Cross-cultural constructions of self: American and Mexican college students

There are two general goals that personality researchers seek to accomplish. The first goal is to define domains that comprise the thousands of personal characteristics that make a person unique. And the second is to examine the generalizability of dimensions across cultures and languages, that is, to observe whether personality domains are universal or culture-specific. Following the steps of personality psychologists the first goal of this dissertation was to define dimensions of personality of Americans and Mexicans, and the second was to observe if dimensions were equivalent or unique across these two cultures. Typically personality researchers, in order to identify the most relevant aspects of human personality, have turned to a questionnaire method whereby people rate themselves along dimensions of traits most often described in natural language. These trait terms are derived from various dictionaries within the researchers' culture. Multiple ratings are then factor analyzed yielding a smaller group of broad traits that then serve to define the culture's primary personality dimensions. In this investigation, personality terms were culled from open-ended personality descriptions. Relying on a new text analytic procedure called the meaning extraction method, it was possible to define dimensions of personality in Americans and Mexicans. The factoranalytically derived results showed that there were seven relevant dimensions of personality for Americans and six dimensions for Mexicans. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses it was possible to observe which dimensions were equivalent and which dimensions were unique to each culture. Specifically, for both Americans and Mexicans, the most important dimensions were Sociability, Values, Hobbies/Activities, and Emotionality. Three dimensions were unique to Americans (i.e., Fun, Existentialism, and College Experience), and two for the Mexicans (Relationships and Simpatía). Other analyses were done to explore the universality and uniqueness of the dimensions. For example, dimensions were correlated with self-reports that measure dimensions wellestablished by personality researchers. The challenge of establishing dimensions across cultures and languages are discussed, along with the limitations of the approach.Psycholog

Prácticas parentales, alimentación saludable y medidas objetivas de composición corporal en la niñez preescolar

El presente trabajo describe la evidencia empírica en cuanto a la relación entre prácticas parentales, alimentación saludable y medidas objetivas de composición corporal en la niñez preescolar en contextos europeos, estadounidenses y latinoamericanos. Se encuentran algunas concordancias en cuanto a la presión y la restricción para comer. Se proponen direcciones para el desarrollo de líneas de investigación en el contexto latinoamericano: a) realización de más estudios, con el fin de confirmar si las relaciones entre las variables de interés se mantienen o cambian; b) realizar estos estudios con muestras aleatorizadas y representativas, con medidas de autoreporte y observacionales, de las prácticas parentales de alimentación; c) exploración del rol mediador y moderador de variables culturales y sociales específicas del contexto latinoamericano

Happiness around the world: A combined etic-emic approach across 63 countries.

What does it mean to be happy? The vast majority of cross-cultural studies on happiness have employed a Western-origin, or "WEIRD" measure of happiness that conceptualizes it as a self-centered (or "independent"), high-arousal emotion. However, research from Eastern cultures, particularly Japan, conceptualizes happiness as including an interpersonal aspect emphasizing harmony and connectedness to others. Following a combined emic-etic approach (Cheung, van de Vijver & Leong, 2011), we assessed the cross-cultural applicability of a measure of independent happiness developed in the US (Subjective Happiness Scale; Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) and a measure of interdependent happiness developed in Japan (Interdependent Happiness Scale; Hitokoto & Uchida, 2015), with data from 63 countries representing 7 sociocultural regions. Results indicate that the schema of independent happiness was more coherent in more WEIRD countries. In contrast, the coherence of interdependent happiness was unrelated to a country's "WEIRD-ness." Reliabilities of both happiness measures were lowest in African and Middle Eastern countries, suggesting these two conceptualizations of happiness may not be globally comprehensive. Overall, while the two measures had many similar correlates and properties, the self-focused concept of independent happiness is "WEIRD-er" than interdependent happiness, suggesting cross-cultural researchers should attend to both conceptualizations

How people talk about their illness in Internet? A preliminary study using the Spanish version of LIWC

Póster presentado en 18th Annual Conference of the European Health Psychology Society, 21-24 June 2004, Helsinki, Finland.Computer-mediated communication has become a new source of informational or emotional support for many people suffering diseases around the world. Particularly, the number of newsgroups, forums or chats created for Spanish-speaking patients is increasing. In these groups, participants seek information and/or share concerns about their illness conditions. This give us the possibility of better understanding the illness experience through the analysis of postings contents and patterns of communication occuring in this virtual context. Text-analysis software has been designed to map linguistic and psychological variables of written messages and can be used to examine the postings from participants in Internet groups. One of the most used programs in English language is the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Pennebaker et al., 2001). The LIWC analyzes written text on a word by word basis and calculates the percentage of the total words that matches up to 72 language categories and subcategories (linguistic dimensions, psychological processes, relativity and personal concerns). The objective of this study is to analyze the word choice of Spanish-Speaking people in online forums of different illness groups. Furthermore, we analyzed differences by gender. A total of 300 postings of participants in several Internet forums (diabetes, AIDS, cancer) were analyzed. The Spanish version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program, which has an internal dictionary of approximately 7000 words and word stems, was used to analyze the postings of the virtual forums. Results showed significative differences in several LIWC dimensions as a function of illness condition and sex

Prácticas parentales, alimentación saludable y medidas objetivas de composición corporal en la niñez preescolar

This paper describes empirical evidence regarding the relationship between parental practices, healthy eating and objective measures of body composition in preschool children in European, American and Latin American contexts. Concordances are noted in terms of pressure and restriction to eat. Directions are proposed for the development of lines of research in the Latin American context: a) conducting more studies in order to confirm if the relations between the variables of interest are maintained or changed; b) conduct these studies with randomized and representative samples, with self-report and observational measures of parental feeding practices; c) exploration of mediator and moderator roles that cultural and social variables specific to the Latin American context have on the relationships between the variables of interest.El presente trabajo describe la evidencia empírica en cuanto a la relación entre prácticas parentales, alimentación saludable y medidas objetivas de composición corporal en la niñez preescolar en contextos europeos, estadounidenses y latinoamericanos. Se encuentran algunas concordancias en cuanto a la presión y la restricción para comer. Se proponen direcciones para el desarrollo de líneas de investigación en el contexto latinoamericano: a) realización de más estudios, con el fin de confirmar si las relaciones entre las variables de interés se mantienen o cambian; b) realizar estos estudios con muestras aleatorizadas y representativas, con medidas de autoreporte y observacionales, de las prácticas parentales de alimentación; c) exploración del rol mediador y moderador de variables culturales y sociales específicas del contexto latinoamericano

Look Who’s Talking NOW! Parentese Speech, Social Context, and Language Development Across Time

In previous studies, we found that the social interactions infants experience in their everyday lives at 11- and 14-months of age affect language ability at 24 months of age. These studies investigated relationships between the speech style (i.e., parentese speech vs. standard speech) and social context [i.e., one-on-one (1:1) vs. group] of language input in infancy and later speech development (i.e., at 24 months of age), controlling for socioeconomic status (SES). Results showed that the amount of exposure to parentese speech-1:1 in infancy was related to productive vocabulary at 24 months. The general goal of the present study was to investigate changes in (1) the pattern of social interactions between caregivers and their children from infancy to childhood and (2) relationships among speech style, social context, and language learning across time. Our study sample consisted of 30 participants from the previously published infant studies, evaluated at 33 months of age. Social interactions were assessed at home using digital first-person perspective recordings of the auditory environment. We found that caregivers use less parentese speech-1:1, and more standard speech-1:1, as their children get older. Furthermore, we found that the effects of parentese speech-1:1 in infancy on later language development at 24 months persist at 33 months of age. Finally, we found that exposure to standard speech-1:1 in childhood was the only social interaction that related to concurrent word production/use. Mediation analyses showed that standard speech-1:1 in childhood fully mediated the effects of parentese speech-1:1 in infancy on language development in childhood, controlling for SES. This study demonstrates that engaging in one-on-one interactions in infancy and later in life has important implications for language development

The psychology of word use: a computer program that analyzes texts in Spanish

El Buscador Lingüístico y Contador de Palabras (LIWC, por sus siglas en inglés, Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001) es un programa de computadora que analiza textos. Este programa calcula el porcentaje de palabras dentro de un texto de acuerdo a varias docenas de categorías. La fiabilidad de este programa ha sido demostrada ampliamente en el ámbito de la lengua inglesa. En esta investigación dos estudios se llevaron a cabo para analizar la equivalencia del programa en español al programa en inglés. En el Estudio 1 se presenta el procedimiento de traducción del LIWC del inglés al español, y se demuestra la equivalencia entre las categorías del LIWC en inglés y sus correspondientes categorías en la versión en español. En el Estudio 2 se muestra el uso del LIWC en inglés y en español al comparar el lenguaje utilizado por mujeres en foros de discusión de depresión y de cáncer de mama en Internet. Los resultados mostraron que las versiones correlacionan en la mayoría de las categorías. Asimismo, se encontró que las mujeres en foros de depresión utilizan distintas categorías de palabras que las mujeres en foros de cáncer de mama y estas diferencias son similares en foros de discusión en español e inglés. Se discuten las implicaciones de usar este programa dentro de la lengua española.Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a computerized text analysis program that calculates the percentage of words in a text according to several dozen categories. LIWC’s reliability has been widely demonstrated with the English language. In the present study, 2 studies were carried out to determine the equivalence of the Spanish versus English versions of LIWC. Study 1 presented the translation procedure from English to Spanish, and tested equivalence between categories in the English LIWC and the corresponding categories in the Spanish version. Study 2 examined both the English and Spanish LIWC version by comparing the language used by women in Internet chat rooms for depression and breast cancer. The results showed high correlations across English and Spanish LIWC categories. Furthermore, women in depression chat rooms used different categories of words than women in breast cancer chat rooms, and these differences were similar in chat rooms in English and in Spanish. The implications of using LIWC with the Spanish language are discussed

#sendeanlat (#tellyourstory):Text Analyses of Tweets About Sexual Assault Experiences

On 11 February 2015, a 20-year-old university student, Ozgecan Aslan, was violently murdered in an attempted rape in Mersin, southern Turkey. This event led to a mass Twitter protest in the country. Women across the country started sharing the hashtag #sendeanlat (“#tellyourstory” in English). In the current exploratory study, 164,279 original tweets were analyzed using the text analytic approach called the Meaning Extraction Method. Results revealed the key themes of reactions to victim blaming, honor culture/namus, assault experiences, social media, and women’s responsibility. Policy, media, and mental-health-related implications and future research directions are discussed