People from honor cultures show heightened emotional responses to insults to their social image. The current research investigates whether people from honor cultures also show heightened protection of social identities. We find that honor concerns may be embedded in some social identities but not others, and that those identities associated with honor concerns are defended more than identities not associated with honor. Three experiments investigated participants' emotional responses to insults to their ethnic or student identity. Results showed that compared with dignity culture (British) participants, participants from an honor culture (Arab) reported stronger anger responses both across and within cultures when their Arab identity, an identity explicitly linked to honor concerns, was insulted. In contrast, responses did not differ between dignity (American) and honor (Arab) cultures when participants received an insult to their student identity, a non-honor-oriented identity. These findings suggest that overarching cultural values are not applied to all identities, and therefore, that cultural variables influence psychological outcomes differently for different identities.

No abstract

No abstract

Emotion is critical for cultural dynamics, that is, for the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. We outline the component micro- and macro-level processes of cultural dynamics, and argue that emotion not only facilitates the transmission and retention of cultural information, but also is shaped and crafted by cultural dynamics. Central to this argument is our understanding of emotion as a complete information package that signals the adaptive significance of the information that the agent is processing. It captures an agent’s appraisal about the relationship between themself and the object of emotional focus, as well as action orientation and allostasis in context. We discuss implications of this perspective in the context of the changing natural and geopolitical environment, and future cultural dynamics into the 21st century.

As globalization advances, immigration has increasingly been contested. Psychological studies of immigration, which are frequently conducted in Western contexts, have established a link between attitudes toward immigrants and individual values. In two studies, the present research investigates this link between values and favorability toward immigrants in an Asian nation with a high proportion of immigrants, Singapore, and considers differences in cultural ideologies and multicultural acquisition, based on the assumption that cultural ideologies and multicultural acquisition share broader underlying motivations with self-transcendence (growth and anxiety-free) and conservation values (protection and anxiety-avoidance). In Study 1, the cultural ideologies of multiculturalism and color blindness, as reified in the Singapore context, explained how self-transcendence and conservation values predict willingness to interact with immigrants. Greater support for multiculturalism mediated the positive relationship between self-transcendence values and favorability toward immigrants. Lower support for color blindness mediated the negative relationship between conservation values and favorability toward immigrants. In Study 2, experimentally induced self-transcendence and conservation values interacted with multicultural acquisition to affect willingness to interact with immigrants. Self-transcendence increased favorability toward immigrants for people with greater multicultural acquisition. Conservation decreased favorability toward immigrants for people with less multicultural acquisition. This research has implications for demonstrating that the cultural context matters for addressing how and among whom to improve intercultural contact in diverse, globalized societies.