians’ optimism, optimism about the future promoted by perception of current rapid societal change made mainland Chinese more decisive. The importance of within-region analyses to disentangle varying factors in decision-making processes is discussed.

Cultural Differences between East Asian and North American in Temporal Orientation

Based on East Asian and North American differences in holistic versus analytical cognitive processing style and the tendency to predict cyclical versus linear trends, this review proposes cultural differences in their temporal orientation. Building on prior research that has compared the cultural differences on past, present, and future orientation, this review hypothesizes that East Asians focus on the past and future more than North Americans, and North Americans focus on the present more than East Asians. It is suggested that in addition to a cultural difference in the focus on the 3 temporal domains, when moving from any past or future time point toward the present, North Americans’ focus on the temporal domain grows more than East Asians’ focus. I present evidence in three categories based on how temporal orientation is defined. Specially, I compare East Asians’ and North Americans’ focus on a temporal domain, their mental representation of a temporal domain and their subjective temporal distance to a temporal domain.

Dopamine-System Genes and Cultural Acquisition: The Norm Sensitivity Hypothesis

Previous research in cultural psychology shows that cultures vary in the social orientation of independence and interdependence. To date, however, little is known about how people may acquire such global patterns of cultural behavior or cultural norms. Nor is it clear what genetic mechanisms may underlie the acquisition of cultural norms. Here, we draw on recent evidence for certain genetic variability in the susceptibility to environmental influences and propose a norm sensitivity hypothesis, which holds that people acquire culture, and rules of cultural behaviors, through reinforcement-mediated social learning processes. One corollary of the hypothesis is that the degree of cultural acquisition should be influenced by polymorphic variants of genes involved in dopaminergic neural pathways, which have been widely implicated in reinforcement learning. We reviewed initial evidence for this prediction and discussed challenges and directions for future research.

Who Reaps the Benefits of Social Change? Exploration and Its Socioecological Boundaries

We investigated the interplay between the personality trait exploration and objective socioecological conditions in shaping individual differences in the experience of two individual-level benefits of current social change: new lifestyle options, which arise from the societal trend toward individualization, and new learning opportunities, which accrue from the societal trend toward lifelong learning. We hypothesized that people with higher trait exploration experience a greater increase in lifestyle options and learning opportunities--but more so in social ecologies in which individualization and lifelong learning are stronger, thus offering greater latitude for exploring the benefits of these trends. We employed structural equation modeling in two parallel adult samples from Germany (N = 2,448) and Poland (N = 2,571), using regional divorce rates as a proxy for individualization and Internet domain registration rates as a proxy for lifelong learning. Higher exploration was related to a greater perceived increase in lifestyle options and in learning opportunities over the past 5 years. These associations were stronger in regions in which the trends toward individualization and lifelong learning, respectively, were more prominent. Individuals higher in exploration are better equipped to reap the benefits of current social change--but the effects of exploration are bounded by the conditions in the social ecology.

Can Income Inequality be Associated With Positive Outcomes? Hope Mediates the Positive Inequality–Happiness Link in Rural China

Prior studies on the inequality–happiness link have yielded mixed results and tend to focus on mechanisms that explain the negative effects of inequality. The current study investigated the inequality–happiness link in China and examined hope as a mechanism that explains positive effects of income inequality. Using data from a large sample of 30,255 Chinese respondents, greater inequality was associated with higher life satisfaction in rural China but not significantly associated with life satisfaction in urban China. The positive inequality–happiness link in rural areas was mediated by hope. By providing evidence for a mechanism through which income inequality can lead to greater well-being, the current study sheds light on the heterogeneity of prior findings on the inequality–happiness link. These results supported a dual-process model of income inequality in which inequality leads to higher or lower subjective well-being through hope and social comparison depending on stages of economic development.

Collective behaviour, uncertainty and environmental change

A central aspect of cultural evolutionary theory concerns how human groups respond to environmental change. Although we are painting with a broad brush, it is fair to say that prior to the twenty-first century, adaptation often happened gradually over multiple human generations, through a combination of individual and social learning, cumulative cultural evolution and demographic shifts. The result was a generally resilient and sustainable population. In the twenty-first century, however, considerable change happens within small portions of a human generation, on a vastly larger range of geographical and population scales and involving a greater degree of horizontal learning. As a way of gauging the complexity of societal response to environmental change in a globalized future, we discuss several theoretical tools for understanding how human groups adapt to uncertainty. We use our analysis to estimate the limits of predictability of future societal change, in the belief that knowing when to hedge bets is better than relying on a false sense of predictability.

Macropsychological Factors Predict Regional Economic Resilience During a Major Economic Crisis

Do macropsychological factors predict “hard” economic outcomes like regional economic resilience? Prior approaches to understanding economic resilience have focused on regional economic infrastructure. In contrast, we draw on research highlighting the key role played by psychological factors in economic behaviors. Using large psychological data sets from the United States ( n = 935,858) and Great Britain ( n = 417,217), we characterize region-level psychological correlates of economic resilience. Specifically, we examine links between regions’ levels of psychological traits and their degree of economic slowdown (indexed by changes in entrepreneurial vitality) in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008–2009. In both countries, more emotionally stable regions and regions with a more prevalent entrepreneurial personality makeup showed a significantly lower economic slowdown. This effect was robust when accounting for regional differences in economic infrastructure. Cause cannot be inferred from these correlational findings, but the results nonetheless point to macropsychological factors as potentially protective factors against macroeconomic shocks.

The relation between language, culture, and thought

The relationship between culture, language, and thought has long been one of the most important topics for those who wish to understand the nature of human cognition. This issue has been investigated for decades across a broad range of research disciplines. However, there has been scant communication across these different disciplines, a situation largely arising through differences in research interests and discrepancies in the definitions of key terms such as 'culture,' 'language,' and 'thought.' This article reviews recent trends in research on the relation between language, culture and thought to capture how cognitive psychology and cultural psychology have defined 'language' and 'culture,' and how this issue was addressed within each research discipline. We then review recent research conducted in interdisciplinary perspectives, which directly compared the roles of culture and language. Finally, we highlight the importance of considering the complex interplay between culture and language to provide a comprehensive picture of how language and culture affect thought.

Culture and cognition

In this paper, we review the latest developments in cultural influences on attention, perception, categorization, memory and cognitive heuristics. We then explore the origin of these cultural differences, and highlight the implications of such culture-specific thinking styles for people's judgment and decision-making processes. We conclude this review by discussing some of the future research directions to further advance our understanding in culture and cognition.

Running With the Pack: Teen Peer-Relationship Qualities as Predictors of Adult Physical Health

This study assessed qualities of adolescent peer relationships as long-term predictors of physical health quality in adulthood. In an intensive multimethod, multireporter study of a community sample of 171 individuals assessed repeatedly from the ages of 13 to 27 years, physical health quality in adulthood was robustly predicted by independent reports of early-adolescent close-friendship quality and by a pattern of acquiescence to social norms in adolescent peer relationships. Predictions remained after accounting for numerous potential confounds, including prior health problems, concurrent body mass index, anxious and depressive symptoms, personality characteristics, adolescent-era financial adversity, and adolescent-era physical attractiveness. These findings have important implications for understanding the unique intensity of peer relationships in adolescence.

Culture and Psychology in the 21st Century

At the end of the 20th century, a survey of the metatheoretical landscape of culture and psychology noted an emerging consensus—physicalist ontology, gene–culture co-evolutionary phylogeny, gene–culture interactionist ontogeny, and a mutual constitutionist view of culture and mind. Revisiting the terrain now, the then emerging consensus seems well established, but new challenges appear on the horizon, prompting us to expand our metatheoretical scope. Extending beyond phylogeny, we need to consider a geological timescale, and further naturalizing the culture concept, we need to consider culture and human activity within the planetary system. According to some, we have left the Holocene, and entered into the Anthropocene, a geological epoch in which human activities have such a disproportionate impact that it deserves to be prefaced by humanity. Psychology with interests in culture can play a critical role in human efforts to investigate the psychological processes involved in the cultural change and to reconceptualize humans’ place in nature.

Wanting to maximize the positive and minimize the negative: implications for mixed affective experience in American and Chinese contexts

Previous studies have demonstrated that European Americans have fewer mixed affective experiences (i.e., are less likely to experience the bad with the good) compared with Chinese. In this article, we argue that these cultural differences are due to "ideal affect," or how people ideally want to feel. Specifically, we predict that people from individualistic cultures want to maximize positive and minimize negative affect more than people from collectivistic cultures, and as a result, they are less likely to actually experience mixed emotions (reflected by a more negative within-person correlation between actual positive and negative affect). We find support for this prediction in 2 experience sampling studies conducted in the United States and China (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, we demonstrate that ideal affect is a distinct construct from dialectical view of the self, which has also been related to mixed affective experience (Study 3). Finally, in Study 4, we demonstrate that experimentally manipulating the desire to maximize the positive and minimize the negative alters participants' actual experience of mixed emotions during a pleasant (but not unpleasant or combined pleasant and unpleasant) TV clip in the United States and Hong Kong. Together, these findings suggest that across cultures, how people want to feel shapes how they actually feel, particularly people's experiences of mixed affect.