Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

A Japanese market research unit, Wacoal, has published a survey among single working women aged 20-30 years in Bangkok, Beijing, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo. Gender stereotypes as found in the Wacoal survey have been correlated with Masculinity Index scores from Hofstede's IBM studies. In the more masculine cultures, as compared to the more feminine ones, sense of responsibility, decisiveness, liveliness, and ambitiousness were less often seen as feminine; caring and gentleness were more often seen as feminine. Meaningful correlations were also found for partner preferences (husbands compared to steady boyfriends). In the more masculine cultures, husbands should be more healthy, rich, and understanding; boyfriends should have more personality, affection, intelligence, and sense of humor. In the more feminine cultures, there was hardly any difference between preferred characteristics in husbands versus boyfriends.

The cross-cultural validity of the Approaches to Studying Inventory (ASI) was supported in an investigation of 302 first-year undergraduates enrolled at a Nepalese university. Evidence of a meaningful learning process model underlying ASI responses was found. As predicted, self-esteem correlated significancy with a more versatile approach to learning. Differences were found between the responses of Australian and Nepalese students to the ASI, but these were not easy to interpret.

This study examined the relatedness of field-dependence to tasks of cognitive ability and academic achievement. Sixty Anglo American and 60 Mexican American 4th-grade students, whose primary home language was English, served as subjects. Students completed a series of associative-memory and reasoning ability tasks. Field-dependence evidenced a strong relationship with a nonverbal test of reasoning ability as well as with measures of reading and math achievement. Ethnic differences in the field-dependence construct were not found, although ethnic differences in academic achievement were evidenced. Achievement differences between Anglo and Mexican American students became nonsignificant, however, when parental level of education was controlled statistically. Finally, the best predictor of academic achievement was found to be a three-variable combination, which consisted of a field-dependence task, a nonverbal test of reasoning ability, and the student's parental level of education. Results of this study support the hypothesis that field-dependence is better considered as a measure of reasoning ability than of cognitive style although it remains of substantial importance as a nonbiased predictor of school achievement for majority and minority students.

Children's social expectations were assessed among 163 Maori and European New Zealanders aged 9 and 12 in response to nine videotaped scenes of everyday social encounters. Compared with European children, Maori children were more focused on peers, more likely to report that they would act independently and assertively, and less deferent to authority. Ethnic differences were significantly greater among younger than among older children. Although most children responded in a manner highly typical of their ethnic group (enculturated), older Maori children were more similar to European peers than younger children, and girls of both ages were more similar to their ethnic group than boys. Among Maori children, an enculturated pattern was associated with less assertiveness and lower self-concept, but was unrelated to cross-ethnic acceptance. These findings differ from findings with minority children in the United States.

The present study empirically examined the relationship between therapist-client ethnic match and the therapists' evaluations of overall client functioning based on the Global Assessment Scale. The sample consisted of thousands of African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and White American outpatient clients in the Los Angeles County mental health system. Findings indicated that ethnically matched therapists judged clients to have higher mental health functioning than did mismatched therapists. After controlling for other variables (e.g., age, gender, marital status, and referral source), this effect persisted for African American and Asian American clients. For both groups, ethnic match significantly predicted ratings of higher client functioning when combining all diagnoses. Within diagnostic category, ethnic match significantly predicted ratings of higher client functioning for African American, Asian American, and Mexican American clients to varying degrees. Implications of these findings are discussed.

The performance of Chinese children in Beijing and Australian children in Sydney was compared on two types of facial expression task. Children of 4, 6, and 8 years of age were presented situation discrimination and situation inference/labeling tasks with both Chinese and Caucasian faces. Some evidence was obtained for an ethnic bias effect in emotion recognition from facial expressions. There was no indication that children from a collectivist culture are poorer at recognizing certain emotions than children from an individualistic society. Overall accuracy increased with age for children from both cultures, but the Chinese children were significantly more accurate than the Australians at all ages. These results are discussed in terms of the possible effects of different socialization practices, demographic factors, and suitability of the testing procedures for the two cultures.