In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Rights, China, and Cross-Cultural Inquiry:Philosophy, History, and Power PoliticsRandall PeerenboomStephen Angle's Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) is a wonderful book that combines philosophically sophisticated discussions of controversial human-rights issues with a detailed intellectual history of the evolution of human-rights discourse in China over the last several hundred years. I will use Angle's book as a platform (...) for consideration of a number of issues regarding the role of philosophy, history, and power politics in relation to human rights in China and elsewhere.Angle focuses his discussion on two claims: first, that countries have different concepts of human rights, and second, that we ought not demand that countries comply with human-rights concepts different from their own.1 These two claims (or something similar) are central to China's official position on rights and to humanrights debates more generally, including the debate about values in Asia.2Angle's response, in short, is that there are distinctive concepts of human rights in China, and that "there have been both continuities and changes in the ways that rights have been conceptualized over the course of China's rich and distinctive rights discourse" (p. 250). However, the only way a community can unilaterally declare its values and practices immune from the scrutiny of others is through "parochialism," which, according to Angle, cuts off that community from making legitimate demands on others. Rather, he suggests, we "should seek an accommodation of differences with one another in the spirit of toleration, and on that basis engage one another on as many levels as possible" (pp. 250-251).One of the many great strengths of this book is that Angle grounds his responses in an interesting and insightful discussion of contemporary philosophers, assessing along the way the contributions and limits of MacIntrye, Rawls, Dworkin, Raz, Walzer, and especially Brandom, among others, to this cross-cultural inquiry of human rights. It might seem, given this list of luminaries, Angle's own training in Western analytic philosophy, and his position in the philosophy department of an American university, that Western philosophy is driving the debate and dictating the fundamental terms and parameters of the inquiry.3 This, of course, is precisely one of the complaints of non-Westerners such as Liu Huaqiu, who argue that they are being measured by Western standards, that rights are concepts grounded in historically contingent modern Western philosophical traditions, and that the rights movement is biased in favor of secular liberalism, which is at odds with and may preclude states based on religious worldviews and communitarian or collectivist [End Page 283] points of view that do not privilege autonomy, choice, and individual interests to the extent that liberals do.Angle's response is twofold. First, he argues, sensibly enough, that we cannot and need not set aside or escape our traditions and value systems. Cross-cultural inquiry must begin from somewhere. But we must remain open-minded and willing to continue the conversation, at least for a considerable while and in most cases indefinitely, even if in some cases we simultaneously must rely on coercion and repression.4 As discussed below, Angle endorses a limited moral pluralism that tolerates some differences while not providing an excuse for appeasing dictators or turning a blind eye to genocide and other atrocities.Second, Angle is not out simply to measure China by the standards of contemporary Western philosophers. Rather, he wants to show that China has its own distinctive discourse on rights, and that this discourse is multifaceted and constantly evolving. According to Angle, "Chinese rights discourse should be seen as an ongoing creative achievement, rather than a reaction to or misunderstanding of Western ideas and institutions" (p. 2).5 He shows this by providing a detailed intellectual history of Chinese rights discourse, another great strength of the book. His primary focus is on several prominent Neo-Confucians and pre-1949 debates, although he also considers some contemporary debates.6 Angle is clearly successful at demonstrating that Chinese thinkers have advanced a number of different views and that rights discourse over the last century and a half has been... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic LiteraturesCary Howie (bio)Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008, xii + 254 pp.Sahar Amer’s Crossing Borders adds to the expanding bibliography on medieval sexualities by showing the resonances between certain female same-sex relationships in medieval French literature and analogous, though generally more explicit, relationships between women (...) in the medieval Arabic tradition. In the process, sexuality becomes a way of talking about the porous boundaries that constitute the field of Old French, and perhaps even Western, literature as such.Amer’s book couldn’t have arrived at a better time, as Sarkozy’s French government once again, in the name of French values, intervenes in the debates around religion and clothing in the public sphere, debates in which the old divides between France and its constitutive others—in this case, certain kinds of Islam and certain kinds of women— have once again come to the fore. By proposing that “medieval French writing is essentially a hybrid, cross-cultural project” (163), Amer contributes not just to the emerging sense of the Middle Ages’ postcoloniality (as articulated by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Sharon Kinoshita, among others) but also to the work being done by intellectual historians and cultural theorists such as Joan Scott and Diane Rubenstein on the fantastic investments that take place within and around French universalism (which could be said to inform the idea of the literary no less than the idea of the citizen).Crossing Borders begins with the notion of borders as “fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration” (ix), and it is the emphasis on a more general sense of cultural exchange, more than the fact of borders per se, that will permeate the chapters that follow. (In fact, the border, like “the lesbian,” Amer’s polemical term of choice for the women she describes, may be important for her argument precisely insofar as it resists visibility, as it remains to some extent difficult to locate.) Amer’s reading of Old French texts, in dialogue with a handful of medieval Arabic narratives and erotic compilations, proceeds from an understanding of medieval culture in which there is “a continuity rather than a rupture between medieval and modern conceptions of alternative [End Page 156] sexualities” (9), and in which it is possible to argue for influences that are tough, if not impossible, to trace empirically. According to this logic, ideas and stories may have circulated “next to” more tangible material goods taken to and from the Arab Islamicate world (13), and French authors may have “culled some elements from Arabic material and wove[n] them into a literary fabric to suit their audience’s sensibilities” (163). This attentiveness to what “may have” happened (e.g., 44, 110) is one of the signature gestures of Amer’s critical poetics, which I am tempted to describe as an imaginative historicism, committed at once to the explanatory power of historical context and to what Amer will repeatedly call the “imagination of the audience” (e.g., 79).After an initial chapter outlining this “cross-cultural” poetics of contextualization and imaginative investment, chapter 2, “Crossing Linguistic Borders,” is dedicated to seven stanzas of a late twelfth-century poem, Étienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, in which a long description is given of women who go “against Nature” by “join[ing] shield to shield without a lance” (32). Amer reads these military metaphors for female homoeroticism in light of Arabic sources including, for example, al-Jurjani’s eleventh-century Anthology of Metonymic Devices, in which one of the cited commonplaces observes, “They [lesbians] manifest a war in which there is no spear-thrusting” (36). Most provocatively, Amer argues for the Arabic provenance of two otherwise untranslatable words in Étienne’s text, “trutennes,” which she traces to an Arabic root meaning “the mons of the beloved” (40), and “eu,” which she interprets as an orgasmic onomatopoeia. From mons to moans, the “medieval French literary lesbian” is a condensation of forms and fantasies—and noises—that come from before and beyond medieval France. In fact, the... (shrink)

This study compares Australian marketers with those in the United States along lines that are particular to the study of ethics. The test measured two different moral philosophies, idealism and relativism, and compared perceptions of ethical problems, ethical intentions, and corporate ethical values. According to Hofstede''s cultural typologies, there should be little difference between American and Australian marketers, but the study did find significant differences. Australians tended to be more idealistic and more relativistic than Americans and the other results (...) were mixed, making it difficult to generalize about the effects of moral philosophies on the components of ethical decision-making measured here. This is an important finding; as firms become increasingly more globalized, marketers will more often be involved in cross-cultural ethical dilemmas and it seems natural to assume that similar cultures will have similar ethical orientations. That assumption may well prove erroneous. (shrink)

In the research on literacy learning the concept of language awareness has come forward as a unifying framework for understanding the underlying knowledge that supports ability in reading and writing. Consensus is gathering around the idea that language awareness is an essential foundation. If subsequent work in this area confirms it, this factor may turn out to be the key cognitive-domain explanation for successful literacy learning in school (and for academic purposes in general). In this review we examine two (...) cross-cultural comparisons regarding this claim. The comparisons point to the need to examine cases that juxtapose contrasting conditions. Relevant contrasts place side by side examples that appear to be typical and examples that appear to be exceptional. Taking what appear on the surface as sharply diverging cases, how is access to requisite underlying competencies similar, and how different, from one instance to the other? (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine the cross-cultural validity of the Organizational Stressor Indicator for Sport Performers scale by investigating its psychometric properties with Ghanaian footballers. The study particularly sought to assess in the Ghanaian context, 1, the convergence validity and reliability of the OSI-SP scale, 2, the discriminant validity of the OSI-SP scale to understand the applicability of its factor structure, and 3, whether the OSI-SP hypothesized model fits the data collected within the study context. (...) The intensity aspect of the OSI-SP questionnaire was administered to 424 Ghana Premier League male footballers who took part in the 2020/2021 season. Quality control strategies were put in place to ensure consistency across interpreters and as well improve the validity of the data. The results from a multi-factor first-order confirmatory factor analysis showed some level of convergence validity of the OSI-SP scale in the Ghanaian context using football players. Out of the 23 items on the original scale, 20 met the factor loadings criterion. In assessing the discriminant validity of the OSI-SP scale using Heterotrait-monotrait, 50% of the correlation ratios met the criterion for the original 23-item instrument. Comparing the new model with the original model using the Akaike Information Criterion value, the model fit indices for the modified model appeared better than the original model with 23-items. Generally, there was minimal support for the applicability of the OSI-SP instrument across the sample of Ghanaian footballers. The implications of these findings are discussed in detail. (shrink)

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix well with the factors that are normally given full explanatory value in the more naturalistic approaches to the study of human behaviour. My purpose in this paper is to (...) alert to some of the theoretical vulnerabilities or concerns that the cross-cultural study of mind and behaviour might entail. I classify these theoretical concerns into three, loosely defined, categories: epistemological, ontological and ethical. The first have to do with what in anthropology was once labelled as ‘butterfly collecting’. What kind of supplementary, or additional, general theoretical knowledge do we produce when we add to the research different, particularistic, culturally determined, ways of knowing? Ontological concerns refer to the underlying reality that those ways of knowing are meant to disclose. If there are so many ways of knowing the world, where is the reality to be known? Ethical concerns are those entailed in the forms of ‘othering’ that unqualified cross-cultural research is likely to produce in research participants. (shrink)

Especially since the discovery of mirror neurons, scholars in a variety of disciplines have made empathy a central focus of research. Yet despite this recent flurry of interest and activity, the cross-cultural study of empathy in context, as part of ongoing, naturally occurring behavior, remains in its infancy. In the present article, I review some of this recent work on the ethnography of empathy. I focus especially on the new issues and questions about empathy that the ethnographic approach (...) raises and the implication of these for the study of empathy more generally. (shrink)

The main purpose of this study is to understand how the ‘laws’ of the cross-cultural model apply to cross-religions/interreligious communications with populations from different cultures amid migration. The aim is to identify the steps in which the cross-culture model generally works and if they apply the same way to the religious realm or not. Being able to navigate through different cultural nuances is a key-skill for us all nowadays, amid globalization, migration, and across borders exchange, (...) while religious/spiritual aids can be a beneficial factor in such a ‘new’ environment. (shrink)

Through the personal stories of managers running global business, this book takes an inside look into the dilemmas of managers who are asked to make profits ethically according to the dictates of their company's ethics code. It examines what companies `think" they are doing to help managers in those situations and how those managers are actually affected. Thanks to the boost from the 1991 Sentencing Guidelines which minimizes penalties for companies with ethics codes caught in ethical wrongdoing, more than 85% (...) of US companies and two thirds of all Canadian companies and half of all European companies now have Codes of Ethics. Yet, over and over, we hear of stories of personal dilemmas and conflicts experienced by individual managers navigating those business waters in other cultures. "Eileen Morgan does an excellent job of mapping the course for navigating the previously uncharted global ethical waters. By identifying best practices, she leads the reader on a journey from Surviving, to Understanding to Knowing the ethical issues that frequently confront international business people. This is a must read for anyone who wants to successfully compete in world markets." -Michael J. Litwin, Executive Vice President, Chief Credit Officer, Heller Financial, Inc. "Eileen Morgan has combined the pragmatic concerns of the individual manager with the moral concerns that come from personal-life history, cultural roots, and corporate ethical culture …This book focuses on the constructive task of formulating and using an "ethical map," and is sure to be a tonic to conscientious managers who want to navigate cross-cultural commerce with integrity. It has done a superb job of creating order out of the complexity of cross-cultural moral experience by insisting that the complexity must be honored and appropriated rather than ignored or suppressed." -Dr. Richard Beauchamp, Professor of Ethics, Christopher Newport University "In this groundbreaking book, Eileen Morgan has provided scores of real-life examples and developed a framework for approaching ethical leadership in international business. This is mandatory reading for anyone involved in global management today...This is an important book on an important subject." -Stephen H. Rhinesmith, Ph.D. Author, A Manager's Guide to Globalization "Eileen Morgan provides us with a much needed roadmap for how to walk the path of ethical leadership with practical feet. She reminds us that ethical decision-making is a critical aspect of every day leadership, and that we can all choose to be 'ethical pioneers' in our companies and our communities. Every leader engaged in global business can benefit from the lessons and stories included in this book." -Christi A. Olson, Ph.D. Chair, Telecommunications Management Department, Golden Gate University "Eileen Morgan's thoughtful analysis of 'ethical capital' should be read by anyone who does business in a global environment…Morgan's book presents the issue clearly, comprehensively and compellingly, demonstrating that ethics is an indispensable aspect of individual leadership and organizational credibility. …It provides a clear roadmap for business leaders who need to communicate their commitment to integrity and accountability to their employees, their partners, and their customer, making their 'ethical capital' one of their most valuable assets." -Nell Minnow, Principal, Lens, The Corporate Governance Investors "Eileen Morgan gives excellent insight into ethical practices. She focuses on business but her insights have general application. This book also describes differences in ethical interpretation that can arise between diverse cultures. Ms. Morgan has made an excellent contribution to understanding the benefit of positive ethical practices." -David C. Lincoln, Sponsor, Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, College of Business, Arizona State University President, Arizona Oxides, LLC · First in-depth look at how managers in global companies actually bridge the gap between their organizations and their daily decisions · Explains the need for internal and external ethical operations¦and how organizations often create confusion rather than clarity with the label of "ethics". (shrink)

Hunt and Vitell''s General Theory (1992) is used in a cross-cultural comparison of U.S. and Taiwanese business practitioners. Results indicate that Taiwanese practitioners exhibit lower perceptions of an ethical issue in a scenario based on bribery, as well as milder deontological evaluations and ethical judgments relative to their U.S. counterparts. In addition, Taiwan respondents showed higher likelihood of making the payment. Several of the paths between variables in the theory are confirmed in both U.S. and Taiwan samples, (...) with summary data suggesting the Hunt and Vitell theory performs well in both U.S. and Taiwan. Some unanticipated linkages within the model were uncovered in the samples. Results and implications are discussed. (shrink)

The recent crisis in a prominent German car manufacturer generated by unethical leadership practices has brought into sharp focus, once again, the need for radical and fundamental ethical transformation among members of capitalism’s leadership elite. The divide between ethics and business needs to be closed and to do this effectively in a globalized world, cross-cultural aspects of moral sentiment need to be better understood. The current paper contributes to the extant literature in this regard by describing and analyzing (...) cross-cultural aspects of German and South African student’s ‘sympathy’ towards business ethical phenomena, using Adam Smith’s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiment’ as a theoretical framework and qualitative methods. The paper constructs a heuristic device based on Adam Smith’s theoretical framework and then proceeds to empirically analyze the theory by investigating German and South African student moral sentiments towards specific ethical leadership behaviors. The study indicates that while there is general cross-cultural homogeneity in moral approbation among students for fundamental aspects of ethical leadership behavior, nuanced custom-based differences emerge from the qualitative analysis. Following Adam Smith, fine grained differences in moral sentiment arising from ‘custom’ are evident. Thus, although ethicality of specific leadership behavior is found to be viewed similarly by both groups of students, significant nuanced differences arise in German students who emphasize intellectual autonomy over the conservatism favored by their South African counterparts. Practical aspects of these findings are briefly discussed. (shrink)

Although virtually all comparative research about risk perception focuses on which hazards are of concern to people in different culture groups, much can be gained by focusing on predictors of levels of risk perception in various countries and places. In this case, we examine standard and novel predictors of risk perception in seven sites among communities affected by a flood in Mexico (one site) and volcanic eruptions in Mexico (one site) and Ecuador (five sites). We conducted more than 450 interviews (...) with questions about how people feel at the time (after the disaster) regarding what happened in the past, their current concerns, and their expectations for the future. We explore how aspects of the context in which people live have an effect on how strongly people perceive natural hazards in relationship with demographic, well-being, and social network factors. Generally, our research indicates that levels of risk perception for past, present, and future aspects of a specific hazard are similar across these two countries and seven sites. However, these contexts produced different predictors of risk perception—in other words, there was little overlap between sites in the variables that predicted the past, present, or future aspects of risk perception in each site. Generally, current stress was related to perception of past danger of an event in the Mexican sites, but not in Ecuador; network variables were mainly important for perception of past danger (rather than future or present danger), although specific network correlates varied from site to site across the countries. (shrink)

This paper examines the email discursive practices of particular speakers of two different languages, namely Peninsular Spanish and British English. More specifically, our study focuses on (in)formality and (in)directness therein, for these lie at the heart of considerable scholarly debate regarding, respectively (i) the general stylistic drift towards orality and informality in technology-mediated communication, and (ii) the degree of communicative (in)directness - within broader politeness orientations - of speakers of different languages, specifically an orientation towards directness in Peninsular Spanish (...) vis-à-vis indirectness in British English. The aim of this paper is thus to investigate the role of (in)formality and (in)directness in email messages sent by members of two groups of undergraduate students to their university lecturers. To this end, a corpus of 100 impromptu emails was compiled and analysed. Results revealed complex, fluctuating patterns regarding levels of (in)formality and (in)directness that underlined cross-cultural variation in the way that different sociopragmatic principles found expression in a specific computer-mediated communicative situation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cross-Cultural Dialogue on Human Rights and the Limits of Conversation:A Reply to Stephen AngleRandall PeerenboomSteve Angle correctly notes that I do not believe that he provides a satisfactory answer to the questions of how to determine whether we are dealing with a single rights concept or discourse or multiple concepts or discourses. He also correctly notes that I believe that philosophical discussions of how to understand concepts (...) [End Page 324] (and usually even discussion of the concepts themselves) tend to divert attention from the real human-rights issues that affect people's lives.One response to my first claim is to suggest that I locate the problem in the tension between what looks like a community-based definition of concepts and his endorsement of a holistic approach to meaning according to which our individual webs of commitments always vary to some extent from one to another.1 There is a tension between a conventional view of concepts that looks to community practices and holistic approaches to meaning that focus on the webs of beliefs of individuals. But that issue, which I agree is not overly troublesome for the present purposes, is not related to the main objection I raise to his adoption of Brandom's theory of concepts. The basic point is that the switch to the more practice-oriented commitments approach to concepts (from the shared-meanings view of concepts) does not provide meaningful criteria for determining when commitments are sufficiently similar or different to decide claims that people are using the same concept or different concepts. Accordingly, it does not solve the philosophical issues that arise in assessing claims such as "Li Buyun and Joseph Raz are using the same concept of rights" or "China has a distinctive rights discourse and thus rights are contingent rather than universal" or "China has a rights discourse similar to that in the West, which supports the view that rights are universal."Angle's second response to my first criticism is to agree that there will be problems drawing lines, and that where we draw the lines will be arbitrary to some extent, in part because of the generality of concepts and in part because where we draw the lines will be affected by our normative views and our purposes for using the concepts. But he suggests that this is not problematic. However, the commitments approach is not very useful philosophically if two people can score commitments in very different ways, or include some commitments and not others in the calculus, and thus reach different conclusions on whether they are using the same concept of right. At least this failing is more than a little problematic for a philosophical account of concepts that purports to promote cross-cultural dialogue by allowing us to sort out claims about whether we are using the same concept or different concepts, whether we mean the same thing by "rights," and whether China's rights discourse is distinctive.But perhaps Angle means that the inability to state clearly whether people are using the same concept, or whether China has a distinctive rights discourse or one similar to Western rights discourse, is not problematic in the practical sense that it does not matter very much to the real human-rights issues that affect people's lives. If so, then we are in basic agreement on the second issue.Support for this view is found in the following passage from his response: "Chinese rights discourse has been, by and large, distinctive (that is, different in various ways from much of Western rights discourse), but this distinctiveness does not stand in the way of communication, dialogue, and constructive engagement. Identifying conceptual differences only leads to angry stares if one wants to manufacture an excuse for ending the conversation. Even then, anyone familiar with my argument should be able to see that the obstacle to conversation is not the conceptual difference [End Page 325] but the desire not to cooperate." This claim suggests that differences in concepts are not as important to resolving rights disputes as the desire to continue the conversation.First, neither I nor Angle claim that differences in concepts are never important to resolving... (shrink)

This article is a reply to six contributions to a special issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice that is devoted to critically discussing A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent. In this book I articulate a comprehensive principle of rightness that is substantially informed by relational values salient in the African philosophical tradition (and some others in the Global South) and defend it as preferable to some major moral-theoretic rivals, including utilitarianism and Kantianism. Some contributions (...) argue for a method of undertaking cross-cultural ethics different from mine in RMT, while others consider to what extent its general ethic can entail and powerfully explain particular duties (or at times aspects of morality beyond duties), with topics including: when biotechnological enhancements are permissible, how to respond emotionally to injustice, how solitude is morally significant, what we owe the environment, and what the obligations of a private business are. I work to clarify and motivate my approach within the constraints of a brief reply. (shrink)

This study examines the cross‐cultural generality of Hering's (1878/1964) color‐opponent theory of color appearance. English‐speaking and Somali‐speaking observers performed variants of two paradigms classically used to study color‐opponency. First, both groups identified similar red, green, blue, and yellow unique hues. Second, 25 English‐speaking and 34 Somali‐speaking observers decomposed the colors present in 135 Munsell color samples into their component Hering elemental sensations—red,green,blue, yellow, white, and black—or else responded “no term.” Both groups responded no term for many samples, notably (...) purples. Somali terms for yellow were often used to name colors all around the color circle, including colors that are bluish according to Hering's theory. Four Somali Grue speakers named both green and blue elicitation samples by their term for green. However, that term did not name the union of all samples called blue or green by English speakers. A similar pattern was found among three Somali Achromatic speakers, who called the blue elicitation sample black or white. Thus, color decomposition by these Somali‐speaking observers suggests a lexically influenced re‐dimensionalization of color appearance space, rather than a simple reduction of the one proposed by Hering. Even some Somali Green‐Blue speakers, whose data were otherwise similar to English, showed similar trends in yellow and blue usage. World Color Survey data mirror these results. These within‐ and cross‐cultural violations of Hering's theory do not challenge the long‐standing view that universal sensory processes mediate color appearance. However, they do demonstrate an important contribution of language in the human understanding of color. (shrink)

We tend to assume that our map of the intellectual disciplines is valid cross-culturally. G. E. R. Lloyd challenges this in relation to eight main areas of human endeavour, namely philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, art, law, religion, and science, by examining how the disciplines were conceived and developed in different times and places.

Categories, as mental structures, are more than simply sums of property frequencies. A number of recent studies have supported the view that the properties of categories may be organised along functional lines and possibly dependency structures more generally. The study presented here investigates whether earlier findings reflect something unique in the English language/North American culture or whether the functional structuring of categories is a more universal phenomenon. A population of English-speaking Americans was compared to a population of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong (...) Chinese. The findings clearly support the view that functional influences on category centrality are universal (or at least common to Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese and English-speaking Americans), albeit with specific cross-cultural/cross-linguistic group differences in the particular properties that are considered central to categories. (shrink)

BackgroundThe global COVID-19 pandemic confronts people with their fragility, vulnerability, and mortality. To date, scales to measure death awareness mainly focus on the anxiety-provoking aspect of mortality cues. This study aims to cross-culturally adapt and validate the Death Reflection Scale, a scale for measuring positive, growth-oriented cognitions of life reflection and prosocial behavior following confrontation with the finiteness of life.Materials and MethodsThe Death Reflection Scale was translated and adapted in a multi-step process to the German language. In this anonymous, (...) cross-sectional, online survey at a large university in Germany, students, healthcare professionals and other staff completed the DRS alongside comparison measures. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess configural, metric, and scalar measurement equivalence across four age and occupational groups. Convergent/divergent validity testing was done via Spearman correlations.Results1,703 participants provided data for a response rate of ∼5%. 24% of respondents were HCP, 22% students. Confirmatory factor analysis showed a higher-order structure of the DRS with a strong general factor and the originally proposed five subscales. Multi-group CFA showed partial metric equivalence across age groups and partial scalar invariance across occupational groups. Non-invariant scales were the Motivation to live, Putting life into perspective, and Legacy subscales. In the convergent validity testing, two hypotheses were fully confirmed, two partially and four were not confirmed. Experiencing a propensity for increased contemplation and life reflection during the pandemic together with spirituality showed correlations of moderate to large size to the DRS and its subscales.ConclusionFurther conceptual work for death awareness to explore the construct’s stability in different population groups needs to be undertaken. However, the DRS can be mostly used to assess positive and growth-oriented aspects of death awareness and death reflection which may be an important avenue when developing counseling and support interventions for groups experiencing a high burden during the pandemic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cross-Cultural Encounters and ExclusionEun-Jeung Lee (bio)There are only a handful of comprehensive studies about the role that knowledge of non-European civilizations and ideas played in the formation of early modern and Enlightenment European thought. Any in-depth treatment of how European thinkers understood China and India between 1600 and 1744 is therefore a more than welcome addition to existing research in this area. During this period, new information (...) about Chinese Confucian culture reached Europe through reports and writings of Jesuit missionaries. It was also during this time that Chinese and Indian ideas started to be excluded from the category of world philosophy.Early modern European thinkers who came into contact with reports about non-European cultures, such as China and India, embraced, rejected, or criticized the transmitted ideas in relation to their own system of thinking. In that sense, European thinkers were not much different from those East Asian scholars who in the seventeenth century first encountered translated Western books and books on the West written in classical Chinese, for [End Page 215] example the Korean literati of the Chosŏn dynasty. These scholars, in a fashion strikingly similar to how their contemporary European thinkers dealt with Chinese Confucian culture, accepted, rejected, or criticized Western knowledge based on their own canon of thought.1 This process can be said to be a ubiquitous response to such cross-cultural encounters. Today, it is generally accepted that it is through such reactions that we can understand the spiritual and social conditions of a society.2 The way European thinkers discussed Chinese or Indian thought throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries allows important insights into Western thought at the time, but not so much that of China or India.The eventual exclusion of Chinese and Indian thought from "world philosophy" in the eighteenth century, scholars agree, had its roots in the belief of the superiority of European civilization. "Histories of world philosophy" became mainstream in the latter half of the eighteenth century, forming the global standard for a very long time due to the effects of European imperialism and European intellectual hegemony. Current debates on the decolonization of philosophy recognize the importance of how to approach depictions of the history of philosophy from a practical and global perspective.3 A critical and systematic study of the process of exclusion of non-European cultures from histories of philosophy compiled in Europe are therefore crucial to such discussions. Selusi Ambrogio's study forms an important contribution to this area of inquiry.Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy spans the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the arrival of information about the history and culture of China in Jesuit treatises and reports came as a great shock to European philosophers. Especially Chinese history and its ancient tradition of written culture, much older than Christian historiography, became the focus of interest in European intellectual circles. It is no coincidence that Descartes, widely considered the founder of modern philosophy, in his Discours de la méthode mentions China as a prime reason for the existence of a new uncertainty in European philosophy.4In his book, Ambrogio systematically shows how the philosophical dispute over the evaluation of Chinese philosophy was embedded within a paradigm shift from the older Philosophia perennis to the newer Philosophia sectaria and eclectica. This shift not only shaped the scientification of the history of philosophy in the eighteenth century, but also redefined European conceptions of time and history. In the debates about the correct paradigm for the history of philosophy, Confucian philosophy, as transmitted by the Jesuits, played a key role due to the long tradition of its canonical texts.Ambrogio summarizes how histories of philosophy written in Europe first included China but subsequently began a process of exclusion of Chinese thought. He does this by placing a special focus on the tension between theology and philosophy before the time of Hegel. In the first chapter, [End Page 216] Ambrogio shows how the Chinese were seen "as contemporaries" but, at the same time, "as ancient barbaric peoples inserted within the biblical history of philosophy" (p. 56). The second chapter deals with discussions that define... (shrink)

We propose in this paper to focus upon the de-ontological self concept discoverable in Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. In a larger study, we intend to contrast this “no self” paradigm with major pro-ontological formulations of the self concept. These pro-ontological definitions can be divided into three basic types, namely the absolute-universal self, the transcendental-constituting self, and the natural-organic self.

Misophonia is a disorder generally characterised by a decreased tolerance to everyday sounds. Although research is increasing in misophonia, a cross-cultural validation of a psychometric tool for measuring misophonia has not been evaluated. This study investigated the validity of the S-Five multidimensional model of the misophonic experience in a sample of Chinese participants. The S-Five was translated in a forward-backward method to Mandarin to establish a satisfactory translation. The translation was also independently back translated to English, with no (...) significant differences when compared to the original S-Five. Through exploratory factor analysis, using responses from 256 Chinese individuals, the five dimensions were replicated, indicating the cross-cultural uniformity of the experience of misophonia as captured by the S-Five. That is, current results point to the stability of the manifestation of misophonia across cultures, seen here for the first time in the literature. By design, the S-Five items were developed to reflect sound sensitivities in a manner that is not specific or matching to individuals of a certain age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, and educational level. Testimonial to this fact is not only the replication of the five factors, but also the replication of the evidence towards satisfactory psychometric properties of the scale. Based on the results of this study, the S-Five is a psychometrically robust tool to be used within the Chinese population. (shrink)

This paper seeks to highlight the East‐West asymmetry in philosophical exchanges. It draws attention to the absence of Eastern thought in the curriculum of philosophy in the West and suggests that cliches and stereotypes about cultures in general and thought‐traditions in particular are perpetuated in this manner. The aim of the paper is to encourage ‘cross‐cultural conversation’ among philosophers. A critical review of the project of ‘comparative philosophy’ is made to disclose the fact that despite the difficulties (...) of such an endeavor, it is an attempt to bring thought‐traditions together and is thereby useful for promoting intercultural understanding. (shrink)

Many families worldwide have at least one member with a behavioral or mental disorder, and yet the majority of the public fails to correctly recognize symptoms of mental illness. Previous research has found that Mental Health Literacy (MHL)—the knowledge and positive beliefs about mental disorders—tends to be higher in European and North American cultures, compared to Asian and African cultures. Nonetheless quantitative research examining the variables that explain this cultural difference remains limited. The purpose of our study was fourfold: (...) (a) to validate measures of MHL cross-culturally, (b) to examine the MHL model quantitatively, (c) to investigate cultural differences in the MHL model, and (d) to examine collectivism as a predictor of MHL. We validated measures of MHL in European American and Indian samples. The results lend strong quantitative support to the MHL model. Recognition of symptoms of mental illness was a central variable: greater recognition predicted greater endorsement of social causes of mental illness and endorsement of professional help-seeking as well as lesser endorsement of lay help-seeking. The MHL model also showed an overwhelming cultural difference; namely, lay help-seeking beliefs played a central role in the Indian sample, and a negligible role in the European American sample. Further, collectivism was positively associated with causal beliefs of mental illness in the European American sample, and with lay help-seeking beliefs in the Indian sample. These findings demonstrate the importance of understanding cultural differences in beliefs about mental illness, particularly in relation to help-seeking beliefs. (shrink)

Culture has been identified as a significant determinant of ethical attitudes of business managers. This research studies the impact of culture on the ethical attitudes of business managers in India, Korea and the United States using multivariate statistical analysis. Employing Geert Hofstede's cultural typology, this study examines the relationship between his five cultural dimensions (individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long-term orientation) and business managers' ethical attitudes. The study uses primary data collected from 345 business manager participants (...) of Executive MBA programs in selected business schools in India, Korea and the United States using Hofstede's Value Survey Module (94) and an instrument designed by the researchers to measure respondents' ethical attitudes (attitudes toward business ethics in general and toward twelve common questionable practices in particular). Results indicate that national culture has a strong influence on business managers' ethical attitudes. In addition to national culture, respondents' general attitudes toward business ethics are related to their personal integrity; their attitudes toward questionable business practices are related to the external environment and gender, as well as to their personal integrity. A strong relationship exists between cultural dimensions of individualism and power distance and respondents' ethical attitudes toward certain questionable practices. The analysis of the relationship between cultural dimensions of masculinity, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation and respondents' ethical attitudes toward questionable practices produced mixed results, likely due to the lack of notable differences in cultural dimension scores among the countries surveyed. (shrink)

Philosophical orthodoxy holds that pains are mental states, taking this to reflect the ordinary conception of pain. Despite this, evidence is mounting that English speakers do not tend to conceptualize pains in this way; rather, they tend to treat pains as being bodily states. We hypothesize that this is driven by two primary factors—the phenomenology of feeling pains and the surface grammar of pain reports. There is reason to expect that neither of these factors is culturally specific, however, and thus (...) reason to expect that the empirical findings for English speakers will generalize to other cultures and other languages. In this article we begin to test this hypothesis, reporting the results of two cross-cultural studies comparing judgments about the location of referred pains between two groups—Americans and South Koreans—that we might otherwise expect to differ in how they understand pains. In line with our predictions, we find that both groups tend to conceive of pains as bodily states. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

Biometric technologies are becoming more pervasive in the workplace, augmenting managerial processes such as hiring, monitoring and terminating employees. Until recently, these devices consisted mainly of GPS tools that track location, software that scrutinizes browser activity and keyboard strokes, and heat/motion sensors that monitor workstation presence. Today, however, a new generation of biometric devices has emerged that can sense, read, monitor and evaluate the affective state of a worker. More popularly known by its commercial moniker, Emotional AI, the technology stems (...) from advancements in affective computing. But whereas previous generations of biometric monitoring targeted the exterior physical body of the worker, concurrent with the writings of Foucault and Hardt, we argue that emotion-recognition tools signal a far more invasive disciplinary gaze that exposes and makes vulnerable the inner regions of the worker-self. Our paper explores attitudes towards empathic surveillance by analyzing a survey of 1015 responses of future job-seekers from 48 countries with Bayesian statistics. Our findings reveal affect tools, left unregulated in the workplace, may lead to heightened stress and anxiety among disadvantaged ethnicities, gender and income class. We also discuss a stark cross-cultural discrepancy whereby East Asians, compared to Western subjects, are more likely to profess a trusting attitude toward EAI-enabled automated management. While this emerging technology is driven by neoliberal incentives to optimize the worksite and increase productivity, ultimately, empathic surveillance may create more problems in terms of algorithmic bias, opaque decisionism, and the erosion of employment relations. Thus, this paper nuances and extends emerging literature on emotion-sensing technologies in the workplace, particularly through its highly original cross-cultural study. (shrink)

We propose in this paper to focus upon the de-ontological self concept discoverable in Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. In a larger study, we intend to contrast this “no self” paradigm with major pro-ontological formulations of the self concept. These pro-ontological definitions can be divided into three basic types, namely the absolute-universal self, the transcendental-constituting self, and the natural-organic self.

The publication of the seventeen papers of a 1962 symposium sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, together with records of some of the discussions. Experts in fields as diverse as cybernetics and the history of Greek science converse. Although the papers treat technical topics, the treatments are not technical. Questions such as the possibility of one culture understanding another have practical overtones, being a prelude to finding means for dealing with international problems. Professor Northrop's two chapters are adhesive, (...) and relate contributions concerned with more general issues, like communication theory, and those concerned with specific topics such as the virtually tenseless Burmese language and contract law.—P. S. (shrink)

Motor development – traditionally studied in WEIRD populations – falls victim to assumptions of universality similar to other domains described by Henrich et al. However, cross-cultural research illustrates the extraordinary diversity that is normal in motor skill acquisition. Indeed, motor development provides an important domain for evaluating cultural challenges to a general behavioral science.

With increasing attention on the role of parenting stress on family functioning and children’s development, one area that has been neglected is how such relations differ across cultures. Although sometimes viewed as homogeneous, Asian countries often have markedly different belief systems. Cross-cultural studies require instruments that have been validated in different socio-cultural contexts. The widely used parenting stress index-short form has been used in several locations. However, results regarding its factorial structure have been mixed. Furthermore, there are (...) only a few cross-cultural comparison studies. This study examined the factorial structure of an abridged version of the PSI-SF with data from Hong Kong and Thailand. The results from confirmatory factor analyses indicated that, in both cultures, a three-factorial structure provides the best model fit. Furthermore, we found evidence for partial metric invariance, suggesting that the test scores can be compared directly. Tests for convergent and discriminant validity revealed that the three factors were correlated with parent general distress, authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting behaviors, in both cultures. These findings suggest that the abridged PSI-SF can provide a meaningful comparison of parenting stress between Hong Kong and Thailand. (shrink)

Loyalty is considered central to people’s moral life, yet little is known about how people think about what it means to be loyal. We used a prototype approach to understand how loyalty is represented in Colombia and the United States and how these representations mediate attributions of loyalty and moral judgments of loyalty violations. Across 7 studies (N = 1,984), we found cross-cultural similarities in the associative meaning of loyalty (Study 1) but found differences in the centrality of (...) features associated with loyalty (Study 2) and the latent structure of loyalty representations (Study 3). Colombians represent loyalty in terms of more general moral characteristics, while US participants represent loyalty in terms of interpersonal commitment, both in contrast with current approaches to loyalty. By comparing representations of loyalty and honesty, we establish that difference in loyalty conceptualizations reflect a different way of thinking about loyalty rather than morality more generally (Study 4). Further, Colombians attributed greater loyalty to individuals with general moral characteristics compared to participants from the United States sample (Study 5) and were more likely to classify non-loyal values as loyalty-related (Study 6). While the centrality of prototypical features predicts categorizing norm violations as loyalty-related, differences in prototypical structure account for differences in the severity of moral judgment for such violations (Study 7), which suggests that loyalty representations have similar functions even though these representations differ in structural characteristics. (shrink)

In this article I respond to six contributors to a special issue of _Social Theory and Practice_ that is devoted to critical discussions of my book _A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent_. In this book I articulate a general principle of rightness that is substantially informed by values salient in the African philosophical tradition (and some others in the Global South) and defend it as preferable to some major rivals, including utilitarianism and Kantianism. Key (...) topics that I address in this article include methodological issues, such as whether it is appropriate to provide an interpretation of the African tradition with some characteristically Western concepts and how metaphysical claims should inform the construction of normative ethical theories, as well as substantive issues pertaining to how to understand the nature of moral status and right action. (shrink)

Indonesia had absorbed various cultures since ancient times, caused the local cultures were enriched with sign language. However, signs on the traditional culture in Indonesia are more symbolic in nature. Interestingly, East and West cross-cultural sign was encountered in Bali, on Sukasada Park design, in Ujung Village, Karangasem regency. The park which was known as Taman Ujung was a legacy of Karangasem Kingdom. This article was compiled from the results of research conducted in 1999, 2012 and 2016. The (...) latest study was specifically conducted to examine the signs on the design of Taman Ujung. Therefore, this study used a semiotic approach, which deals with the science of signs. Such signs could be seen in the form of design, material‟s quality and decoration of the building. The pavilion, placed in the middle of the pond caused Taman Ujung was different from the traditional Balinese garden in general. The Pavilion, called Gili, became a sign of the influence of modern western architecture. The use of concrete construction and decorative concrete mold were signs of the influence of western technology. Their decorative Karang Bentala and a lion with a crown were related to the Royal Dutch symbol mark. This sign implies the meaning of good relations between Karangasem Kingdom and Netherlands‟ Kingdom in the past. (shrink)

This volume examines the motives behind rejections of beauty often found within contemporary art practice, where much critically acclaimed art is deliberately ugly and alienating. It reflects on the nature and value of beauty, asking whether beauty still has a future in art and what role it can play in our lives generally. The volume discusses the possible “end of art,” what art is, and the relation between art and beauty beyond their historically Western horizons to include perspectives from Asia. (...) The individual chapters address a number of interrelated issues, including: art, beauty and the sacred; beauty as a source of joy and consolation; beauty as a bridge between the natural and the human; beauty and the human form; the role of curatorial practice in defining art; order and creativity; and the distinction between art and craft. The volume offers a valuable addition to cross-cultural dialogue and, in particular, to the sparse literature on art and beauty in comparative context. It demonstrates the relevance of the rich tradition of Asian aesthetics and the vibrant practices of contemporary art in Asia to Western discussions about the future of art and the role of beauty. (shrink)

The overall trend toward globalization in design, greatly enhanced by digital technologies, has raised issues and challenges on how to preserve the cultural differences and values of different societies. There is a tendency to lose touch with local cultural values when designing artefacts for global use, and social nuances and traditions risk to be flattened or stereotyped in the pursuit of developing new technologies and products for the global society. Attempts to reduce the tension between the global and (...) the local in design can be seen in the development of standards and guidelines for cross-cultural design, that are mostly focused on user interface design. However, when moving from preferences, metaphors, appearance, and navigation toward cultural models of interaction and physical design, new methodologies and tools for cross-cultural design are needed. This paper describes a poetry-inspired design method for cross-cultural sharing within the design process. The approach uses poetry to sensitize the designer to the subtleties and diversity of a culture so that the design can be given new aesthetic and cultural significance. The methodology is exemplified by actual design cases developed within the course “Cultural Sensitivity” of the Master’s Degree Program in Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology, where poetry was used for uncovering underlying or implicit assumptions, intercultural differences and similarities, as well as for general sensitization of young designers. (shrink)

Little work has been done on beliefs toward academic misconduct in Ukraine. This study explored the beliefs of Ukrainian students toward various forms of academic misconduct and compared the results to the U.S. undergraduate students (N = 270). Twenty-two forms of cheating, plagiarism, and questionable academic behaviors were grouped in five categories: unilateral cheating, collective cheating, falsification gaining favoritism, and performing extra work to receive better grades. Cross-cultural comparisons of beliefs were pivotal in this study. Results indicated that, (...) in general, Ukrainian students are less likely to believe that academic misconduct is wrong compared to their U.S. counterparts, as well as seem to have different beliefs on what is and isn’t academic misconduct. Recommendations are proposed to help students change their beliefs and to reduce academic dishonesty. These recommendations also have application purposes outside of Ukraine. (shrink)

What appears irrelevant or negligible to readers of one cultural tradition may be seminal and indispensable to those of another. This article studies a prominent Chinese mode of living—the earnest pursuit of the aesthetic qualities of life—to help bridge the “impasses of noncommunication” in cross-cultural understanding. It constructs the working concept of “the aesthetic dimension of life” from Chinese formative thoughts before it applies the concept to the reading of “Forever by Your Side,” a “short-short story” by (...) a contemporary peasant writer in China. The discussion focuses on how the ethical and the aesthetic are mutually entailing and how aspirations for the aesthetic in life affect human actions in general and ordinary people’s everyday choices and behavior in particular. Approaching the story from Chinese cultural tradition and analyzing it with Chinese conceptual paradigms, this article offers an in-depth understanding of contemporary China in its civilizational context and shows a way to overcome obstacles of cross-cultural communication. (shrink)

In this paper, first, I briefly discuss various types of obstacles and difficulties for cross-cultural study and in particular failure of translational equivalence of linguistic stimuli and questions by referring to the literature in cultural psychology. Second, I summarize the extant cross-cultural studies of semantic judgments about reference and truth-value with regard to proper names, with a focus on Sytsma et al.’s (2015) study that examined the differences between English and Japanese. Lastly, I introduce and (...) discuss the two recent studies of semantic judgments in Japanese that my colleagues and I conducted. These two studies suggest that the translation Sytsma et al. used failed to consider the linguistic features characteristic of Japanese and other East Asian languages, and thereby failed to ensure translational equivalence. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Thinking aloud is the concurrent verbalization of thoughts while performing a task. The study of thinking-aloud protocols has a long tradition in cognitive psychology, the field of education, and the industrial-organizational context. It has been used rarely in cultural and cross-cultural psychology. This paper will describe thinking aloud as a useful method in cultural and cross-cultural psychology referring to a few studies in general and one study in particular to show the wide applications (...) of this method. Thinking-aloud protocols can be applied for a) improving the validity of cross-cultural surveys, b) process analysis of thoughts and the analysis of changes over time, c) theory development across cultures, d) the study of cultural meaning systems, and e) individual as well as group level analyses allowing hypothesis testing cross-culturally. Limitations of the thinking-aloud method are also discussed. (shrink)

The growth in international trade in recent years necessitates a better understanding of customs and expectations in cross-cultural negotiations. While several researchers have sought to examine and detail the similarities and differences between select countries, their data have generally been obtained under neutral or unspecified negotiating conditions. However, issue importance, opponent (prowess, ethical reputation), and context (location, confederate awareness, urgency) can play a significant role in the use of negotiating tactics. This paper describes a study comparing the perceptions (...) of one hundred and forty-two current and future business professionals from two emerging trade partners, Brazil and the United States, regarding the appropriateness and likely use of five categories of negotiation tactics under seven challenging or unfavorable negotiating conditions commonly faced by negotiators. The results indicate an overall conditional effect for both attitudes (perceived appropriateness) and intentions (likelihood of use). In addition, while no significant difference in perceived appropriateness was found due to country, there were differences in likely use due to country for six conditions-behaviors. (shrink)

: Since the late 1970s, American appraisals of Chinese medical ethics and Chinese responses to American bioethics range from frank criticism to warm appreciation, from refutation to acceptance. Yet in the United States as well as in China, American bioethics and Chinese medical ethics have been seen, respectively, as individualistic and communitarian. In this widely-accepted general comparison, the great variation in the two medical moralities, especially the diversity of Chinese experiences, has been unfortunately minimized, if not totally ignored. Neither (...) American bioethics nor Chinese medical ethics is a field with only one dominant way of thinking. Medical moralities in America and China--traditional and modern--have always been plural and diverse. For example, American and Chinese cultures and medical moralities both exhibit individualistic and communitarian traditions. For this reason, bioethics in general and cross-cultural bioethics in particular must be fundamentally interpretive. Interpretive cross-cultural bioethics appreciates the plurality of medical morality within any culture. It can serve as a vital means of social and cultural criticism through engaged interpretations. (shrink)

The similarities and differences in dream content at the cross-cultural, gender, and individual levels provide one starting point for carrying out studies that attempt to discover correspondences between dream content and various types of waking cognition. Hobson and Kahn’s . Dream content: Individual and generic aspects. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 850–858.) conclusion that dream content may be more generic than most researchers realize, and that individual differences are less salient than usually thought, provides the occasion for a review (...) of findings based on the Hall and Van de Castle . The content analysis of dreams. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.) coding system for the study of dream content. Then new findings based on a computationally intensive randomization strategy are presented to show the minimum sample sizes needed to detect gender and individual differences in dream content. Generally speaking, sample sizes of 100–125 dream reports are needed because most dream elements appear in less than 50% of dream reports and the magnitude of the differences usually is not large. (shrink)

A ‘community of minds’ has long been presumed to be a condition of possibility for genuine argumentative interactions. In part because of this disciplinary presupposition, argumentation scholars tend to exclude from their scope of inquiry conflict resolution among culturally heterogeneous and ideologically incompatible formations. Such a stance needs to be reexamined in view of recent developments in the on-going process of globalization. The unprecedented worldwide economic and financial integration has created for the first time a ‘generalized interest’ across national and (...) continental boundaries. The need to countercheck global market forces has given rise to calls for a ‘global legal/ethical system’ or even a ‘transnational public sphere.’ Non-Western interlocutors in general are willing to debate cross-cultural issues in Western terms. Increasingly, Western interlocutors are also seeking to justify Western positions in non-Western terms. This emerging situation renders it both necessary and possible to argue across the boundaries of communities that do not share the same cultural or rhetorical tradition. It also poses a host of theoretical and practical issues whose exploration and analysis should become a new focus of argumentation studies. (shrink)

Trolling—the online exploitation of website, chat, or game mechanics at another user's expense—can and does take place all over cyberspace. It can take myriad forms, as well—some verbal, like trash-talking an opponent in a game, and some silent, like refusing to include a new player in a team effort during an in-game quest. However, despite this variety, there are few to no studies comparing the effects of these differing trolling types on victims. In addition, no study has yet taken into (...) account users' offline cultural context and norms into the trolling victim experience. To fill this gap in the literature, the present study put participants from three culturally-distinct countries—Pakistan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands—in a simulated trolling interaction using the Cyberball game. Participants were either flamed or ostracized by a member of their own cultural group or a minority member, and the participants' emotional responses, behavioral intentions toward the other players, and messages sent during the game were taken as indicators of their response to the trolling. Results showed that our Taiwanese sample used the most reactive aggression when trolled and our Dutch sample was the most passive. In addition, ostracism generally produced the desire to repair relationships, irrespective of cultural context, and perpetrator culture only produced an effect in the behavioral intentions of our Pakistani sample. Overall, it would appear that online and offline culture interact to produce the variety of responses to trolling seen in extant literature. Additional implications for future research into computer-mediated communication and online aggression are also discussed. (shrink)