Singaporean humor: a cross-cultural, cross-gender comparison.

One hundred and nineteen undergraduate students (62 men and 57 women) of Chinese origin at the National University of Singapore answered three self-report humor questionnaires. Students were also asked to supply their favorite joke (M. A. Johnson, 1991) and a description of a person with an outstanding sense of humor (M. Crawford & D. Gressley, 1991). These responses were compared with results obtained using the same questionnaires and methods in previous studies in Israel and the United States. In general, means and reliabilities of results obtained from the Singapore study replicated those found in other countries. However, Singaporean participants reported significantly less use of humor for coping. Content analysis of jokes supplied by Singaporean students reflected conservative values: Compared with American students, they reported a significantly greater number of jokes with aggressive content and relatively fewer jokes with sexual content. Contrary to expectations, very few gender differences were found. Regardless of gender, a majority of participants nominated a man as an example of a person with an outstanding sense of humor.

Cross-cultural, gender, and age differences in Singaporean mothers' conceptions of children's intelligence.

The effect of mothers' ethnic affiliation on their conceptions of children's intelligence was examined. Seven hundred eight Singaporean mothers of Chinese, Malay, and Indian ethnic origin responded to a 55-item questionnaire. For each item, the respondents indicated, on a 9-point scale, how typical they thought the specified behavior was for an intelligent child. There was a high level of similarity among the factor structures of the three subsamples, but several specific intergroup differences indicated that the mothers' conceptions of children's intelligence were affected to a certain extent by their ethnic affiliations and by the age and the sex of the child.

Personality differences between kibbutz born and city born adults.

Two hundred and thirty-two men and women students at the University of Haifa were administered a Hebrew version of the California Psychological Inventory. Half of the students were kibbutz born, and the others city born. The two samples were matched on sex, age, level of education, and economic level. Of the 18 scales, significant differences between the means were found in only two scales for each sex group: namely, Responsibility and Achievement via Independence for males, and Achievement via Independence and Intellectual Efficiency for females. The other comparisons of means for each sex group were not significant, nor were there any significant differences between the variances. It seems, then, that the differences in child rearing between kibbutz and city do not necessarily produce major differences in personality traits. An alternative hypothesis might be suggested: kibbutz child-rearing practices, different as they are from the city approach, do not create a "new" type of personality.