Relationship standards and Malay Muslim couples' marital satisfaction.

Relationship standards are beliefs about what is important in high-quality couple relationships. Clarifying standards cross-culturally informs theory about relationship quality and goals for culturally appropriate couple therapy. The current study assessed four standards (Couple Bond, Family Responsibility, Relationship Effort, and Religion) in n = 113 Malay Muslim couples, and the association of those standards with marital satisfaction. All four standards were strongly endorsed, Religion was the most strongly endorsed, and there were minimal sex differences. Separate actor-partner interdependence models showed actor effects of all four standards on own satisfaction for husbands and wives, partner effects of three of the four husbands' standards (not Relationship Effort) on wives' satisfaction, but no partner effects of female standards on male satisfaction. The findings underscore the importance of all four standards in Malay Muslim marriages and that attention to all these standards might need to be part of couple therapy with Malay couples.

Perceiving societal pressure to be happy is linked to poor well-being, especially in happy nations.

Happiness is a valuable experience, and societies want their citizens to be happy. Although this societal commitment seems laudable, overly emphasizing positivity (versus negativity) may create an unattainable emotion norm that ironically compromises individual well-being. In this multi-national study (40 countries; 7443 participants), we investigate how societal pressure to be happy and not sad predicts emotional, cognitive and clinical indicators of well-being around the world, and examine how these relations differ as a function of countries' national happiness levels (collected from the World Happiness Report). Although detrimental well-being associations manifest for an average country, the strength of these relations varies across countries. People's felt societal pressure to be happy and not sad is particularly linked to poor well-being in countries with a higher World Happiness Index. Although the cross-sectional nature of our work prohibits causal conclusions, our findings highlight the correlational link between social emotion valuation and individual well-being, and suggest that high national happiness levels may have downsides for some.

Social mindfulness predicts concern for nature and immigrants across 36 nations.

People cooperate every day in ways that range from largescale contributions that mitigate climate change to simple actions such as leaving another individual with choice - known as social mindfulness. It is not yet clear whether and how these complex and more simple forms of cooperation relate. Prior work has found that countries with individuals who made more socially mindful choices were linked to a higher country environmental performance - a proxy for complex cooperation. Here we replicated this initial finding in 41 samples around the world, demonstrating the robustness of the association between social mindfulness and environmental performance, and substantially built on it to show this relationship extended to a wide range of complex cooperative indices, tied closely to many current societal issues. We found that greater social mindfulness expressed by an individual was related to living in countries with more social capital, more community participation and reduced prejudice towards immigrants. Our findings speak to the symbiotic relationship between simple and more complex forms of cooperation in societies.

Culture, cross-role consistency, and adjustment: testing trait and cultural psychology perspectives.

Trait and cultural psychology perspectives on cross-role consistency and its relation to adjustment were examined in 2 individualistic cultures, the United States (N=231) and Australia (N=195), and 4 collectivistic cultures, Mexico (N=199), the Philippines (N=195), Malaysia (N=217), and Japan (N=180). Cross-role consistency in trait ratings was evident in all cultures, supporting trait perspectives. Cultural comparisons of mean consistency provided support for cultural psychology perspectives as applied to East Asian cultures (i.e., Japan) but not collectivistic cultures more generally. Some but not all of the hypothesized predictors of consistency were supported across cultures. Cross-role consistency predicted aspects of adjustment in all cultures, but prediction was most reliable in the U.S. sample and weakest in the Japanese sample. Alternative constructs proposed by cultural psychologists--personality coherence, social appraisal, and relationship harmony--predicted adjustment in all cultures but were not, as hypothesized, better predictors of adjustment in collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures.

Cross-Situational Self-Consistency in Nine Cultures: The Importance of Separating Influences of Social Norms and Distinctive Dispositions.

We assessed self-consistency (expressing similar traits in different situations) by having undergraduates in the United States ( n = 230), Australia ( n = 220), Canada ( n = 240), Ecuador ( n = 101), Mexico ( n = 209), Venezuela ( n = 209), Japan ( n = 178), Malaysia ( n = 254), and the Philippines ( n = 241) report the traits they expressed in four different social situations. Self-consistency was positively associated with age, well-being, living in Latin America, and not living in Japan; however, each of these variables showed a unique pattern of associations with various psychologically distinct sources of raw self-consistency, including cross-situationally consistent social norms and injunctions. For example, low consistency between injunctive norms and trait expressions fully explained the low self-consistency in Japan. In accord with trait theory, after removing normative and injunctive sources of consistency, there remained robust distinctive noninjunctive self-consistency (reflecting individuating personality dispositions) in every country, including Japan. The results highlight how clarifying the determinants and implications of self-consistency requires differentiating its distinctive, injunctive, and noninjunctive components.