Religious people live longer than nonreligious people, according to a staple of social science research. Yet, are those longevity benefits an inherent feature of religiosity? To find out, we coded ...gravestone inscriptions and imagery to assess the religiosity and longevity of 6,400 deceased people from religious and nonreligious U.S. counties. We show that in religious cultural contexts, religious people lived 2.2 years longer than did nonreligious people. In nonreligious cultural contexts, however, religiosity conferred no such longevity benefits. Evidently, a longer life is not an inherent feature of religiosity. Instead, religious people only live longer in religious cultural contexts where religiosity is valued. Our study answers a fundamental question on the nature of religiosity and showcases the scientific potential of gravestone analyses.
Cultural differences between the United States and China have been investigated using a broad array of psychological tasks measuring differences between cognition, language, perception, and ...reasoning. Using online convenience samples of adults, we conducted two large-scale replications of 12 tasks previously reported to show differences between Western and East Asian cultures. Our results showed a heterogeneous pattern of successes and failures: five tasks yielded robust cultural differences, while five showed no difference between cultures, and two showed a small difference in the opposite direction. We observed moderate reliability for all multitrial tasks, but there was little relation between task scores. As in prior work, cross-cultural differences in cognition (in those tasks showing differences) were not strongly related to explicit measures of cultural identity and behavior. All of our tasks, data, and analyses are openly available for reuse, providing a foundation for future studies that seek to establish a robust and replicable science of cross-cultural difference. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
The world population has doubled over the last half century. Yet, research on the psychological effects of human population density, once a popular topic, has decreased over the past few decades. ...Applying a fresh perspective to an old topic, we draw upon life history theory to examine the effects of population density. Across nations and across the U.S. states (Studies 1 and 2), we find that dense populations exhibit behaviors corresponding to a slower life history strategy, including greater future-orientation, greater investment in education, more long-term mating orientation, later marriage age, lower fertility, and greater parental investment. In Studies 3 and 4, experimentally manipulating perceptions of high density led individuals to become more future-oriented. Finally, in Studies 5 and 6, experimentally manipulating perceptions of high density seemed to lead to life-stage-specific slower strategies, with college students preferring to invest in fewer rather than more relationship partners, and an older MTurk sample preferring to invest in fewer rather than more children. This research sheds new insight on the effects of density and its implications for human cultural variation and society at large.
In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. ...Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from China, the country with the largest population and second largest economy, which is a common cultural comparison. We applied the fixation index (FST), a meaningful statistic in evolutionary theory, to the World Values Survey of cultural beliefs and behaviors. As the extreme WEIRDness of the literature begins to dissolve, our tool will become more useful for designing, planning, and justifying a wide range of comparative psychological projects. Our code and accompanying online application allow for comparisons between any two countries. Analyses of regional diversity reveal the relative homogeneity of the United States. Cultural distance predicts various psychological outcomes.
An Ultra-Short Measure for Work Engagement Schaufeli, Wilmar B; Shimazu, Akihito; Hakanen, Jari ...
European journal of psychological assessment : official organ of the European Association of Psychological Assessment,
2019, Letnik:
35, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The current study introduces an ultra-short, 3-item
version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. Using five national samples from
Finland (N = 22,117), Japan
(N = 1,968), the Netherlands
...(N = 38,278), Belgium/Flanders
(N = 5,062), and Spain
(N = 10,040) its internal consistency and
factorial validity vis-à-vis validated measures of burnout, workaholism,
and job boredom are demonstrated. Moreover, the UWES-3 shares 86-92% of
its variance with the longer nine-item version and the pattern of correlations
of both versions with 9 indicators of well-being, 8 job demands, 10 job
resources, and 6 outcomes is highly similar with an average, absolute difference
between correlations of only .02. Hence, it is concluded that the UWES-3 is a
reliable and valid indicator of work engagement that can be used as an
alternative to the longer version, for instance in national and international
epidemiological surveys on employee's working conditions.
Mastery-approach (MAP) goals, focusing on developing competence and acquiring task mastery, are posited to be the most optimal, beneficial type of achievement goal for academic and life outcomes. ...Although there is meta-analytic evidence supporting this finding, such evidence does not allow us to conclude that the extant MAP goal findings generalize across cultures. Meta-analyses have often suffered from overrepresentation of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) samples; reliance on bivariate correlations; and lack the ability to directly control individual-level background variables. To address these limitations, this study used nationally representative data from 77 countries/regions (N = 595,444 adolescents) to examine the relations of MAP goals to four antecedents (workmastery, competitiveness, fear of failure, fixed mindset) and 16 consequences (task-specific motivational, achievement-related, and well-being outcomes), and tested the cross-cultural generalizability of these relations. Results showed that MAP goals were: (a) grounded primarily in positive but not negative achievement motives/beliefs; (b) most strongly predictive of well-being outcomes, followed by adaptive motivation; (c) positively but consistently weakly associated with achievement-related outcomes, particularly for academic performance (β = .069); (d) negatively and weakly associated with maladaptive outcomes; and (e) uniquely predictive of various consequences, controlling for the antecedents and covariates. Further, the MAP goal predictions were generalizable across countries/regions for 13 of 16 consequences. While directions of effect sizes were slightly mixed for academic performance, perceived reading, and PISA test difficulty, the effect sizes were consistently small for most countries/regions. This generalizability points to quite strong cross-cultural support for the observed patterns.
The temporal‐focus hypothesis claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be ...independent from the space–time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the sagittal axis to find out the respective influences of language and culture on mental space–time mappings. An examination of Mandarin speakers' co‐speech gestures shows that some Chinese spontaneously perform past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back (besides future‐in‐front/past‐at‐back) gestures, especially when gestures are accompanying past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back space–time metaphors (Exp. 1). Using a temporal performance task, the study confirms that Chinese can conceptualize the future as behind and the past as in front of them, and that such space–time mappings are affected by the different expressions of Mandarin space–time metaphors (Exp. 2). Additionally, a survey on cultural attitudes toward time shows that Chinese tend to focus slightly more on the future than on the past (Exp. 3). Within the Chinese sample, we did not find evidence for the effect of participants' cultural temporal attitudes on space–time mappings, but a cross‐cultural comparison of space–time mappings between Chinese, Moroccans, and Spaniards provides strong support for the temporal‐focus hypothesis. Furthermore, the results of Exp. 2 are replicated even after controlling for factors such as cultural temporal attitudes and age (Exp. 3), which implies that linguistic sagittal temporal metaphors can indeed influence Mandarin speakers' space–time mappings. The findings not only contribute to a better understanding of Chinese people's sagittal temporal orientation, but also have additional implications for theories on the mental space–time mappings and the relationship between language and thought.
Meta-analysis is an indispensable tool used to synthesize research findings in the social, educational, medical, management, and behavioral sciences. Most meta-analytic models assume independence ...among effect sizes. However, effect sizes can be dependent for various reasons. For example, studies might report multiple effect sizes on the same construct, and effect sizes reported by participants from the same cultural group are likely to be more similar than those reported by other cultural groups. This article reviews the problems and common methods to handle dependent effect sizes. The objective of this article is to demonstrate how 3-level meta-analyses can be used to model dependent effect sizes. The advantages of the structural equation modeling approach over the multilevel approach with regard to conducting a 3-level meta-analysis are discussed. This article also seeks to extend the key concepts of Q statistics, I2, and R2 from 2-level meta-analyses to 3-level meta-analyses. The proposed procedures are implemented using the open source metaSEM package for the R statistical environment. Two real data sets are used to illustrate these procedures. New research directions related to 3-level meta-analyses are discussed.
In Arabic, as in many languages, the future is "ahead" and the past is "behind." Yet in the research reported here, we showed that Arabic speakers tend to conceptualize the future as behind and the ...past as ahead of them, despite using spoken metaphors that suggest the opposite. We propose a new account of how space-time mappings become activated in individuals' minds and entrenched in their cultures, the temporal-focus hypothesis: People should conceptualize either the future or the past as in front of them to the extent that their culture (or subculture) is future oriented or past oriented. Results support the temporal-focus hypothesis, demonstrating that the space-time mappings in people's minds are conditioned by their cultural attitudes toward time, that they depend on attentional focus, and that they can vary independently of the space-time mappings enshrined in language.
Objectives: During multisensory emotion perception, the attention devoted to the visual versus the auditory modality (i.e., modality dominance) varies depending on the cultural background of the ...perceiver. In the present study, we examined (a) how cultural familiarity influences multisensory emotion perception in Eastern and Western cultures and (b) the underlying processes accounting for the cultural difference in modality dominance. Method: Native Mandarin speakers from China and native English speakers from the United States were presented with audiovisual emotional stimuli from their own culture (i.e., familiar) and from a different culture (i.e., unfamiliar) and asked to evaluate the emotion from one of the two modalities. Across modalities, the emotions were either the same (i.e., congruent, happy face, and happy voice) or different (i.e., incongruent, happy face, and sad voice). Results: When the input was in a familiar cultural context, American participants were more influenced by the visual modality, while Chinese participants were more influenced by the auditory modality. While both groups integrated the incongruent emotion from the irrelevant modality, only the American group integrated the congruent emotion from the irrelevant modality. When the input was in a less familiar cultural context, both groups showed increased visual dominance, but only the Chinese group simultaneously showed decreased auditory dominance. Conclusions: We conclude that cultural background and input familiarity interact to influence modality dominance during multisensory emotion perception.
Public Significance Statement
The present study reveals that American participants were more influenced by facial expressions than vocal expressions, while Chinese participants were more influenced by vocal expressions than facial expressions during multisensory emotion perception. Recognizing these differences could facilitate communication and interactions between individuals from East Asian and Western cultures.
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