Fundamental social motives measured across forty-two cultures in two waves

How does psychology vary across human societies? The fundamental social motives framework adopts an evolutionary approach to capture the broad range of human social goals within a taxonomy of ancestrally recurring threats and opportunities. These motives—self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and kin care—are high in fitness relevance and everyday salience, yet understudied cross-culturally. Here, we gathered data on these motives in 42 countries (N = 15,915) in two cross-sectional waves, including 19 countries (N = 10,907) for which data were gathered in both waves. Wave 1 was collected from mid-2016 through late 2019 (32 countries, N = 8,998; 3,302 male, 5,585 female; Mage = 24.43, SD = 7.91). Wave 2 was collected from April through November 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic (29 countries, N = 6,917; 2,249 male, 4,218 female; Mage = 28.59, SD = 11.31). These data can be used to assess differences and similarities in people’s fundamental social motives both across and within cultures, at different time points, and in relation to other commonly studied cultural indicators and outcomes

Cross-Cultural Transition and Psychological Adaptation of International Students: The Mediating Role of Host National Connectedness

Cross-cultural transitions are challenging and often have detrimental consequences for psychological well-being. This is particularly true for international students at tertiary institutions who are not only transitioning between school and higher education, but also between vastly different educational systems. This study tests a predictive model of psychological adaptation with international students whereby host national connectedness mediates the effects of personal resources and contextual factors on adaptive outcomes. A sample (N = 1527) of international tertiary students in New Zealand completed a survey that measured self-reported English language proficiency, perceived cultural distance, perceived cultural inclusiveness in the classroom, host national connectedness (defined by frequency of contact, number of friends, social support, and general belongingness), and positive (life satisfaction) and negative (psychological symptoms) indicators of psychological adaptation. Path analysis indicated that host national connectedness fully mediated the effects of English language proficiency on psychological symptoms and partially mediated the effects of language proficiency, cultural distance and cultural inclusion in the classroom on life satisfaction and psychological symptoms. The findings highlight the importance of international students’ relationships with host nationals, and the results are discussed in relation to strategies that could enhance student-host connectedness during cross-cultural transitions

racing Personality Structure in Narratives: A Computational Bottom–Up Approach to Unpack Writers, Characters, and Personality in Historical Context

We present a new method for personality assessment at a distance to uncover personality structure in historical texts. We focus on how two 19th century authors understood and described human personality; we apply a new bottom-up computational approach to extract personality dimensions used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to describe fictional characters in 21 novels. We matched personality descriptions using three person-description dictionaries (Allport & Odbert, 1936; Goldberg, 1982; Saucier, 1997) and used Goldberg’s (1992) marker scales as reference points for interpretation. Factor structures did not show strong convergence with the contemporary Big Five model. Jane Austen described characters in terms of social and emotional richness with greater nuances, but using a less extensive vocabulary. Charles Dickens, in contrast, used a rich and diverse personality vocabulary, but those descriptions centered around more restricted dimensions of power and dominance. Although we could identify conceptually similar factors across the two authors, analyses of the overlapping vocabulary between the two authors suggested only moderate convergence. We discuss the utility and potential of automated text analysis and the lexical hypothesis to (a) provide insights into implicit personality models in historical texts, and (b) bridge the divide between idiographic and nomothetic perspectives

Development of the South African Personality Inventory: A cross-cultural design in a non-Western society: Lessons learned and generalizability to other parts of the world

The usual operationalization of the psycholexical approach to personality becomes inefficient when dealing with languages with a limited lexicography or languages that are inaccessible to the investigator. These conditions, which probably hold for most of the world’s languages, call for different approaches to uncover the complexities of personality. This chapter describes the mixed-method approach in designing the South African Personality Inventory (SAPI). We describe (1) the dynamics and lessons learned from the extensive qualitative research conducted in 11 languages, (2) the challenges of item development and reduction with a focus on cultural comparability and validity, and (3) the complexities in extracting and validating the SAPI factor structure across language versions. We discuss how the diversification of methods can enrich the understanding of personality in understudied contexts and inform the debate between universal models (with their lure of cross-cultural comparability) and indigenous models (with their claim to ecological validity)