Ethical Challenges of Cross-Cultural Research - The Example of a Psychological Research Project in the Andean Context.

Using the example of a psychological research project in the Andean context, this explorative interview study adds to the current debate about ethical challenges of psychological cross-cultural research projects by being one of the first to address those challenges empirically. Using a multilevel approach, we conducted interviews with three groups of experts (study participants, i.e., Kichwa mothers, research assistants and experts on research in Indigenous communities in Ecuador; N = 10). Overall, the thematic analysis identified that the establishment of horizontal research relationships allows the best adaption to context-specific values (e.g., balance between giving and receiving), norms and societal structures. On the grounds of the analysis, we derived reflective questions for addressing the complex ethical challenges in future cross-cultural projects.

Universality without uniformity - infants' reactions to unresponsive partners in urban Germany and rural Ecuador.

Previous studies based on non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples provide initial evidence that the still-face effect is universal. Based on the assumption that - independent of their cultural niches - infants share some fundamental expectations of social interactions, we put forth the assumption that a universal response exists for when a social interaction is interrupted. At the same time, we hypothesized that the size of the effect depends on the typicality of the interaction that precedes the adult partners' interruption. To test these hypotheses, we conducted the Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) with infants (3- and 4.5-month-olds) from two cultural milieus, namely Münster (urban Germany) and the Kichwa ethnic group from the northern Andes region (rural Ecuador), as these contexts presumably offer different ways of construing the self that are associated with different parenting styles, namely distal and proximal parenting. Furthermore, we developed a paradigm that comes much closer to the average expected environment of Kichwa infants, the "No-Touch Paradigm" (NTP). Overall, the results support our initial hypothesis that the still-face effect is universal. Moreover, infants from both cultural milieus responded to the no-touch condition with a change in negative affect. At the same time, some of the infants' responses were accentuated in a culture-specific way: Kichwa infants had a stronger response to an interruption of proximal interaction patterns during the NTP. While our findings underline infants' universal predisposition for face-to-face interaction, they also suggest that cultural differences in internalized interactions do influence infant behavior and experience and, in turn, development.

Interactional preludes to infants' affective climax - Mother-infant interaction around infant smiling in two cultures.

Due to limited research on cross-cultural similarities and differences in the development of infant smiling, the main goals of this study were to analyze, first, the development of infants' bouts of intense smiling during their third month and, second, the interactional preludes to infants' affective climax in two cultural contexts, namely Kichwa families from the Ecuadorian Andes region and educated urban middle-class families from Münster, Germany, which differ concerning their cultural models on infant smiling. Based on a longitudinal, naturalistic study design, mother-infant interaction in Kichwa (n = 10) and Münster (n = 10) families was analyzed when infants were 9 and 13 weeks old. Following a mixed methods approach, a quantitative analysis of infant smiling based on a 1-second interval-coding approach showed that there was a significant increase in infants' high-intensity positive affect from 9 to 13 weeks in the Münster, but not the Kichwa sample, leading to significant cross-cultural differences at 13 weeks. Complementarily, the qualitative analysis of the interactional preludes to the 66 infants' affective climaxes at 13 weeks identified two main patterns that characterized the dynamic that resulted in high-intensity positive affect and that were similar across the two cultural contexts: the first was intense and multimodal stimulation with repetition and theme variation, and the second was positively tuned and mutually contingent responsiveness, often in the form of prolonged proto-conversations between mother and infant. Overall, this open approach converged on key mechanisms underlying infant smiling, namely infants' experience of mastery based on effortful assimilation or self-efficacy, which was embedded in episodes of intersubjective coordination. Overall, these results suggest universality without uniformity; that is, similar interactional mechanisms are associated with high-intense positivity in infants, while the episodes are co-constructed differently in different dyads and high-intense positivity varies in significance and frequency across cultures.