The role of emotional similarity and emotional accuracy in belonging and stress among first-generation and continuing-generation students.

Extensive research has documented the psychological, social, and academic predicament of first-generation college students. However, basic psychological mechanisms underlying the challenges experienced by these students have been understudied. Taking a cultural psychology perspective, the present research considers the role of emotional (mis)match as a key mechanism for explaining first-generation students' lowered well-being. A sample of 344 American undergraduate students completed a survey designed to measure two aspects of emotional processing: (1) Emotional Accuracy - how accurately students perceive emotional reactions of majority-culture students (continuing-generation junior and senior students who have been socialized into college culture), and (2) Emotional Similarity -how similar students' emotions are to the emotions experienced by majority-culture students. Emotional Accuracy predicted positive outcomes, in general, but was lower among first-generation students. Unexpectedly, Emotional Similarity predicted negative student outcomes. As one of the first studies addressing basic psychological mechanisms in college adjustment, these findings underscore the importance of understanding the roles that specific emotional processes play in social adjustment.

Individual costs and community benefits: Collectivism and individuals' compliance with public health interventions.

Differences in national responses to COVID-19 have been associated with the cultural value of collectivism. The present research builds on these findings by examining the relationship between collectivism at the individual level and adherence to public health recommendations to combat COVID-19 during the pre-vaccination stage of the pandemic, and examines different characteristics of collectivism (i.e., concern for community, trust in institutions, perceived social norms) as potential psychological mechanisms that could explain greater compliance. A study with a cross-section of American participants (N = 530) examined the relationship between collectivism and opting-in to digital contact tracing (DCT) and wearing face coverings in the general population. More collectivistic individuals were more likely to comply with public health interventions than less collectivistic individuals. While collectivism was positively associated with the three potential psychological mechanisms, only perceived social norms about the proportion of people performing the public health interventions explained the relationship between collectivism and compliance with both public health interventions. This research identifies specific pathways by which collectivism can lead to compliance with community-benefiting public health behaviors to combat contagious diseases and highlights the role of cultural orientation in shaping individuals' decisions that involve a tension between individual cost and community benefit.

Beliefs and Social Norms as Precursors of Environmental Support: The Joint Influence of Collectivism and Socioeconomic Status.

The present research investigates how the cultural value of collectivism interacts with socioeconomic status (SES) to influence the basis of action. Using a U.S. national sample (N = 2,538), the research examines how these sociocultural factors jointly moderate the strength of two precursors of environmental support: beliefs about climate change and perceived descriptive norms. SES and collectivism interacted with climate change beliefs such that beliefs predicted environmental support (i.e., proenvironmental behaviors and policy support) more strongly for those who were high in SES and low in collectivism than for all other groups. This interaction was explained, in part, by sense of control. For descriptive norms, SES and collectivism did not interact but rather norms predicted action most strongly for those high in collectivism and high in SES. These findings demonstrate the theoretical and applied importance of examining multiple sociocultural characteristics together to understand the factors that drive action.

Psychology and the Threat of Contagion: Feeling Vulnerable to a Disease Moderates the Link Between Xenophobic Thoughts and Support for Ingroup-Protective Actions.

The widespread threat of contagious disease disrupts not only everyday life but also psychological experience. Building on findings regarding xenophobic responses to contagious diseases, this research investigates how perceived vulnerability to a disease moderates the psychological link between people's xenophobic thoughts and support for ingroup-protective actions. Three datasets collected during the time of Ebola (N = 867) and COVID-19 (Ns = 992 and 926) measured perceived disease risk, group-serving biases (i.e., xenophobic thoughts), and support for restrictive travel policies (i.e., ingroup-protective actions). Using correlational and quasi-experimental analyses, results indicated that for people who perceive greater disease risk, the association between group-serving bias and restrictive policy support is weakened. This weakened association occurred because people who felt more vulnerable to these diseases increased support for ingroup-protective actions more strongly than xenophobic thoughts. This research underscores the importance of understanding the impact of threats on psychological processes beyond the impact on psychological outcomes.

Religion, Social Connectedness, and Xenophobic Responses to Ebola.

This study examined the role of religion in xenophobic responses to the threat of Ebola. Religious communities often offer members strong social ties and social support, which may help members cope with psychological and physical threat, including global threats like Ebola. Our analysis of a nationally representative sample in the U.S. (N = 1,000) found that overall, the more vulnerable to Ebola people felt, the more they exhibited xenophobic responses, but this relationship was moderated by importance of religion. Those who perceived religion as more important in their lives exhibited weaker xenophobic reactions than those who perceived religion as less important. Furthermore, social connectedness measured by collectivism explained the moderating role of religion, suggesting that higher collectivism associated with religion served as a psychological buffer. Religious people showed attenuated threat responses because they had a stronger social system that may offer resources for its members to cope with psychological and physical threats. The current research highlights that different cultural groups react to increased threats in divergent ways.

Religiosity Moderates the Link Between Environmental Beliefs and Pro-Environmental Support: The Role of Belief in a Controlling God.

The current research examines differences in what motivates environmentally sustainable behavior between more and less religious people in the United States. We found that religiosity moderates the extent to which environmental beliefs predict pro-environmental support. Specifically, environmental beliefs predicted pro-environmental support less strongly among more religious people than less religious people (Studies 1 and 2). Using a correlational (Study 2) and an experimental (Study 3) design, we further found that one particular aspect of religiosity-believing in a controlling god-reduced the importance of personally held environmental beliefs in shaping one's support for pro-environmental actions. Our findings suggest that motivation to act based on personal beliefs may be attenuated among people who are religious because they believe in an external source of control. Sociocultural factors, such as religion, shape the psychological underpinnings of social actions, and the present research underscores the importance of understanding psychological diversity in promoting support toward environmental sustainability.

The ego dampening influence of religion: evidence from behavioral genetics and psychology.

Religion is a product of evolutionary and biological processes. Thus, understanding why some people are religious and how it impacts their everyday lives requires an integrated perspective. This review presents a theoretical framework incorporating recent findings on religious influences on the behavioral expression of genetic and psychological predispositions. We propose that religion may facilitate ego dampening, or weakening of the impact of one's internal drive, for the service of sociality. Evidence from gene-environment interaction and behavioral studies suggests that religious beliefs and practices may dampen more prepotent, self-focused motives that can be at odds with cooperation and social cohesion. The review underscores the importance of taking an interdisciplinary perspective to understand complex and fundamental questions about religion.

My emotions belong here and there: extending the phenomenon of emotional acculturation to heritage culture fit.

When immigrant minorities engage in a new cultural context, their patterns of emotional experience come to change - a process we coined emotional acculturation. To date, research on emotional acculturation focused on the antecedents and consequences of changes in minorities' fit with the new culture. Yet, most minorities also continue to engage in their heritage culture. Therefore, the current research investigated which personal and situational factors afford minorities to maintain emotional fit with their heritage culture. Two studies compared the emotional patterns of Korean Americans (n = 49) with those of Koreans in Korea (n = 80), and the emotional patterns of Turkish Belgians (n = 144) with those of Turks in Turkey (n = 250), respectively. As expected, we found that although minorities did not fit the heritage emotional patterns as well as participants in their home countries, spending time with heritage culture friends and interacting in heritage culture settings explained within-group differences in minorities' heritage culture fit. Therefore, the current research shows that minorities' emotional patterns are not only cultivated, but also activated by their interactions in different socio-cultural contexts. Moreover, it provides further evidence for cultural frame-switching in the domain of emotion.

Not All Forms of Independence Are Created Equal: Only Being Independent the "Right Way" Is Associated With Self-Esteem and Life Satisfaction.

Past research has found a strong and positive association between the independent self-construal and life satisfaction, mediated through self-esteem, in both individualistic and collectivistic cultures. In Study 1, we collected data from four countries (the United States, Japan, Romania, and Hungary; N = 736) and replicated these findings in cultures which have received little attention in past research. In Study 2, we treated independence as a multifaceted construct and further examined its relationship with self-esteem and life satisfaction using samples from the United States and Romania (N = 370). Different ways of being independent are associated with self-esteem and life satisfaction in the two cultures, suggesting that it is not independence as a global concept that predicts self-esteem and life satisfaction, but rather, feeling independent in culturally appropriate ways is a signal that one's way of being fits in and is valued in one's context.

Cultural Variability in the Association Between Age and Well-Being: The Role of Uncertainty Avoidance.

Past research has found a mixed relationship between age and subjective well-being. The current research advances the understanding of these findings by incorporating a cultural perspective. We tested whether the relationship between age and well-being is moderated by uncertainty avoidance, a cultural dimension dealing with society's tolerance for ambiguity. In Study 1 (N = 64,228), using a multilevel approach with an international database, we found that older age was associated with lower well-being in countries higher in uncertainty avoidance but not in countries lower in uncertainty avoidance. Further, this cultural variation was mediated by a sense of control. In Study 2 (N = 1,025), we compared a culture with low uncertainty avoidance (the United States) with a culture with high uncertainty avoidance (Romania) and found a consistent pattern: Age was negatively associated with well-being in Romania but not in the United States. This cultural difference was mediated by the use of contrasting coping strategies associated with different levels of a sense of control.

Age and Social Support Seeking: Understanding the Role of Perceived Social Costs to Others.

We examined age differences in the use of different types of social support and the reasons for these differences. We found that older adults (age 60+) seek explicit social support less compared with young adults (age 18-25), but there is no difference in implicit social support seeking. Concerns about the potential social costs of seeking explicit support mediate the age differences in explicit social support seeking. Whereas young adults view this strategy as conferring more benefits than costs, older adults have a more balanced view of the costs and benefits of explicit social support seeking. Older and young adults do not differ in perceptions of the relative costs versus benefits of implicit social support seeking. Finally, we found older adults benefit more from implicit (vs. explicit) social support emotionally than young adults, which further explains why age groups differ in their use of explicit versus implicit social support.

Incorporating the cultural diversity of family and close relationships into the study of health.

Relationships are at the center of the human social environment, and their quality and longevity are now recognized to have particular relevance for health. The goal of this article is to bring attention to the role of culture in how relationships, particularly close relationships and family relationships, influence health. To this end, 2 contexts that are characterized by 2 distinct forms of cultural collectivism (East Asian and Latino) are spotlighted to highlight the unique patterns that underlie broader cultural categories (e.g., collectivism). In addition, related research on other understudied cultures and nonethnic or nonnational forms of culture (e.g., social class, religion) is also discussed. The review centers on social support, a key pathway through which relationships shape psychological and physical health, as the psychological process that has received the most empirical attention in this area. Overall, it is clear that new and more systematic approaches are needed to generate a more comprehensive, novel, and inclusive understanding of the role of culture in relationship processes that shape health. Three recommendations are offered for researchers and professionals to generate and incorporate knowledge of culture-specific relationship processes into their understanding of health. (PsycINFO Database Record

Automatic Mechanisms for Social Attention Are Culturally Penetrable.

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom-up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top-down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi-gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.

Cultural Variability in the Link Between Environmental Concern and Support for Environmental Action.

Research on sustainability behaviors has been based on the assumption that increasing personal concerns about the environment will increase proenvironmental action. We tested whether this assumption is more applicable to individualistic cultures than to collectivistic cultures. In Study 1, we compared 47 countries ( N = 57,268) and found that they varied considerably in the degree to which environmental concern predicted support for proenvironmental action. National-level individualism explained the between-nation variability above and beyond the effects of other cultural values and independently of person-level individualism. In Study 2, we compared individualistic and collectivistic nations (United States vs. Japan; N = 251) and found culture-specific predictors of proenvironmental behavior. Environmental concern predicted environmentally friendly consumer choice among European Americans but not Japanese. For Japanese participants, perceived norms about environmental behavior predicted proenvironmental decision making. Facilitating sustainability across nations requires an understanding of how culture determines which psychological factors drive human action.

Fear of Ebola: The Influence of Collectivism on Xenophobic Threat Responses.

In response to the Ebola scare in 2014, many people evinced strong fear and xenophobia. The present study, informed by the pathogen-prevalence hypothesis, tested the influence of individualism and collectivism on xenophobic response to the threat of Ebola. A nationally representative sample of 1,000 Americans completed a survey, indicating their perceptions of their vulnerability to Ebola, ability to protect themselves from Ebola (protection efficacy), and xenophobic tendencies. Overall, the more vulnerable people felt, the more they exhibited xenophobic responses, but this relationship was moderated by individualism and collectivism. The increase in xenophobia associated with increased vulnerability was especially pronounced among people with high individualism scores and those with low collectivism scores. These relationships were mediated by protection efficacy. State-level collectivism had the same moderating effect on the association between perceived vulnerability and xenophobia that individual-level value orientation did. Collectivism-and the set of practices and rituals associated with collectivistic cultures-may serve as psychological protection against the threat of disease.

Cultural Differences in Support Provision: The Importance of Relationship Quality.

Emotional expression is highly valued in individualistic cultures, whereas emotional restraint is prioritized in collectivistic cultures. We hypothesized that high-quality relationships in these cultures would exhibit the forms of support provision congruent with their respective expectations. Study 1 examined support transactions among friends in response to a laboratory stressor and found that objectively judged relationship quality (RQ) more strongly positively predicted emotion-focused support provision behaviors by European Americans than by Asian Americans. Study 2, a questionnaire study, found that self-reported RQ predicted emotion-focused support provision more strongly among European Americans than among Japanese. Study 3 investigated more indirect forms of support and found that RQ more strongly predicted worrying about and monitoring close others enduring stressors and spending time with them without talking about the stressor among Asian Americans compared with European Americans. These findings suggest that RQ is expressed in terms of support provision in culturally normative ways.

Religion priming and an oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) polymorphism interact to affect self-control in a social context.

Using a genetic moderation approach, this study examines how an experimental prime of religion impacts self-control in a social context, and whether this effect differs depending on the genotype of an oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) polymorphism (rs53576). People with different genotypes of OXTR seem to have different genetic orientations toward sociality, which may have consequences for the way they respond to religious cues in the environment. In order to determine whether the influence of religion priming on self-control is socially motivated, we examine whether this effect is stronger for people who have OXTR genotypes that should be linked to greater rather than less social sensitivity (i.e., GG vs. AA/AG genotypes). The results showed that experimentally priming religion increased self-control behaviors for people with GG genotypes more so than people with AA/AG genotypes. Furthermore, this Gene × Religion interaction emerged in a social context, when people were interacting face to face with another person. This research integrates genetic moderation and social psychological approaches to address a novel question about religion's influence on self-control behavior, which has implications for coping with distress and psychopathology. These findings also highlight the importance of the social context for understanding genetic moderation of psychological effects.

The dual function of social gaze.

Ears cannot speak, lips cannot hear, but eyes can both signal and perceive. For human beings, this dual function makes the eyes a remarkable tool for social interaction. For psychologists trying to understand eye movements, however, their dual function causes a fundamental ambiguity. In order to contrast signaling and perceiving functions of social gaze, we manipulated participants' beliefs about social context as they looked at the same stimuli. Participants watched videos of faces of higher and lower ranked people, while they themselves were filmed. They believed either that the recordings of them would later be seen by the people in the videos or that no-one would see them. This manipulation significantly changed how participants responded to the social rank of the target faces. Specifically, when they believed that the targets would later be looking at them, and so could use gaze to signal information, participants looked proportionally less at the eyes of the higher ranked targets. We conclude that previous claims about eye movements and face perception that are based on a single social context can only be generalized with caution. A complete understanding of face perception needs to address both functions of social gaze.

Cultural neuroscience: biology of the mind in cultural contexts.

This article provides a review of how cultural contexts shape and are shaped by psychological and neurobiological processes. We propose a framework that aims to culturally contextualize behavioral, genetic, neural, and physiological processes. Empirical evidence is presented to offer concrete examples of how neurobiological processes underlie social behaviors, and how these components are interconnected in larger cultural contexts. These findings provide some understanding of how the meanings shared by cultural experiences trigger a neurobiological, psychological, and behavioral chain of events, and how these events may be coordinated and maintained within a person. The review concludes with a reflection on the current state of cultural neuroscience and questions for the field to address.