Cross-Cultural Research

This study investigates which structural factors most strongly predict armed and unarmed revolutionary destabilization across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as well as Asia using country–year data for 1950–2022 and a set of economic, demographic, political, and climatic indicators. It employs an interpretable machine learning framework (CatBoost with SHAP values and permutation importance), which allows it to relax functional form assumptions, systematically compare predictor importance across outcomes and regions, and uncover nonlinear and interaction effects. Armed revolutionary destabilization is shown to be most strongly associated with prior conflict, economic contraction, natural-resource dependence, and weak state capacity, particularly in SSA and MENA, while in Asia it is driven more by domestic political-economic dynamics. Unarmed revolutionary destabilization is linked to institutional legitimacy, corruption vulnerability, population density, and external economic shocks, with export shocks most salient in Asia, incumbent duration in SSA, and trade integration in MENA.

The current study examines affectionate communication between young adult children and their parents across cultures. Participants (N = 716) from China (n = 201), Saudi Arabia (n = 171), South Korea (n = 159), and the U.S. (n = 185) reported their perceptions of parents’ affectionate communication in verbal, nonverbal, and supportive aspects; their own affectionate communication toward parents; and relational closeness. The main findings are: (1) young adult children universally perceive their parents as communicating affection more often than they reciprocate, (2) among parents’ affectionate communication, supportive affectionate communication is the only form of communication associated with relational closeness, and (3) culture impacts frequencies of perceived parents’ and young adult children’s own affectionate communication and the association between affectionate communication and relational closeness. Implications for cross-cultural similarities and differences are addressed.

Amongst Aawambo families in Namibia, the practice of fosterage (i.e., a system whereby a child is raised by family or non-biological relations rather than their biological parents) remains a culturally consistent practice. Scholars have endeavored to understand the implications of this and similar parenting practices in and outside of Namibia, with evidence showing both potential positive and negative outcomes of fosterage for the children who experience this system. What has yet to be studied is the within-culture comparison of those who experience fosterage and those who do not as a correlate of adult psychological distress. These practices span regions of Namibia, with migration from rural to urban regions also interwoven into Aawambo familial structures and parental care. To better understand fosterage and psychological outcomes, the purpose of this study was to compare mental health of Aawambo adults who did and did not experience fosterage as children and live in a rural or urban area of the country at time of data collection. We found no differences in psychological distress by fosterage but did by region, with those in the urban area showing more distress. We discuss these findings with respect to the evolved nest concept of childcare and its implications for functioning in adulthood.

This study examined the relationship between independent and interdependent self-construals, as measured by the Self-Construal Scale (SCS), to evaluate the independence of these constructs, and their associations with analytic-holistic thinking (Analysis-Holism Scale; AHS), Big Five personality traits, and subjective well-being across five cultural groups. Participants included 440 individuals from Korea (n = 109), Canada (n = 256; 90 European, 53 East Asian, 113 South Asian), and the United States (n = 75 European Americans). Independent and interdependent self-construals were uncorrelated among Koreans, European Canadians, and European Americans, consistent with theoretical expectations, whereas East Asian and South Asian Canadians showed positive correlations between the two self-construals. Self-construals also exhibited distinct patterns of associations with personality traits and subjective well-being indicators across cultural groups. These findings provide partial support for the theoretical independence of the two dimensions: independence was observed in monocultural groups, whereas a closer association emerged in bicultural groups. Overall, these results underscore the importance of evaluating the cross-cultural applicability of the SCS and AHS and highlight the need for culturally sensitive measurement approaches, particularly for bicultural populations, when assessing individuals’ self-construals.

Why are some ingroup members (i.e., natives) more tolerant of, or hostile toward, outgroup others (i.e., immigrants)? A large volume of evidence exists attempting to address this issue. The bulk of findings from observational and experimental research focuses on the dual concept of ‘realistic’ and ‘symbolic’ threat, operationalized in terms of migrant stock or percentage of foreign-born population. According to the literature, a higher stock generally indicates a higher threat, which in turn implies greater xenophobic sentiment. Against this backdrop, the present study shifts the analytic emphasis to a novel explanatory mechanism in the US context: strength of social norms at the state level. Specifically, by drawing on the concept of cultural tightness-looseness, it asks whether American citizens in a geographic region characterized by strong social norms and stringent sanctioning of deviance are, on average, more xenophobic. Results from mixed effects models provide substantial support. Based on nationally representative data collected by the Pew Research Center (2018) during the height of Trump administration, the analysis reveals that cultural tightness has a contextual effect: net of controls, residency in a state with a higher index score is associated with greater levels of anti-immigrant prejudice and stronger preference for anti-immigration policy.

The professionalization of addressing conflict creates a field filled with specialists highly trained to apply modularized and manualized, often evidence-based solutions. But how effective are these professionalized conflict management strategies in Indigenous and localized cultural contexts compared to homegrown Indigenous approaches? While instances of these Indigenous peacebuilding and conflict management strategies are routine throughout the world, to date, no one has attempted to test which conflict management approaches are most effective empirically, nor has the literature sufficiently addressed the contexts in which strategies are most helpful. Using multi-dimensional scaling and chi-square tests of independence applied to a similarity matrix of co-occurrences from select Outline of Cultural Materials subjects from the Human Relations Area Files cultural database, this study tests the hypothesis: Indigenous conflict management strategies are more effective (i.e., less associated conflict) than non-Indigenous conflict management strategies in Indigenous contexts. We show that Indigenous conflict management approaches co-occur with conflict less often than non-Indigenous strategies. From an applied perspective, when we break conflict into four discreet types—sociocultural/interpersonal, political, legal/judicial, and economic—Indigenous conflict management strategies co-occur most often with socio-cultural types of conflicts. The results suggest that Indigenous approaches are more effective in Indigenous contexts overall, while they are most often applied to socio-cultural and interpersonal conflicts. Based on our findings, homegrown solutions effectively manage, resolve, and transform localized conflicts.