Distressed yet bonded: A longitudinal investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic's silver lining effects on life satisfaction.

It is a common understanding that the 2019 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) significantly harmed mental health. However, findings on changes in overall life satisfaction have been mixed and inconclusive. To address this puzzling phenomenon, we draw upon the domain-specific perspective of well-being and research on catastrophe compassion and propose that the pandemic can have opposing effects on mental health and communal satisfaction, which then differently relate to people's overall life satisfaction. Longitudinal analyses of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) Survey of Australia (N = 12,093) showed that while there was a greater decrease in mental health in the first COVID-19 pandemic year (2019-2020) than in the previous years (2017-2019), an increase in communal satisfaction also occurred, demonstrating a potential silver lining effect of the pandemic on people's satisfaction with family, community, and neighborhood. Moreover, consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, changes in mental health, communal satisfaction, and life satisfaction were related to age, such that older adults generally reported less harmful and more beneficial psychological changes. We further found that age was associated with stronger associations of mental health and communal satisfaction with life satisfaction during the pandemic year. Overall, our findings speak to the importance of communal life in life satisfaction during the pandemic and age-related differences in the process, shedding light on the need to devise customized support to address inequalities in pandemic effects on public well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Moral disciplining provides a satisfying explanation for Chinese lay concepts of immorality.

In our research on lay prototypes of immorality, we found that Chinese consider immoral behaviors to be more about showing coarse character, rather than being violent and harmful (called criminal behaviors). The target article provides a satisfying rationale for why this Chinese immorality concept, which has many similarities to the puritanical morality described here, is connected to the morality of cooperation.

Moral expressions in Hong Kong, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom: Cultural similarities and differences in how affective facial muscle activity predicts judgments.

How does facial muscle activity relate to moral judgments across cultures? To explore this question, we used facial electromyography (EMG) among residents of New Zealand (N = 30) and Hong Kong (N = 40), comparing findings to prior data from the United Kingdom. We recorded EMG involved in expressions of disgust (m.levator labii), anger (m.corrugator supercilii), amusement (m.zygomaticus major), and surprise (m.medial frontalis) while participants thought about 90 scenarios that varied in valence and relevance to the harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity moral dimensions. Overall, levator and corrugator activity were associated with more negative judgments in all samples, while only in Hong Kong a decrease in medial frontalis activity was associated with negativity. Both levator and corrugator were cross-culturally associated with negative judgments in purity scenarios. In contrast to prior findings, harm and fairness violations were associated with different levator and/or corrugator activity across samples. We discuss implications for the relationship between spontaneous facial muscle activity and moral versus negativity judgments across cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Multiculturalism, Culture Mixing, and Prejudice: Effects of Priming Chinese Diversity Models Among Hong Kong University Students.

In two studies, we investigated how Hong Kong university students reacted to descriptions of China as multicultural vs. assimilatory, examining effects on emotions, prejudice toward Mainland Chinese, attitudes toward Hong Kong/China culture mixing, and cultural identities. Study 1 compared a multicultural priming condition to a control condition and found that the multiculturalism prime significantly reduced desire to socially distance from Mainland Chinese. Study 2 compared multiculturalism, assimilation, or control primes' effects, and found that the multiculturalism prime, through increased positive emotions, indirectly reduced social distancing from Mainland Chinese and disgust toward culture mixing, and increased Chinese ethnic identity and multicultural identity styles; the assimilation prime had the opposite indirect effects through increasing negative emotions. Results show new evidence of the importance of emotion in how non-immigrant regional groups, who are both minority and majority culture members, react to different diversity models. Multicultural frames increased positive emotions, with downstream positive effects on both intergroup attitudes and integrated identities.

The joy of obligation: Human cultural worldviews can enhance the rewards of meeting obligations.

Is it particularly human to feel coerced into fulfilling moral obligations, or is it particularly human to enjoy them? I argue for the importance of taking into account how culture promotes prosocial behavior, discussing how Confucian heritage culture enhances the satisfaction of meeting one's obligations.

For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across Cultures.

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one's actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one's actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions.

A Sense of Obligation: Cultural Differences in the Experience of Obligation.

In this investigation of cultural differences in the experience of obligation, we distinguish between Confucian Role Ethics versus Relative Autonomy lay theories of motivation and illustrate them with data showing relevant cultural differences in both social judgments and intrapersonal experience. First, when judging others, Western European heritage culture (WEHC) participants (relative to Confucian heritage culture [CHC] participants) judged obligation-motivated actors more negatively than those motivated by agency (Study 1, N = 529). Second, in daily diary and situation sampling studies, CHC participants (relative to WEHC participants) perceived more congruency between their own agentic and obligated motivations, and more positive emotional associations with obligated motivations (Study 2, N = 200 and Study 3, N = 244). Agentic motivation, however, was universally associated with positive emotions. More research on a Role Ethics rather than Relative Autonomy conception of agency may improve our understanding of human motivation, especially across cultures.

The added value of world views over self-views: Predicting modest behaviour in Eastern and Western cultures.

Personality research has been focused on different aspects of the self, including traits, attitudes, beliefs, goals, and motivation. These aspects of the self are used to explain and predict social behaviour. The present research assessed generalized beliefs about the world, termed 'social axioms' (Leung et al., ), and examined their additive power over beliefs about the self in explaining a communal behaviour, that is, modesty. Three studies predicted reported modest behaviour among Mainland Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, East Asian Canadians, and European Canadians. In addition to self-reports in Studies 1 and 2, informant reports from participants' parents and close friends were collected in Study 3 to construct a behavioural composite after examining the resulting multitrait-multimethod matrix and intraclass correlations. World views (operationalized as social axioms) explained additional variance in modest behaviour over and above self-views (operationalized as self-efficacy, self-construals, and trait modesty) in both Eastern and Western cultures. Variation in reports on three factors of modest behaviour was found across self-, parent, and friend perspectives, with significant differences across perspectives in self-effacement and other-enhancement, but not in avoidance of attention-seeking.

Conceptualizing psychological processes in response to globalization: Components, antecedents, and consequences of global orientations.

The influences of globalization have permeated various aspects of life in contemporary society, from technical innovations, economic development, and lifestyles, to communication patterns. The present research proposed a construct termed global orientation to denote individual differences in the psychological processes of acculturating to the globalizing world. It encompasses multicultural acquisition as a proactive response and ethnic protection as a defensive response to globalization. Ten studies examined the applicability of global orientations among majority and minority groups, including immigrants and sojourners, in multicultural and relatively monocultural contexts, and across Eastern and Western cultures. Multicultural acquisition is positively correlated with both independent and interdependent self-construals, bilingual proficiency and usage, and dual cultural identifications. Multicultural acquisition is promotion-focused, while ethnic protection is prevention-focused and related to acculturative stress. Global orientations affect individuating and modest behavior over and above multicultural ideology, predict overlap with outgroups over and above political orientation, and predict psychological adaptation, sociocultural competence, tolerance, and attitudes toward ethnocultural groups over and above acculturation expectations/strategies. Global orientations also predict English and Chinese oral presentation performance in multilevel analyses and the frequency and pleasantness of intercultural contact in cross-lagged panel models. We discuss how the psychological study of global orientations contributes to theory and research on acculturation, cultural identity, and intergroup relations.

Do people's world views matter? The why and how.

Over the past decades, personality and social psychologists have extensively investigated the role of self-views in individual functioning. Research on world views, however, has been less well studied due to overly specific conceptualizations, and little research about how and why they impact life outcomes. To answer why and how world views matter, we conducted 7 studies to examine the functions, antecedents, and consequences of generalized beliefs about the world, operationalized as social axioms (Leung et al., 2002). This research focused on 2 axiom factors, namely, social cynicism and reward for application. These axioms were found to explain individual differences in self-views over and above personality traits in Hong Kong and U.S. samples (Study 1) and to explain cultural differences in self-views in addition to self-construals among Mainland Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, East Asian Canadians, and European Canadians (Study 2). Endorsement of social axioms by participants, their parents, and close friends was collected from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Canada to infer parental and peer influences on world views (Study 3). World views affected psychological well-being through the mediation of positive self-views across 3 age groups, including children, adolescents, and young adults (Study 4) and over time (Study 5). The mediation of negative self-views was through comparative self-criticism rather than internalized self-criticism (Study 6). Holistic thinking moderated the effect of social cynicism on self-views and psychological well-being (Study 7). These results converge to show that world views as a distal force and self-views as a proximal force matter in people's subjective evaluation of their lives. (PsycINFO Database Record

Immorality East and West: Are Immoral Behaviors Especially Harmful, or Especially Uncivilized?

What makes some acts immoral? Although Western theories of morality often define harmful behaviors as centrally immoral, whether this is applicable to other cultures is still under debate. In particular, Confucianism emphasizes civility as fundamental to moral excellence. We describe three studies examining how the word immoral is used by Chinese and Westerners. Layperson-generated examples were used to examine cultural differences in which behaviors are called "immoral" (Study 1, n = 609; Study 2, n = 480), and whether "immoral" behaviors were best characterized as particularly harmful versus uncivilized (Study 3, N = 443). Results suggest that Chinese were more likely to use the word immoral for behaviors that were uncivilized, rather than exceptionally harmful, whereas Westerners were more likely to link immorality tightly to harm. More research into lay concepts of morality is needed to inform theories of moral cognition and improve understanding of human conceptualizations of social norms.

Consensus at the Heart of Division: Commentary on Norton and Ariely (2011).

We argue that seemingly deep-seated partisan divisions may be built on a foundation of surprising consensus, not only in terms of the wealth distributions that people prefer (Norton & Ariely, 2011, this issue), but also in the gut-level moral reactions and beliefs about money and happiness that may underlie those preferences.

Personality: the universal and the culturally specific.

There appears to be a universal desire to understand individual differences. This common desire exhibits both universal and culturally specific features. Motivations to view oneself positively differ substantially across cultural contexts, as do a number of other variables that covary with this motivation (i.e., approach-avoidance motivations, internal-external frames of reference, independent-interdependent views of self, incremental-entity theories of abilities, dialectical self-views, and relational mobility). The structure of personality traits, particularly the five-factor model of personality, emerges quite consistently across cultures, with some key variations noted when the structure is drawn from indigenous traits in other languages. The extent to which each of the Big 5 traits is endorsed in each culture varies considerably, although we note some methodological challenges with comparing personality traits across cultures. Finally, although people everywhere can conceive of each other in terms of personality traits, people in collectivistic cultures appear to rely on traits to a lesser degree when understanding themselves and others, compared with those from individualistic cultures.

What do cross-national comparisons of personality traits tell us? The case of conscientiousness.

Much research contrasts self-reported personality traits across cultures. We submit that this enterprise is weakened by significant methodological problems (in particular, the reference-group effect) that undermine the validity of national averages of personality scores. In this study, behavioral and demographic predictors of conscientiousness were correlated with different cross-national measures of conscientiousness based on self-reports, peer reports, and perceptions of national character. The predictors correlated strongly with perceptions of national character, but not with self-reports and peer reports. Country-level self- and peer-report measures of conscientiousness failed as markers of between-nation differences in personality.